If you can leave the world a little more beautiful than when you found it you've left a life well lived.
Here is a painting by my lovely wife Raquell. It faces huge bay windows which look out over Lake Atitlan (yes, we are still here ... it's lovely). As you can see, some volunteers exchange a little less energy than others.
We are going to look at a sweet mango and habanero spicy chili sauce but first, if you missed my previous post on mushroom cultivation (and a kind of crappy chili sauce), here again is the easiest, fastest and very effective way to grow mycelium from mushrooms you find or buy at the store.
- Simply soak some egg cartons or cardboard in a bowl of 9:1 water and hydrogen peroxide.
- Cut off the mushroom stems and roots (that's the same as mycelium by the way)
- Break small pieces onto the soaked material.
- Seal it up tight in a bag. You don't want little fruit fly like bugs getting in there.
- Cut slits in the bag and seal it with sports tape or any micropores tape. Careful for flies!
- Label and date the bag and leave it in a dark, humid, room temperature like place.
Mycelium will quickly start to take over and you'll have a nice amount of fungi to inoculate a grow bag or garden. Since this isn't the most sterile way to clone mushrooms, it works best with strong, hardy strains like oysters.
Seed saving is something I should have gotten into long ago. What a fine way to collect and share the most wonderful of souvenirs (careful at borders). Above is an amazing selection of Latin American corn including one cob of a super specialized cotton candy coloured cob which was selectively bred for radical colours over the course of 20 years. I also saved seeds from some of the chilies used to make what we are going to talk about next.
Look at these beauties. On the left we have a tiny pepper whose name translates to 'bite of the dog' and I can tell you with certainty that it does indeed bite hard. From there we have an unknown pepper that was selling in bunches at the market of Santa Clara in Guatemala and it full flavoured and super spicy. I wonder how it rates on the Scoville Scale? After, there are the classic red and yellow habanero followed by the good ol' red and green jalapeño.
We are going to make a bright coloured mango and habanero spicy sauce today. I used ripe mango, yellow habanero, carrot, onion, garlic, lime, salt, black pepper and vinegar.
I lightly sautéed the habanero peppers, onions and garlic with a little oil on a pan to bring out the flavours. You can take some seeds and cores out of the habaneros if you're not into 'knock your socks off spicy'. At the same time I started simmering the mango and carrots in some vinegar with the the lime, salt and black pepper included as well.
Before anything in the pan starts to brown, dump it all together in the pot with the vinegar and carrots and let it all simmer together on low for about 15 mins. This does two things. First, it allows all the flavours to blend together and second, it pasteurizes the ingredients to allow for a longer shelf life.
Let the whole thing cool down a bit before throwing it all in the blender. Liquify to your liking and add more salt to taste. Be careful to keep a lid on the blender as hot sauce splashing up in your face is gonna be a bad time. Also, if you want to wear gloves while handling the chili peppers it might be a good idea as well. My fingers were burning for a good 24 hours.
This sauce was a total hit on just about anything and have a look at that colour! I preserved a variety of chilies in a jar of vinegar with a bay leaf and some salt and black pepper. Let's see how the flavours grow with age. If you really want to properly pasteurize your sauce for preservation you can seal the glass bottles and boil them in water for 20 mins. That should give you a shelf life of around a year if done properly.
Finally, a farewell selfie pic with some of the good folks hanging around Fungi Academy. We're saying goodbye to Tilo who inspired me to save seeds. Many thanks good man!
No comments:
Post a Comment