Food Fun

Yay for rain! Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, were almost a constant downpour and it has been absolutely marvelous! We didn't turn on the fans at all on Sunday and enjoyed the quiet we didn't realize we were missing when they were on.  Not only did we enjoy the quiet, but my hair enjoyed being able to stay in one place instead of being constantly blown into a lion's mane :)

Yesterday morning I woke up to find Joe like this:

We will take towel blankets over sweating any day :)

So I decided to dedicate this post to food because I couldn't think of a more worthy thing to dedicate it to :) Discovering new food, eating good food, and trying to figure out how to make food have all been a big part of our experience down here, so I thought I'd write a little about it.  And it's going to be really random - so I'll just apologize for that up front...

We LOVE the street food down here!  It really is just like pouring oil into our stomachs, but it's tasty oil!  There are hot dog stands and fruit stands everywhere, all day, but the Nicaraguan street food starts to come out around 4ish.  Some evenings Joe and I decide that it will be a street food dinner and we just walk the streets and try things we haven't eaten before.

There's not much variety - the stands sell tacos and enchiladas, or you can get the "complete" which is fried plantains, rice and beans, coleslaw, and chicken all wrapped up in a plantain leaf.  But each place has a slightly different serving size, price, or ingredient, so it's always a new adventure.

Here are some tacos: meat and rice rolled up in a cornmeal tortilla and fried, then topped with coleslaw and cream.

Their enchiladas are fried tortillas with fried rice pocketed inside, topped with coleslaw.  Sorry it's so blurry.

 A couple Saturday evenings ago Joe and I headed into town to find out what was going on. We had seen on Friday that a big stage was being set up in the town center, so we decided to check it out.  On the way we saw different groups parading through the streets with matching shirts and bands playing, and when we got to the center, the place was packed with all of these different groups.  They were all from different parts of Nicaragua and Honduras, with their shirts telling what city they represented.  A lot of people had Honduras flags, scarves, and jerseys, but we never really figured out what the big event was.  A lot of Catholic leadership was on the stand and eventually a cardinal showed up and was robed and sat on the "throne" in the center of the stage.  There were speeches and choirs that performed.

The tour buses that had brought all of the people were scattered around town.  We liked the back of this one :)

We didn't stay for long, but the event gave us an excuse to try some more food from the numerous food stands everywhere.  This is Joe holding a little bag of fried plantains - like potato chips.  When someone buys a bag, the vendor opens it up, spoons some coleslaw into it and squirts hot sauce on top.  Then you eat it with your fingers. Delicious!

 I also tried a quesillo - a tortilla with a large round piece of cheese, caramelized onions, cream, and hot sauce on top.  Probably a one-time try, but at least I felt cultured while eating it :)

This is a picture of a woman cooking her family's dinner.  A lot of people cook their meals over wood fires.  Amazing.

Decided to try a choco banana.  We've seen signs for them everywhere so we finally bought one.  Frozen banana covered with wax chocolate.  I tried to eat it, but when I couldn't feel the inside of my mouth anymore for all of the wax, I just threw the chocolate away and ate the banana :)

 S'mores! We discovered marshmallows at the grocery store and we had some square cookies on hand that have chocolate on one side, so we gave it a try.  Delicious!!  The marshmallows aren't quite the same quality as we're used to (who knew marshmallows could have a lower quality??) but when it's all melted together it's yummy sugar goodness and it doesn't matter.

Sad ending to the story though: we bought the marshmallows and made s'mores about a month ago and just two days ago I decided I felt like eating a marshmallow, so I got them out of the cupboard and the bag was full of huge, juicy, red ants busy making their colony in there - complete with larvae. Pretty nasty.  I thought I had tied off the bag well enough, but I guess if I've learned anything here it's that if we have anything sugary that we don't want to be sharing with a lot of other critters, we had better keep it in the fridge.  Lesson learned again.

So, a while back our landlord and his wife went to Costa Rica and Panama for a week or two and they left a supply of cookies for us to hand out to the kids who came by (they give cookies to kids who they know won't get them at home because they're too poor).  So for the time they were gone we had to go out to the gate every time the kids knocked and hand out cookies. As fun as it was to see the kids, we were glad when Jerry and Debora returned and we could disregard the constant knocking at the gate again :)

But, the next time I saw those cookies in town I bought some to try and LOVED them! They're not what one would expect from a cookie, they're kind of bland with a hint of molasses, but the taste has definitely grown on me. They're now one of my favorite treats, and the best part is - Joe doesn't like them!  Score!  So if I buy some I get to eat them all :)

For breakfast for Father's Day I tried my hand at making stove top biscuits. Definitely not oven biscuits, but not bad. It was just so nice to have warm "breadish" anything that we could put butter and jam on.

It's been so interesting for me to see how slowly I go through margarine and sugar here.  Back home I would stock up on margarine and would be constantly transferring it from the freezer to the fridge and throwing away empty boxes, but here, I'm still working on my fourth cube of it.  And same with the sugar - we used to go through sugar like nobody's business, but here I've used a total of 2 cups (one cup for the cobbler, and one cup for the "brownies" which will both be pictured later, so start getting excited :)) I guess I've never realized before just how much of that stuff is used up because of the baked goods we consume.  I've just been surprised at how not having an oven has cut back on our use of those two ingredients.

Anyway, this was the other half of the Father's Day breakfast...gotta love omelets!

Speaking of Father's Day, we hardly knew it even came in this country.  Mother's day was such a big event here, we were excited to see what they would do for Father's Day.  It was celebrated here the Sunday after it was celebrated in the states, and when we were walking to church we saw this mother and son carrying Father's day gift baskets.  That's the only sign of it we saw all day.  Not a word was said about fathers in church, no music, no fireworks, no store displays, nothing.

Kind of sad, but we have heard quite a few times that a lot of the people here don't really have fathers. That stick around, anyway.  Most have mothers that they live with, but not many have fathers that they know.  So maybe that's why it wasn't such a big deal...

Jerry and Deborah invited us over for homemade pizza one night.  Jerry is a vegan, so it was just crust and sauce, but Deborah has definitely perfected the sauce.  It was heavenly.  She did put Nicaraguan cheese on half, and it worked.  Joe usually won't touch the cheese here, but on the pizza it was perfect.

Dragon fruit is now in season, so we decided to try it. 

Hmmmm....reminded me of a kiwi. Probably because of all of the seeds.  It was good, but we probably won't buy another one.  It cost us 25 bananas!! Joe's and my new system for deciding if something is worth the money is asking if we're willing to give up that many bananas for it.  "Would you rather have this taco or 15 bananas?" "The bus trip would cost 120 bananas, do you still want to go?" Yes, I know - we're pathetic.

And the dragon fruit juice turned our mouths pink! 

 

 Another night out for street food.  Too bad we remembered to take the picture after the food was gone :)

Our 4th of July was pretty uneventful, but we did what we could to make it a special day :)

Started off the morning by watching this video my sister put together for a Relief Society presentation once.  Pretty inspiring, I thought.


Then spent the day playing patriotic music online while Joe worked.  We made sure to blast Neil Diamond's "Coming to America" a few times to make the day legit.

I tried to think of a 4th of July food I could make and thought of a mango pie, but couldn't find a pie tin, so the idea turned into mango cobbler instead because our landlord said he had a casserole dish I could borrow.

It was quite an accomplishment for me since I've never used a gas oven before.  The oven temperature knob has no numbers on it, it just turns up the flame on the bottom of the oven. Plus I made it without any measuring cups or spoons, which I'm not very skilled at either.  But it was edible!  It tasted more like mango corn bread than cobbler, but it was sweet and that's all we needed.

So this street food experiment was quite the failure.  I've read online about Nicaraguan nacatamales and have seen them sometimes being sold on the street, so I finally decided to get a couple while I was at the market.  It's cornmeal and lard mixed together to create the "dough" and then meat and vegetables and seasonings are put inside, it's wrapped in a plantain leaf and boiled.  I was pretty excited to get home from the market and try them with Joe.



We unwrapped them from the plantain leaves...

And took a bite.  There was nothing inside :( Just two big hunks of lard and cornmeal.  It's probably the first food we've thrown away since we came here. I'll have to try again at another stand and ask what's in them before I buy them :)

Who knew there were so many kinds of bananas in this world??  It took us a while to figure out which were bananas and which were plantains, but now that we've got that pretty much figured out, we're still coming in contact with crazy looking bananas.  Skinny ones, fat ones, long ones, short ones.  So these are the squat ones and they are packed with sugar.  Wow, I think I had five different canker sores in my mouth after sharing one with Joe.  Ok, that's an exaggeration, but my mouth could definitely feel the sugar.  And the cool thing was, it was the texture of a banana, but it tasted like a pear.  How's that for a weird fruit.

I was on the phone with my sister the other day and she mentioned that they were making BYU mint brownies.  It was like she had stabbed me in the stomach. As soon as I hung up I googled how to make brownies on a stove top.  Someone suggested you make the batter like normal and then add water to cook them like pancakes.  So I did.

Definitely not brownies.  But a nice, sweet treat nonetheless.  I think having cocoa powder that we're used to would have helped, but we still use the stuff we found at the market which is quite a different taste.

Joe got a twin pop banana the other day! Definitely worth a picture :)

 

And that's the end of the random food pictures!  Thanks for reading! :)

Croquet

A few Saturdays ago Jerry and Deborah invited us to go with them to a park by the lake and play croquet with them.  Joe rode on the back of Jerry's motorcycle and I rode behind Deborah on hers - that was the best part of the whole evening :) SOOO much faster than walking and a lot cooler and breezier too!

We rode out to the lake and were amazed at how many people were out there!  Joe and I have walked along the lake many times and have seen all of the parks and walkways and playgrounds that have been built, but it's always empty when we go.  We've even commented to ourselves sadly that, "they built it, but no one came."  Boy were we wrong.  Apparently on the weekends it is the place to be.  That place was packed.  Families everywhere, picnics, soccer games, bikers, the benches were packed, the sidewalks were busy, the playgrounds were crowded, and most of the grass areas had been claimed too. 

We found a small area to set up our game and played for a couple of hours.  Within minutes of starting we had quite the audience watching us - apparently they had never seen anything quite like croquet.  I didn't get a picture of all of them, but there were probably 30 people gathered on the sidewalk watching us, and about 10 kids crowded around us - laying their heads down by our balls and picking up the balls to play with them every once in a while.  It was kind of hard to play trying not to hit their heads or their shins and asking them to please leave our balls where they were.  But eventually they all found more exciting things to do and we were able to play in peace and take a few pictures.

Then we drove through the town because they wanted to buy some popcorn for us.  We were stopped by a parade - they have these every few weeks for different saints - so we stopped and watched and took some pictures.  There were a lot of school kids in uniform, some nuns scattered throughout,

a lot of traditional dancing groups with bands playing music for them,

and of course the saint that was being honored, carried through the city by some men.

 The best part was that when it was over and we were getting back on the motorcycles, I saw two moms carrying two little baby girls, probably about 18 months old, that had been dressed up like nuns.  You know when you see little girls dressed up in BYU cheerleader outfits at football games?  Yeah, these people dress up their girls like nuns.  Awesome!  I so wish I had had the camera ready for that one!

We stopped at a popcorn stand, they bought us some popcorn, and then we rode to the cathedral and ate it sitting on the steps and enjoyed some people watching.  It was such beautiful weather and a perfect way to end the day. 

On our ride home it started raining, which made the ride that much better :)  Speed with water (when I'm not the one driving) has got to be one of the best combinations around.  It was such a fun evening and so nice of them to invite us!

Masaya Volcano

Joe and I decided it was time for another day trip, so we headed out to see the Masaya volcano - about 30 minutes away.  We got there at 8:30 am which was 30 minutes before they opened, so we spent a while swatting mosquitoes, killing ants, and eating bread.  Whenever we go sightseeing we always pack bananas and bread.  They're the only foods we've found around here that can be packed around and don't require utensils.  And, pretty amazingly, the bananas don't seem to bruise as easily as they do in the states, so it works out pretty well.

When they opened, we paid our entrance fee (one of Joe's biggest frustrations here is that they charge foreigners a different price than the Nicaraguans.  We paid $5 each, but if we were Nicaraguan, the price would have been 50 cents each) and started walking. The volcano was 4 miles away.  They had a shuttle to take people to the crater for a price, but we were happy to save the money, get the exercise, and enjoy the landscape.  

Here's a volcanic rock field.  And yes, we walked with an umbrella. Never thought I would do it, but now I think I just might do it again sometime. It made me feel very Asian, but it sure did a good job of keeping the heat levels down! 

Oh, we had Joe's phone camera on night vision mode?? That's why it looked like we were looking through blue-tinted sun glasses! Sorry- still trying to figure out Joe's phone...

They were handing out hard hats to everyone to wear on the ride up to the volcano and while walking around at the top, but since we were walking up instead of driving the guy said we didn't have to wear them because it would get too hot.  Seemed a little backwards to me - I would have thought they would have been more concerned since we were walking up.  Good thing we had our umbrella for protection :)
 

It was a gorgeous walk - dense jungle around us, beautiful, exotic birds, monkey swinging ropes...

 Eventually the trees ended and we walked a ways through volcanic rock and dead shrubs to get to the volcano crater.  This was the first volcano I've looked into and it was pretty awesome.  We couldn't see any molten lava - apparently you have to go at night to be able to see that - but looking down into the huge, gaping hole with smoke pouring out was pretty cool.  It's one of the most active volcanoes in Nicaragua, most recently erupting last April when it threw up some rocks and ash.  But it's always spewing out noxious gases and we were warned not to be up there for longer than 20 minutes so we wouldn't breathe in too much. The gases were so bad we didn't want to stay for even 20 minutes.





 

The view walking down was amazing.

Aaahhh...back to the shade of the trees.

 Back at the entrance we spent some time at the visitor center and were quite impressed with how nice it was.  There was a lot of interesting information and some of it was even in English!

One of my favorite things was a 3D map of the volcanoes in Nicaragua.  We've heard of quite a few of them, but it was fun to look from an aerial view and see how they all line up in a row along the fault line.

When we were done at the visitor center we headed back out to the highway and walked the 3 miles to our next destination - Fort Coyote.

There were some beautiful houses along the way. 

We also took a picture when we passed this chair factory because EVERYONE here uses rocking chairs.  When we look into a house we see about 5 or 6 rocking chairs in front of a t.v. and that's it for their main room.  And people all the time sit out along the street in front of their houses in rocking chairs - wicker, wooden, plastic - these people cannot live without their rocking chairs.  We have two at our apartment and we're almost addicted.

And on our walk we saw a Papa Johns!!  This is the only American restaurant/fast food place we've seen down here.  It was pretty exciting :)

Fort Coyote is owned by the Boy Scouts of Nicaragua.  We never really figured out what it was built for originally, but it's been a fort, a dungeon, and, some say, a torture chamber.

It was cool to see the scout symbol on the front gates.

Had to get a picture of this resilient little tree growing up the back of the entrance :) 

After a very steep, hot climb we saw the fort.

Again, the scout symbol -  "Siempre Listo"

Pretty neat fort...

And an awesome view!

We could see the smoke from the Masaya volcano where we had just been.

They had guided tours, but since we wouldn't have been able to understand them anyways we just walked around by ourselves.  This is a picture in the upper part of the fort, but we also went down a steep ramp to some rooms and hallways way under the ground where we could barely see in front of us after our eyes adjusted.  That was pretty creepy.  Not sure I would've wanted a guide telling us what had happened down there...

They also had some displays that explained the history of the place.  It was fun to see the picture of Baden Powell - the founder of Scouting. Apparently the scouts used to use this fort for their jamborees back in the day.  Now they just give tours as a fund raiser.

We walked back down to the highway again and caught a bus back to Granada.  By the end of the day we figured we had walked about 13 miles.  And it sure felt good :)