Cashew, the fruit

So one of the things that I found shocking when I first came to Brazil is cashew trees. I remember my first trip to the Amazon in 2004, going to Alter do Chão with a couple of the women from the office with whom I'd made friends and stopping along the road to fill a bag with cashew fruit. They are sweet and tart, and drip with juice like any overly ripe fruit should.

In reality, the fruit are false fruit from the biological perspective, since they don't contain seeds. The seed is actually the cashew nut, and must be roasted properly to remove the oils. Wikipedia says its the same oils that are in poison ivy, so you can imagine that you would not want to bite into the unroasted nut.

But the cashew trees here in the yard are fruiting, which is both gorgeous and delicious. So today in the heat, I picked some cashews and made some juice. tasty tasty juice.

Jacote

So in the weeks leading up to my birthday Eduardo mentioned again the idea of separating out a couple of the horses that are more or less wild here on the farm. There were three yearlings, and it was a good time to separate them from the herd if we wanted to train them. So we spent a fair amount of time looking at the three yearlings, and once I picked mine out, Eduardo rounded up the herd and brought them to the corral to get treated for ticks and to separate off my yearling and his mom.

The three yearlings consisted of two females and one male. The two females are sorrel and the male is a dapple brown/gray. I chose the male, for no better reason than he's adorable. As far as we could tell, no one had a smoother trot, so it seemed as good of a way to make a decision as any. So the day before my birthday, Eduardo separated the male and his mom and put them in the pasture behind our house. It took until yesterday to name them. Eduardo suggested Jacote for the little guy, which is the name of a local fruit that apparently has his coloring. I named the mother Nevoa (Fog). She's white with a slight grey dapple, and is pretty old, so has a little bit of the wispy fuzz, so it seemed appropriate.

I've been feeding them corn every morning, and they're gradually getting more accustomed to me. This morning we spent some time out there and Eduardo gave me some lessons on getting up close to the mother. She let us pet her for the first time today. Jacote is still really jumpy, but I'm hopeful that as the mother becomes more comfortable with us, he will to.

Needless to say, it'll be quite an adventure for me to try to train Jacote from scratch. Especially given that I barely ride. But the idea is that we'll learn together. So here goes...