Food brings people together. Since July, Living Stones has been able to offer food in Cajueiro Claro, bringing the group closer like a family. I, Rachel, decided to explore this part of the program by taking over the cooking for a week. Once the food is ready, we all file into the classroom, sit around makeshift tables, and sing “God is so good.” Then begins the laughter and fun.
Monday: I opened the box with the pressure cooker. Flavio soaked the salt out of the meat while I sorted through the beans and picked out the bad ones. Then the inaugural attempt using the pressure cooker. I went to cut up vegetables to put in the beans and realized I’d never seen this bumpy green thing before. I held it up and asked the kids “How do you cut this?” I didn’t even know what part of it was edible.
Pressure cookers are scary. You open it at the wrong time, and it will explode. Paulo sat at the table, graphically telling us how his cousin got burnt all over her face when she opened it wrong. We played around with the lid, lifting it up to let the steam out. We even got it going to a beat while we danced around the kitchen.
The problem with pressure cookers is that you have to get all the steam out before you can open it, and only then can you check to see if it is cooked. Boo. After a few false tries, bingo. Rachel’s first time making beans: and it was good.
Tuesday: I bought too many bananas. It was just one of those deals you can’t pass up. So I brought them to Living Stones and made vitamina de banana, which is basically banana milkshakes. Flavio made spaghetti and sausage meat stuff to add to the rest of the beans. And it was good.
Wednesday: Fried chicken. Oh yes. And I am a vegetarian. Growing up, the only time I made chicken was the boneless, skinless stuff you stick in the George Foreman machine: it doesn’t even look like it used to be an animal. After wrestling with gooey skin and fat whatever that stuff was, I made a sauce and fried that chicken. And made spaghetti. I was told my cooking was sublime. And it was good.
Thursday: Flavio’s motorcycle was in the shop, so we walked the 4 kilometers to Cajueiro and got there too late to make a whole meal. I decided to make something different: my own version of cappuccino with cookies. While the cookies disappeared, I was told “Why can’t you just make normal chocolate milk? We don’t like this fancy stuff.” Well fine then. And I thought it was good.
Friday: I got out the big cuscus maker. In Brazil, cuscus is sort of like cornbread, not the middle eastern grain. You steam it to make it stick together. Along with my own version of sausage and eggs, when the kids saw the traditional Brazilian food, they declared that I had officially learned how to cook, and so was now ready to get married. And it was good.
Saturday: Flavio picked up the kids in the Kombi (Volkswagon bus) and brought them to my apartment—the trip into Carpina (the big city for them) was pretty exciting. They came in and looked at all my pictures and explored my bathroom and (I think) finally decided that maybe I wasn’t so weird after all.
I made three very large pizzas, three kinds of juice, and cut open a watermelon. All of it vanished, except for the green olives I put on the pizza, which I found scattered all over the apartment after they had left. They could have told me they didn’t like them—I only put them on the pizza because that is traditional in Brazil.
We called my mother on Skype and all the kids said hello. You should have seen them crowding around me. I took them up to the top floor of the apartment, where you can look out over the city and feel the wind in your face: they loved it. It was the highest up that some of them had ever been. It was beautiful to see their faces. To get those hugs.
Special thanks to Frank for all his help while here in Brazil: we will miss you!
