Guanacaste

As I mentioned before, I'm in the Guanacaste region of Costa Rica right now.  It's an area with a lot of history, and very distinct from the Zona Sur, where I've been with the Chinchillas.  The land is flatter and drier, the accents are different, and the roads are better.  It's amazing in such a small country that so much can change about the landscape and the people in just a few hours.

Learn more about Guanacaste and its history here.

On the Road Again

Having completed a hefty five and a half months on or around the Chinchilla farm, I recently cut the cord for some serious wandering.  I currently have a plane ticket back to the States for July 28th, so time is slowly ticking to a close for me here. (Barring my changing said ticket - always a possibility!)

First, I spent about a week at a friend's home in San Isidro, coming slowly out of the culture shock of not living on the farm anymore.  Things like a hot shower, a room I could close the door to and know that no one else was on their way in, and whole-grain based vegetarian meals were at once jarring and rejuvenating. My friend was generous with his time and his space, and I left there ready to travel and explore.

My first destination? Guanacaste, the northwestern zone of Costa Rica.  You'll hear more about it in the next post!

Happy Juan Santamaría Day!

History lesson!

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.

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?