We made it down to Placencia for our anniversary getaway. It was actually a couple weeks past our actually anniversary, as ours fell in the middle of the Easter holiday and we wanted to avoid the crowds near the beaches.
We met up with our good friends Ron & Rhonda who were down from the states, still looking for their piece of paradise on the beach. We were hoping to get out and do a little fishing, but once again the weather did not cooperate with us. That’s okay because that just left more time to hang out with our friends in the pool and all the other great beach bars and restaurants. Hopefully soon Ron & Rhoda will find a piece of property that’s just right for them.
Belikin has started making craft beers and they are only available in a handful of locations around the country. They call them TWO-5 beer, which is a Belizean phrase meaning close friends. We were lucky enough to be at one of those locations where it was available. They offered a sample board of five different flavors. There was Soursop, Fever Grass, Pina, Caramel, and Bird Pepper. Ron & Rhonda, Kelley and I tried them all and I think we each had a different one as our favorite. Kelley and I are not really craft beer people, so we think we will just stick to our regular Belikin.
A neighbor of ours has bees and sells some really delicious honey. We are still picking quite a few raspberries so I was looking for some different things to do with them. I came across raspberry-infused honey and it sounded pretty good. It takes a few weeks to fully infuse the honey, but I bet it’s going to be good.
I also saw another recipe that only took minutes to make. Raspberry-vanilla-honey butter. We made this up and it was great, not too sweet like you might think it would be. It goes great on toast, banana bread, and just about anything else. Kelley has made savory butters before with habaneros, garlic or basil and stuff, but we have never done one that was sweet. We cant wait to try some other honey fruit butters with whatever fruit we are picking.
We just roasted up six pounds of cacao beans from the garden. Next step is to remove a thin skin from the beans and then they are ready to be ground up and turned into chocolate. Our cacao plants are still loaded with pods and are producing more blossoms. It looks like this is just the beginning of a good year for chocolate.
If you are not a foodie or are not an adventurous eater then you might want to skip this next section. No, it’s not crickets or armadillo (even though we both have eaten those), It’s a pig head.
We used to cook this quite often when we lived in Mexico, so we asked our butcher if he could round one up for us. After we cut it in half we roasted it on the grill in wine and spices for about 4 hours. It is very rich and fatty which made for some good tacos, plus you get that nice crunchy skin. Being so rich, we ended up giving Ruben half the head, because that was enough fatty goodness for us for a while.
Our heliconia’s or lobster claw plants are in full bloom. There must be at least 100 flowers on plants right now, and they are beautiful. We started with only a couple of plants, but they have spread and we are having good luck growing them from their seeds. Eventually, we will plant these all over the property. It seems that in the spring when the lobster claws bloom that means that the real lobster season is only a couple of months away. Lobster season in Belize opens on July 1st, which means it’s time for Lobster Fest!
A friend of ours from the states asked us if we could do a favor for them. I don’t know if you have heard of Flat Stanley. It’s where a kid takes a picture of their face and puts it on a cartoon body on a piece of paper and then takes pictures of them on different adventures. I guess this one kid in their grandson’s class, for some reason couldn’t participate in this, so they asked us if we could take him around Belize for some adventures. So Flat Ben spent some time up in the jungle doing different things plus he also got to go down to the Caribbean shore for a weekend. Kelley and I had a lot of fun doing this and it was great that we could send Ben out on a little Belizean adventure.
Belize is full of history and ancient Mayan archaeological sights. We have been all around the country and learned a lot about the history of Belize. It seems that almost every day we are seeing or learning something new about this great place. The other day we stumbled upon a piece of history that is not in any of their books or on any of their tours. A lot of the younger generation will have no clue what this is, but now that we are becoming part of history ourselves, we immediately recognized how important this used to be in our lives.
One thing that we miss by living in the jungle is a beautiful sunset. Usually, the sky here just goes from light to very dark in no time at all. Where we lived in Puerto Peñasco, Mexico there were some of the most beautiful sunsets in the world. So any time we get a little color in our jungle sky we think it’s something special to us.
Usually, April and May are the hottest months down here before the rains come. April was a pleasant surprise this year with very nice temps and some rains mixed in. May on the other hand is making up for it. The past few days have been very hot and humid. I’ve seen our temp gauge read 101 degrees with a heat index of 119°. We’ve had the heater off in the hot tub for a while now, but it wasn’t really cooling down. So the other day we drained it and refilled it with cool water that was actually almost cold to get into, and it felt great. It was like our own personal pool with a swim-up bar, okay it was an ice chest full of beer, but you get the point. Kelley said that it was a great way to stay cool on a very hot Mother’s Day. Once April and May are gone the temps cool back down, so it would be a great time to come down to Belize.
Happy late Mothers Day to all you great mothers out there!