Greetings from Mykanos,
We are still picking coffee, it is still raining on and off (essential element of the coffee season), and the price of coffee is still going up, albeit slowly and not without occasional dips. So all in all, things are looking up. Unlike last Christmas we are actually making some money and have started reducing our mountain of debt to something more like a series of hills … big ones, but hills nonetheless, and they are not currently alive to the sound of ruin.
We are selling a lot of coffee to Nespresso, so you who like the capsules can expect to be drinking some of our coffee in approximately nine months. That is how long it takes to get from green beans here, to roasted, blended, ground, and encapsulated coffee in Switzerland; which is one of the reasons they are so strict on levels of moisture content in the dried beans.
We took advantage of the improving situation and had a break in Lima for some R&R, which could stand for Rest & Recreation but probably more accurately stood for Remarkable Repasts. It gave Adriano the opportunity to get away from the business for a week, and for the two of us to share some Peruvian cuisine.
Billed as the gastronomic capital of South America, it’s home to a number of famous restaurants.
Our favourites were spot on … Las Brujas de Cachiche, El Hornero, Alfresco and La Gloria. The chef at La Gloria remembered us and came out and ordered the food for us. The manager at El Hornero (brother in law of the chef at La Gloria) gave us free pisco sours and sat with us for a bit to talk about food. Excellent ceviches … octopus with a mild tapenade sauce was spectacular … a filet mignon of salmon with coconut and little crayfish … squid and octopus with marinated red peppercorns and tiny capers … black squid ink risotto with calamari … grilled sweetbreads with a squeeze of lime … intensely flavoured cazuela de mariscos (seafood casserole) … tender moist suckling pig … deep fried leg of cuy (guinea pig) with arugula … succulent ribeye steak and onglet (that’s what we know it as in France, it’s called ‘hanger steak’ in the US) … and on and on.
Edible souvenirs from Lima.
By the way, if you have ever wondered what to do when the rocoto chilli turns out to be hotter than you expected, or any other chilli for that matter, boiled sweet potato … the traditional accompaniment, along with maiz, for ceviche … is the answer. It quenches the fire and soothes the palate. Thanks go to our brilliant waiter at Las Brujas de Cachiche.
We left Lima just as the Global Climate Change Conference was kicking off. Representatives from 197 countries, heads of NGO’s and captains of industry jetted in and clogged up the hotels and top end restaurants. We were staying in a very modest, but very accommodating, hotel in Miraflores. On our last morning there, having breakfast in the courtyard, we talked to two young women peering at their notebook computers over coffee. They were from The Netherlands and worked for the Red Cross, specialising in disaster relief in the wake of natural catastrophes attributed to climate change. “Ah,” I said, “You are the good guys.” “Yes” they agreed, “That is why we have to stay here and not in a 5 star deluxe hotel”.
Back here we are doing our bit to combat carbon emissions by planting 50,000 more coffee trees (the ones that had been germinating in view of my office window) along with ever more vegetables in the huertas, although they are currently being consumed at a fairly rapid rate.
We are in the midst of many dinners here for friends in the run up to Christmas. Adriano likes to have drinks in the outside bar / barbecue area, then first course in the dining room, main course at the big table on the verandah, and dessert upstairs in the new kitchen/bar/terrace … all illuminated by the Christmas lights in the garden, where every palm is wrapped in snake lights. Beautiful table settings for each course, of course … and lots of washing up.
Adriano, the barman.
DB in Sydney very kindly sent me an article about ‘elephant poo’ coffee being made in Thailand. It claims to be the world’s most expensive coffee, and follows on from the famous ‘kopi luak’ in Indonesia where the coffee cherries are fed to civet cats and the partly digested beans are collected from their droppings. Allegedly the transit through the digestive tract takes away some of the bitterness of the coffee. Of course, if you start with high quality mountain grown Arabica (like what we have got), there is no bitterness to take away, but maybe I am biased.
DB thought it might provide employment for Torsalino, but he doesn’t know anything about coffee, much prefers Whiskas, and anyway, is not very big and I think the quantity produced would be very limited.
But it did get me thinking that maybe Colombia could compete in the lunatic, overpriced, gimmicky specialist sector by producing ‘hippo poo’ coffee.
It seems we have a minor plague of hippopotami happening here at the moment.
It is all down to the late Pablo Escobar. Back in the 80’s, when he was just one of the richest men in the world thanks to his cocaine smuggling, but before he started killing everyone who disagreed with him, from presidential candidates down, he installed a zoo at his country estate, Hacienda Napoles.
He smuggled in elephants, giraffes, tigers and lions and lots of other exotic fauna, including four hippos; three female and one male. How one can ‘smuggle’ elephants and giraffes into a country is an interesting topic in itself.
In the 90’s the estate was confiscated and he was killed, and the animals were dispersed to zoos in Colombia. But the hippos were not. They stayed in their lake and for the past 20 years have been breeding happily. It seems they like the Colombian environment. There are no droughts, which normally restrict the size of the herds in Africa, and they are reaching sexual maturity in just three years rather than the nine it usually takes. Today there might be as many as 60 … nobody knows for sure. Most are in the lake but 12 have escaped into the Magdalena River, one of Colombia’s three great rivers, and hippos have been seen 250 kilometres north, blobbing around happily.
Nobody has been killed yet, but it is only a matter of time. They are herbivores, but territorial, and whilst they don’t attack humans they do kill them if they get in the way, getting between the hippo and the water for example. Hippos kill more humans in Africa than any other animal, inadvertently certainly, but just as thoroughly.
Environmentalists have described the Colombian hippo situation as a ‘ticking time bomb’, and plans were announced to commence a sterilisation campaign. There was an immediate outcry however, about it being cruel and inhuman and unfair, because people here think the hippos, especially when young, very cute.
These would probably be the same people who don’t sterilise cats and dogs, but prefer to drown the pups and kittens in rivers when they are born.
That is something Torsalino knows very well.
Love from him and me … and Torsalino.
Barry
