The Wonders of the Microwave & Nature

We had a couple of Ken's older responsible boys babysit for us this past weekend so we could get away for a little while and go out without the kids for the first time since we got here.  Ruddy and Allen were kind enough to volunteer for the job and showed up with movies for the kids to watch.  Neither Ruddy or Allen speak any English, and the kids don't speak any Spanish, so there was a lot of pointing going on but they seemed able to communicate fairly well so we decided to go ahead and go out.  (Besides, they had Ken's cell number for emergencies).  The had picked up the movies at what I like to call the Bolivian Blockbuster.  If you thought that movie piracy was even remotely bad in Canada, you really get your eyes opened up wide here.  Any market and most restaurants have kids or booths selling ANY movie you want whether its in the theatre or not, on burned DVDs for about $1.50 a copy.  But wait, there's more.  You not only get the burned DVD, you get a plastic DVD box like you get when you buy a movie at Futureshop, and you get a full color printed sleeve for the movie as well.  All for the low low price of $1.50  So the boys came over armed with The Frog Princess, Planet 51, and Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs for $4.50.

Since they were going to provide the movies, we figured we would provide the snacks, so we had the pop and microwave popcorn ready to go for when they got here.  This is where the wonders of the microwave come in.  I never really thought about it before, but if you had lived on the street most of your life, you probably have never seen microwave popcorn.  I have never seen such a look of awe and wonder on a 17 or 18 year old as I saw on Ruddy's face when the bag put in the microwave started getting bigger and the popping noises came out.  He watched for the whole 3 minutes and was absolutely astounded.  It went over so well, that we cooked the second bag just because we could.

We were out for a few hours and came home to this:

 

That's Ruddy with a belly full of microwave popcorn asleep on the couch with Jordan.

Now for today's little adventure.  The kids have been mowing through the fruit since there is tons of it and its really cheap, so we needed to go get some more and we needed some groceries as well.  We took a taxi to the store (taxi's are an adventure all to themselves here), and picked up most of the groceries we needed.  Unfortunately, the grocery stores really do not have very good fruit for some reason.  Luckily, we are not far away from a street market, and there are about 40 fruit stands in the market full of really great produce (and wasps).  I am sure most of you know that I love food, so every trip to the market is a chance to find some new strange food to try.  Today was no exception so I picked up some chirimoya which in English we call a custard apple.  This fruit looks like a hand grenade and has a very soft, almost squishy inside with lots of black seeds.  They are so soft, that one was squished in the bag on the way home and made a heck of a mess.  You basically eat it with a spoon since the flesh is very much like an egg custard which is where the english name comes from.  Its a pain in the butt to eat, but its pretty tasty and makes REALLY great ice cream.

 

 

The second fruit was a bit of a mystery to us as we had no idea what it was but bought it anyways because it looked good.  The lady at the stand called it maracuya.  We got it home, and thinking it was very much like an apple because it felt like was and was pretty solid, cut it open to find this:

 

We tried the flesh and it had absolutely no taste at all.  So we asked our housemate Nancy who after looking at it a while, recognized it as something they commonly make juice out of here.  The catch is that you don't eat the flesh, you eat the mucous around the seeds.  Pardon my description, but it has the same consistency as boogers as you can see below:

 

Everybody tried them, and they are very sour/tart.  Lucky for me, that's exactly what I like and nobody else did, so the maracuya is all mine.  I think the texture really put the others off more than the taste.  The picture with the spoon, isn't the seeds falling off the spoon, its the boogers holding the seeds together as they are lifted out of the fruit.  Anyways, more for me.

We had a chance this evening to sit down and talk to Nancy who is also staying here.  She is a from a small farming community in Bolivia and is staying here while she tries to get into education at the university here.  Nancy speaks Spanish, German and English and makes me feel like I am completely unworldly (which I probably am).  Anyways, I was lamenting that I haven't found the meat down here to be very much to my liking because the beef tastes quite different, pork is hard to come by, and its chicken all the time (not that I mind chicken).  After discussing it for a while, we figured out why the beef tastes different.  In Canada, we butcher our beef, and then hang it to age.  In Bolivia, they butcher their beef, then eat or sell it the same day or the next day.  They do not age their beef at all.  That gives it a very different taste and texture because it still has a fair amount of blood in it and it hasn't had a chance to break down the proteins like aging does.  I am sure they would find our beef tastes funny if they came to Canada as well.

Anyways, back to my maracuya.