Muchas Aventuras de Comida (entre otras cosas)

Kiddies, we've got a lot of ground to cover, so I'd recommend before getting started on this post you make up some hot chocolate and grab the comfiest chair in the house. The past few weeks here have been wonderful: progress on the houses is coming along extremely well, we should be finishing on schedule; we've made quite a bit of progress beginning the permitting process for the next lot as well. We have also been fortunate enough to take part in a couple of awesome adventures over the past few weeks and those are the experiences we'd like to share with you all.

First off, two weekends ago us and a few of the people who work for the foundation decided to have a road trip. The two of us don't travel too much within Costa Rica because we're living on the traveler budget, and focusing a lot on developing our relationships with the folks around here, but we're sure glad we were a part of this trip. Seven of us took the hour drive down to the very tip of the Nicoya Peninsula to a town called Mal Pais.

We spent the weekend relaxing, hanging out at the beach and hiking to some neat waterfalls. Oh yeah, and eating. You'll quickly notice that food is very much the central theme of this post. As we spent the majority of our time less than a quarter mile from the ocean, the seafood was wonderful, so we made sure to concentrate our consumptive energy on that cuisine. One of the neatest parts about the weekend, however, was the cultural mix that we had within the group. There were three Ticos and four of us from the US and it's fair to say that the weekend was completely bi-lingual; it was perfectly acceptable to speak to someone in either of the two languages (irrespective of what their native language was and even in what language they had just spoken to you).

That was a really neat experience, it made for some neat polylingual conversations, and of course, the everpresent meta-conversation about languages. All of us non-spanish speakers took advantage of having three friendly, walking dictionaries at our disposal and worked hard to pick up as much spanish as we could during the weekend. We even spent a few hours one night playing Catchphrase in Spanish. For the silly little gringos that we are, I think we did pretty well.

Here's a picture of the lovely little bungalows that we stayed in (close enough that the sound of the surf rocked you to sleep at night). What a great weekend (Thanks Yanith!)

Next on the docket of fun things to talk about is one of the culinary adventures that we've been having here at home lately. We've been experimenting with food a lot lately and are absolutely loving it. Produce is cheaper here than it will ever be again in our life (at least that what my mom hopes for, because cheap produce would imply another transcontinental adventure) and so we're making the most of it by cooking at home lots and lots.

We've decided a fun thing to do in the blog is to start posting more and more of the recipes that we're currently trying to let the foodies in all of you give it a try at home.

This past week we made a loaf of bread that was absolutely spectacular. Miah has gotten in to breadmaking (he's still pushing to open up a bakery / B&B somewhere in the south of Italy - sorry mom) and decided to hunt down and try out a recipe for fresh thyme bread. Here's the result of some of the experimentation:

Thyme Garlic Bread
4 cups flour
1 1/2 cups warm water
1 tsp sugar
4 cloves minced garlic
2 tsp yeast (more colloquially known as yeasty beasties)
2 tsp salt
2 Tb finely chopped fresh thyme

Dissolve yeast in warm water, let sit for 10 minutes. In a large bowl, mix 2 cups flour, sugar and salt. Add yeast mixture and mix together well, scraping the sides of the bowl. Slowly add as much of the rest of the flour as you can stopping at a medium dough. Turn out the mixture on to a lightly floured surface and knead for 8 minutes. Flatten out the dough and spread the thyme and garlic evenly throughout. Knead for 2 minutes more to distribute the spices. Place in a lightly oiled bowl and cover with a moist cloth. Let rise in a warm place until doubled (roughly two hours). Turn out dough on to a lightly floured surface and knead for two more minutes. Put in to a bread pan or form in to a loaf on a baking sheet and let sit, covered, for 10 more minutes. Bake on 250 for about 50 minutes. Enjoy

A word to the intrepid about our baking temperatures and times: our oven is loco. Our cooking temperatures seem to run pretty low, so you might want to consider bumping up to 300 or something. I look cooking this bread so low because of the way the crust turns out (not too thick, not too tough), but you can experiment and see what you like best.

We made grilled cheese, avocado and tomato sandwiches out of this bread and they were absolutely incredible. We highly recommend (5 gold stars for you little buddy), and we have included a salivation inducing photo.

Lastly, let's talk about football (and food). For those of you who live on the moon, both college and pro football are now a few weeks in and possibly the most exciting thing currently happening on the face of the planet. This last weekend was sort-of devoted to that end. We spent the weekend with our buddies Zach (yes sir, you made it in to the blog) and Eric, bouncing around from house to house watching obscene amounts of football. The true trump-card of the weekend however was not the 10 hours of football we watched over the course of two days, but instead the meal we cooked on friday night. If anybody from 1410 is reading this, they'll be proud to know that this meal was brought to you by the letter bacon, and worth every artery-clogging calorie.

The menu in brief: NY strip wrapped in bacon, portabella mushrooom slices wrapped in bacon, pinapple wrapped in bacon and banana stuffed jalapeño peppers (we ran out of bacon). We cooked it all up on the grill and feasted. Hooray.

As for now, we're back to the grind, trying to get some houses built and write some grad school admissions essays,


We hope everyone is doing well, we love and miss you,
Go Pack! Go Chargers!
TeamWander

Fiestas de Santa Rosa

Wow! I don't even know where to begin. From roughly our first week here in Costa Rica, we've been hearing many tales about the fiestas that can be found throughout Guanacaste. However, there's really one festival that is touted and bragged about more than any other: Santa Rosa Last week, we were sucked in to the tornado of Guanacastecan debauchery that is la fiesta de Santa Rosa.



Imagine a cross between a full-on rodeo, a NC State Homecoming tailgate, and the biggest house party the local authorities would let slide. All of these events combined make up this fiesta. We started out at 8 am, wandering up and down the dirt streets of Santa Rosa looking for someone to rent horses from (why do we need horses? to go get the bulls of course). Fortunately we had a nice Tica friend to help us negotiate the cost of horse rental down by 30 percent.


We got our trusty steeds rented and set of for what, unbeknownst to us, was going to be the longest (and best populated) horse ride of our lives. I say best populated because joining us to go collect the bulls were about 1000 of our closest costa rican friends; on horseback, on fourwheelers, on dirtbikes, even hanging out the back of shabby pickup trucks. Us and this motley crew traveled for about 3 hours on horseback, stopping of course to buy beer from the roadside beer trucks, and hitch our horses for a drink or two at the local establishments that we happened to pass by. The road ended for us at a giant hacienda with a brass band playing, a team of ladies selling fried chicken out of plastic tubs, and reliably, requisite beer stands. After a few hours of this, the throng of people (somehow without receiving any sort of perceivable signal) all hopped back on their horse (or whatever, we did meet one guy riding a donkey) and started traveling back the way we came. However this time, this crew of people was herding the bulls that would be used for the bull-fights of the evening.

So to rewind the first three hours of the trip, we took the same 3 hour ride back, stopping again at the local watering hole along the way. On the way back however, our horses (read: Miah's horse) must have discovered her love for a good chase because we did a lot more galloping than anything else. Nothing like racing an 8 year old costa rican on horseback down a dirt road full of people all traveling a different pace.

Once we got back and got our horses returned apparently we had completed the prelude to the day as it was time for the real fiesta to start. There were purportedly hours more of parties and bullfights (we had friends who came home well after midnight) however we didn't have the steam to stay in the running, so we headed home to cook a yummy dinner.

Unfortunately for them, two passers-by (Jessica and Hugo, down from California) happened to be pulled in to this adventure as well. Little did they know when they were planning their visit that this would be how they spent their saturday. It wasn't till sunday morning that we all collectively groaned and whimpered our way out of our respective beds that we realized how sore an 8 hour horseback adventure could really make you.

What are you doing on thursday night?
Team Wander

La langosta, como prometida

Per Ryan and Shannon's request, here's a pic of the lobster that our tico friend spent over an hour digging out of the bottom of the ocean for us. It must have been a heck of a battle, because the tico came up bleeding and the lobster came up missing a claw. But it sure tasted good!