Recipe: Homemade Chocolate

Chocolate is one of my very favorite foods, right up there with ice cream and bread. So when two of our students asked me if I would help them make chocolate for a class project, I was totally game.

I had never made chocolate from scratch before, but since cacao beans are plentiful and cheap here in Nicaragua, it seemed like the ideal time to try it out. Farmers in southeastern Nicaragua began growing cacao years ago as a cash crop for export to chocolate-making hubs like Switzerland, Germany, and the US. Only more recently have a handful of Nicaraguan companies been taking advantage of the abundance of Nicaraguan cacao to produce chocolate domestically as well.

We visited one such company just outside of Matagalpa when we were first in Nicaragua almost two years ago. El Castillo de Cacao, like other Nicaraguan chocolate producers, makes a rustic chocolate that isn't as smooth and creamy as the kind you get from industrial chocolate factories. But it has its own unique appeal all the same, with a grainier texture and a strong cacao flavor. This was the kind of homemade chocolate we set out to make, with a recipe from El Castillo de Cacao itself.

El Castillo de Cacao Chocolate Recipe

(This recipe makes a lot of chocolate. Feel free to half it for a smaller batch).

Ingredients

2 pounds and 2 ounces of cacao beans

2 pounds of sugar (You could probably decrease this for a more bitter chocolate).

2 cups of milk

1.5 cups of powdered milk

1 teaspoon of salt

Nuts or dried fruit (optional)

Directions

The first step is to toast the cacao beans. We did this in a big, cast-iron pot over an open fire, but I imagine you could do it in a big pot on the stove over high heat as well. Stir the beans regularly to toast them evenly for 20 minutes. They should seem slightly burnt but not completely charred when you remove them from the flame.

Let the beans cool for a few minutes. When they are cool enough to handle, peal them by rubbing them in between your palms and letting the dried skins drop back into the pot. When they are all pealed, remove the skins by pouring them into a bowl in front of a fan, which will blow the skins away as you pour. Do this several times if necessary, pouring the beans back and forth between bowls.

Next, mill the beans. This step is fairly easy here in Nicaragua, where nearly everyone has a hand-crank mill in their homes – and, failing that, where there are industrial mills to grind corn for tortillas in every small town. If you can't find a mill, you could probably use a food processor or blender. You may need to mill the beans several times – the finer the grain, the better the chocolate will be. At this stage, the cacao oils emerge and produce a sort of thick cacao paste.

Now, in a big pot over the stove, heat up the milk and then add the sugar. When the sugar melts, add the ground cacao paste, the milk powder, and the salt. Stir it all over low heat, mixing it constantly. When it has boiled and is well mixed, remove the pot from the fire. Let it cool.

Before the chocolate has cooled completely, shape it. We rolled them into little balls and let them cool like that. You could also try making special shapes with cookie cutters, or just letting it cool in one big mass on a cookie pan. If you want to add nuts or fruit, roll them into the chocolate or just put them on top.  

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Riding the Nicaraguan Chicken Bus

Here in Nicaragua, we spend an enormous amount of time riding buses. Last week we went on vacation to the southeastern corner of Nicaragua and all told, spent almost thirty hours on either buses or boats. Given all of this time with nothing else to do but ponder the mystery of why it takes so damn long to get anywhere in a country the size of New York state, we've stockpiled quite a lot of data on the Nicaraguan public transportation system.

The first thing you need to know about Nicaraguan public transportation is that almost everyone uses it. Even people wealthy enough to own their own cars – who are certainly the minority of Nicaraguans – usually take the bus when they're not transporting a large object or a lot of people. The reason, of course, is that taking the bus is cheap; to travel 25 kilometers by bus from San Nicolas to Esteli only costs 15 cordobas, or 55 cents. So with a huge percentage of the population dependent on a public transportation system highly subsidized by the government, it is possible to travel cheaply almost anywhere in Nicaragua.

To get from place to place, then, you don't have to have a lot of money, but you do need to have time. There are two types of buses traveling between most major Nicaraguan cities: express buses and “ruteado” buses. Express buses are usually big and shiny on the outside, like charter buses in the US, and they can get you where you're going relatively quickly, with not many stops along the way.

Ruteados, on the other hand, take foreeeeeeever. Ruteados, or “chicken buses,” as they've been dubbed by tourists surprised by the abundance of farm animals permitted on public buses, are really just souped-up American school buses. After a certain number of years of carrying American children to and from school, these buses are deemed unsafe and are shipped off to Central America, where they are painted bright colors, modified so that they can carry more people, and sent on treacherous routes through rivers and up and down steep dirt roads. Many of the buses still have the original school bus signs attached above the driver's seat: “Your child's safety is our business.” These are mixed in with Jesus stickers and Spanish religious truisms: “No soy el dueño del mundo, pero si soy el hijo del dueño.” The bus from Esteli to La Garnacha has the label of the year that it was made: 1978.

With ruteado buses, you don't get tickets or assigned seats. This means that once the bus pulls up to the bus terminal, everyone races to get on, shoving each other aside or running to the back door, in an effort to get a seat. The least aggressive passengers are left standing in the aisle. The weird thing is that after all of this survival-of-the-fittest clawing and pushing dies down and everyone is settled into their places, people go back to being downright chummy with each other. If there is a mother standing in the aisle and holding her baby, a seated passenger will offer to hold the baby, and the mother hands her baby over to a complete stranger.

Because the bus owners earn money not based on how many trips they take, but on how many passengers ride the bus, they never turn anyone down. Even if the bus is completely packed to the gills, the bus driver will stop to let more people on. When the bus is really full, people ride on top of the bus. On the most packed bus I've ever ridden on, at one point I realized that I was standing obliquely, with my head not directly above my feet.

Ruteado buses also don't have specific bus stops. You can flag the bus down from anywhere along its route and it will stop to let you on. This makes it especially slow going, since often people will stand 20 feet away from each other so that the bus has to stop twice instead of just once. Another reason that ruteados take so long to get anywhere is that often, the bus driver will stop the bus and, without any warning, get off the bus for 15 or 20 minutes to have breakfast.

Every time the buses near a substantially-sized town, a huge horde of vendors climb on the bus and ride it until the next town, pushing their way through the passengers and advertising their wares in their own unique singsongs. “Helote helote heloooooote!” or “Tajadas y papitas, tajadas y papitas.” But it's not just food that they sell; they also sell some really strange things – fingernail clippers, medicine, moralizing booklets – and somehow, amazingly, the passengers buy these things. Sometimes the vendors give long, 10-minute spiels about whatever it is they're selling, always beginning by saying, “I know that it's rude to interrupt your journey, but please just give me a moment of your time.”

There are three things we've found in our extensive research into the Nicaraguan public transportation system that were true on almost every bus we've ridden. One is that buses always smell like corn. You might think that with so many people packed into such a small space, the buses would absorb an unpleasant body odor, but usually the pervading odor is just corn. The second rule is that buses almost always blare loud music. In this way, we've become overly-familiar with the favorite bachata, reggaeton, ranchera, and Christian tunes popular among many Nicaraguans. Sometimes, on the buses lucky enough to be endowed with flat-screen TVs, these tunes are accompanied by lewd music videos of almost-naked women shaking it while ugly men sing at them.

The final constant of every single Nicaraguan bus I've ever been on is the general good nature of all of the passengers. It is stunning to me how well people put up with extremely uncomfortable circumstances. I consider myself a person with a fairly high tolerance for discomfort, but I am like a whiny baby compared with most Nicaraguan bus-riders. When buses are so crowded that people's bodies are forced into weird corners and contortions, when the bus driver inexplicably stops for half an hour, when the bus is so hot that a sheen of sweat pastes your clothes to your skin – when any of these things happen, you don't hear a complaining peep out of a single passenger. This, I think, is the biggest lesson that the Nicaraguan public transportation system has to teach us.

Killing Chickens

On Sunday, in one of the most beautiful places imaginable, Davie killed his first chicken. There we were, in what could have been a child's drawing of mountains, the green humps of hills overlapping forever into the distance. And there was Davie, standing in front of a clump of chickens strung up by their feet on a tree branch, surrounded by Nicaraguan friends urging him on. It was the perfect paradigm: death in the midst of so much life.

Our friend Fatima, who works at the pharmacy next to our house, had been inviting us to kill chickens with her for quite a while. Last year she and three other women started a small poultry business as part of a class assignment for one of her agriculture classes. When they realized that there was a real demand for locally-grown chicken in this community, the group of women continued the business even after the class was over.

We have been buying Fatima's chicken when they slaughter a round of them every other month. It's good meat, tender with a strong chicken flavor. So we decided it was time for us to dispel the meat-eater's vague illusions about where meat really comes from. With this conviction in mind, we put on our boots and stomped bravely off to the farm.

When we got there, we realized that boots weren't the only chicken-killing articles we should have put on. We had assumed that there would be plastic aprons or ponchos at the ready, but everyone else was just wearing normal clothes, now completely covered in blood and chicken feathers.

Fatima showed us the different stations of the process. The 100 or so chickens that would be killed that day were held in a small building, where Fatima's brother was weighing each live chicken and then stuffing them into a big burlap sack. At six weeks of age, they all weighed around seven pounds, with the males weighing slightly more and the females slightly less. Fatima told me that this particular kind of chicken doesn't lay eggs. (Though I wondered if that was just because they were too young to lay eggs). They buy the chicks from a vendor in Esteli and feed them a mix of grains until they are large enough to slaughter.

The next step in the process was of course the most dire: slaughter. They took the chickens over to a structure made of three small tree branches tied together like a goal post and hung the chickens from their feet on the horizontal pole. Fatima took a knife and quickly slitted a chicken's throat. It flapped around a bit as the blood drained out of its neck, but it made less of a ruckus than I had expected. Then it was Davie's turn. He drew the knife once and then again across the chicken's throat, and then it was over. The chickens flapped about for a bit, spewing blood across their white feathers before finally going still. A dog lapped up the blood that trickled down the rocks below the dead chickens. (Later I saw a few egg-laying hens pecking about this same blood).

After the chickens were dead, they submerged them in a big pot of boiling water to remove the feathers. Then they took them into a sort of kitchen. After soaking them in ice water and picking off any remaining feathers, an assembly line of four or so people cut open the chickens and removed their organs. Some of the organs they kept (the liver, the heart, and the gullet), but the intestines they discarded. Then the chickens were divided into the various cuts that customers request – wings, breasts, legs, etc. For me, watching these whole chickens being hacked and gutted and taken apart was maybe the grossest part of the process.

That night for dinner we made ourselves some fresh-killed, honey-baked chicken, and it was delicious. Amazingly, after all that, I was no less disgusted to bite into a juicy bit of meat that only hours before had been a living animal. I'm not saying that eating meat is necessarily a good habit, but at least now I understand it a little better.

How to Dress for the Campo

Nicaraguans don't wear any kind of traditional clothing like many other Latin American cultures do. Instead, the distinctive style of dress that you find in the Nicaraguan campo comes directly from American used-clothes warehouses. When your local Value Village or Salvation Army can no longer sell certain items, they package them up into enormous, 60-pound "pacas," and ship them off to Nicaragua, where people buy individual pieces of clothing for around 50 cents.

This system of recycled clothes has drastically influenced the culture of style in every corner of Nicaragua. The hottest fashion around, worn by old women, little boys, and everyone in between, is a bright-colored t-shirt from Hollister, Abercrombie, or Aeropostale. These brands are so cool, in fact, that people sometimes sew their logos onto other items of clothing, or reinvent them with creative twists like "Hollixer" or "Aberpostale."

If you want to blend in in the Nicaraguan campo, here are a few fashion tips that you must follow.

1. Hollister goes well with horses.

2. Cowboy hats, leather boots, and big belt buckles are as Nicaraguan as traditional dancing.

3. If you don't like the wide brim, go for a baseball cap instead.

4. Undershirts are ideal get-up for street-lounging.

5. Everyone has to pick sides. Who will you choose?

6. Accessorizing your school uniform is simple with bright friendship bracelets and a trucker cap.

7. Respect the professional polo.

8. Long pencil skirts are perfect for every occasion - they bend with you!

9. Who needs undershirts? A sheer shirt is a sure shirt!

10. The higher the heel, the better.

11. Long hair is beautiful. Long hair in an elaborate braid is even more beautiful.

12. Plastic hair claws are WAY back in style. 

13. The head is an easel. Hair cuts are an art.

14. T-shirts with English words are always cool - it doesn't matter what they say!

The Magic of Cross-Cultural Connection

This past weekend David and I had the chance to be part of a cross-cultural exchange between high school students. Billy Byrnes, who was a VMM volunteer in San Nicolas before us, brought a group of American high school kids to San Nicolas for a few days to learn about what life is like in the Nicaraguan campo. This being quite an ambitious weekend goal, we set about packing in the cultural experiences.

When the students arrived on Thursday, we went to evening mass with them. They did a good job of enduring the long service, all in Spanish, with the occasional excitement: a stray dog bounding up to the front of the church, the congregation singing a Spanish, religified version of Bob Dylan's “Blowin in the Wind,” and of course the constant battle against flying ants.

On Friday the American students joined their Nicaraguan compatriots in their three-mile walk to school. This three miles is a daily stroll for many Nicaraguan high school students, but most of the Americans were completely worn out by the time they reached the paved road.

At school, we started the day with a ceremonial ribbon-cutting for the new athletic court roof. The mayor's office pulled out all the stops for this event, blaring patriotic music through human-sized stereos and hanging clumps of balloons from the court posts. After a few folkloric dances, Ruben Dario poems, and flowery speeches, we divided the American students into small groups and took them into the Nicaraguan classes, where we held Q and A sessions. We had the students ask each other questions about their various interests and high school experiences and then played a round of English/Spanish charades.

At first the Nicaraguan students especially were really shy about relating to the American students, but this shyness quickly dissolved during recess when they all got together to play soccer and basketball. By the time lunch rolled around, they all had crushes on each other. The Americans ate lunch with the Nicaraguan 11^th grade class and the two groups performed for each other the songs in English that they had prepared for this occasion. This turned into an impromptu dance party that resulted in lots of bonding and, eventually when it was time for the Americans to leave, facebook name exchanging.

It was interesting for me to sit back and witness all of this, and to realize the profound differences in these kids' experiences. It was immediately obvious to me that the American kids, even though they were on turf that was not their own, all had so much more confidence in themselves than the Nicaraguans. The Americans were the ones asking all the questions during the Q and A; the Americans were also the ones who belted out their songs with little self-consciousness. Even though most of the American students had only taken high school Spanish classes just like the Nicaraguans had taken high school English, the Americans were far more advanced in their second language abilities. They were able to carry on basic conversations in Spanish whereas our Nicaraguan students were too embarrassed to utter even a single word in English.

But beyond all of this inequality and difference, a beautiful bond formed nonetheless. This felt immense. This felt like a true exchange. Both groups of students had so much curiosity about each other. Both groups overcame the smallness of their worlds to connect across cultural boundaries and wealth gaps, to reach a fuller sense of the what the world is. This is the idealist's dream.

For David and me, and for Billy too I think, this was an amazing opportunity to share that idealist's dream with these students. We have experienced the magic of cross-cultural connection during our two years here, and in doing so, we have come to cherish this community. We weren't sure if it would be possible for this group of students to form these bonds and realize the world-broadening power of cross-cultural exchange in a single weekend, but I think it was possible. A day of interaction can't form friendships that will survive the years, of course. But what I hope will survive in all of these students, American and Nicaraguan, is an awareness of a bigger world.

Feliz Dia de La Madre!

Nicaraguan women have crazy super powers. I have seen campo women grab, with their bare hands, a cast iron pot directly from a raging fire. I have seen a blind, 90-year-old woman walk miles over rocky terrain to reach the bus station. I have heard of a woman giving birth to 18 children, all in her own home, and then raising these children single-handedly. Considering these amazing feats of strength, it is no wonder that Mother's Day is one of Nicaragua's biggest holidays. (Though a single day could never make up for all of the hardships that these women suffer every day of their lives).

Around May 30th every year, you see people rushing around with big white cardboard boxes that contain the obligatory Mother's Day cake. In school, students make decorative Mother's Day bulletin boards with generic pictures of mothers that they printed off from the internet. And in every house – Catholic or Evangelical, rich or poor – people find a way to celebrate their mothers.

In honor of Nicaraguan Mother's Day, we want to celebrate the woman who has been like a Nicaraguan mother to us: Idalia Lopez Camas. As the principal at the San Nicolas high school, Idalia has been our main supervisor, but she has also been one of our best friends. When we were first in San Nicolas we went to Idalia for everything, and like a good mother, she helped us in every way she could: patiently explaining the school system, relaying the San Nicolas bus schedule, bringing over a big bag of beans and teaching us how to make Nicaraguan rice and beans. For every request we made, Idalia would do her characteristic thinking head-wobble and figure out some way to help us.

As the school principal, Idalia is one of the few women in San Nicolas who hold prominent positions in the community. But she certainly doesn't do it for the glory; Idalia's fervor for education has driven her entire life. In a time and place when Nicaraguan women were excluded from school without a second thought, Idalia earned her high school and college degrees by walking more than 12 miles to Esteli to take classes. She told me that once her shoe wore out while she was walking, so she walked into the city barefoot.

After she had married, when she had young children and was living in the tiny community of La Garnacha, Idalia taught elementary school classes during the day. High school classes weren't offered at that time. So, realizing how empowering it could be for these campo folks to get a high school education, Idalia started giving high school classes in the evenings. She wasn't even paid for this second job. But because of her conviction that education was the path to a better life for her neighbors, Idalia volunteered her evenings to teach high school.

Idalia's belief in the power of education lives on today. Her oldest daughter just graduated from college with a degree in pharmacy, and her younger two daughters are both in good school programs in Esteli. Even Idalia herself has dreams of going back to college to get a second degree.

Idalia is also the only person in San Nicolas who seems to have any authority over teenagers. Often our students will be running around, yelling and passing notes and being generally rambunctious when suddenly a silence will fall over the entire class. When we look up, Idalia is inevitably at the door, glaring in with the sternest face I've ever seen. Sometimes I almost feel like I'm in trouble. But the second the students leave, Idalia looks at me and bursts into laughter as if to say, “Ha! Did you see how angry they thought I was?”

I've also discovered that for some reason Idalia loves to make me laugh. She'll say something in the teacher's lounge and covertly glance over to see if I heard her joke. Even if I didn't understand her fast Spanish, I'll usually crack a smile, which I know feeds her hilarity, so that she'll build on her joke. One day when this happened, Idalia said to all of the other teachers in the room, “Look, I made Sarah laugh! She thinks I'm funny.”

I do think Idalia is funny. And I think she is caring and intelligent and incredibly hard-working. She single-handedly runs the entire high school, working tirelessly six days a week, with few vacations, for the betterment of her community. Now here is a woman with some crazy super powers.