La Tamaleada December 4, 2010

Lydia, la tamalera!

Tamales are traditionally eaten in Costa Rica for Christmas because they take quite a lot of work to prepare (the whole process is called a tamaleada). But when I mentioned to Lydia that it was a shame I wouldn’t be around to make them with her she immediately said we’d make them early. I’ve had very few tamales in my life: a couple at Mexican restaurants and one here in Costa Rica, and I’ve never made them before. I was so grateful for the opportunity to see how Lydia prepares her tamales, and even more grateful when I found that it took an entire day and many different ingredients. The whole family helped out in one way or another.

Here’s a photo summary of the the tamal-making process:

Prepare the banana leaves

Cut down fresh, green banana leaves and brown leaves. Build a small fire with the brown leaves and quickly heat the green leaves so that they become malleable.

Peel the leaves off their stalk in small chunks and wipe them down to clean them.

Prepare ingredients

The masa, dough, is the most important of all components! Lydia first prepared 1 kilo of regular masa, which is corn flour you add water to normally, but she used chicken broth. She then prepared 1 kilo of mashed potatoes and added chopped celery, onion, garlic and culantro to them. She mixed the two together, added the famous Salsa Lizano, some pepper, cumin and oil and cooked the whole mixture until it reached the right consistency. Thick enough to hold together on its own but not solidifying.

You can fill tamales with anything you have or desire, it just has to be cooked and chopped. The youngest brother in the family killed and prepared a chicken in the morning so that we could have chicken tamales. Lydia says that the famous ingredient in her filling is hard boiled egg. We also added a little potato, red pepper, rice, green beans and carrot to each tamal.

Assembly

Place one banana leaf piece on top of one larger piece (in case one breaks). Spoon some masa onto the leaf and place a little of every filling ingredient on top. (It’s probably easier to mix the filling all together and just spoon that on top, but this is how they do it!). Then carefully fold two opposite sides over and then the other two and place the tamal facing down.

Once all the tamales are filled put two together (folded side in) and tie with some string. Boil water and stack tamales into the pot, they don’t have to be covered in water but the pot should be closed so that the steam helps cook them. Cook for 30 minutes or so.

Enjoy!

Gingerly unwrap tamal and enjoy!

The masa Lydia made was so good I could have eaten it on its own without any filling! It had to be the chicken broth, mashed potatoes and fresh culantro and celery from the garden that did it. Because we placed each filling ingredient in one at a time, with each bite I got a little something different. This time a carrot, next time some chicken. They are so delicious! We ended up making nearly 90! I thanked Lydia ten times for having the whole family go through so much trouble just so that I could make and have tamales with them.

I’ll never forget my first tamaleada!

Tiquismos December 1, 2010

My favorite ticoism: No sea yegua! Seriously? Our mare getting in to trouble, as usual!

Three months is just enough time to settle in to new surroundings, a new culture, even a new language. I had planned on staying in Costa Rica for one month, but next week my 90 day visa will run out. Here in Mastatal at La Iguana I found so much more than I ever expected: love, happiness and chocolate! I have gotten to know everyone at La Iguana and they have gotten to know me so well that I have been invited back whenever I like, as a member of the family.

Living with a tico family has given me the chance to immerse myself into a little bit of this country, its people and its customs. I am already bilingual, but now I can speak like a tica! I will never lose my Argentine accent and I have not picked up the tico accent, but their expressions (called tiquismos or ticoisms) have just started to roll off my tongue naturally. Just the other week as I was hiking back from the banana field with Juan Luis, another farmer crossed our path and greeted us. “Hola, como le va?” Hello, how are you, he asked. And then it came out, the most tico expression there is, without even thinking I responded “pura vida.” At that moment I realized that Mastatal has become more to me than a destination on my world travels, it has become a home, one I feel a part of and can return to whenever.

Because Mastatal is such a small, remote community the people here speak with their own accent and have their own unique expressions. Some of them are specific to country life and I thought they would be fun to share. I don’t use all of these myself as some are quite vulgar (that’s what you hear when you work out in the field with boys), but most are used throughout Costa Rica.

Greetings

Tico responses to “how are you?”All of these mean good or very well:

Pura vida: pure life. By far the most typical tico expression there is, you hear it all the time.

Solo bueno: only good

Solo yogur: only yogurt, don’t ask me why! (Only used in Mastatal)

Tuanis: from the English too nice

Todo parejo: everything’s even

X dos: from police code

Exclamations

Mae: dude. Used ALL the time!

Suave: soft, however it means hold on a second. I use this all the time now!

Seguro: sure, I guess so

Tome: take that

Oiga, vea, di, diay: listen, look. Usually used at the beginning of a sentence or to get someone’s attention.

No sea yegua: don’t be a mare (female horse). My favorite expression, it means holy shit or seriously? Probably only used in the country because here people know from experience that mares can be quite stubborn.

Al chile: to the chile, meaning seriously?

Verdad: You know

Jale: hurry up, c’mon

Curses (usually regarding someone)

Hijo de puta/hijueputa: son of a bitch. I hear this all the time every day. It is not as vulgar as it sounds.

Que yegua: what a mare, meaning what an ass

Caripicha: dick face or cara gorra: also dick face (not as common)

Playo: gay, meaning idiot. This one is offensive to me but very common here, unfortunately.

Pura mierda: full of crap or simply that’s shit

Expressions

Estar de goma: to have a hangover. Important for many tourists in this country

Tomando guaro: to drink hard alcohol made of sugar cane, actually means someone is at the bar or having a drink, it could be anything, like beer.

Haga chocolate!: make chocolate! Used when things are getting heated, like at bingo the other night when someone was going to win at any moment.

Ser necio: to be annoying

Que colera: What cholera, meaning what a drag

Ni papa, ni mierda: not even potatoes, not even shit, meaning nothing

Other Interesting Vocab

Tata: dad

Orinar: urinate, the common word (even though it’s so formal) for having to go pee

Pulperia: corner store. Abasteceria: food store like a quicky mart. Soda: diner. Very confusing for me at first because sometimes they are one in the same or connected.

Monte: weeds. Very important for me because in Argentina yuyos is weeds and here yuyos is athlete’s foot!

Vacilar: to joke

Vara, chunche, chuncha: a thing, object or stuff

There are so many more tiquismos but these are the ones I hear most often.

Going Bananas

I promised I’d write a post about all the different ways we have been preparing bananas and plantains, so here it is! A photolog of our banana inventions. I didn’t follow any recipes here, just general directions and crazy ideas, but they worked! If you happen to have tons of bananas and plantains these preparations are great because some require ripe fruits and others unripe, that way (hopefully) you don’t waste any!

 

Pizza! Well, it’s the closest we have gotten to having pizza here at La Iguana. We save our flour for baking bread and chocolate goodies to sell, so we would never make pizza dough. One day I took boiled, green bananas, mashed them, pressed them out onto an oiled cookie sheet, baked it, then spread bean dip, tomatoes, oregano and cheese on top and baked again. It’s delicious!

Banana brownies: we run out of eggs here very often and ripe bananas are a great replacement. ½ a large banana=1 egg. It does change the texture and taste of the brownies, but I like chocolate and bananas. I even blended peanuts, bananas, sugar and oil to make a peanut butter banana cream to spread on top. They had to be consumed immediately though!

 

Plantain chips: using green plantains sliced thin in a food processor and fried in abundant oil. We season with salt and limon and serve with bean dip (mashed, seasoned, cooked black beans) and guacamole.

 

Frozen bananas: probably my favorite way to preserve and prepare ripe bananas because it’s so easy and delicious, you just has to peel them. When bananas are frozen they taste and feel like ice cream! I eat them with granola or chocolate sauce.

Chocolate banana cream pie: I made this for Thanksgiving and it was a huge hit. I ran in to so many ingredient constraints as I was trying to follow Mark Bittman’s recipe for banana cream pie. I didn’t have butter for the crust, didn’t have enough eggs to split them and just use yolks, didn’t have any prepared and sweetened chocolate, didn’t have any cream and ran out of milk! I substituted solidified vegetable oil, whole eggs, pure ground cacao, and kefir, but it worked! There was, I couldn’t believe it, a little white chocolate for the decoration!

Chapeando los Bananos, Clearing Bananas November 28, 2010

Today I took Jorge’s, the eldest son’s, place out in the fields chopping. He is finishing up university out of town on the weekends, and since we work on Saturdays it was the perfect opportunity for me to go out to the field to work. Even though I have been out many times before and enjoy the work, the family is not used to girls doing this sort of work.

Today, this is what we did…

Hiked down to the banana and plantain field and immediately began sharpening our machetes

 

My machete and clearing stick. You use the stick to prevent brush (or insects!) from getting into your face or hurting your hand

 

My job was to clear off all the browning leaves from the trees, it helps prevent rotting, disease, incorporates organic matter into the soil, increases sun exposure, reduces weight etc...

 

Beautiful bananos (bananas), not quite ready yet...

 

We left at 6:15, had breakfast at 8:30 and finished up at 10:30. This is Juan Luis, he said we finished so fast because I helped. I almost believe him!

 

We harvested some bananas to sell and take back home. When you harvest bananas you cut down the entire tree, no worries there is at least one baby tree growing just beside it to harvest from next time.

 

Thankfully we had a horse to haul the heavy load back! It would have been impossible otherwise, there were just three of us.

 

Juan Luis: "ya sos una campesina!" (now you are a true farmer!) Me: "Mi papa va a estar tan orgulloso!" (My dad will be so proud!)

 

Later that day Juan Luis told me about his childhood here in Mastatal. His family has been farming on this very same land for nearly 50 years. They have grown corn, beans, rice, bananas, plantains, cacao, tempate (for biodiesel) and pineapple, rotating and resting the land in between. Right now they are growing tempate (for the first time through a cooperative), beans (for the family to eat), cacao (to sell), bananas and plantains (for the family).

Right now the bananas are doing really well, so I suggested we sell them to another farm with volunteers (rancho Mastatal), they don’t have any. We’ll see what price we get…a whole bunch of about 80 goes for just $2 or $3!!!! Not worth it… I’m going to try to pull out my sales skills to up the price a bit. At least $5. Now I know the challenges of growing bananas and I will cherish every banana I get to enjoy here at La Iguana. I eat them about 3 times a day! And no they do not make you gain weight (mom!). I suppose if you go out to chop with machetes and eat bananas it’s hard to gain weight anyway… In any case, I’ve never eaten such delicious bananas in my life!