mooshed together
Sep. 9th, 2022 11:00 pmWhen we were in Letícia, I bought a bar of soap (and a beautiful green plastic bucket) to wash out socks and underwear and things. The soap was just a bar of Dove soap, but it's not soap I buy at home, so the scent was new to me, and so it became the scent of vacation, a scent of Letícia. We brought it home with us (along with the bucket), and every time I use it, the scent takes me back there.
Now, though, it's mooshed together with some fragments of old soap. Familiar everyday soap fragrance and faraway holiday soap fragrance, mixed together. It feels like the perfect symbol for how all the intense, striking, unique experiences of the trip smoosh together with the rest of my past experiences, and with what I'm thinking and feeling and doing right now.
So for example I brought home roasted, coarsely ground cassava (Manihot esculenta, aka manioc, aka, in Spanish, yuca, sometimes spelled yucca, but not to be confused with this plant, which is not cassava)...
because we had had some in a Tikuna/Magüta meal, and it was very tasty...
And now I cook it like couscous or with rice and serve it with stir fry or omelets. I haven't found a way to cook it that preserves its crunch and yet doesn't threaten to break our teeth (the meal we were served managed that trick).
(A little extra about the ground, roasted cassava: it's sold in plastic bags thicker than my arm. In this picture you can see piles of the plastic bags stacked on a wooden crate, and you can see raw cassava stacked like kindling by the blue striped bag. There are two sorts of cassava: sweet, which you can just cook and eat, and bitter, which needs lots of processing to get out the cyanide. All cassava has cyanide in it--sorry, I should say "cyanogenic glycosides"--but the sweet cassava has less and it disappears with cooking. The bitter needs more processing, and that's what they grow in the Amazon. You soak it and dry it and roast it and grind it. It can take days. I love that it's grown locally, processed locally, and sold and bought locally--except when someone like me buys a bag and carries it home.)
(Here's a photo from my guides' website, showing it being roasted.)
I promised![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
wayfaringwordhack some pictures of the giant water lilies. My husband-and-wife guide team told me they are bigger during the rainy season, but they were fine and big! They were originally called Victoria regia but apparently now are called Victoria amazonica:
Unfortunately there's nothing for scale, but this one, from my guides' website, shows their son supported by one (he seems like he's ready to be done with the experience at this point).
ETA: How much weight can a leaf hold? About 30 kg, if it's well distributed! And in comments I thought of other things I wanted to share (read here)
Now, though, it's mooshed together with some fragments of old soap. Familiar everyday soap fragrance and faraway holiday soap fragrance, mixed together. It feels like the perfect symbol for how all the intense, striking, unique experiences of the trip smoosh together with the rest of my past experiences, and with what I'm thinking and feeling and doing right now.
So for example I brought home roasted, coarsely ground cassava (Manihot esculenta, aka manioc, aka, in Spanish, yuca, sometimes spelled yucca, but not to be confused with this plant, which is not cassava)...
because we had had some in a Tikuna/Magüta meal, and it was very tasty...
And now I cook it like couscous or with rice and serve it with stir fry or omelets. I haven't found a way to cook it that preserves its crunch and yet doesn't threaten to break our teeth (the meal we were served managed that trick).
(A little extra about the ground, roasted cassava: it's sold in plastic bags thicker than my arm. In this picture you can see piles of the plastic bags stacked on a wooden crate, and you can see raw cassava stacked like kindling by the blue striped bag. There are two sorts of cassava: sweet, which you can just cook and eat, and bitter, which needs lots of processing to get out the cyanide. All cassava has cyanide in it--sorry, I should say "cyanogenic glycosides"--but the sweet cassava has less and it disappears with cooking. The bitter needs more processing, and that's what they grow in the Amazon. You soak it and dry it and roast it and grind it. It can take days. I love that it's grown locally, processed locally, and sold and bought locally--except when someone like me buys a bag and carries it home.)
(Here's a photo from my guides' website, showing it being roasted.)
I promised
wayfaringwordhack some pictures of the giant water lilies. My husband-and-wife guide team told me they are bigger during the rainy season, but they were fine and big! They were originally called Victoria regia but apparently now are called Victoria amazonica:Unfortunately there's nothing for scale, but this one, from my guides' website, shows their son supported by one (he seems like he's ready to be done with the experience at this point).
ETA: How much weight can a leaf hold? About 30 kg, if it's well distributed! And in comments I thought of other things I wanted to share (read here)
