Learning how

“That’s not how you make it!”  She laughed at me, but with a shocked look on her face. “Your mouth will burn up that way!”

Hmm. That sounds about right.

How you really cook it.

See, there’s this strange grass-like thing in the market. I see women selling big bags full of it, and I’ve asked them what it is, but knowing the name doesn’t really help unless you already know the plant. Then I realized that it was actually a big leaf that they cut into thin strips to sell. So not grass-like at all. And still a mystery.

One day there was a distinct lack of vegetables in the market, so I started asking more questions about this unfamiliar plant. I asked if you could eat it like a salad, and the ladies of the market assured me that it tasted delicious. Chances are, they didn’t understand my question, but just wanted me to buy from them! 

So I took the new plant home and added it to a salad. Have you ever tried eating shredded fiberglass? I haven’t either, but that’s the impression I got as my mouth burned from a million little cuts. That plant was nasty! 

So, next language lesson, I decided to tell ~A~ the story of the nasty plant. And she laughed at me.

Sometimes this is how we learn, right? I got ~A~ to bring all the stuff for cooking the mystery plant to my house for my next language lesson and she showed me how to cook it. Turns out, it’s not too bad (read: pretty good). It's a cousin to the sweet potato leaf, but not quite the same. And it has to be cooked.

That's a lot of what life here looks like: getting to know the unfamiliar. And in the process I learned more vocabulary!

Ready to eat!

For those of you who are interested, here’s the approximate recipe:

2 lbs of mystery plant (they cook a lot of green plants this way: cassava leaves, Meringa, even eggplant; I imagine you could substitute almost any leafy green)

1 large coconut

Half a head of garlic

1 medium onion

Tb black pepper

Tb salt

Pinch each of cinnamon, cumin, and cardamom

1 whole clove

You take all the spices except the onion, and grind them up together into a paste. Grate the coconut and make coconut milk out of it… probably 6 cups coconut milk total? Heat up the coconut milk and add slivered onion and spices. Boil for a couple minutes, then add mystery plant and simmer for 30 minutes, until most of the liquid is gone. Serve over rice. 

In other news, I roasted some coffee beans last week. They turned out pretty good. The green beans available here aren't high quality, but fresh-roasting and grinding will cover a lot of inadequacies. Here are a couple pictures from the process:

Just starting to roast

Almost done. See the smoke from the chaff?

Cooling the beans quickly. It ended up a medium-dark roast. Next time I'll try for more of an espresso roast.