Making Butter, Collecting Fruit and a Myriad of Birds
We arrived on December 7th, and it has rained every day save for three. The Caribbean rainy season can last until February and then begins again in August. It is the rain that keeps everything this lovely shade of green and keeps the rivers so abundantly beautiful. We are staying on a friend’s farm that is about 1 hour west of our property. She had to go back to the States for work, and since our cabin was ruined, we needed a place to stay. It has worked out great for both of us so far. It came furnished with everything we needed.
There is a dairy farm on the property here. I can now identify every calf just from its moo. The milking of the cows starts at 4 a.m. sharp, and so does the noise. I get out of bed around 4:02 every morning now. The coffee is so tasty I forget all about the noise as I enjoy my joe. The on-site dairy affords me the pleasure of grass-fed organic milk, yogurt, sour cream, and ice cream made from those noisy beasts, so I guess I can live with it. I even make my own butter from the fresh cream.
Making Butter in a Ball Jar
To make butter from fresh cream, you add cream to a jar with a lid that is twice the volume of the cream, and then you shake until your arms feel like they are falling off. If you start to sweat, you know that you only have about 40 minutes left. Right when you are about to give up, you start to notice yellow globs separating from the milk in the jar. This is fresh wholesome butter! You scoop out the butter, place it in a container, then use the leftover milk (buttermilk) to make pancakes or biscuits. See video*
Collecting Fruit from the Farm
The orchard here is mature, so every few days I pick bananas, coconuts, mangos, star fruits, and cassava to supplement my store bought rice, beans, eggs, meat, and vegetables. I have two new favorite breakfasts now. One is two eggs over easy on top of fried cassava with a dollop of sour cream and the other is fried plantain with fresh plain yogurt. I have so much time to cook I have come up with all kinds of crazy stuff. I get organic chocolate from Puerto Viejo, which creates a decadent chocolate lava cake, yummy. I celebrated Christmas at a restaurant that has a tilapia pond. You catch it. They cook it.
To offset the abundance of food that I eat, I do yoga in the mornings as the toucans and parrots watch from the trees. That is completely true and not just the part about the birds.
We are currently looking into an apartment that is closer to the farm. I will need to be closer when I start building the house. I don’t want our lack of Spanish via the telephone to be detrimental when the contractor has a question. It will be better to have a pen and draw it out for him on the spot, just to avoid costly mistakes. I am finding it difficult to find a contractor. The one I had lined up ended up having a severe drinking problem. Too much alcoholism in my past life to deal with that. I think the neighbors have been recommending someone but I only understand about two or three words out of every sentence, so who knows.
We have only visited the farm 3 times in the past two weeks due to the rain. We got in a few good days of weed chopping but can’t do much else until things dry up a bit. I really want to talk to our neighbors, but learning Spanish is taking a while. I’m certain that I sound like a 3-year-old. I think I have present tense down ok, but when someone says anything in past or future tense, which is all the time, I get confused. Overall, Spanish has been much easier than Swahili. I am trying to find a translator that can go with me to talk to builders.
The phone line here didn’t work our first few weeks, and there is no cell reception until after a 20-minute drive, so if you tried to call me, sorry. The internet access works great even if it is only 128k. Not enough bandwidth for video, but you wouldn’t want to see my waterlogged face anyway.
For those of you who asked, the days are between 70-75 and the nights drop to between 60-65. Great temps.