Saturday, February 19, 2011

Day 19


This little guy is iridescent blue-green... the picture doesn't really do his beauty justice!
Today we carried everything that could move out of the kitchen. The floors were swept, washed with soap and water, squeegeed off, and left to dry.
We then mopped them with red wax to re-finish them.
Kim and Marcelo do this once a month to help keep the kitchen area clean. The floors here are beautiful- I think you have seen them in many of my pictures.
Surrounding the outside of the kitchen is one layer of bricks, laid as tall as you want the floor to be. The inside of the floor is tamped dirt (subsoil, I suspect) that is then covered with about 1 to 1 ½ inches of concrete mixed with sand.
The very top layer is ¼ inch of liquid concrete mixed with iron oxide (to color it red) but no sand, which makes it very smooth. And apparently, all that is needed to maintain it is that layer of wax. We all noticed that the bottoms of our feet are pink today (from the wax).
So is Conan!
We walked up the stream to the waterfall during siesta, and were amazed at how much less water is running now, after a week without rain. After a quick dunk the thunder clouds rolled in, and we high-tailed it back home to grab our clothes off the line and zip our rain flies closed before everything got wet. It rained briefly (thanks be!), leaving the air feeling cooler, and quite lovely.

We are spending the afternoon baking- making roselle jam (what we know to be hibiscus flowers used for tea at home are actually roselle, says Kim)...
(here's the roselle, cooked down with sugar. We then blended it in a hand-crank blender, and jarred it...)
Here is our wood-fired stove, getting warm for our culinary adventures!
We are also making peanut butter from peanuts that Kim toasted yesterday ground in our hand-crank mill,
yogurt, and cake (to eat our lovely spreads on, of course!). I’m about to throw together a salad in an effort to be righteous… everyone else suggested that we just eat cake and jam for dinner! But Kim brought a whole spread of lovely fruits and veggies from the Farmer’s market today, and I want to dig in!
(cheeks tinted pink by the jam, which is so delicious that I am eating it out of the bowl with my finger... so unlike me!)

2 comments:

  1. Super delicious... and very nutty. I like making peanut butter! I'd like to find a hand mill when we get home... wanna make some?

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