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...

Mimosa in the Rain

This year, like last year, had a suddent onset of the dry season. One week it rained seemingly everyday, and then it simply stopped raining all together. At this point we've gone a couple of months without rain. And then to tonight, we got a real rain.

I scampered home from the in-laws to take the electronics out of their sockets ditching my umbrella next to the front door. I ran back outside to close all the windows without grabbing the umbrella and when I get back to the front door found Mimosa sitting underneath the umbrella, looking quite pitiful. She's not a big fan of getting wet in the rain. So I continue my scurrying to grab my camera, and when I come back outside I find that she's curled up in the corner with her rug, and brought the umbrella with her. I was overcome by the absolute adorable-ness of the situation and took far far too many photos. In my defense, I needed to try to improve the lighting from pitch dark.

From pig to sausage: Days 2 and 3

So the second day, we started a bit later. Everyone came over for feijoada and then we got to work. Eduardo started building a smoker a bit before lunch, and he and Clovis worked on that all afternoon so that we were ready to start smoking the various pieces around 5p. The rest of us working on filling the sausages, tying them off, and tying up the various cuts.



For the salami we used silicon tubing, but for all the others actual intestine was used. Carmen's grandparents made and sold sausage in Colombia and Clovis remembers his mom making sausages, so they both had stories about how the intestines were cleaned and prepared for sausage making.



This morning (the third day) we took all of the pieces out of the smoker this morning, and put in all the sausages. And currently, everything that's out of the smoker is hanging in our kitchen. A few more days and we'll take it down and I imagine it will go in the fridge. This morning I'm already snacking on the tenderloin. An interesting piece of information I learned today while furiously using google translator to figure out the names of the various pieces is that Canadian bacon is an American invention, and that it's not made using the bacon, but is rather the loin. Which makes a lot more sense when you look at it (round as opposed to flat and meaty as opposed to striped with fat).

From pig to sausage: Day 1

This weekend a friend came over to teach us how to make sausages. Clovis bought a pig from the farm next door a bit over a month ago, and it was slaughtered Thursday to be ready for Friday's start. Friday was Cuiabá birthday (and a city holiday) so we therefore had a long weekend. Good since the process takes three days.

So Friday we started with the entire pig at about nine in the morning, and Rivania and Decimo showed us how to butcher it. Take off the feet, take out the tenderloin, disjoint the ribs, take out the ribs, then come the loin, then the ham, then skin the head, remove the tail, separate the belly for the bacon, and the rest of the skin and the fat. Just the butchering took all morning.




The head is then put to boil with water and salt, and then the meat was taken off to make frankfurters. We then made four different sausage recipes and salami. Salami has beef mixed in, whereas the others are pure pork. We made the filling for Tuscan sausage, pepperoni, Portuguese sausage, and 'simple' sausage. 2 kilograms of each (1 kg = 2.2 lbs) and everything rested in the fridge over night. We also seasoned all of the other pieces (feet, bacon, loin, tenderloin, tail, face, ribs) to be ready for smoking everything on day 2. The bones were salted and left in the sun, and the skin was boiled with salt and baking soda and then left to dry in the shade to make fried pig skin later. We finished up around 6p.

Pumpkin mania

So tonight Eduardo baked up three little pumpkins and specifically asked for PIIIIIEEEEEEE. He was very subtle about his desire for PIIIIEEEEEE. Thusly, I made PIIIIEEEEE, and with the extra pumpkin puree made a double batch of pumpking chocolate chip cookies.

Pumpkins galore!

Last week my father-in-law took 50+ pumpkins out of the garden in one day. So I put out the call via facebook for any and all pumpkin recipes known. Thus far I've only tried a couple, but they've turned out pretty well. Of course all the recipes from the states call for canned pumpkin, but it's really easy to make a fresh pumpkin puree instead. I just halve the pumpkin and bake it at a medium temperature until it can be pierced easily with a fork. Then I scoop it out and blend it into a puree. Depending on the type of pumpkin, it's good to let it drain, but for the pumpkins we have here I haven't needed to.

I got a pumpkin bread recipe off of epicurious. This recipe makes a lot of pumpkin bread. So be ready to halve the recipe, freeze a bunch, or treat co-workers. It came out tasty, but I had trouble grinding the roasted pumpkin seeds sufficiently. A lot of people apparently just left them out, but I found the bread to be really moist even with all the extra flour.

Otherwise, I used only 1 c. of sugar in the raw, as opposed to 1 c. white sugar and 1 c. brown sugar. But at home we don't even like our deserts to be very sweet, so this is definitely to taste. I also used whole milk as opposed to butter milk, since that's what was in the fridge.

I also got a recipe for Pumpkin chocolate chip cookies from an old college friend that was amazing. Our resident non-desert-eater even requested more. There are no chocolate chips for sale in Brazil, so I just got a bar of semi-bitter chocolate and chopped it up. Once again I halved the sugar and used raw sugar as opposed to white, but otherwise stuck close to the recipe.