I love trying out the local cuisine when I’m travelling and I love to cook, so naturally I’m always on the lookout for a cooking class wherever I happen to be. In El Valle, on the Pacific Coast of Colombia, where tourism is still just beginning to take off I didn’t expect to have this opportunity. But I was wrong. The moment I mentioned to my hosts that I would love to learn how to make some of the delicious local cuisines they’d be serving us for meals, they were off making the appropriate calls and arranged for my friend and I to visit the house of a girl that worked in the hostel to have a cooking lesson with her mum.
We arrived to the family’s home and were welcomed with open arms, the young children loved having visitors and enjoyed posing for photos with their beautiful smiles. After all the introductions we began preparing for the cooking lesson. The family’s kitchen backed onto the river. They used an open fire to cook their meals and they had a water tank for collecting rainwater for cooking and drinking. We made coconut rice from scratch on the fire and patacones (fried plantains) – two of our favourite Colombian Pacific Coast cuisines. We also made a delicious borojo juice, the borojo plant is native to this region and I took a strong liking to it. The cooking lesson was hands-on and we had a great time with the family. Not only did we have the most brilliant cooking lesson, but we also had the most amazing experience of being invited to someone’s home, meeting their entire family and making some beautiful new friends.
Here are the recipes:
Coconut rice
1. Grate the coconut and add water to squeeze out the milk.
2. Add salt and sugar to the boiling coconut milk.
3. Reduce the milk to coconut oil.
4. Add more coconut milk and rice, reduce until rice is cooked.
Patacones
1. Peel and slice plantains about 2 inches thick.
2. Fry the plantains in oil.
3. Take out and squash between 2 plates or flat surfaces.
4. Fry the patacones a bit more and serve.
And lastly, I leave you with this poem that Orbe (our cooking teacher) sang as we were cooking around the fire. (I wrote this down as best I could, it was much longer and I may have gotten some of the Spanish mixed up.)
El fuego es sagrado y lo dijo quien prendamos fogata y empezar a ver. Prendí mi fogata a orillos del mar y no me cansaba de mirar y mirar. Subian las llamas chispiaba candela y junto a el estaban dos hermosas etnias. Negros y mestizos compartía suelo y danzaban rondas al sagrado fuego.
un latte deslactosada 