Food food food

It used to be the trouble with kids is that all they wanted was peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

Well now, meet the new baby gourmet, who are a pain in the neck when they visit your home...or join in the discussion at epilog

no, we don't have that problem: it's rice every meal, and if the visitors don't like our brown rice Dita will buy a bit of white rice from the kiosk around the corner.

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Awhile back I wrote about how the poor Indians in South America are growing quinoa for American yuppies while eating their normal diet.

history of the grain here... more here

most of the recipes on line seem to be gourmet, so I suspect ordinary Incas in the good old days used it in soups or in porridge (as oatmeal) although there are reports that the warriors mixed it with fat to carry to war. Ah, but where did the fat come from? no olives, no pigs for lard.Guess I'll have to google about it later: alas, lots of fake stuff about Incas and Mayans on line, by rich gringos who see poverty as romance and the empires as wonderful advanced civilizations...something I see all the time in history books. As if ordinary folks back then didn't mind being hungry and work their tushies off for the rich...

It was also one of the grains used to make Chicha, the local beer. My son's grandfather in their home town used to brew it, and sell it. He had a portable radio for music. This was, of course, 30 years ago, and they probably have electricity now.

But you too can grow your own: Instructions here. But you have to remove the husks, which have  a poisonous saponins in them to discourage being eaten by birds.

You can mix the grain and water in a blender and spin on the lowest setting, or even put a mesh bag of quinoa in the washing machine and run the rinse cycle. After washing you will have to let the seed completely dry before storage.

Recipes here. And no, we don't have it here in the palenke.--------------------------------------------------

I'll have to google about south American cooking: it's not the same as Mexican, and it varies from region to region...: Yes, my sons are Colombian, but their area was potato country, and the food there was mainly soups, with boiled potatoes and veggies and various roots with a little meat (goat or chicken) or fish.  The specialty of their town was cuy, aka Guinea pig...my son said that his first mom used to keep a few in the kitchen to feed grass and snacks, and when they got "weak" and needed a meat meal, she'd kill a few and stew them. They ate a lot of bananas too (this includes the non sweet plantanos, which is boiled as a veggie).

(when they came to the US and were given tacos they had never seen any...they didn't tend to eat a lot of beans/legumes in their diet). The stores in their town sold yogurt! but there wasn't any McDonalds yet...and their small isolated city had a cocacola bottling plant(!) but for milk, we bought it from a vendor and boiled it, or took a little "farmer's cheese" in it to get rid of the bitter taste.

the best place to find Colombian recipes is MyColombianRecipe webpage.

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