AVOCADO, THE WONDER FRUIT

Kick start your day with something healthy and hearty!

Recipes need not be the length of a ruler and it should not hold you ransom in the kitchen unless you're a Kitchen Goddess for which I am not. 

Here’s one “quick to assemble” recipe that you can add to your breakfast and eat without guilt.

I don’t want to dwell on the many benefits of this fruit both for health and in skincare.  Avocado itself is rather bland and boring but once you get past to eating this rich tasting fruit, it’s actually rather delicious.   

What you need

2 slices of any type of bread or toast

1 ripe avocado

Trickle of condensed milk / honey

What you do

Halve the avocado and slice into bite size pieces.  Slight mash of the avocado is also doable.

Spread or place the avocado generously on the bread.

Lightly dribble a trickle of condensed milk or honey over the avocado spread.

Have it for breakfast or in between when you feel like some healthy snacking.  I enjoyed that very much!

WHERE ONIONS AND SHALLOTS ARE THE SAME

 

The thing about being on an island with a small population is the closed camaraderie.

I heard a voice and parted the laundry on the clothes line to see someone standing near the garden fence.

“Do you have an onion to spare?”

“Wait… let me see” as I left the other basket of unhung laundry and skipped into the kitchen.

So I didn’t have an onion but he was happy to leave with 2 shallots instead.

HOPE IN THE FORM OF A MELON

Failure will only inspire you to try again unless you have given up hope of ever succeeding.  To begin you must be interested in whatever you aim to do.  So if you fail once over something you're keen about, you will only endeavour to try harder and put right the things that went wrong.  

I have big gardening dreams so one of the first thing that I set my sight on was growing rock melons from Australia.  Yes, Australia!  I bought a melon, ate it and saved the seeds.  Having big dreams meant growing all the seeds that I've collected from that one single melon and that's like A LOT! 

I was so excited that just a few days after sowing... actually to be more precised, after dumping all the seeds into a small pot and covering them with some earth, the shoots started to sprout.  

 See I wasn't kidding...

So proud of my effort I wore a goofy grin and went around taking lots of photos in different angles.  Seriously some of the shoots were pretty cute!  Check these out...

 

Anyone like my lil' hat...?

 

I was so overwhelmed by all those cute shoots that I left them to fight for space in the little pot while I contemplated what I should do with all of them.   

Meanwhile, rows and rows of round succulent melons hanging from the vines and basking in the sun were already flashing in my head. Seriously I lived on dreams and big ones too! I imagined harvesting a perfect prized melon just like during fall / Halloween where farms / farmers engaged in competing to see who grows the biggest pumpkin.

Big dreams meant no thinning of precious seedlings.  Every shoot was potential melon to me and by the time I was ready to re-pot, I lost more than half of them.   

Here's what left of those shoots

However re-potting does wonder and a couple of the plants  actually blossomed rather well and gave me hope that a melon was on its way when I succumbed to an imaginary flower.  That again got me a little complacent.

To cut the story short, instead of getting nearer to harvesting home grown melons, the plants seemed to have stunted in growth for reasons I've yet to find out four months since I first sown those seeds.  I don't foresee any melon on the vine anytime soon.

So the morale of this story is "don't jump before you leap."  Ask around, read up or familiarise yourself before you shoulder those big dreams. 

It's not a secret that I still harbour hope of harvesting my first melon in the not too distant future but  this time around, I am just sowing a few seeds and saving the rest for later. Watching over a few of them against a whole lot means I have time to nurture them into edible size melons! #hopefully

Yes, I've left a note in my head to re-pot them as soon as the shoot bursts through those seeds.

Hope is my new best friend.  Don't you just hope for something good to happen all the time? ;)