It’s 8:47 pm on Thanksgiving night and I lumber off the bus, my stomach three-and-a-half times the size it was just hours before. In my hands is a pot of army green-looking mush, which kind of looks like a Florida Wetland without the mangroves trees holding it together. How did I make such a weird-looking thing that any sane person wouldn’t touch with a two-foot fork? Well, she made me. Who? Okay, I will start from the beginning.
9:17 pm, the day before Thanksgiving. All I have is a gigantic squash-pumpkin-looking thing that I had hoped I could magically turn into pumpkin pie by 5 o’ clock the following day. I tread up the stairs of my apartment to find my neighbors, five young girls and a guy asking me what in the heck I’m doing with an “ayote.” I try to explain to them what a pie is, and when they ask me how I plan on making one, I respond, “I don’t have ninguna idea.” Then they offer to make me a typical Hondurena squash/pumpkin desert for me; I just have to bring the pumpkin next door to the fried chicken restaurant where they all work and the work will be done for me. Of course, I just have to buy some cinnamon and dulce de panela. Dulce de panela is this brick-hard-cane-juice-based-tasting thing that I have no clue how they make, but somehow it gets from liquid to cement hard just by stirring. Anyways, desperate and out of ideas I tell them I’ll be there at 3:00, the time when the chicken place isn’t too crowded so they can help me out.
I did a few chores the next day after getting out of school, walked over to the doctor, got some stitches out of my hand, paid the Honduran computer geeks that fixed my LCD computer screen for $35 (pretty cheap considering the screen itself costs about $20 plus shipping,) and went over and bought the cinnamon and cement brick of cane juice. At 2:14 pm I loaded the pumpkin onto my shoulder and grabbed my brick of sweetener and walked over to the chicken restaurant two buildings away. The girls smiled as I walked over toward the register and behind into the forbidden doors of the kitchen, feeling like I was the mayor of that place.
Inside the kitchen isn’t what I imagined. It’s a relatively big room which a couple of ice box freezers, fryers, and a gas stove that one would use to go camping with a tent. We head on over to the “pila,” the only source of consistent water in a town in which rain decides when you can and can’t use water. (Ironically, the water goes out in Cofradia when it rains a lot due to the pipes being clogged with dirt and debris.) We wash my gigantic baby of a pumpkin-squash and my friend, Maria, takes a giant chicken-cutting knife, and with a big whack, the knife is only about a quarter-of-an-inch buried into the weird-looking yellow vegetable. She uses all her weight to press down on her knife, and with a big sigh, finally slices through it. The preparation has begun.
Inside this weird squash thing is a green forest of algae-looking stuff and pumpkin-looking seeds. I curiously pop some into my mouth and even the slimy green algae tastes edible. We chop my baby into pieces and layer the chicken-nugget-sized pieces in a pot, layering cinnamon and slabs of the sticky cement stuff in between more layers of the pumkin-y thing. A full pot later, I go back up to my apartment with Maria who pours in a couple of cups of water into the pot and then takes out a black plastic bag and starts ripping it and putting it over the pumpkin stuff in the pot while it begins to boil. “Won’t that melt the plastic?” asks my roommate, Ryan, and Maria assures him in her mumbled Spanish that no, Hondurans are experts at turning a healthy vegetable into a sugary treat. Okay, well she didn’t say that, but it does have a lot of truth. Anyway, an hour later, my pot started smelling like a scented candle and I couldn’t wait to try it.
At 4:02 I somehow convinced myself that one wasn’t enough. Maybe I just wanted to give some more pieces to the fried chicken neighbors people who helped me make it, or maybe I wanted to try making one all on my own, but at 4:22 I was walking out of the market with another giant pumpkin-y thing, a cement brick of dulce de panela, and another package of cinnamon, all costing a whopping 48 lempiras, about $2.25. Oh, and also I bought a couple of pineapples to gift to the chicken place people. You see any opportunity they get, they are gifting me things. So far, only about a week of having moved in, they have helped me wash and fold clothes, gifted our apartment bags of chicken and French fries, bought me two baleadas, and now have single-handedly saved (or so I thought) my Thanksgiving. Anyways, I did end up preparing and boiling the second pumpkin squash thing all by myself, despite being held up at the market for a while talking to the people there. I was finally on my home, on my way to complete the Thanksgiving adventure!
I brought some pieces down to the chicken place, eager for them to try. Not surprisingly, even with a brick the size of my head of dulce de panela, the Hondurans don’t find it sweet enough. The bigger problem is I can’t fit my two pumpkins-worth of slices into the big pot. Then Maria said, “Podemos hacer un puree,” or that we could make a puree. So at 5:10 pm I am scrambling to scrape off the blackened-by-cane-sugar mush from their boiling hot pumpkin rinds into a big tupperware. I finish at 5:19, minutes before we are scheduled to leave, and dump all the green-looking slimy mush back into the big pot and there we go. That’s how I got from having one giant pumpkin to a pot of dark army green-looking wetland swamp mush.
And here I am. Now I have this huge pot of dark green stuff. Barely touched. I can’t say it was all a failure because it was another of my Honduran adventures. Although almost nobody knew how to, or even dared eat it, I feel like I learned a lot of interesting things. Can’t quite pinpoint what those things are…
