Two minor, semi earth-shaking events occurred this week.
1. I bought a teflon pan.
2. I introduced banana bread to my cooking club.
Okay, so you’re all really wowed right now, I know. Let’s start with the damn pan.
So yeah, I bought a teflon pan in town. It cost a dollar and it’s red. There was a blue one too, but at the time, the red one was calling my name and found its way into my basket. Why is this exciting, you might ask? Well, you see, pretty much everything in this country is fried, sautéed, or cooked in oil. Eggs, fish, pupusas, chicken, plantains. All fried in oil. Lots of it. Not saying that’s bad. We do it in the states too. It’s just the way it is. Consequently, or maybe it’s just a funny coincidence (you be the judge), all the women (and men too) have a nice little buddha belly going on. They’re great. When you guys visit, you’ll enjoy them as much as I do. Trust me. So despite running around cleaning the entire house, or tending to their cows and kids all day, all the women here have these sweet panzas as they’re called. Even the little kids have their panzitas.
Anyway, back to the pan. So with my beautiful new shiny red pan, I whipped up some eggs and chorizo for lunch the other day, and I didn't use any oil. Egad! When my mom saw this, she nearly freaked out. “It didn’t stick! And you didn't use any oil?” “Yep, I know. It’s the magic of Teflon. Thank you, DuPont.”
So, this may all seem like nonsense to you all, but when every meal a family of six eats is fried up in a pan with a ton of oil, it adds up. You see where I'm going with this... the panzas. That's right. So it’s kind of a big deal when you get rid of all that oil. Or maybe not. Maybe their bodies will sense what the gringo is trying to do and start demanding calories from other things, like an extra tortilla, or demanding more sugar in their coffee. I dunno. All I know is it was a bit of a Aha! moment in my family when my mom saw how well the pan worked. So yay. Small victory!
Now the banana bread.
Okay, for any of you that know me, you know that I’m kind of a fiend for the banana bread. Don’t know why. Everyone has their fetishes I suppose. Well mine is the pan de guineo. When I got here in my community, one of the first things I noticed is that there were banana trees everywhere. You can literally just pick them off the trees, or if you buy them, they cost nothing. Like 20 for a dollar nothing.
In general, however, people are sort of obsessed with plantains, banana’s bigger, blander, older brother (no offense Ben!). They love them and fry them up every chance they get. When I questioned my mom the other day why we don’t fry up bananas for breakfast and always use plantains, she literally didn’t have an answer. It was one of those “just because” moments. Anyway, I made my choice years ago, and plantains can go screw.
So when my cooking group asked me (oh yeah, I formed a weekly women's cooking group - it's fun) what kind of stuff I like to make, I listed off a whole bunch of stuff. I also casually mentioned banana bread. When I said this, they all sort of jumped. "What's banana bread?" Ah, here was my opening. I told them everything. Long story short, next time we met (Thursdays at 2, if you're in the neighborhood), we all brought the ingredients, I wrote the recipe on a giant poster, and we went to town. Check it out...
In the end, it was a big hit. And helped launch the women's cooking group, which I'm sure will run out of steam after a few months. But, it's fun for now!
Hmm, what else? Some other news that you all might find interesting. My town hosted a motocross competition a few weeks ago. It was nuts. And pretty amazing considering gas is 5 bucks a gallon here. But hey, he looks like he’s having fun, right?
And we had a community-wide recycling day at our school. No surprises here. Exactly what you’d expect. We broke into teams and collected all sorts of plastic bottles and pieces of aluminum. The idea being that they’d see that the crap they throw on the ground is actually worth something, and that picking it up is easy. In the end, we filled up two “jumbos,” or what they call a frickin huge bag here. The final weigh in. Two jumbos: 100 and 45 lbs. And at 10 cents a pound, that works out to be $14. Not a lot, right? Well considering that the average daily pay for a salvadoran is just over 6 bucks, it's kind of significant. I'll let you know how it all goes.
