I love baking bread. I love the smell of active yeast and of the dough rising. I love using my muscles to knead the bread and then the feeling of clean hands after I wash all the sticky dough off of them. I love watching it rise as though some miracle took place and the satisfaction of punching it back down. But best of all I like the end result: the smell of fresh bread wafting out my door and the wonderful taste of warm, soft bread. I remember as a girl watching my mom make bread and I held a kind of respect and awe for her and those like her ho knew the art and mysteries of bread. It seemed about the most complicated thing one could make in the kitchen. Whenever I tried to help her, I felt I was always doing something wrong. When I was kneading, I always put too much or too little flour and my miniature hands didn’t knead forcefully enough. I always anticipated punching down the dough wanting to do it long before it was ready and she always had to remind me not to push it down too hard. When we made rolls for Thanksgiving, I played with the dough too much and no matter how long I teased and shifted it, my rolls never came out perfectly smooth like hers. If I ever commented on her astounding ability to make rolls, she denied any talent and said it was Aunt Karen, Grandma, or Great Grandma who really could make rolls, not her.
Here in Paraguay, I bake and cook a lot. It started out with a lot of cakes but it eventually progressed to the more difficult art of bread and I’ve discovered that I like making rolls instead of full loaves. (Though I don’t dare boast equal ability to the masters of bread in my family.) In fact, making bread of any shape or form now seems a simple task because I have never worked harder for my food than in this country.
I have been able to experiment with many things here that I never would have thought of trying in the States because I have so much time on my hands. I regularly make granola, bread and yogurt for myself. I have made cool things like peach jam, blackberry jam, dulce de leche, hummus, sun dried tomatoes, sesame crackers, and sesame candies. Once I made enchiladas with homemade sauce and homemade tortillas and it took the better part of my morning. I have made so many cakes that I rarely look at a recipe anymore for instructions and I have all but perfected my potato soup and Spanish rice. One of my better experiments was spaghetti sauce with eggplant, raw peanuts and curry. Some discoveries have been accidental because I have been missing one or two ingredients and have no other options. Plus I don’t actually own any measuring cups or spoons, so everything is a bit of a guessing game.
If I am eating with Paraguayans, sometimes I have to help search for firewood and chop it with a machete just to have cooking power. If we make chipa guazu, we have to go to the chakra, pick off enough cobs off the stalks to fill a large back, shuck all the corn, cut the kernels off with a knife, and grind the corn by hand. The actual mixing the ground up corn with oil, salt, cheese, milk whey, and a little more oil is the easy part. Once I made chipa kandoi (peanut chipa) with my friend and at least half the ingredients came from her fields. The peanuts her family had grown and shucked and we toasted, peeled, and ground them and ground the corn they had grown and dried into flour. The mandioca flour she had made by digging up buckets and buckets of mandioca, peeling and cleaning it all, loading it onto an ox cart to take down the street to grind it by machine, spending hours sifting with water through thin material and then leaving the remaining flour out the in sun for a few days to dry. My contribution of sugar, anis and coco seemed a measly comparison to her work. We then spend a good four hours making fire, mixing the ingredients and forming the chipa, and waiting for it to cook. At the end of the afternoon I was hot and sweaty and had ground peanuts, flour, and soot all over my clothes and body. And yet, there is a certain satisfaction I get after working so hard for all my food. Unless you are cooking something delicate, it always tastes better if you cook it by fire. And there is always the feeling that the food is well earned calories after you have been slaving away for hours.
The Paraguayans will remind you that the food is better when it’s fresh and natural and I can’t say I can argue that. As unpleasant as it might be to watch a pig or chicken be slaughtered, at least I know where it came from and for the most part, what it ate as well. The juice we make includes only fruit, sugar and water. No additives or preservatives are necessary. Most of the vegetables I get in site come from someone’s garden or chackra and I have fresh oregano, mint, basil, and rosemary in my yard. I buy milk from my neighbor who has a cow and I cook, back, and make my yogurt with it. Almost everything I eat, I can trace to it’s original source and there is something about that which makes me feel safe.
I am still slightly in awe at the fantastic change that comes upon dough when it rises and I still get the same satisfaction today as when I was a girl watching it sink down as I gleefully punch the air out. If possible, maybe I love it just a little bit more. The thing is, living here and spending so many hours of my day working for a meal has made me appreciate food in a fuller way. (No pun intended.) I have come to take pleasure in chopping up vegetables, mixing recipes, coming up with new ideas and just being a part of the process of my meal. Perhaps that sounds cheesy, but I feel so much more fulfilled after preparing my meal than letting a microwave do the work for me. Food and eating are a central part of our lives and I believe that it should be that way. When people meet, they often eat and families gather around the table to share food. The United States has an entire holiday (incidentally my favorite) that is devoted to food and eating. Every country has food and dishes specific to them and customs that often revolve around that. Eating becomes as much of a social activity as it is something we do to sustain ourselves.
I don't think my neighbors realize just how amazing it is that the land they live on is capable of producing well over 75 percent of their food. Nor do I think people in the United States realize how insane it is to have a dozen supermarkets at their disposal, full of more food than they could possibly consume, most of which comes with very little preparation and far too much packaging. People in Paraguay work all day to get a meal on the table and people in the US work all day to afford to buy prepared food to put on the table. Somehow I can’t make sense of that, but I won’t go on a rant about the United States right now. I’ll just say I like to be a part of the food preparation and feel it in my hands. And I like to watch the dough rise.
