¡Pacaya!

I tried pacaya the first time I was in Guatemala, back in 2007, and might have forgotten its existence except that I have a little picture scribbled in the notebook where I was keeping all my Spanish-learnin notes back then...  

Pacaya - an example of comida amarga (bitter)

Pacaya, so the internet tells me, is actually the male inflorescence (that's bunch of flowers to you non-botanists) of a certain kind of palm tree, eaten primarily in Guatemala but a little bit in adjoining countries.  The inflorescence is a bunch of long skinny strands of tiny unopened flowers, but they come encased in tough, fibrous pods.

So when I spotted a couple of women selling little bundles of it in the market a couple of weeks ago, I decided to pick it up and give its cooking a shot myself.  I asked them how to cook it, and which were better, the skinny or the fat pods - the same, they answered, although I'm not sure I'm convinced... in any case, I picked skinny.  

Pacaya in its pod

The first step is to cut away the pods - underneath the little strands look a lot like a bunch of extra-skinny, extra-long baby corn, held together at one end by a central stem.

Raw pacaya, along with tomato and onion for salsa, and eggs for batter

Next step is to drop the stiff pacaya into boiling water, just for a minute or two, to loosen up the strands, and to start cooking up a quick n easy sauce of tomato and white onion --- a good bit of sweetness to balance the bitter pacaya fritters.

When they're good and soft, the pacaya get globbed into a simple batter of egg, a bit of corn flour, salt, and chile powder... I was worried the boiled pacaya would fall apart since they were so skinny and wobbly, but they held together quite nicely and sopped up lots of eggy goodness between the strands.

While the tomatoes and onions cooked up, I fried up the fritters in a bit of olive oil...

Check out the high-class kitchen - up to two burners these days!

 And voila!

The pacaya not only looks like baby corn, but has a similar flavor as well, except with a nice, sharp, amargo bite.  Soaked in tasty egg batter and topped with bites of the tomato-sweet salsa, they were a great lunch!!!  Next time I'm going to buy the fat pods and judge for myself.

In other food/drink news (we all know what's important in life, after all), this is what a bottle of wine looks like after I attack it with half-functional hands and a leatherman multitool:

But hey, it's open!!!  I am enjoying the fermented fruits of my labor as I write this... 

And in other other food news, mango season has begun!  Mangos have been available since I arrived, but now they're everywhere, perfectly ripe, and extremely cheap.  I picked up this bag of mini beauties for ten quetzales (about $1.25) at the market today... don't know how I'm going to get through them all before they go bad, but I'm sure I'll find a way...

Wine included for scale.  Note creative corking technique...

The Flores Soundscape

6am, Monday: A series of four rounds of bracingly loud fireworks go off, somewhere very nearby - in the alley outside?  It might be somebody's birthday.  I stick in one of my sound-cancelling headphones and go back to sleep.

6am - 10:30am, daily:  Rooster time.  Sometimes the rooster goes off at 4 in the morning, sometimes in the afternoon, but mostly he is consistent and on schedule.  Flores is too tightly packed and paved to have many roosters-in-residence, so the fact that my windows overlook one of the few small yards that houses one is a special auditory privilege.  I guess.

7am, daily, and sometimes again shortly after 8: A woman circles the island selling newspapers, her voice mechanically repeating the same words, at the same volume, with the same inflection, day in and day out:  "¡Periodico, el diario, la prensa!  ¡Periodico, el diario, la prensa!"

Monday (Tuesday, Wednesday...): Somewhere just at the edge of audibility, Whitney Houston's I will always love you plays on repeat, all day long.  Sunday and Thursday it was unchained melody.  I wonder if I am going crazy.  I wonder how those closer to the music are not.

6pm, Saturday - All day Sunday: the plonking piano and unending, nasal, poorly harmonized singing of the evangelical churches.  Some of these sounds are from just up the hill, some carry from San Miguel across the water.  All are irritating.

Dusk (5:30ish), daily: the ugly, scrungy looking blackbirds come out and made a racket - honking, tweeting, clacking,  twippering, xylophloaming.  They are nothing much to look at but they make an incredible variety of noises, at incredible volume.  They gather in the park at the top of the island, lining the trees and the telephone lines, pooping on unsuspecting tourists, and singing their mad chorus, until a few short minutes later they flap off again and disappear until the next day.  This description pretty exactly matches that given to me by my grandparents who spend the winter on the Arizona/Nevada border... but they didn't know what kind of birds they were, either.

Always: televisions.

Always: people yelling to each other up and down the street, between rooms in houses, across rooftops.

Occasionally: the sound of keys clacking on a typewriter, or the jitter of an old dot-matrix printer.

Always: my fridge.  It is loud.  It sounds like it is trying to brew coffee.  At night, sometimes, I am thankful because it is a bit like white noise, and it drowns out the tvs and such still blaring nearby, but it switches on and off, so I can't rely on its soundblocking properties.

When everything else is quiet enough: the sound of lanchas bustling across the water, ferrying people back and forth to San Miguel.

Friday night: rain.