Fresh Chicken Soup!

Machetes and Marching Ants
One of my concerns before my trip was what-the-H am I going to do when Tammy and Juan are at work? I'm still fresh in the culture, still learning the language, still learning my way around, etc. Well! The past couple of days I have helped Doña Marten outside in the yard. Yesterday, we cut long grass with machetes, working and talking, maybe a little more talking than working, but with two of us we kept each other company and got the work done a lot faster! We wore hats, long sleeve button up shirts, rain boots, and gloves. I kneeled in a pile of pig poo, and when I told Doña Marten about it, she warned me not to put my knees on the ground because the ants will crawl all over me and bite me! I've gotten bit a couple times by the ants, not pleasant! I started pulling some of the weeds with my gloves, and I had ants crawling all over my gloves. So I stuck to the machete...

Quick Love Story
So she told me the story of how she and her husband met and got married. They got engaged after three months of dating! He was in the peace corps and she owned a grocery store with her sister. Their grocery store was the only store that had an international phone, so he came in there almost everyday to make calls and to see her. He wrote her a letter once, when he was still learning English, will you be my girlfriend? She said no. He wrote her another letter asking the same thing, and she said no. Finally he wrote a third letter saying, "I don't want to bother you, but this is the last time I will ask you if you want to be my girlfriend." They got engaged so she could go to the United States with him and told her parents by showing them a wedding invitation!

Bananas & Fresh Chicken Soup
Yesterday was cutting the grass, today I learned how to cut bananas down from a tree and kill a chicken. We used a machete to cut down the whole trunk of the section of bananas we were cutting down. Apparently, after a bunch of bananas has grown, the tree itself is dead. So you cut at the trunk until it falls over and you can reach the top of the banana bunch with your machete. Also, the juice inside the banana tree stains a really bad brown color so definitely don't want to get it on you! Did you know banana trees had flowers? Me neither. They are really big and purple and hang upside down under the bottom of the banana bunch.

Joke: What was Beethoven's favorite fruit?
-Ba-na-na-na (Beethovens 5th? eh? eh?)

After we got the bananas, it was time to start making lunch...chicken soup! I'm glad for this experience, but I'm not sure how much I'm going to like chicken after today, we will see when lunch time comes around...BEWARE! DON'T KEEP READING UNLESS YOU WANT TO KNOW HOW TO KILL A CHICKEN!!

Here it is, How to Kill a Chicken
      So we had a gallina tied up until we had washed all of the surfaces in the outdoor kitchen and prepared a space for us to get it done. She was already boiling water over their wood burning stove. Then, she took a rag and tied it around the chicken's feet so she could hold it upside down. She took a long skinny piece of wood, laid it across the chicken's neck and stepped on both sides of the wood, a.k.a. suffocating it. Then she twisted its neck and twisted its neck until it was over, the whole time saying "I'm sorry! I'm sorry, poor little chicken."
      Next we hung the chicken upside down for a few minutes so the blood would drain to the head. Then, we put it in a big bowl, poured the boiling water over it, let it soak a few minutes to make plucking the feathers off much easier. (I helped with this part!) We plucked all the feathers off, then held the chicken over the fire. This, she explained, made it easier for taking off the skin of the feet. So we slid off the scaly skin part (is anybody still reading by this point?!) and tossed it into a container with the stuff we were either not going to use or give to the dogs. Then, the chicken was washed with lemon and "exfoliated" with salt to remove all bacteria. What a day at the spa! Haha?
     Then! It was time to dismember and remove the innards. Apparently you don't feed the chicken the morning you are going to kill it because when you cut off the head you will get chunks of undigested food... Who wants that? Anyways, we found some small eggs on the inside! Which we kept to boil in the soup. We cut up the chicken, removed all its goods, took out the intestines to give to the dogs, and just about everything other than the feet, the head, and the intestines were put into the soup. Which will cook for 2 hours until lunch time- yum! Apparently we had a very fat chicken today and it will taste better because of how it was raised- you can also tell by the color of the fat, its a yellowy color instead of a white (which isn't as tasty).

A special note to Dana: Your advice was great. Since I've been here I've only said "Yes!" And I have had some of the best experiences.

What I've learned:
1) Natural, fresh food and natural preparation is the most delicious and rewarding way to eat. It really makes you enjoy your meat when you raised it and prepared it yourself. Also, the only thing we used on it was lemon (from their lemon trees) and salt. No chemicals or chicken bullion flavor or anything that affects the naturalness of what God provided!
2) Don't cook the chicken the same day as you killed it, the muscles are still tense and so is the meat! Too hard to chew. Keep it in your fridge for a day, then cook it.
3) Always say yes!
4) A machete is a good tool to have around the house! Christmas present...?? haha