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.

Granada

Some of you may remember that I traveled to Nicaragua in January to renew my visa.  It was a strange trip - full of wind storms and not much else.  I recently returned to accompany a friend to renew her visa, and had a wonderfully different experience.  This time, I headed to Granada, which can be found on the northern coast of Lake Nicaragua.  (It's the oldest continuously inhabited city in Latin America, for all you trivia buffs.)

I fell in love with Granada immediately.  Where cities in Costa Rica are relatively organized, Granada is riotous, dirty, and thrilling. It immediately reminded me of Peru. I hadn't before realized how much I missed that chaotic river of people feeling until we were wading through the market, surrounded on all sides by people, animals, and wares.  Women called out about their food or merely waved a banana leaf above their loaves of bread.  Men resoled shoes or hawked the latest cell phone charger.  Kids sifted through knees, market bags, horse legs, and stalls, creating their own small river beneath the larger one. 

The other side of Granada´s charm lies in something very different.  As I mentioned above, it´s an extremely old city, and proud of the fact.  The buildings around the main square in Granada are beautifully restored to bright colonial architecture - crisp white plaster details surrounding warm yellow walls, wooden balconies slowly disappearing under determined vines.

The rest of the city shows a more realistic echo of the city´s age in faded homes and occasional details that reminded me of the decadent beauty of New Orleans.  The contrast between the two, though, is what made the city most interesting to me.  I am a person that tends to like contrasts.  Salty with sweet.  Challenging but fun.  New but old.  Granada fed just that part of me.

I found Nicaraguans to be a kind, polite group of people.  They often went out of their way to be helpful to me, patiently waiting as I made a decision or searched for the right word as I spoke.  Here in Costa Rica, there is some cultural tension between "Nicas" and "Ticos," but I am happy to report that stereotypes are just that.  I am already planning to return to Granada during my upcoming travels, and can´t wait to see more parts of Nicaragua as well.

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?

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!)