etc.,

In Z's house she served potato gnocchi -invariably- with burnt butter sauce, plus an excellent grated parmesano cheese. I just can't imitate that. Another lovely inimitable dish was rissotto a la milanese.I've not had either since as good, anywhere.

Mostly we ate low-fat, though, but not because we were following a special diet. It was just that in that house they had brought the old world customs with them, and it was natural.

Minestrone was often at the table. With the second course there was always a lettuce salad, dressed at the table with precise spoonfuls of good olive oil and vinegar. The lettuce often came from laP and was ripped by hand-often in pieces large enough to go splat on your face when they sprung from the fork. Osso buco was a favorite.OK, that's greasy. Delicious, but greasy.Mostly things just weren't, though.

There was never dessert, only for company. Instead, there was always a big platter of fruit. And always a half copa of red wine. Nobody ever asked for more. We drank water, tisanes and freshly ground coffee. I never even saw a bottle of a soft drink there.

On the unhealthy side, N nonstopped smoking throughout the meals!!! In those days, EVERYBODY smoked, me too, but not while eating. It was gross. But it was his house and he was boss.
The poor man finally paid a price for that.

wheat

Alas, I love all the bad stuff-everything oily and greasy, like cream,butter,bacon, chicharones, crisp chicken skin, and everything starchy and fattening, like, most of all---pasta!!!! and bread.
I mean spaghetti, macaroni,lasagna, and most especially, ravioli.
Pasta is made from wheat.But not all dried pasta is the same...it depends, in part, on the kind of wheat.
Rice, maize (corn), and wheat are the world's leading cereals. Wheat is basically a grass.
So, next time I have some cake or toast, I'll be doing what rabbits do. Eating grass.

lemons

Lemons are wonderful. Tasty, healthful, versatile....
They can flavor just about everything from rice pudding to meatballs !!! Lemonade is one of the finest refreshing drinks. The Moroccans pickle them, people suck on them, use them to whiten hands and linen, reduce fishy odors, to avoid discoloring food like chopped apples and avocados, to make key lime and lemon meringue pie, cebiches...and the lemon plant with its flowers is just lovely.
Peter Paul and Mary, that folk group from the 70's, sang "Lemon tree, very pretty, and the lemon flower is sweet..but the fruit of the poor lemon is impossible to eat..." That song was beautiful, but those last words are simply wrong.
My friend P had a Meyer lemon tree in her yard. F like lemon juice on everything, as does his daughter, K. I like-need-to have them around. If I don't, I feel panicky.

roses and tomato paste

N taught me how to prune rose bushes in his musty and dust laden garden. it never rained there.

I'm really sad-he's been dead now many years- he never realized I was what he wanted.
He said it was a pity nobody would carry on his passions, especially with La P, but there was me, whom he never really saw , because-I guess- I was a girl, and the daughter of the black sheep. When I got married, he donated ALL the roses he had , but in La P, for an enormous pot at the reception.

Funny. I remember him carving up lobsters that actually moved !!! after being cut up, in Washington. Then in Ottawa he made frog's legs (ug) and a dynamite pea thing. In Lima he made pickled small oranges, and probably taught Z how to cook things. And people learned well. The food was GOOD.
I was the one who picked up on gardening, cooking, photography and painting. But I was never offered a hand into his world while he was still alive.

In La P he had a vegetable garden and he planted tomatoes which, wow, produced tomatoes, tomatoes, and even more tomatoes!!! Big lesson there. What to do with surplus? Z began giving some away and trading them with the grocer for other produce, but there were only two in their family, so that still left alot over.
Then Z began making really good tomato paste. I've never managed to get it quite right, though, and now I can't ask her about it.

cardamom

GW grew cardamom, a sort of cousin to ginger-which is well known in Chinese cuisine, ginger ale and gingersnaps, for instance. I love having some roots around for various other uses, though.

I remember seeing it growing, many years ago while I could still walk. It was in M's plantation on the road to Esmeraldas. But at that time I didn't know much about it at all.
Also, I didn't pay much attention to it because the plantation was incredibly beautiful, but dedicated to something quite different: African palm.

Those palms were quite old, and therefore tall, and because of that their fronds did not obscure vision.Underneath them grew a jungle of ferns in the shade created. There were birds all over the place,which my friend E. told me came from a neighboring protected primary forest patch.

E. told me that next to the banana plantation there were no birds.

spinach

Today I decided I'd look into something simple again...I chose spinach.
Ooops, did I goof!!!

Again I find a simple vegetable to be something so big it'll take at least two days to wade through the available information.

One surprising thing I found out was what they call "espinaca" around here (and I know as New Zealand spinach) is not related to regular spinach at all!!! Captain Cook used it to combat scurvy on his ship, though.
One good thing about it is snails and slugs don't like it. That's a positive point.
I remember finding a slug on a reguk]lar spinach bunch when I was poking around the kitchen as a child. As much as I like it, even today I am leary of eating some I have not personally washed.
I don't like New Zealand spinach much. One interesting thing about it is that it's an HEIRLOOM PLANT. I must look that up, too.

zanahorias

I'm going to switch languages.

Well, I was going to write about the simple carrot, but, when I started gathering information it became a much larger project than I had anticipated. I need to read through some rather long articles.It seems like an uncomplicated vegetable has a complex history!

I guess with GW I got into plants more than I had before. (I'll use initials when I write.) I used to go to his plantation in the tropics here, and then read books on botany and economic applications of plant uses. I really loved that plantation...the tropical plants were fantastic. The trouble is it's overwhelming, though.The tropics. Things GROW.

The area around the house was cleaned, so it was like a garden.Beyond that was the tangled jungle of his cardamom cultivation, a forbidding wall of green.
There were three clusters of really incredible plants there. Not even in the Amazon have I seen things of that size. They were shell, flame and torch ginger--ornamental "cousins" to cardamom.

Just below the house was a river, and beyond that, a hill he had left with primary jungle.The birds from there in the morning made a racket.Enough to wake me up.

On the path to the river he had planted toquilla, and around a processing area further up, small coconuts.He had planted kudzu in the fields.

I learned to distinguish them and their names.