Brew Party

To commemorate the many hours spent cultivating tasty beverages, we had a get together yesterday to taste the fruits of Eric's labor.  He has had the help of many people over the months and they converged at the house for a taste.  There were 10 varieties...

The smoky atmosphere makes for a colorful sunset each night.  It also makes for black feet when we walk barefoot on the tile floor.  Yuck.

Brewing up a Birthday Party

We celebrated Dempsey's 8th birthday last week.  Rice Krispies were requested for the school b-day celebration.  In the afternoon we headed to "Bungalow", the (only?) pee-wee golf course in the city.  We played a round, ordered wings, chicken fingers and nachos and D had a friend spend the night for a sleep over.  Woke up in the morning and made challah french toast.  Demspey said it was the best b-day ever.  smile

With all the beer brewing that's been going on around here, the kids were starting to protest.   "When can we make root beer?!"  So Eric ordered some ginger beer extract and he and the kids made root beer last weekend.  After getting the ingredients heated and mixed, there were bottles to wash...

     Then bottles to be filled...
 

 Linnea taking a nip o' the root beer

 The last of it gets put in a glass for a tasting.  It's not carbonated yet, but still tasty!

One week later, we cracked open a bottle and... bubbles!  Good, ol' fashioned root beer!

Garden Booty

Eric was fortunate enough to be in the right place at the right time to score some corn from Manuel tonight. Here's the first look at the corn that's been growing across the street.

We'll let you know tomorrow how it tastes in our tortilla soup.

Mercado de Mayoreo

We headed downtown this morning to buy fresh veggies and fruit at the open air market, Mercado de Mayoreo.  Our maid has been bemoaning the less-than-fresh produce that's available to us at La Colonia, the market where we do most of our shopping.

We drove toward the National Stadium and parked across from the main entrance of the market.  Today we found sweet potatoes, cucumbers, broccoli, tasty tortillas, onions, beets, avocado, and pineapple.  There was, of course, so much more.  Last week, I bought fruit (can't remember the name at the moment)  that looked like a greenish-yellow pinecone.  I cut it open at home and it had pale colored insides with big black seeds.  I spooned out the flesh.  There weren't any other takers in the household to try the mystery fruit.  Needless to say, we didn't buy another one today.

Last week, I bought some delicious caramels from a lady who was walking around the market, selling them out of her bag.  They look like kitty turds wrapped in cellophane, but they were so rich and delicious that we couldn't wait to find her again today.

You guessed it, no caramel lady today.

These have to be the tastiest tortillas in Tegucigalpa!  10 lempiras for a bag of 16 tortillas (50 cents)!

Things We Love About Honduras

We are loving some things about living here.  Some of them we have just discovered.  Some of them are things that we have noticed all along, but we are just beginning to appreciate them.

This is the feel good.  Our grocery bags are 100% biodegradable.  If you've seen all the plastic garbage bags that are a normal part of the "ecosystem" here, you would know why this is so exciting.

Last night we went to a Jazz Festival.  Great music at a great outdoor venue.  We sure do miss seeing/hearing live music!  Gotta love it, it only cost $3 to get in!

Caramel made with goat's milk.  Mmmmmm... super tasty in my latte.

Monkey Licker (pretty much goes without saying why we like this!)

A herd of horses (there were about 6 or 7 of them) on the side of the road.

It's hard to see these little beautiful flowers because they're covered in dust.  This is at the side entrance of another bilingual school just outside the city.  We've seen this climbing vine growing in Sebastopol, and now we've spotted it here, decorating the chain link and concertina wire.  Gotta love the contrasts of nature and security.

We saved the best for last.  The thing we love most about living on Honduras is that our kids have discovered that their greatest playmate is each other.  They can play and play for hours making forts, playing with Legos and Playmobiles, Dempsey reads to Linnea, drawing and painting.  Yes, there is of course, fighting.  But that's all a part of being siblings, right?

Catch-up: Halloween

We are a little We are a little behind on getting pictures put up from our Halloween festivities. Although the school said that they were "scaling down" the Halloween party this year, I didn't notice. There was a parade and class parties. Dempsey and Linnea came home with gobs of candy, enough to last through Thanksgiving. We were invited by some neighbors (an American family) to go trick or treating in our neighborhood on Saturday night, with Marine escorts. We passed on the invitation, in part because our kids didn't need any more candy, and Eric and I were headed out to a Halloween party that night. But, I wanted to know, would the Marines be in costume? Camouflage? Mind you, I really don't think the escorts were necessary... sometimes the Embassy folks are a little over-cautious. They are very nice, but they freak me out a little.

Today is Thursday, and that is the day our maid goes across the hall to Colin and Elisa's house. She goes over to clean, do laundry, iron. This means we are on our own for dinner. But what is funny is that we can tell that she's been over to our place too, because our breakfast dishes are done and our beds are made. About cooking dinner, I really don't mind... cooking a couple nights a week isn't difficult at all. So tonight I dug up a recipe that my mom gave me years ago. It's spicy peanut noodles with shrimp. All ingredients were readily available at our usual grocery store... egg noodles, soy sauce, rice vinegar, cilantro, cucumbers, red and yellow pepper, peanuts, shrimp. The kids loved that we got to use chop sticks and slurp noodles. We also got to eat a meal that was familiar to home. I probably made this dish twice a month when we lived in Sebastopol.

I also think it is funny that, now that we are bloggers, we take pictures of ourselves eating dinner, then write about it to our friends. Life is strange...

Lychee, Mangosteen & Beans

A few people have commented that they like seeing what we have been eating down here in Honduras. Well, beans have become a major part of our diet, with of course rice and tortillas. Beans are pretty much part of every meal. We got a pressure cooker and have been learning to make the best refried beans! The secret so far is to get some oil hot in the bottom of the pressure cooker and throw in about four cloves of garlic to brown before adding all the soaked beans. About twenty minutes later... Simple, tasty, nutritious, and cheep!

Also we have been enjoying pineapple, mangosteen, lychee, and mangos!

New Habits

Shopping habits are a funny thing.  When we were living in Northern California, I had my shopping gig down.  There was a particular store that was my place and I knew that store like the back of my hand.  I could whip through the aisles in less that 25 minutes and get a weeks worth of groceries for about $150.

We are starting some new habits here... our new place to shop is La Colonia.  There is one not to far from our house.  The produce is pretty good (notice the beautiful basil - D loved the basil so much he picked off several leaves and put them in a bowl by his bed because the smell reminded him of our a field trip he went on last year in kindergarten), the aisles are well organized and it's not too big where you'd feel like you would get lost.  I don't like "Pais".  It's a big grocery store in the mall that we went to a few times when we first got here.  Come to find out, it's owned by WalMart.  It's huge, has a lot of crap, and we tended to wander the aisles and back track to find what we needed.  I think the first time we went there, it took almost an hour before we were done.  It is cheaper, but not worth the effort.  Typically, we have been spending about $130 a week on groceries here.  Hopefully as we stock up our shelves with more of the basics, our weekly food bill will decrease some. 

We now buy milk in a carton.  That was a little weird at first.  The carton sits on a shelf in the store, not refrigerated.  We Americans are funny about refrigerating our dairy products.  But we have been drinking the stuff and no one is sick.  Of course, we refrigerate it after we open it.  L doesn't like it, but everyone else does.  

Zambos are plantain chips with a delicious spiciness to them.  Yummmmm.  Even L likes these.

Salva Vida's go down real easy.  I can't say that I'd choose to drink it at home when there are so many great IPA's to choose from, but when in Rome... We've also been buying Stoly vodka for about $8 a bottle.   I hate to admit that we also buy Coke now, but we also have a new drink in our repertoire - rum and Coke is dang tasty. 

Another new habit is getting our bottled water once a week. The water guy that comes around each Saturday morning at about 8 o'clock.  He stands on the street below our apartment yelling "Agua!" but it sounds more like "Awa!".  We tell him how many 5 gallon bottles we need, he hoofs them up 3 flights of stairs to our apartment, we trade our empties for fulls, and voila! we have drinking water for the next week.  A 5 gallon bottle is 30 lempiras, about $1.50.  We give him a tip for bringing the water up.  This morning, between Colin and Elisa and us, he brought up three 5 gallon bottles all at once.  We had the kids take down the empties.

The last photo is of the kids sorting through candy from a "pinata" D went to yesterday.  Pinata is what they call b-day parties.  At a pinata, a kid can score so much candy, it rivals a successful night of trick-or-treating.   To my chagrin, the kid's candy intake has increased one hundred-fold since we arrived.  Its an ever-present entity at school and pinatas.   Anyway, a boy in his class celebrated his b-day by inviting friends over to slip 'n slide.  Because we don't have a car yet, the boy's mother graciously offered to bring D home after the party.  He got back at about 7:30, with the boy, his mother and their Driver.  Come to find out, this boy's grandfather is a former president of Honduras (not the most recent former president, however).  Hmmmm, our life is really different here...

La Caja China and Travel Day!

The Caja China is the coolest way to cook a pig!  We borrowed this one form Paul Schroeder at Monti's Rotisserie in Santa Rosa.  We were able to cook our pig from Gleason Ranch in about four hours.  It came out perfect! (Thanks Malcolm)

It is such a luxury to have the opportunity to eat a pig that was raised locally in such a sustainable way.  Not only did it taste better than any pork that I have ever had but we felt better eating it!  Check out Nancy at Gleason Ranch www.gleasonranch.com

Nancy Rocks!

The going away party was awesome and thanks to all who came and made us feel so loved.  It is so nice to have such special friends who we will miss so much.

Straight from the party we left the house we were staying at and came over to Jennie's parents house to stage and pack all our luggage.  Today we get everything packed up and we all will head for San Francisco for dinner before our 11:59pm flight!  Excited is an understatement.