Off-grid Homestead - Winter Foraging and Food Processing

We actually had a surprise frost last night. Well, I say surprise but we had seen small patches of frost on the ground before so it wasn't totally unexpected. We weren't really sure whether we'd get hard frosts where we are. They're supposedly quite rare in this area of Spain but we're in a bit of a microclimate here. We're at 300 meters above sea level and we're also in a valley because the barranco runs around the boundary of our land and the cold air kind of settles here in the dip. We've almost seen a full four seasons here now but we're still observing and learning all the time. Luckily most of the veggies seem to have pulled through although it does look like the spot I chose for the banana tree wasn't quite protected enough. Although the nights in winter can be cold, when the sun comes out the days usually warm up really quickly. These are carob beans. They grow on the carob tree, a native tree found throughout the Mediterranean and North Africa. We have several growing on our land actually but I noticed this particular one at the side of a nearby footpath because it had a lot of pods within easy reach. The pods are full of small seeds but it's actually the pods themselves that we eat. They can be turned into a powder which can be used in the same way as cocoa powder. Carob has sometimes been called a starvation food, something you wouldn't normally eat unless you were desperate, I presume because of how fiddly it is the process. Nowadays it's also called a superfood though which I think is a much nicer way to refer to it so I'm going to go with that. At the start of the year I set a challenge for myself. I decided I was going to eat something from our land every single day of the year. It could be something as small as a sprig of rosemary or it could be a whole stew of homegrown vegetables. The challenge can also include non-plant products like eggs which we're not actually producing at the moment and also things preserved from earlier in the year. We're not on a mission to become self-sustainable in terms of but I just really wanted to challenge myself to keep the garden producing all year round and start cooking more recipes with the kind of plants that grow well here. I've also been having a lot of fun foraging. It's something I've always wanted to do but never really made the time for and this year I'm also determined to take things slower and make more time for these sorts of things. I really love going out in nature with intention, whether that's the intention to identify a particular plant or forage or take a beautiful photo because that intention I think really helps you notice the things you might not notice otherwise. It's really amazing how generous and abundant nature is when you start paying attention. I was going to leave this carob to dry for a bit longer and then blend it again to get it even finer but I just can't resist trying it and seeing what it's like. I'm going to make some hot chocolate. So I've got some hot almond milk here and I'm just going to sieve some of the carob and just get the finer particles out and that should hopefully dissolve in in the milk. Oh that is really good. It's sweet, it's nutty, it's an interesting colour. It's not like a chocolatey colour like I was expecting. It's more of a hazelnutty, praliney kind of colour. But it is so good.