Greetings from Bogotá.
If the last letter was mainly about animals, this one is definitely about people.
We have just had a delightful visitation, long in the planning and even longer in the hopeful expectation of its manifestation. The two couples in question were Fran & Jones, British Aussies who now live in Costa Rica, and Rob & Cary, Canadian Aussies who are based in Sydney.
It was in 2002, in London, that I first mooted the suggestion that Fran & Jones might like to come and visit us at Rancho Grande, “ … when the country turns around a bit”. Her response then was, “It will have to do a lot of turning before I get on that plane, darling”.
Well, turned it has, and it was with great joy that we met them at the airport in Pereira They had just flown direct from Cartagena, where they had spent three days in the beautiful Santa Clara hotel. Needless to say they had to readjust their quality, luxury and glamour criteria in line with our simple life in the bush, but they were up for the challenge and mastered the transition effortlessly.
Cary & Rob are keen bird enthusiasts and they were up very early each morning, sipping coffee in their ‘mesadoras’ (rocking chars) on the front verandah enjoying the show put on by our local feathered friends. Every day, Albeiro, our caretaker, puts partly peeled plantain on the rather rustic bird feeding board that juts out from our electric power pole, and the birds come in great numbers, and variety of colour, to eat their fill.
Rob & Cary were particularly taken with the pair of Barranquero Coronados (Momotus momota olivaresi) that live on Mykanos or somewhere close. They are specific to our area and allegedly quite rare, but we see them every day as they help themselves to plantain and pick the seeds off the palm tree flowers. They are quite big, and very colourful, with a bright turquoise circle on the head, which gives them the ‘Coronado’ or ‘crown’ nomenclature.
Prior to our guests arrival, Adriano had been busy putting the finishing touches to his studio / gallery which was to be the venue for Thursday’s Galah Dinner (Gala for you Brits). Entry was forbidden to all (including me) prior to the dinner and we all wondered what was in store.
We kicked off the evening with Chilean sparkling wine in the new kiosk, which is set amidst three tilapia ponds and connected to the house by a gravel path, punctuated with avocado trees, bordered with ferns and plants and delineated by two raised, bromeliad bedecked, fish ponds.
As well as our international visitors we had four local friends: Maria Eugenia, our favourite bank manager; Fabio, our accountant; Lina, the proprietor of our favourite bakery and cafeteria; and Horacio, our administrator.
When the summons ‘a la mesa’ (to the table’) came, we ambled over to enter a pristine art gallery, hung with work by Adriano, in the middle of which was set a large dining table, with ten placemats, each an individual work of art. The pièce de resistance was a small totem pole of angels in the corner, on which sat Cornelius the rooster, eyeing the guests with interest before eventually settling down to sleep.
We had five courses and lots of wine before doing the same.
Friday morning saw us having breakfast at Lina’s, up in town, before we were treated to a private tour of the region’s main Trilladora (Mill) where all the coffee beans are processed, sorted, graded and packed ready for export to the far corners of the world. Maria Eugenia organised it during the Gala Dinner, and joined us for a presentation by Don Antonio, the Director of the Trilladora, and a guided tour through the various stages of the process by his second in command.
Learning that Fran and Jones are longstanding Nespresso devotees, Don Antonio proudly informed us that 80% of the Colombian coffee that goes into Nespresso capsules is processed in his Trilladora in Anserma.
The day before, Adriano had taken them through our end of the process at Rancho Grande; how the picked coffee cherries are crushed and the beans separated then washed, fermented and dried, ready to be shipped to the Co-Op for evaluation and sale. It is from the Co-Op that the coffee is shipped to the Trilladora. This was the next step the coffee takes on its way to your cups.
The whole milling process was fascinating, from seeing the amount of shit … stones, nails, wire etc … that had to be separated from the beans at the start, to how they are graded by size and density and accumulated in lots that satisfy the different recognised standards and, more importantly, agreed price points.
I should point out that our coffee doesn’t come with nails and bits of wire and stones, but then our coffee is not dried on a tarp at the side of the road, where animals can walk over it and vehicles zoom past, as is the case with many small family farmers.
The first time I did this tour of the Trilladora, some ten years ago, there were 150 women whose eagle eyes were relied upon to identity sub-standard beans from the mass that flowed past them on continuously moving, brightly lit conveyor belts. These days it is done by machines, at the rate of tens of thousands of beans per second, each bean being imaged, evaluated and compared with the acceptable standard, while the conveyor belts and chairs formerly used by those 150 ladies stand idle.
The educational focus continued that evening with a ‘hands on’ class in making empanadas.
Both Jones and Rob love empanadas. To be more accurate they love Adriano’s empanadas. When Adriano first cooked them for Rob in Tuscany in 2015 he complained that Adriano had ruined empanadas for him forever because he didn’t think any other empanadas would be as good. Jones has been an empanada-maniac for decades, ever since Adriano invented guinea fowl empanadas for him in Provence (Jones couldn’t eat beef at the time). Expectations were high.
Adriano, assisted by Fabio, took Fran, Jones, Rob and Cary through the entire process: from making, kneading and judging the maize dough or pastry; to cooking the beef and potatoes; to seasoning, spicing, mixing and blending the different ingredients; to rolling out and cutting the pastry discs and assembling the finished article. Together they made masses of empanadas. It really only works if you make a lot. They also made a couple of spicy salsas, one tomato based and one avocado based, along with a non-spicy salsa for the locals.
The focus then shifted to the outside kitchen where, assisted by local friend Enohe and the ever helpful Lucero, the empanadas were deep fried on the wood burning stove, as is traditional. And as they were cooked, they were eaten. Just one course that night … empanadas, accompanied by salad, washed down with Chilean and Argentinean wines.
When everyone was full, the balance of uncooked empanadas went into the freezer, where they await the opportunity to delight our friends, and us, in future meals.
We are still not sure who ate the most empanadas on Friday. It could have been Jones, or me, or friend Jorge Ivan who had joined us, but I suspect it was Rob. After all, he had been saving himself for this occasion for almost two years so one could hardly blame him.
All in all, a good time was had by all I believe, and that includes Pispirispis who changed the habit of a lifetime and took to sitting on Rob’s knee. I was impressed, but also quite happy to have a break as I am usually regarded as the warm sofa.
We finished with a farewell dinner here in Bogotá at Leo Cocina y Cava, the restaurant of Leonor Espinosa that I wrote about some years back, after Adriano and I had celebrated an anniversary there. Respected as one the top chefs in Latin America, with one of the top restaurants, she specialises in little-known ingredients from the Amazon, the Andes, and the Caribbean and Pacific Coasts, using them to enhance and elevate dishes to which we are accustomed, and to create dishes that we never would have imagined. Adriano was very proud to see our friends enjoying very fine food, made by a world-renowned self taught Colombian chef, using traditional, and sometimes forgotten, Colombian ingredients.
I know how he felt. It is always a rare privilege to share our Colombia with friends. That is not tourist Colombia, with guides and groups and gimmicks, but our Colombia; our everyday lives, our friends and our surroundings…
… with the odd Galah Dinner thrown in, of course.
I mean, if you can’t go over the top every now and then, what’s the point?
Love from him and me
Baz
