El Chef

One of the fun things about living with only the basics is that improvisation, ingenuity and creativity come to the fore. Cooking here is always a bit of an adventure with many factors limiting what you might normally be tempted to prepare for a dinner party of somewhere between 10 and 20 guests. Added to this, amongst the volunteers, there has been a fairly large amount of pressure on for cooking fantastic desserts.

Imagine that you had 20 people arriving for dinner and you looked in the cupboard to find a cabbage and a large beetroot. Imagine further that you had no electricity, no hot water, no refrigerator and only some basic dry supplies. This was my first cooking experience. The veggie run did come in an hour or so before deadline so I was able to benefit from some fresh tomatoes, cucumbers and avocados. Prior to that we had scoured the property for coconuts, pineapple, limes, green papaya, yucca. It ended up being a pretty good feed of yucca frites, green papaya salad, mixed salad and pineapple upside down cake for dessert.

We generally cook two evening meals or Sunday brunch per week with another volunteer. Last night I was on again and it pretty much rained all day from just after breakfast. With not much to do in the afternoon (besides read, of course), I decided to stay down in the kitchen after lunch to get a jump on the preparing the yucca for an encore of yucca frites. I didn't quite expect to spend the entire afternoon down there but these things happen.

Kitchen disasters at home tend to seem fairly benign when cooking in this environment. It ended up being quite a comedy in the end from not having enough time to get everything cooked in the oven, then running out of gas, trying to light the clay oven outside (unsuccessfully), an invasion of flying insects who were diving in our faces, clothes and food, ants biting our feet, whisking eight egg whites into merangue by hand. At the end of all this, a pretty good feed was before us and, after some nasty Argentinian cask wine called 'Termidor' in a coffee mug, I was relaxed enough to enjoy the meal.

I still can't believe I was able to make an adequate Lemon Merangue Pie (with no recipe) in these circumstances!