Tapa Dulce

Warning: long post ahead! Kept realizing how long it was getting, but still wanting to share more! Sorry. :)

Since I arrived in October, I´ve been patiently waiting to be part of a big event on the farm: making tapa dulce. It´s something that the Chinchillas do every few months - as often as the sugar cane field returns to a dense, sweet, jungle of stalks.  Last Wednesday, I got the word.  Early in the morning, I pulled on long pants and long sleeves and headed out into the cañal. While neighborhood men carefully selected the sweetest (oldest) stalks, shaved them of leaves, and sliced them from their roots, I hauled armful after armful toward the trapiche. 

 Mom and Mike pose in the sugar cane field during their visit.

Basically a large rotating press which feeds the extracted juice into a pair of enormous pots, the trapiche mostly sits waiting, hidden in a corner of the farm away from everyday view.  But this day it became a hot, noisy factory.  Once we had a big enough pile to satisfy my host-dad Memo, we fired up the machine and got to work.  He fed cane after cane into the clanking machine and I grabbed the husks as they slithered out like fresh pasta.  The bundles of husks will be burnt as fuel the next time we make dulce, but find a second life in the mean time as bedding for the pigs (and later fertilizer!)

The press with its impressive gears, with piles of bagazo behind.

Dark, swampy green cane juice quickly filled the gigantic pots below us as we worked, and soon it was time to start cooking.  After all the dirty work of harvesting and crushing sugar cane comes the fun and delicious work of cooking it.  Each stage of the five hour process has a name and a treat to taste, and all of us dutifully ate ourselves sick.

A few of many of the delicious stages of sugar:

Dirty and cut up by the sugar cane - ready to start eating.  

This is the simplest treat - sugar cane with the husk cut away.  Sweet, gushing, and refreshing.

Atolillo.

The first byproduct of cooking - a superfine foam that is just barely sweet but very velvety.

 

 Espumas.

As the mixture comes to a boil, a huge spoon with lots of holes in it is used to mix and fluff the juice. The millions of bubbles are also scooped off and eaten with a spoon - it has a texture like the head of a beer.

 

Rondas.

This pic is of the very rim of the cooking pot.  As the pot is stirred, foam laps onto the edges and begins to cook there.  As the foam is scraped off, it turns just a tiny bit sticky.  This was my favorite stage.

Pruebas.

Look how far the juice has cooked down at this point!  Wooden paddles are scooped into the pot and then swished in buckets of water.  The stained-glass sugar that comes off is tested for how fast it breaks - this indicates if the sugar is ready for the trough.  But it also tastes absolutely delicious.  Toasty, chewy, and warm. Important to be careful about fillings with this stuff.

After a mysterious point of perfection is reached in the large cooking pot, the sugar is poured into this large trough and stirred constantly for around 10 minutes.  Here, the consistency moves from glassy and smooth to more granular.

A small portion of the sugar mixture is scooped out to make sobado, a delicious candy that will be shared with friends and neighbors.

And then, finally, it´s time.  The sugar gets poured into mold after mold, sets for a surprisingly few minutes, and then gets flipped with a THUNK onto the table to turn out the molds.  What you´re left with, after an entire day of crushing, cooking and stirring (and just the beginning of the stomachache that is to come), is:

Tapa Dulce.

Food, Food, and more Food.

One of my favorite things that I have inherited from my mom is a curiousity and excitement over new foods.  From my dad´s side, I was impressed with the idea that food should be a celebration, and not an obligation.  Both ideas continue to inspire me.  When people look at my photos from my travels here so far, they often comment that I have a lot of pictures of food.  What can I say? On the farm, the food we grow inspires awe in me because I have the priveledge of living alongside it.  Out and about, food inspires me as a window into the people I am visiting.  Following are some recent shots I took while travelling in Granada and on my last days at Finca Chinchilla.

Donut! Bought from an ancient lady slowly waving a horse tail over her wares to keep the flies off. Unfortunately, it tasted like rush hour.  I suspect the fumes of busy Granada had been working on it for a while.

 Jocotes.  A little sweet, a little sour. The perfect breakfast.

The city of Granada is obsessed with hot dogs.  Seriously.  I counted at least one hot dog cart for each block in the busy parts of the city.  How could I leave without eating one?

Did you know that cashews grew like this? I had to buy some cashews for the family to convince them that the bottom part was just as good as the fruit.

Rose apples.  Perfect for pulling off the tree as you pass underneath on horseback.

The Chinchillas absolutely war over these, which are called guavas here (very confusing at first.) To eat them, you simply suck off the white furry part and leave the seed behind.

Starfruit, pulled off the tree just behind the kitchen.  These are tiny but sweet enough to eat just as they are.

How to Make BioGas

1. Start with feed.

2. Add two hungry pigs

3. Let nature take its course
 

4. Trap the gas from all that nature before it gets away!

(You can see the huge balloon that traps the gas just behind the piggies in this picture.)

5. Cook.

We've just recently gotten the biogas system back running here at the farm, but I have to say its one of my favorite things I´ve learned about here.  It is such a simple, simple system, but it does so much.  What amounts to an enormous black trash bag and a few meters of piping transforms a waste product into renewable energy.  Some people around here say that they would never eat food cooked with biogas, but Luz and I like to say it's the cleanest possible gas to use.  The flame, by the way, looks just exactly the same, and it smells nearly the same as the odor they give to the gas you buy in tanks.  With two small pigs, we are cooking well over half of the food for a family of six plus a hungry gringa.  Why don't more people do this?

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. :) 

Worth 1000 Words

Nothing fancy today, just some images from the past weeks.

 The view from my window when we are mowing the lawn.

 

 Flowers that have sprung up shouting from underneath one of the garden beds.

 Empanadas!  Filled with homemade pineapple jelly.  

I was so proud of myself.

Taken on the way home from a walk with Nicol. I live here!

Emus!

   Things here on the Chinchilla farm for the past week or two have been a strange jumble of comforting routine and new developments.  I was thinking the other day about how lost and awkward I felt when I first arrived here - I never knew what to do with myself those days.  I´d fidget and draw out tasks because I knew that when I finished I´d feel aimless again.  These days, the rhythm of the farm is something comforting.  I lend a hand when and where I can, and am able to see and pick up tasks that I know need doing without a second thought.  The truth is, I feel at home here.  While I still have to drag myself out of bed some mornings, I am always happy and in the swing of things by the time I´ve collected the first bucket of eggs or the third handful of weeds.

   That said, there is also a lot happening right now that will change farm life at Finca Chinchilla.  The Chinchillas just this week negotiated a deal with a man from the Osa Peninsula to bring emus to the farm - 16 in all.  They are very excited about the new venture, and if their new business partner knows what he is talking about, it should be a very profitable move.  For my part, I am excited to have a whole new project in which I can learn and lend a hand.  (And a little nervous! Anyone ever been to the "Safari" in Natural Bridge, VA? Those things are big and hungry!) Construction of the new pasture fence starts this week, with the animals arriving sometime this month.  I will be sure to keep you guys updated on our emu adventure here.

How to Milk a Cow

1. Lasso the cow by its horns and tether it to the side of the corral.
2. Tie the cow´s hind feet together.  Be careful - if she doesn´t feel like being milked, she´ll make it hard on you.  Also, you are in the "discharge" danger zone while doing this - be aware!
3. Let the cow´s baby out of the other side of the corral.  If necessary, help it find the udder. (Little cows are apt to try and suckle knees, pants legs, and tails in an effort to eat the first few days!)
4. Make sure the calf suckles at each teat for at least a few seconds, and then lasso it and tether it to the side of the corral with its mom.
5. Splash water on each teat to rinse it of calf spit, dirt, grass, ticks, and who knows what.
6. Milk! Don´t be afraid to seriously pull - that calf is rougher on her than you will ever be. 
7. Attempt to be cool and develop a sophisticated "finger drumming" type technique for squeezing out milk.  Realize you´re not that cool and will just have to settle for whatever movement makes milk come out.
8. About halfway through, let the calf nurse again for a few seconds to encourage milk to keep coming.
9. Pour the last of the milk from the pitcher into the bucket, carefully release the cow´s legs, and let the calf nurse in earnest.
10. Use this distraction to undo the cow´s horns and slip out of the corral.
11. Repeat daily.

FLASHBACK NUMBER ONE - ¡Quinceañera! (Part One)

Since the day I arrived in Costa Rica, I´ve heard about one event more than any other: the upcoming quinceañera of Fernanda, my host sister.  If you´ve never heard of a quinceañera, think wedding without a groom, or, if you´re from the old south, debutante party.  At fifteen, girls here get to be the princess of a huge party celebrating their coming of age, complete with an enormous cake, a court of 14 girls and their escorts, a principal table, toasts, and first dances.   It´s pretty wild, and I was beside myself to get to be a part of it. Even better was the timing - my mom and brother were down in Costa Rica visiting for the new year, and their trip overlapped with the party!

In the days leading up to the big event, the Chinchilla farm was a crazy flurry of activity. Arriving from Dominical to celebrate Christmas with the family, I was immediately and happily thrown into the mix of helping prepare.  Luz and I scrubbed her husbands old house from top to bottom using laundry detergent, brooms, and liberal hosing down. (I will never get tired of the taboo feeling I get from being allowed to spray a hose at the inside wall of a house. I want tile floors in my own house just so I can one day do this.) I chopped enough carrots into half moons to fill an entire refridgerator crisper drawer. We polished and decorated 30 champagne flutes, reminicsed about the older daughter´s party as we reworked her decorations and imagined how they would once again be reworked for Daniela.  We hauled some thirty mattresses, blankets, and pillows into the newly cleaned and de-batted house for incoming guests.  We made cookies and baked sweet tamal.  And the guests began to slowly trickle in. Each day, the excitement about the party inched higher and more faces showed up to lend a hand.  Lucky for me, those faces soon included my mom and brother. :)

On the day of the party, both preparation and excitement reached a critical mass.  I went early to the party site with my mom, Luz, and a big handful of other helpers to bedeck the place with as much purple and pink as it could handle, and then returned to bedeck myself in party gear for the first time since I´d left the country.  After months of baggy work pants and technical tees, my lacy dress and flashy heels felt beyond bizarre.  Luz and I giggled at one another in our finery - we´d gotten pretty used to only seeing each other in scrubby work clothes. But complete with my new digs, a fresh haircut, and the first make up to touch my face in weeks, I felt scrubbed clean and ready to go.

Costa Tican Thanksgiving!

Last Saturday, TJ and I hosted a Thanksgiving meal for all the gringos and many of the Ticos we know in La Rivera.  We set it up as a potluck with each gringo bringing a dish and sharing all around.  TJ and I cooked from the time we woke up on Saturday until after the last guest arrived, subbing in Costa Rican ingredients and measurements with lots of nervous shrugs but surprising success.

The Menu:

• 2 roasted chickens (both mine and TJ´s first time - they were beyond delicious.)
• Gravy (made from said chicken drippings...yum!)
• Stuffing
• Sweet potato casserole
• Angel biscuits
• Potatoes au gratin
• Squash soufflé
• Green bean casserole
• Apple pie
• Blackberry pie
• Ice cream

and of course, beans and rice. I made the stuffing, angel biscuits, and sweet potato casserole, and (thinking the whole time of you, Bek!) nameplaces!

Everything was going exactly to plan, food bopping out of the oven every time I turned around.  Guests began to arrive.  And arrive.  And arrive. 

The spread, along with a few guests.

We ended up with 9 more people than we planned for! Chairs were pulled from all sides, tabled pushed together, amounts fretted over, and nameplaces shoved in a drawer.  I was nervous about how this new party would turn out, but as I wandered out the front door to take my place at the table, I left a countertop still full of food and faced 21 guests - mostly silent, mostly grinning, mouths too full to talk.  Strangers, friends, and family mixed freely as the first Thanksgiving came to La Rivera.  How blessed am I?

Some pics that made me laugh.

That´s all there is to say, really.

How to Pick Coffee

You will need:

• a coffee grove
• a laundry basket with a sack attached as a belt
• hands

1. Attach the laundry basket around your waist, tightening the grain sack around your hips to hold it snug.

2. Approach coffee tree.

3. Pick any berry that has blushed red. If in doubt, give the berry a hard squeeze.  Could the seed pop out? Good, pick that one too.

4. Do not slip on the banana leaves that cover the ground of the cafetál!  This is all shade grown cofee, so there will be plants of all kinds scattered among the coffee trees.  Take a moment to look upward.  What a peaceful day.

5. Picnic lunch with Memo - beef from our farm, a fried platano, rice, beans, and cabbage salad.  YUM.

6. If you come across a coffee flower, for goodness sake, smell it!  It will smell wonderful.

 

7. Bag up the coffee and take it to the co-op´s sorting machine.  Mixed with all the surrounding farm´s coffee and processed to remove the meat of the berry, this coffee will soon head off (still green) to all corners of the world.

Paisaje

Costa Rica is beautiful.  Shockingly, wonderously, invigoratingly so.  I wish I was able to describe how alive and gorgeous everything is, but I´m going to try and show you instead.

 

The very first picture I took in Costa Rica.

This is taken along the road leading to the Chinchilla´s house.

In one of the higher pastures of the farm.

The view from a hammock filled hut at a neighboring farm.

Here, Memo and I are one our way to fix the water pipe.

Finally,  a rainbow bursts from behind the main corral.

Till next week! (Miss you Mom!)

P.S. THANK YOU Bek and Ben for the mail!!!! :)

Meet your Meat

One of the reasons I came to Costa Rica, and specifically one of the reasons I wanted to spend time on a farm, was to better aquaint myself with my food.  Most everyone in America is removed - very removed from the food they eat, including myself.  What would it be like to eat food that I knew intimately?  I had a pretty good idea that eating food from a garden not thirty feet away would be pretty great, but what about meat?

Having been a vegetarian/occcasional pescatarian in New Orleans last year, I began eating meat again when I arrived in Costa Rica.  I wanted to test my theory that I was only okay with eating meat if I knew where it came from and could be honestly aware of what I was eating. Most of the meat that we eat at Finca Chinchilla comes from the farm itself, from animals that I have contact with every day.  It´s been an interesting project so far - one that I´ll be writing about more in the next bit.  For today though, a few pictures of my friends and food.  Sad but true: food is cute!

Some tiny chicks that the Chinchillas bought to eat.

They´ll be ready in about a month and a half.

Close up!

Fun fact: in Costa Rica (and elsewhere), chicks say "pio pio" instead of "cheep cheep!"

This little guy belongs to Memo´s brother.

He is a huge scaredy-cat, but ridiculously adorable.