Les Pido Disculpe

I promise I haven´t disappeared forever.  I´m just in a small war with my jump drive, attempting to wrestle away my photos and pre-typed entries.  When I win, you guys are in for some serious reading.  Think Nicaragua, another cabelgata, making sugar, and how to make biogas. :)

´Till then!

Recipe to Cure Homesickness

 
To cure homesickness, I recommend something you can only get at home paired with something you can only get where you are.  It should be indulgent, comforting, and, above all, delicious. For me, that thing is chocolate chip cookies, paired with farm fresh milk. (Since I can't magically turn the farm into Juan's Flying Burrito for the night, I had to come up with some something else!)

Though chocolate chip cookies are a delicious cliche back home, here they are a curiosity. In fact, chocolate chips are nearly impossible to find! I ended up just chopping up some chocolate bars for mine.  So far, the only version of our standard that's reached Costa Rica is the little four pack of hard Chips Ahoy.  Unacceptable. My version is big, chewy, and alllllllllmost underbaked.

I've attached the recipe I used below, in case the pictures make you jealous.

2 cups plus 2 Tbs all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
12 Tbs (1 1/2 sticks) unsalted butter, melted and cooled until warm
1 cup packed brown sugar
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1 large egg plus one yolk
2 tsp vanilla
1-1 1/2 cups semisweet chocolate chips

For optional convenience, line baking sheets with parchment paper.
Preheat to 325 F

Whisk flour, baking soda, and salt together in medium bowl, set aside.

Mix together sugar and butter until thoroughly blended. Then beat in the egg, yolk, and vanilla.

Add dry ingredients and mix until just combined.

Stir in chocolate chips to taste.

Roll into scant 1/4 cup balls (or just make sorta big balls that fill the dent of your palm!), then pull apart the ball and stick the smooth sides together, and place on backing sheet.  You want the top of the cookie to be jagged.

Bake for 15-18 minutes, reversing the baking sheet halfway through.  You should pull the cookies when the outsides are golden brown but the centers are still just a little puffy. 

Cool on cooling racks. Try not to be jealous about the milk - ask around at your local farmer's market and try to find some free range milk of your own!

ENJOY!

My First Stitches, or, Look Mom, My Tendon!

Tuesday evening, around 4 o’clock. I’d just finished cleaning eggs with Nicol and we were planning on going on one of our regular walks around the area (though they’re probably more appropriately called hikes – this place is steep!) Luz and Memo had gone to San Isidro for an appointment, and wouldn’t be back for a while. Before leaving, Luz asked me to give the emus some sugar cane after my host brother chopped it up. Memito, however, had gone off on some errand that seemed more fun than chopping up cane, and I wasn’t sure he’d come back before it got dark. So, I decided that no machismo men were around to look at me condescendingly as I picked up a machete, and that I would just go ahead and do it myself. Sugar cane under one arm, machete in the other, I set off.
Ping! Ping! Ping! The skin of the sugar cane flew off as I hacked into the delicious insides (and, truth be told, plotted about keeping a few pieces for myself.) But as I tossed the chunks in with the emus, I realized that they were really pretty wide for the emus to eat in one gulp. So, why not cut the cane down the middle first? Ping! Ping! THUNK. I looked down at my left hand with curiousity, then horror. The skin on the first knuckle of my index finger was neatly parted, revealing surprisingly little blood but a lot more of the inside of me than I ever wanted to see. What was that white thing? BONE?! I dropped the machete where it lay and started off for the house, knowing that I would need to be as calm as possible when telling Nicol what happened. I was, after all, the adult in the house for the evening, until Luz and Memo came home.

Thankfully, Nicol was a champ. After a shared bout of feeling lightheaded and sick, we rallied and got to work. Nicol boiled water and found a clean shirt to cut up while I clamped my hand shut. We cleaned the cut, wrapped it, and I ate some chocolate crackers to keep my blood sugar up. (Such a sacrifice.) Then, we waited. And waited. One of the drawbacks of being a campesina is that the hospital is not exactly right around the corner, and not everyone carries cellphones. If it had been a true emergency, there were plenty of neighbors to run to that would have helped us out in a hearbeat. In general though, trips to the hospital are taken at a more…leisurely pace than in the States.

Around 7:30, they finally pulled up in the driveway, and we were on our way back to town in just a few minutes. I walked into the emergency room expecting a long wait and lots of frustration, but was seen to a bed almost right away. I think I must have been a bit of a curiousity, because twice I thought that the doctor had arrived to see me, when instead they had instead just come to chat and find out why I was there. The normal confusion over who exactly I was followed. (You’re not an exchange student? You live on a farm just because you… want to? Where?! Hm…..)

At last, a nurse came in to see me, looked at my hand, and got to work. She injected anesthesia all around the cut, and that was the last thing that hurt for a good long while. I was so numb that it felt like I was watching someone else’s hand get washed and sewed up. Fascinating, but a little disorienting. I was on my way in no time.

So. Frankenhand and all, I’m back at the farm, on forced vacation. When almost everything you do day to day involves hauling or pulling or animal waste or all three, infection and pulled stitches loom large. So far, I’ve only mastered collecting eggs. One hand shooing chickens and grabbing eggs, the other in a plastic bag, high in the air. With luck, though, I’ll soon be back at work with only a unique souvenir to show for it.

10 Things I Know About Emus

1. They have dinosaur feet

 

2. The leader of the herd is always female

3. Alpha females inflate an air sack at the bottom of their neck and use it to communicate with their herd. It sounds exactly like a tympani drum.
 

4. They love water, especially hose showers. I can start with one emu in a corner, spraying it with water from the hose, and in two minutes all sixteen will be there, wallowing in the stream of water.

5. Sometimes, they think that your fingers are something they should eat.

6. They are fast.
 

7. They eat bananas in one gulp, peel or no peel.
 

8. They like to be petted on their necks.

9. They have tiny wings, about 6 inches long, that end in a tiny talon.
 

10. They love chopped up sugar cane (foreshadowing!)

Emu mu here, and emu mu there.....

The emus have arrived!  They are gangly, curious, hungry, and strange. The more time I spend with them, the more I like having them around, though their arrival was not without its low points.  I should have known when the owner pulled up at 3 a.m. that it was going to be an interesting morning, but as I shoved my feet into my boots and stumbled out to the truck, I grinned intstead of gritting my teeth.

 It happened to be market morning, so Luz and Memo had to head out around 4:30.  The kids have to get ready for school and leave the house by 5:45, so it ended up falling to me and the man who was selling us the emus to transport them to the pen.  I stood in pitch dark swooning in my usual way at the stars and pausing only when a bouncing headlamp that occasionally told me another emu was on its way.  As Steven brought the emu to the gate, I swiftly pulled off the pillowcase we used to hood them and opened the pen to usher them in.  The next to last emu, however, decided that she had different plans.  About halfway down the path to the pen, she bolted.  Head covered, she crashed through the brush and into the wide creek that runs alongside the Chinchilla home.  Steven and I chased her across the creek, into the woods, back into the creek, and into a nearby cow pasture before losing sight of her. At some point during all this mess, she managed to rip off the pillowcase, thank goodness.  It was now blushing dawn on the farm, and my chores were calling.  We decided to let the emu calm down a little in the pasture before trying to catch her again, and I ran off to care for the hens and get my littlest host sister ready for school. 

As I swept up the last of the rice from breakfast, I heard the hens screeching.  Not good – you shouldn’t be able to hear the hens from the kitchen.  Was it a skunk again?  I did not want to kill a skunk.  I arrived at the hen house, machete in hand, to find that the emu had found her way across the farm and was circling the hen house.  I couldn´t help but laugh – I imagine that for the hens, it was like seeing the Jolly Green Giant.  So began another hour of emu hunting.  At one point, as we followed her down the road to town, I looked over at Steven. “Never in my whole life would I have believed I’d be chasing an emu down the road at 8 o’clock in the morning.”

Many detours and fence-scramblings later, we finally got Pinot into the pen.  She still looks at me like she doesn’t trust me, and I return the look with gusto. I can’t help believing that she liked how helpless we were chasing her, after being cooped up so long on the truck.

p.s. The title of this post is lovingly dedicated to Johnald. :)