Tea and pineapple cakes
Hi people, It's been a good week. Markus is doing a great job as the new sous-chef and that's all I can say about that for now. I did a bit of baking yesterday... on a school field trip. We took the kids to a nougat factory. They also make the famous and delicious pineapple cakes. I was so happy, I've known these cakes since I lived in Japan, when ever so often a Taiwanese kid in my class would come back from a trip here and bring me back a box of them. They're actually more like shortbread cookies with pineapple filling. Yesterday my students and I made a bunch of them, it was fun. I miss baking as we don't have an oven in our apartment, only two gas burners. Most people don't have them here, nor clothes dryers. We have to hang our laundry in the laundry room next to the kitchen. It's ok though, things dry really quickly. Supposedly there is a dryer function on the washer but we haven't figured out how to use it, it's all in chinese. Another cool thing we've tried recently is the local tea. It's kind of like oolong but I don't know its name. It's tasty and the ritual of preparing it is half the fun. First you warm up the cups with boiling water. Then you let the tea seep for a while, then you pour it into the cups and empty that into a bin, since it's the first round and the tea is too bitter still. Then you pour the second round and drink it quickly. The cups are tiny and seem like toy sets for little girl's tea parties. You continue this routine of filling them up and this can last for hours. We experienced this on top of Yaming Mountain, with our Taiwanese hosts. It reminded me of a Taiwanese movie I saw in a Colombian movie theatre about 10 years ago by Ang Lee (director of Brokeback Mountain). The movie was called something like Eating, Drinking, Man, Woman. A great movie about a Taiwanese retired chef who still pulls out all the stops for his Sunday dinners with his three daughters. While watching this movie I remember my mouth watering, the food looked so good. I saw this movie with Spanish subtitles! The funny thing is that the next day my cousin Camila and I went out for fried rice, which is the only chinese food we could find in Bogota. But I'm pretty sure the movie is available in the foreign section of Blockbuster in Canada. It won all kinds of awards. Bye for now!
