For last night's nostalgic tortillas, I was not going to be satisfied with a bag of thin machine-pressed standard fare, so I found dried masa flour in the hispanic aisle of the supermarket, and mixed up the masa and patted out the tortillas by hand - Guatemalan tortillas are slightly bigger and about two or three times as thick as your typical Mexican corn tortilla. The process of mixing the masa dough and the sound of a bare hand slapping out the tortilla were probably more exciting to me than the eventual product, although I did get better as I went and ended up making some deliciously soft, fat, chewy-on-the-inside-with-a-slight-toasty-crunch tortillas. Yum!
I actually only patted out tortillas once while in Guatemala, and that was in my very first two weeks, while staying with a family in San Andres. But I watched Doña Elena, the wife of Don Nicolas, and her oldest daughter Leni as they cranked out piles of steaming fresh tortillas for every meal in Paso Caballos. While it takes me a few minutes to carefully imitate their movements and slowly form a rough-edged circle that's still a little bit too thick, they would have produced ten beautiful, perfectly even tortillas. I guess they do have a bit of a headstart in terms of practice, they probably produce about 100 tortillas per day! By the end of my trip, I was eating about 10 tortillas per day, and that was still less than the rest of the family. So with me, the parents, and 7 kids (the 8th was off studying in San Andres), Elena and Leni were tortellando up a storm.
(Doña Elena in her house, making tortilla)
(Doña Elena in her house, making tortilla)Yes, "to tortilla" is a verb en Español. And it doesn't really count as food, either, there is comida, and there is tortilla, and they are different things. People would always ask me if we had tortilla in the United States, and I would tell them that they existed, but they were mostly made of flour, or otherwise thin and machine-made corn tortillas, but that people didn't really eat them with everything like they do in Guatemala. They would ask what we ate instead of tortillas - bread? But I would explain that we don't really have an equivalent, there is no staple so central, nothing that so brilliantly combines sustenance and eating utensil - because there certainly weren't any other utensils in Paso Caballos!
Well, OK, the first time I was there they had a spoon, which the family would sometimes give to me if I was eating soup. When I returned, however, the spoon appeared to have been lost, at which point I figured out how to eat my ramen with tortilla.
My diet in Paso Caballos consisted almost exclusively of the three following items (tortilla not included, of course): black beans, eggs, and chicken-flavored ramen noodle soup. A typical day would be ramen for breakfast, eggs for lunch, eggs for dinner. The next day? Beans for breakfast, beans for lunch, eggs for dinner. Green matter was scarce enough that I started considering a bit of fresh chile or onion cooked in with the beans to be a "vegetable." One day I was presented with a tomato that had been boiled and then smashed up with chili powder - I was nearly ecstatic!
Don Nicolas's family would eat meat every once in a while, and I would have happily broken my vegetarianism for a bit of variety in my diet, but I just couldn't do it... I tried a little piece of chicken one day, and it grossed me out, and even just looking at the other meats was entirely unappetizing. I guess I've been a vegetarian for too long, I just couldn't bring myself to take a bite. But when the family did cook meat for themselves (maybe a couple of times a week) I would take a bowl of the broth it was cooked in, as that usually contained some onion, wild cilantro, and maybe even a tomato or two. Over the course of my stay there, I consumed the broths of many different animals: chicken, turkey (both domestic and wild), pig (domestic and wild), deer, tepiscuintle (image of this large forest rodent below), and some things that were just called "meat."
The deer was my favorite.By the end of my trip, I had figured out some key strategies on how to get vitamins into my diet. I had located the store that sold V8 juice, and then during my last week Don Nicolas's store got a crate of orange juice, and I probably consumed as much as the rest of the town put together. I also learned to keep an eye on the kids, because they could sometimes be seen munching on fruit during the afternoon, and I would ask them to share with me. This prevented fruit-related heartbreak, like the one beans-beans-egg day when I came around to the house for dinner and saw the empty husks of a couple of fresh pineapples outside, but all the sweet juicy goodness was long gone.
At the biological station the situation was a bit better - for one thing, once I knew the drill I was able to bring food and cook for myself, which meant not only that I could eat lots of veggies, but that I could also introduce the bio station boys to funny american foods like sapo en el agujero (toad in the hole), and sandwich de queso a la plancha (grilled cheese), which caused great amusement and were consumed with plenty of tortilla, of course.
I also went fishing out there once per visit (I visited the station three times, for 3-5 days each time), and caught fish for lunch directly under the "no fishing, area of investigation" signs (right behind the pole in the picture below), which made me feel like a good representative of a snooty ivy league environmental school. The fish were just called blanco, in typical descriptive Central American style. They are endemic to the region, and delicious.
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