MMMMM Bagels

Things have been looking up at site. I feel far more productive and happy. I spent the past few weeks trying to figure out why. I have a project that’s goings great (a biohuerto behind the health post), I will build my first cocina mejorada tomorrow (4^th of June), I’ve made more time for myself (namely reading the first 5.5 Harry Potter’s in Spanish..I got 2.5 left to go), and the library looks like it might actually exist by the end of the month (cross your fingers). These are all great things. I know they sure make my boss happy-- I’m actually working on steady projects (Can I get an AMEN)! But naw, that’s not what’s improved my productivity and made me at times actually giddy. No, I believe I’ve narrowed it down to one of 2 things:

1.       I increased my chocolate intake

2.       I increased my Bagel intake

Now any female can attest to an increase in chocolate intake will make even the nastiest day seem a heck of a lot better, it’s a natural mood booster; but I’m guessing you’re wondering where I got the bagels from since I’m fairly sure half of you have heard me gripping about the lack of bagels in Peru. Well the chocolate and the bagels are connected. I’ve been teaching all of my cooking knowledge to a family in my community who makes bread.

It all started one famous day (in my site at least). Norma’s 11^th birthday. I was asked to me the God-mother of the birthday party (aka provide the cake and drinks and so on) for Norma’s very first birthday party (the other 10 birthdays went by unmarked). Since I’m A. a cheap, and B. had no intention of paying to go to Chiclayo to pay to buy a cake, I decided to make a cake for Norma. Armed with the knowledge that lemon is her favorite flavor I made a lemon cake and decorated it to say “HAPPY BIRTHDAY NORMA”…but in Spanish of course. The cake was ready and waiting a full 2 hours before the party so I put another pan on top of it and left in on the kitchen table at my house to go and set up the Piñata I made Norma (I know I’m cheap, but she loved it) and make sure all the other food preparations were going well.

With everything in order at the professor’s house I went to go get the cake…and what did I encounter? The family cat, Camacho, having a hay day eating all the icing off the cake. Okay, I knew I’d been in Peru too long when my first instinct (after nearly killing the cat) was that if just the icing was gone, I’d decorate it again and call it a day. But Camacho had eaten the top off the better half of the cake. So now I had 30 minutes to pull another cake, decorated cake at that, out of thin air. I ran around to buy more ingredients and threw another S./10 in the family money pot for the extra gas I was surely going to burn through making the second cake. An hour and a half later, I arrived slightly late (yes an hour and a half is slightly late in Peru…)with the newly decorated cake that was a hit with everyone.

So now I’ve diverged sufficiently that you’ve forgotten why this story was important—It’s how everyone in my town caught word that I can make cakes. Don Elmer and his wife Rosa happened to be at the party with me (they make bread in my site) and asked me if I’d be interested in teaching them how to make the cake. Not being able to pass up a free invite to make sweets I said yes.

We started out baking. I taught them how to bake a lemon and vanilla cake, and then they asked me if I knew how to make alfajores (a Peruvian cookie) and I actually did, so I taught them that. We just made enough for them to eat (I’d help out of course). Then I started getting more requests for birthday cakes and decided that Rosa had a business opportunity that was just too good to pass up. I taught her more cakes, cookies, and pies and referred any birthday cake request to her. We now bake on average 10 cakes a week in addition to 6 dozen individual apple pies and 6 dozen alfajores for her to sell. She’s turning a great profit and I get to bake. Now I don’t do all the baking of course. I make the cake or whatever the first 2 times, the 3^rd I help her or her daughter make the cake, the 4^th they do as much on their own as they can, and by the 5^th it’s their “final exam” and they do it all on their own. Rosa has now mastered the art of: the carrot cake, chocolate cake, vanilla cake, lemon cake, apple pies, chocolate chess pie, banana cream pie, banana bread, orange-nut bread, cinnamon-raisin bread, and quiche. Yes, you read that right, quiche.

When making alfajores you only use the yolk, and one day I had left over pie dough, and decided to put the egg whites to use, I mean I hadn’t had a good quiche in a looong time and the oven was just calling my name. So I chopped up a small onion and tomato and threw in some garlic and salt and pepper. Ta-da a super sensation was created. My town actually likes quiche…who would have thought it. I can’t convince these people to eat raw carrots and they like a quiche? That faithful quiche day there happened to be my usual following there watching (a group of 5-10 mothers who spend their free time watching me cook and talking about how they can lose weight to be “skinny like the gringa”) and I offered them all a piece and it became an instant hit. Who would have thought it?

Now not everything I’ve made has gone over great. One day I found a bagel recipe and decided to give it a go. It didn’t look that hard. I mixed the dough, let it rise, kneaded in cinnamon sugar and raisins, made little bagels, let the rise more, boiled them, and then put then in the oven after the bread. I’ll be darned if I didn’t get a half dozen tasty bagels! Now these were no 9^th Street Bruger’s Bagels of course, I mean it was my first attempt, but I was in heaven. I was eating a bagel. Don Elmer was mocking me because I was the giddiest he’d ever seen me eating my bagel with butter (I made it fresh from the cow). I decided that I’d be nice and share my little slice of heaven with my friends. They didn’t like it. They kept on saying that it was not fully cooked (bagels are supposed to be spongy in the middle darnit!) and they were too chewy. Oh the horror of it all—okay, not really. That just meant more bagels for me! So now I made my half dozen bagels a week, next week I plan on trying to make sesame seed bagels (Don Elmer is going to share his sesame seeds). Now if I can just figure out how to make cream cheese I’d be in heaven.

I tell you, an increase in chocolate and bagels just makes everything seem so much better

Lessons Learned

I had an enlightening conversation with my World Wise school class at Riverside High a week ago. I was talking with a few of the students on Skype; they had just asked me what a school day was like here in Nanchoc. Upon my saying that they students are only in school from 8am to 1pm the Riverside students faces lit up, “god that’s so not fair, why can’t we have half days?” was the general consensus. I was taken aback. Not exactly sure why, I know had I been talking to myself my senior year of high school I would have loved the idea of half days just as much as they did. But now, 6 years after graduation (god that makes me feel old) all I can think of is how much I took for granted what we have in the states.

The teachers here are teaching because it is a lucrative job—in my town they receive better pay than both the nurse AND the OB-GYN at the health post. The teachers here lack the spark that I saw in my teachers growing up. At first I accredited the lack of enthusiasm to the differences in the educational system (I guessed that the teachers enjoyed straight-up-lectures just as much as their students didn’t) then I found out about the pay and it all clicked. The teachers are teachers for the money, not for the love of teaching.

Now that being said, I can recall a few teachers growing up that just didn’t have a real interest in their job. It was just that, a job. But the majority of my teachers loved their jobs and were quite good at it—however bad of a student I might have been.

Mr. Carter, my 6^th grade AIG Math teacher had the ability to simultaneously scare the begeezeuos out of us and inspire us to do better.  We were graded on hamburgers. McDonalds is a cruddy grade because their burgers aren’t all that great; they’re edible, not enjoyable. But a Wendy’s burger, they were the best because a Wendy’s burger is square—they don’t cut corners. “Good, Better, Best. Better than the rest, until your good is always better and your better is the best,” it was his credo for our class. His aspiration for us was to always do better. At the time I’m sure I rolled my eyes. What self respecting 6^th grader wouldn’t have? But now, I think Mr. Carter had the right idea. I’ve got that credo written out on paper stuck to the back of the door to my room-- just a little personal reminder. Good. Better. Best. McDonalds bad, Wendy’s good.

I think an entire teaching style can be accredited to Mr. Quackenbush (yes that’s a real name), my high school physics teacher. He was a hippie in all definitions and forms. Long, gray hair almost always worn in a pony tail and occasionally he’d wear his Star Trek shirt…not a black shirt that said Star Trek, but a real Spaceship-whatever-beam-me-up-Scottie shirt. We all overlooked the fact that he looked like a crazy person (okay, maybe he was crazy…) because he made the material fun. When learning about gravity and ramps we pushed his old F-150 down a slope and did some calculations. A few painful Excel-Sheet-induced hours later: BAM! g=9.8m/s/s. Well I’ll be darned. Then who wants to learn about projectile motion from a book? Not any student I’ve ever seen. What did we do? Why we turned the football goal posts into a huge slingshot! A few rolls of duct tape and a handful of bungee cords later and we had sent a Basketball flying across the field (all videotaped so we could call it research of course). A good week later we had figured out, with a lot of help from Excel, that the dern ball moved up with the same speed that it fell down with. Go figure. Then I won’t even go into the details about the electricity labs, I´ll just say that it’s a lot of fun to blow things up. And that you can blow things up and learn at the same time. Don’t believe me? Ask anyone from my Physics or AP Physics class what they learned, you’ll get 2 answers: There is such a thing as a rubber tree, it can be grown in a pot, and it really has rubber inside; and that a=v/t and a=g for something falling straight down. Call his teaching style what you will, but learning can be fun. Mr. Q  taught me that.

If I have to thank one teacher above all others it would be my art teachers. Now, I know what you’re thinking. I studied math, I should thank a math teacher, or a science teacher. Mr. Carter and Mr. Q inspire me now-- now that I’m older and wiser and all that jazz—but when I was in school there was one class that I could walk out of and always, no matter what, feel like I was the king of my world. Art class. Why art you ask? Because it taught me to be creative—a trait that I just don’t see in my students here.

If I give a sheet of paper to 10 students and then say draw your house; they will all draw the same box with triangle roof and a triangle mountain-scape in the background (yes, the high school students too). The color might be different, but the idea, the same. I didn’t realize how much I had taken for granted us having art growing up. And real art, a whole hour to ourselves to play with clay, to make a mess with paint, and to develop creative thought. Here art class is nothing more than students regurgitation lines to a play they have no interest in, or the mandated dance class that no one seems to enjoy. Rarely are they allowed to draw (material costs too much) and even more rarely are they told that their work is beautiful. But in all the art classes I could remember we all walked out having learned something; more likely than not, something about ourselves. At the end of a class I could say to myself, “wow, who knew I had the patience to draw that stairwell in perfect perspective?” And I’d say it with pride. I can say after spending 15 hours cursing at (working on) a MatLab program the last thing I’d think was, “wow who knew I had the patience for that?” It was more likely I’d let out an exasperated “holy cow thank the lord that’s over with. Get me out of here.”

I had spent a lot of time thinking about how much I took for granted in my schooling all week—both the fun and the un-fun. I looked at school as something I was required to do, not something to appreciate or something to be thankful for. So here’s a extremely late “Thank You” for all of those teachers who taught me that learning is supposed to be fun, that I can do anything that I try to do, and that I am my own individual and I have the right to my own ideas and thoughts. Now I know that our way of doing things isn’t perfect in the Sates, but it wasn’t until I left and saw how others learn did I realize how grateful I should be.