So what's a girl to do.
Cue drumroll......
Enter the humble Carob.
Now whilst it isn't chocolate, it is a pretty close second in my opinion, in fact so much so I'm rather apt to using it in recipes as a replacement for regular chocolate which is made from cocoa beans. (You replace cocoa powder with carob powder at a ratio of one-for-one)
Why, well, Carob is not only chocolatey (is that a real word?) it is also naturally sweet, low in fat, high in fiber, contains calcium, and most importantly to me personally, no caffeine. By the way, chocolate can be a migraine trigger which means Carob could be your ticket (if you suffer) to having chocolate flavoured items and eating them.
Speaking of eating ones chocolate, my dogs, absolutely love the taste of Carobs and have been known to vie with me over the plump ones as I am picking them.
http://youtu.be/2sKCjP6er2I
In fact, all those doggy treats you see in the shops are made with Carob flour or as it is also known Carob Powder because real chocolate, (made from Cocoa beans) is actually poisonous to dogs.
But it isn't just doggy treats that are made from Carobs.
Diabetic Chocolate for one is made with them.
As are many brands of cake mixes and anything pretty much when it says, 'chocolate flavour'.
So you are probably eating Carob products without even knowing it and more importantly noticing it.
Oh, I just remembered something else they are used for.... The coating on certain medication, Did you know that they use the seeds inside of the pod to make it. (The pod is what they make the Carob powder from). Now whilst I don't actually know of anyone who likes the taste, fact is the manufacturers all claim it helps the tablets you are taking to go down a little easier. As to whether that is true or not, well I leave it up to you to decide.
And here's another little snippet for you. Did you know in olden times the Carob was so prized they used to weigh such things as gold against the seeds from the pod, hence why we say your necklace is 18 carat.
The term carat originates from the Greek word kerateeon, meaning "fruit of the carob". Carob seeds were used for precision weighing of gold and gemstones, since it was thought that carob seeds had a uniform weight. The modern carat, known as the metric carat, was adopted in 1907 and defined as a weight of 200 mg. This is actually very close to the mass of larger carob seeds. One carat can be divided into 100 points, a measurement often used in the diamond trade. Interestingly, the term karat was also derived from the name for the carob seed. So how did the weight of the carob seed relate to the purity of gold, and why is pure gold defined as "24 karat"? A precise answer is not easy to find, but the connection appears to have originated from the Roman Emperor Constantine, who introduced a gold coin that was equal to 24 carob seeds in weight.
This of course is all very interesting, but I bet you are wondering how do you pick Carobs.
Well in the case as it is on our farm mostly by hand, which just happens to be.... the old fashioned way.
Clay (from the US) and Ines (from Germany) picking up the Carobs, supervised as always by Toby.
Of course the old ways are not to everyones taste, in fact quite a few of my neighbours whose land has been sprayed into submission (thanks to weedkiller etc) use leaf blowers to collect them up into a mounds after which they shovel them up. However, we choose not to spray the land instead we cut back the weeds, sometimes using a Strimmer and of course sometimes using an Azada.
Which once cut we have to rake up the weeds ready for burning at a later date, (when we have a licence and it is safe to do so).
Of course because we do not spray weedkiller and because we don't use a leaf blower to collect up the Carobs as I have said we get on down and pick them by hand.
Although occasionally we do get a little high tech in our approach. By this I mean we sometimes knock the pods from out of the branches using the handle off of one of my long handled saws. LOL!
Joschka (from Germany) joined us after Clay had gone on to his next host and soon got stuck in gently knocking the pods down, landing as they did on the net (for the most part) which we had spread out to catch them.
After which we collected them up and popped them into the buckets along with those we had picked up off the ground ready to load into the sacks which we take down to the co-operative.
And from there they wend their way to you.
But where do the holes come in I hear you ask. After all the title of this post is "Carobs and Holes" well they don't. It is just my way of telling you what else we have been up to this month.
And what we have been doing is.....
Filling in and of course digging holes!
Naturally we needed the supervision of Toby, after all mere humans cannot hope to get things right without guidance.
Joschka (bless him) proved to be pretty handy with a pick so Ines and I let him swing away to his hearts content.
In between breaks Ines and I cleaned out the holes and moved rocks so that the task was that much easier for Joschka.
But of course, Toby had other ideas and insisted Ines gave him a nice back massage. Thankfully she was up to the task and soon had him declaring his undying love, well until that was she stopped, then it was back to work supervising.
For safety (while the holes aren't filled with concrete) Toby insisted we place rocks around the holes so that no one can just simply walk into them. Of course this is only a temporary measure as we are hoping to erect posts in the holes very soon.
Pretty soon we were in a position to pop the top rails on to the uprights.
Of course a little fun was to be had once the days work was done.
Toby of course watched closely what was going on and eventually interrupted the game as mere humans couldn't hope to get it right without his input.
No comments:
Post a Comment