Campo Cookin’

While David was off playing in the woods with Glen, Patricia and I were busy in the campo kitchen.  (Please excuse the terribly antiquated gender role stereotypes).  To refresh your memory, Glen and Patricia were PCVs in Honduras in the 70s and are back for a few weeks to work with a local NGO.  Unlike our time spent with medical brigades and other gringo groups, there was no translating involved as Glen & Patricia have both maintained an excellent level of Spanish.  (Don’t tell but in some cases their vocabulary was better than ours, que pena!)

Anyways, it was a bit unclear what Patricia and I would actually be doing with the campo ladies.  Patricia had heard that she was supposed to be giving nutrition workshops and helping the ladies create a healthy recipes book.  As always, things didn’t quite turn out that way but we did have a great time and learned a lot.  This cooking experience coincides with a new book that I am reading, “A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove: A History of American Women Told Through Food, Recipes, and Remembrances”.  What is so interesting to me is that many of the cooking methods described in the book as being used by women in the early colonial times are quite similar to method used by campo ladies!

Let’s start at the beginning, what is the campo?  The campo is the equivalent of what we call the “boondocks” or “the sticks” in NC.  Over time these clusters of houses in remote areas have become small communities with the addition of public services like schools, electricity, and in some cases, water systems.  The traditional campo house is a small square structure using sticks as framing with mud/adobe walls, dirt floors, and usually a tin roof.  The inside of the house is then divided in half with the front half being the kitchen and the back half being a shared sleeping space for all family members.  Some houses have a wall separating the two areas or some have curtains.  In one of the houses we were cooking in the mother used feed sacks to create a cloth wall.  The kitchen half of the house is equipped with a traditional woodstove or fogón.

Making tortillas on the fogón

The house may or may not have windows but will have a couple of doors to allow for air circulation.  These doors are usually left open all day which means the animals of the property, chickens, ducks, dogs, cats, and even pigs, have access to the house.  This is one of the hygiene issues we try to address in communities but it can be very difficult!

Candida cleaning local greens for a blended green lemonade, tasty!

Back to the cooking experience: the first day we went to Candida’s house loaded down with produce and soy beans bought in Santa Bárbara.  Note: I did not necessarily agree with bringing in these products, I thought it would be more interesting to cook with what was available in the community.  However, this would have seriously hampered the nutrition aspect as I suspect we would’ve just been eating beans, eggs, and tortillas.  There is a truck that sells fresh produce but it only comes by once a month!  So in the interest of promoting a balanced diet with more vegetables, we brought them with us.

Sorting the vegetables before washing

Candida has received several trainings from the FUCOHSO team and is now an expert in making various products from soy beans including, milk, chorizo (sausage), cheese, and tortas (patties).  Part of the reason we cooked with Candida was so that Patricia and I could learn the soy recipes so that they could be taught to women of another community that we would be visiting the following days.  In the end we did mostly assisting and observing but I did make my first corn tortillas, which turned out rather well!  When the men folk returned from the fields we all enjoyed the super tasty soy recipes!  My favorite was the chorizo which was a mix of ground soy, chopped onion, tomato, green pepper, cumin, and salt which was then cooked and eaten with rice.  David’s favorite was the tortas which was the same mixture as the chorizo with added flour as a binder then shaped into patties and pan fried.  Yum!

Lil cuties, Andrea and Nicole

A few days later we went to a different community and women from the first community taught other women the soy recipes they had learned.  On the first day Candida had already ground the soy in her tabletop corn mill but on this day we had to do that ourselves.  In bigger towns ladies often carry their corn to an electric mill but in the campo everything is done by hand.

Little girls learn lifeskills early in the campo; milling corn for tortillas

By the time this lady and I finished milling the soy we were both dripping sweat!  Campo ladies make tortillas for every meal and therefore must mill corn three times a day!  (The masa will dry out too much if you do it all at one time).

My turn - cranking out ground soy beans

On top of milling multiple times a day the ladies must also go out and cut wood for their stoves.  In some cases the stoves are outside but they are often indoors and create a very smoky environment which is a leading cause of upper respiratory infections and pneumonia in these populations.  Many PCVs in Honduras have been involved in improved stoves projects that use a better design to reduce smoke.

Making soy milk and soaking vegetables in chlorinated water

Another aspect of the cooking demonstrations was to reinforce kitchen hygiene practices.  Since treated water is nearly nonexistent in Honduras, the ladies are taught to treat the water themselves with chlorine.  They are also taught to soak vegetables and produce in a chlorinated water to disinfect and kill harmful bacteria.  Unfortunately, it is difficult to monitor this practice because many families are very tight on money and see buying chlorine (even though it is cheap) as an unnecessary expense.  But it was great to see the ladies being so vigilant while we were there and hopefully enough repetition will help them adopt the practice in their own homes.

The ladies put out all the food and said "dig in!", notice who raced to the table

I love cooking so this was a really fun experience for me!  I also came to appreciate even more the luxuries we have in our home here such as a sink in the kitchen with running water, a gas stove, and a refrigerator!  Even though there is a rather limited amount of fresh produce in our town, I do feel lucky that we are almost always able to buy some type of vegetable.  Can you imagine only having fresh vegetables once a month?  (And forget about canned or frozen, those are even less available than fresh).

And lastly, here is the adorable kitten we almost took home.  The sweet doña of the house offered her to us but we let reason and responsibility win out.

Why didn't we take her?!