Ceviche por la Madre de Ivonne y Luis

Our Spanish teachers, the sister and brother team of Ivonne and Luis, brought in their Mom to show us how to make traditional ceviche. This is the recipe. Here are pictures of the class.

Trumpet fish (small and white)
juice of 10 key limes. Key limes are small so maybe 5 normal limes are equivalent.
1 1/2 red onions
three tomatoes
1/4 cup chopped cilantro
juice of 2 oranges
2 T olive oil
Black pepper
Green plantains thinly sliced

Debone and devein fish, cut small and put in juice of  7 limes with salt for 2 hours. Thinly slice (picar) red onions, wash onions with salt to reduce acid then squeeze in 3 limes, soak for ten minutes. Thinly slice tomatoes. Combine all with olive oil, cilantro, orange juice, and fish. Black pepper to taste.
Meanwhile fry sliced plantains in oil to make chifles.

Serve soup with chifles. Popcorn works too.

For shrimp, boil shelled and deveined shrimp for 5 minutes then soak in lime and salt for 2 hours.

Tortillas de Verde

The first recipie posted from our Ecuador trip. They taste like plantain latkes. Made by them given to us by our friend Anna who says she can't cook. Wrong.

4 plantain
50 ¢ queso fresco
2 eggs
1 onion (white)
Salt (one salt-spoon-ful)
Cilantro

=makes 10 quite large (could possibly be 12 smaller.
Fry in deepish oil, not as much as chips but nearly.

Anna Milsom

Home

     We are home. Have been for two days now.  The trip home was not entirely smooth but we made it safe and sound. The kids handled the trip better than expected and our house and people are in good shape. They went back to school today and Steph and I will go back to work in a couple of days. Tonight the kids are spending with family and friends. This is the first night without them near by in over 88 days.
     Thank you all so much for following us. At the highest we had 61 views of one blog post. Our most viewed photo was this one at 164 views for some reason.
     Thanks Martha Rustad for the most comments. Thank you Charlie from Central Market. Charlie is one of the culinary people who we love and has developed a great teasing relationship with Lumia. Upon our first trip to CM he saw us walking in he called us out as the Intrepid Explorers. He has been reading our blog and looking at our photos and was able to talk with us immediately about our adventures. That is why I did this blog and will continue. Back to commentary on my latest grilling or picking adventures.
     Look here very soon for our top lists of our adventures.
     Keep Traveling

Otavalo

     The other days in Quito we wandered, saw some more churches, ate food, hung out at home. I'm having a hard time getting motivated to elaborate so I will skip to the good things.

     On a side note, complete strangers have approached us in the street and told us to hold onto our kids. Quito is kinda creepy.

     Friday night 3/6 we had ice cream with a wonderful Ecuadorian family that we met back in Baños. They live in Quito and they took us to a modern suburban mall for ice cream. They even found a boy cousin to join us so Cael would have someone to play with. The kids ran around laughing and got sweaty and Steph and I had coffee with their moms. We all needed some same age entertainment. 

     Saturday 3/7 we did our last road trip. We had a nice Ecuadorian driver take us up in to the hills to Otavalo. It is touted as the largest outdoor market and it did not disappoint. The area is known for its woven, colorful tablecloths and wool wall hangings but there are many other crafts too. The main square and many roads leading up to it are packed with vendors, many in traditional garb. You weave in and out of the maze of cloth draped stalls and haggle them down, they will all eventually go down in price a bit but the prices are usually not too high to begin with. On the way we stopped at a national park at a salt lake but the weather was a bit socked in and we did not get a great view. Then we went to the much applauded Parque Condor where they rescue raptors of all kinds. We just made it for the raptor show. The center is up on top of a big hill and they let two big eagles loose to soar while the presenter talked about them. They got so far away that you would think that they will never come back but then the presenter whistles and they come right back and land on the arm of the keeper right in the middle of the crowd. It is a very nice presentation and you feel the birds are getting to get out and stretch. On the way back our driver loosened up and played his favorite American music for us, the Bee Gees. 

     Drivers in Ecuador are crazy. Stop signs are usually optional. Passing warnings are ignored. The steeper and windier the road, the faster you go, especially if you are a bus. It is okay to honk in exasperation when you are in the middle of a long line of non-moving traffic. We have had many white knuckled moments over these three months. As of this writing we have three more days and I hope for no more adventures, just a smooth ride home. See you back in Seattle in March 11!

Quito 3/3 and 3/4

     For the last stage of our Ecuadorian adventure we are in Quito, the capitol. It is a high elevation city on a plateau surrounded by mountains, a volcano, and valleys. Just east of the city you are in the Amazon river drainage.

    It is sprawling and it has many very different parts. We are just outside of the old town which has many beautiful old churches, the presidential palace and many older colonial building. Riding around town we have also seen newer neighborhoods, some ugly from the 70s to 80s and some more modern. There are also many big poor neighborhoods but we have not ventured into those. We have been warned away from them. 

     Our apartment is a little tucked away oasis and hard to leave. But first on 3/3 we went to the presidential palace and saw the changing of the guard. There were soldiers dressed up fancy and midevil like, some in horses but most on foot with spears or sabers. There were some more serious soldiers in BDUs and machine guns and secret service. Security is a big business here in Ecuador. The President and Vice President made an appearance from the balcony. Ecuadorians are divided and opinionated on their current president but he sounds like a guy I would support. 

     After that we wandered through a couple of churches and wound up sitting outside for lunch in the Plaza de San Francisco. The people watching was fun. The church on the square was very pretty with lots of gold and a traditional craft store in their basement was almost as cool as the museum we went to the next day. Then we found a grocery store and went home for spaghetti. 

     A note on typical Ecuadorian food. Aside from the coastal seafood, which I already covered, most Ecuadorian meals out consist of 1) soup, usually with some potatoes. 2) grilled or fried or stewed meat. 3) Potatoes fried or baked or rolled into a pattie or rice 4) a small salad of lettuce, tomatoes and pickled red onions. 5) a shared bowl of large baked corn kernels. It is good food but not great. This is not a culinary country. That is one of the reasons we are eating at home most nights.

     Day two in Quito, 3/4, we started off in a native ancient tribal art museum. Casa del Alabado is in a beautiful restored colonial building and has a great collection of mostly pre Incan native art going back 5000 years. The art is more intricate than I expected. I got the kids to stay interested by having them pick which peace was their favorite in each room then we would discus. 

     Lunch was typical Ecuadorian faire except some of the food was delivered by a waiter in a full purple gown and pointed hood. This is in preparation for the upcoming Good Friday celebration.

     We ended our days touring at Quito's most famous church Iglesias de la Compañia de Jesus. We were not allowed to take pictures of this church dripping with an estimated 7 tons of gold but I snuck one of the central dome. Lumia was accosted by a gaggle of school girls on school tour who were entranced by her hair. I got pictures of that. Lumia was very patient with her fans. It was like a scene from 'A Hard Days Night.'

     Two more days on the next post. 

     

Our favorite Ecuador guide book

If we keep at pace we will have done 14 of the top 21 things to do in Ecuador in the Rough Guide.

http://www.amazon.com/Rough-Guide-Ecuador-Melissa-Graham/dp/1409363848

It's not called a rain forest for nothing

     On Februaury 26 we got up from our hotel in Quito and met our tour guide Chris who drove us down to the Amazon. We did not know that we would have a personal guide. We thought we would be in a bus of Amazon goers. Our guide started the tour the second we got in the car. He has a degree in tourism and therefore knows a lot of history and flora and fauna facts about Ecuador. Just east of Quito you are on the east side of the Andes that drain into the Amazon. We drove through a high pass, cloud forest and then into flatter rain forest. We stopped at a lovely thermal springs at Termas de Papallacta for a soak and lunch. They had 15 or more pools from ice cold to almost scalding in depths of 1 foot to six feet. Each pool had seats, some were made of natural rock and others of blue patterned tile. The place was many leveled with nice trees and bushes.

     We continued our drive and it got warmer and much more humid. We stopped for a few minutes in the first town along the Napo. We wandered around until we could see the monkeys that lived in the city park and feed them raw eggs. 

     We then stopped a few more villages down the Napo where we got into a skinny river boat with Hector (we had this same boat and pilot the whole time) and cruised the rest of the way to Casa del Suizo Lodge, which was super fun. It is a palm covered house that sits up on a bluff beside the Napo. It is in the last little town that has road access in this part of the jungle. Further east requires a boat.

     The lodge is really nice with clean accommodations, great food, a fantastic view and nice people. However, any extra thing is separate including drinking water and Internet. So watch your dollar. Otherwise I would suggest this place. There are fancier places and places deeper in the jungle; this place is a nice middle road.

     That afternoon we went into town to see a local who carves balsa wood into animals. The lodge has hundreds of them as fish and birds. Then we watched a heated soccer match between local teams on a covered concrete pitch. The guy who was bad mouthing the ref got a yellow card. Later he was the bartender at the lodge! Then the kids played in the pool while Steph and I had piña drinks at the swim-up bar. I always wanted a drink at a drive-up bar. At night bats come out for laps over the pool eating bugs attracted to the lights.  

     The next morning 2/27 we took our river boat and hiked up to the top of the forest. We saw old and recovering (primary and secondary) rainforest. Every day we also have a local guide Jairdl (pronounced Heidle) who described the flora, fauna and people. There are many different palm plants with many different uses. There are tons of bugs. One type of termite can be crushed and used as bug repellant. I tried this. We should have tried it on Lumia, who has at least twenty bites per leg right now! We did not see many animals except bugs as they are usually hiding or have moved further into the forest. 

     Then we went to an animal rescue center where we saw lots of animals - tapirs, macaws, monkeys, cayman, rodents, snakes - and it started to rain, heavy fat rain, and we had left our rain gear in the boat. It's not called the rainforest for nothing as it cleared by noon but we still got soaked. 

      Animal rescue centers are usually pretty sad but even sadder when given the tour by a grumpy German volunteer. It is quite sad to hear about animals that were only fed rice their whole lives or see macaws with their wings cut off. Moral of the visit is this: don't buy exotic animals for pets. You don't need them and can't provide them the enviroemt they need. Please don't even think about it. If you do, call us up and we'll tells you the horror stories to convince you differently!

      The best animals we saw were a cayman, monkeys and a lost flock bird that did not have a flock so followed us around. Now very soaked we headed back to the lodge for lunch. 

     In the afternoon we went to a tiny rainforest village up on stilts where we met Carlotta who showed us how to make chicha, a drink of fermented yucca. We tried it and it was meh, we tried the aged version and it was much better and stronger. We were shown many of the traditional things that made up her house, her village and her family. We got our faces painted with acheote. Then Jairdl showed us how to use the blow darts. Cael was the best and hit the target twice. (He might have had a little help from Jairdl with the aiming.) We went to the town by the lodge where a woman showed us the traditional pottery The rest of the afternoon was spent at the lodge swimming pool. We think the kids might recall the pool as their biggest experience in the rain forest...

     It rained overnight but the next morning 2/28 we were up for another hike. We hit the jungle and saw many more plants and bugs. We saw a huge centipede and leaf cutter ants. We rode on a little zip ine for fun. Lumia was starting to love our guides and walked with them. We tried the lemon ants, which tasted just like lemons (and, truly, you can only find limes in Ecuador). Then we build a raft of balsa wood and rafted back to the lodge. This was super fun. The kids took turns jumping off the raft. It was also nice to just drift down the river quietly. That afternoon we panned for gold and found a couple of tiny specks then we went to a butterfly farm. The coolest had bright blue insides of their wings but when they sat still, they closed their wings. I did not get the perfect pictures but I got some pretty good ones. Then we walked through the school but they were not in session so we did not see the kids. We went back for more pool time and a good grill dinner. There was a group there from North America, so we talked to some of them.

     The Amazon was great. You don't see as many things that you see in a Hollywood movie about the Amazon but it was beautiful and fun to learn about. I think the whole family would vote the boat rides up and down the Napo as our most fun part, including the raft trip. The next morning we headed back to Quito for part 5, the final part of our adventure. We are all getting pretty ready to be home. See you in less than two weeks.