corn and the bean

I love Mexican food. I spent a while down there and fell in love with beans with epazote, real tacos, tlayudas, mole oaxaqueño, chiles en nogada.... the list goes on.

Trouble is, I'm in Japan. You can't even buy fake Mexican food here, let alone cornmeal or black beans (and leave it to me to try to make frijoles out of black soybeans which turned out awfully weird, cause the soybeans have a really firm, meaty texture and they're very sweet, not exactly what I was going for. Not to mention black soybeans are about $20 a kilo.) So I decided I'd grow my own flour corn, grind it up into tortillas, plant a few pintos, and a miniature forest of cilantro. As I popped the seeds into the ground, I had a visions of grilled, spiced venison on hot, fragrant tortillas, topped with some homemade queso and a spritz of sudachi lime with a side of beans.  Mmm. Imagining the food you're going to eat seems to make the work go by faster.

The beans I seem to have planted too early. They got pretty wet during the rainy season and plus having a baby when I should have been weeding didn't help things either. Then they got slayed by an errant WWOOFer with a weed whacker. So no beans.

The corn came up looking pretty strong, but I didn't plant much, and planted a few different varieties at different times: Strawberry Corn for popcorn, Multi-colored Flour Corn, Wachichu Flint, and Hickory King Dent.

The Strawberry Corn did well, although it looks more like raspberries, but anyway I got maybe 10 ears out of it. They're cute little nubbins, kind of annoying to pick off the cob, but it makes tasty popcorn with an incredibly light, crispy texture even though it won't pop into big, fluffy flakes. Not sure what I'm doing wrong here.

The flour corns were a moderate success, and would have done a lot better had I planted more and gotten better pollination. It's neat to see what an un- or under-pollinated ear of corn looks like. The Wachichu Flint is a vibrant red color, the Hickory King is long, appealing, even rows of kernels that look like someone poked them with their thumbnail, and the Multi-color is a mix of indigo, red, cream, and yellow. If I make cornbread out of it it will look like mud.

I'm saving some for seed since I planted the Strawberry Corn paired with the Multi-colored Corn, and the Wachichu Flint paired with the Hickory King Kent. This means that next year I think I'll get some interesting hybrids. Will I get Rainbow Swirl Strawberry Corn and King Wachichu Flint Dent? I sure hope so. I'll have to read up on it in my favorite book ever, Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties, by Carol Deppe, since I kind of forgot how corn breeding works.

And for the cilantro. I love the stuff, throwing it in salads, sprinkling it on soups, but I guess I got a little cilantro-happy and after putting it into the salad for about the 14th time in a row I caught Gen and Midori muttering to themselves in Japanese about how they didn't like the flavor of it but how it's better if they didn't tell me. But I am finally starting to get this whole Japanese thing, so I called them out on it and now we don't eat cilantro. It's not a totally sad story since I let it go to seed, and now the seed heads are waiting to be plucked and I'll grind them up in the coffee grinder and throw them in curry or falafel.

Here's the queen bean plus a sampling of my corn harvest. I know it's a weird photo but I hate uploading photos, it takes so long and I think it's posting photos that keeps me from blogging more often. Anyhow, it's mostly the Hickory King Dent plus a few ears of Strawberry Corn and Wachichu, and a bunch of ears that didn't get pollinated well.  You can see how the bugs liked it, which doesn't bother me near as much as raccoons or monkeys liking it. I'll take a few squishy little bugs any day over monkeys. I'm a little sore right now since they've taken to digging up all my sweet potatoes when I'm not looking.