The Best Thing About St. Croix (besides new friends) - Raw Food!!!!!

As a reader of this blog you have heard me whine about food quite a bit - especially the lack of choices here in Puerto Rico. I have never been a big fan of meat, especially beef, and beef is the only decent meat here. All other meats (unless it is frozen chicken breasts) have bones and tendons and sinew and skin and tattoos and other gross things attached. Fresh fish? Nope. So going to St. Croix was an opportunity to have a few more choices than Puerto Rico although having been there before I was not expecting much. I was, however, elated to find a Raw/Live Vegetarian Food Restaurant called Lalita! This was a true find and I had a juice drink there one day and had two dinners there which were both superb. I had met a couple local vegetarian people at the airport (one was the nice gal distributing the free rum samples) and they had told me about it.

One of the appetizers was a "pizza." First I have to add a little about "raw" food. Raw food is not cooked. They use a lot of nut pastes made by soaking nuts and macerating them in the food processor and they make a lot of cookies and "baked" goods by dehydrating components that are held together by sugars (agave nectar, honey etc). I think some things at this restaurant were cooked - the bread and tortillas used for sandwiches and maybe this wafer for the pizza? When I suggested the restaurant the people I suggested it to were great sports...but didn't realize it was a raw food restaurant, they thought it was just vegetarian! One of the guys, "Kellog" (his code name) was a little disappointed when I told him his lasagna wouldn't have melted cheese and noodles! He was a great sport and ate there AGAIN, and then AGAIN when his wife joined him on the last day of class! So this "pizza" had a wonton-like crust with basil pesto, Parmesan cheese, tomato, spices and bell pepper puree. It was alright but not my favorite of our choices.

Another thing we tried was the Pad Thai. Since rice noodles are only soaked it counts as raw I suppose but I don't even care about raw or cooked really. I was ecstatic to have yummy, flavorful, and beautiful food! This is the most excited I have been about food in a long time! The white ribbon on top is made of young coconut meat - something we have LOTS of in the yard. The baby greens and reds are things I want to grow hydroponically and I don't know what the sauce was but I figure it is fish sauce, hot peppers, sugar, lime juice and other typical Thai spices.

CJ ordered the watermelon gazpacho which was really yummy and beautiful. There was mango, watermelon, tomato, onion, cilantro and I don't know what else but very flavorful.

I had the beet ravioli. They used a mandolin I suppose to slice the beets. I don't know if they were raw or not - maybe they were tender because of the thinness? Inside was a cashew paste and the sauces were pureed bell pepper. There was pistachio dust on top. Very tasty.

Greg had this spinach soup that had Dr. Seuss-like swirls of pureed bell pepper. Very tasty flavorings.

This is the lasagna and side salad. The "noodles" are shaved zucchini and there was corn, ricotta, some kind of green (spinach?), sun dried tomatoes and other stuff. Kind of a deconstructed lasagna really.

Another appetizer we had were these rolls that had seaweed, avocado, carrot, other veggies and instead of rice - grated jicama! I love the crunch of jicama! Like I said, this was the most excited I have been about food in a long time. For dessert we shared a few things - mango cheesecake, a silky chocolate torte that was killer (very very rich), cookies-n-cream (non dairy non-soy ice cream and a broken up cookie (dehydrated nuts, sugars, and other stuff). All were amazingly delicious!

Besides the raw place I went with Ricardo and Stephen to a sushi sashimi place called Dashi. It was very good and had some nice combinations besides the normal yellow tail (can't get enough of it) and smoked eel (gotta have it). It was Ricardo's first time eating sushi/sashimi and he enjoyed it with only a teeny tiny bit of wasabi.  So I managed to corrupt a few people and get them to try new things with great success. Now I am super excited about getting a raw food cookbook so I can start trying to eat like this at least once a week. I know I can get nuts here and possibly some of the other main ingredients. Instead of growing veggies with fish I will probably go hydroponic and look forward to designing a covered area for that and possibly a few special chickens?

Aquaponics Course Overview

I just spent a week on St. Croix attending an aquaponics course. The course was presented by Jim Rakocy (the aquaponics god), Don Bailey (money man), Jason and Charlie (fish and plant guys). If you follow our blog you know that there is no green food in Puerto Rico and you know that I need to change that. Aquaponics sounded like just the thing...fresh fish and fresh veggies. I thought I wanted to set up a hydroponic system and then the thought of raising fish as well came up and since Jeff has always had a fish tank we figured why not aquaponics? I signed up for the expensive course and last week started my journey.
Jeff took me to the Mayaguez airport and there was a taxi sitting at the curb. If you know the Mayaguez airport you know that this is not good and that the taxi was for me and the other 2 passengers of the plane that had mechanical problems. Cape Air put us in a taxi, or "Breaking Bad Mobile," to head for San Juan. (If you don't watch Breaking Bad on tv you should.) Of course there was no way to get there in the same amount of time (30 minutes in the air = 2 hours on the ground) so I missed the connecting flight. They put me on an American Eagle flight that left at 2pm instead of the 11:30 Cape Air flight I was supposed to be on. I arrived on St. Croix at 2:30 instead of noon but that was fine since I wasn't renting a car and would just go check in at the University and wait for others to arrive.


Just so happens that 2 other people from the class were on my American Eagle flight and were on it because of flight problems. Diana and Pablo (from Argentina) and I then waited for Stephen at the airport for an hour or so under the misguided idea that the taxi rate would be less with more people in it and we didn't want to have Stephen have to pay a lot more and have to find things on his own. Since I was late and was pleased to have others to join we figured it would be ok to wait for him. The 4 mile trip to the University was 8 dollars each - the shock that just kept shocking as the week went on! I got checked in (stayed in the dorm) and then headed into Christiansted for dinner with some other folks. We wandered for an hour maybe trying to find somewhere decent to eat and then settled on what turned out to be kind of crappy food. The company was great though! The next day class started and was a long day of researchers reading powerpoint presentations to us (researchers are not teachers). The class also turned out to be way to large (92 people) and that is a number they were not prepared for. Hooray for the afternoon when we got to go outside to actually see the set ups! This is what I want...green food. This is a member of the morning glory family called Kang Kong and it is a tasty green you can you raw (new leaves) or cooked - it is "water spinach." I snagged a couple shoots and brought them back with me. All this green is "planted" in water - the giant water troughs are called "raceways" and the plants are planted in little mesh pots sitting in holes made in a Styrofoam type sheet with holes in it that floats on the water. Fish crap water is circulated through these raceways and feeds the plants.

They were growing many herbs, different kinds of lettuce, cantaloupe, cucumbers and there are many possibilities that they don't grow since they don't make money (they tie up the raceways for months rather than weeks as is the case with lettuce).


Green green green and oh, what's that under the covered area? A sewage treatment facility? Nope - all the filters and degassers and fish tanks required for the fish breeding part of the system. Kind of industrial looking.

A peek under the rafts shows beautiful root systems and nice leafy greens - that's what I want.

Besides all the clarifiers, bio filters, take-the-chunks-out filters, fish rearing tanks and everything there was another way to do things that was a little more simple but kind of disgusting. The Biofloc system. Everything in this course was developed by the University of the Virgin Islands (mainly Jim Rakocy). It is all on the internet everywhere. This course was geared to about 30% of the people who attended. The people who want to raise fish and vegetables FOR PROFIT (theoretically). The rest of us were home hobbyists (40%) or people from all over the world who already raise Tilapia on a large scale and I guess wanted to hear it from the master before he retires. I don't fall into the "commercial" category. Isn't this lovely? A sewage treatment pond in your yard. Don't you want one?

Raising fish commercially is involved and the master has perfected how to do it with the goal being to produce even sized portions of fish that don't have a terrible "off flavor" and to produce vegetables to basically pay for feeding and raising the fish. There is an added goal of making "added value" products (breaded fillets, fillets with herb packets and recipes etc etc) in an effort to earn more money. Since we are basically fishing out all the naturally occurring fish in the oceans this may be the wave of the future. Unfortunately China kind of has the market on Tilapia and probably everything else at this point. Lots of energy demands that don't work for us on this scale because of the solar but could work for a backyard design.

I am having some philosophical problems with the whole deal so I focused on taking away some applicable construction ideas for my hybrid system. If we want to have an attractive pond with koi this would be a good construction idea. Coated welded wire mesh and metal stakes are the structure of this fish tank. The liner is tied to the walls which would be less costly than a fiberglass or plastic tank and more importantly, easier to move around and locate on the property. I could then berm up dirt against the walls and plant nice looking things there.

More welded wire mesh, wood beams and cement for construction of the building for the fish tanks - I like the idea of using the wire mesh to keep shade cloth from flapping around in the wind for a greenhouse structure. I think another layer on top of the cloth would really keep it in place on the roof. The wire would keep chickens and cats out.

I enjoyed checking the fish mouths for eggs ..

It was interesting sexing the fish before separating them for sex changing.

They are kind of attractive fish. A bit boring to eat but that mildness lets you do lots of things with it and here in Puerto Rico fresh fish options are slim to none.

I'll have a few more posts about the trip - extra curricular activities and my philosophy about what I want to do next...I am kind of tired of thinking about it right now though.