How to make Hallacas or why you should just pay the 7 guilders in the supermarket....

We had the brilliant idea to 'be cultural' about Christmas in Holland this year. Last time we were in Zeeland, Oom Milo and I thought that we could make the typical Venezuelan dish, that has become a Antillean staple. My father calls these his 'survival kits' and stocks the freezer every year.

A good ayaka (hallaca) is quite expensive and they get more and more expensive every year. On my mother's side of the family, the sisters get together and make these bananaleaf packets, which is usually lots of fun. I guess when you are little you have no sense of time....if they did it in one evening....

So Oom Milo and I, who both like a culinair challenge, thought: we could do that. A date was set, Carol was also invited and we started gathering the ingredients.

The first challenge was to find a good recipe. There are so many different kinds of ayakas, you could fill them with whatever you want.

The key ingredients were bananaleaves, yellow corn meal, a spice called onotto, and for the filling whatever you prefer + prunes, green peppers, onions, capers and olives.

We chose a meat and chicken filling. The spice onotto ( now known as oh, no -tto) gives the dough its particular yellow color and taste. Many phonecalls and trips to the most obscure 'toko's' later we had what we needed.

On the particular day I woke up at 6:00, to pick up Kwek at 7:30. After waking her up we drove of to Zeeland, where we woke up Oom Milo too. Apparently people think I'm kidding when I say I'll be there at 7:30 and 9:00 on a Saturday....to cook....

Anyway, we had a recipe for 50 ayacas. I had bought the leaves and Kwek was put to work cutting them up to size. The leaves had to be washed, and at this point we were already reconsidering our very ambitious target of 50. After washing the 10th leave I had lost all feeling in my fingers and I was wet to my knees. So we decided to go for 30 ayakas.

After changing into a pair of pants of Oom Milo, we started on the filling. The recipe called for onotto oil. Guys, if you ever try this out for yourself, skip this step. You have to warm the oil and let the seeds steep. The problem is, the smell......oh the smell......the whole house, our clothes and everything we had with us, smelled of Oh-no-tto. It doesn't stink, it just smells like a cheap curry restaurant.....for days.....

By now it was 13:00h and the ayaka count was still 0. The target count by now: 25. We followed the recipe for the stew filling, but it was not looking very tasty.

Hmm, not quite the way I have ever seen an ayaka filled before....But hey, it tasted ok, so we moved on to the masa (dough). This had to be made with lard (pig's fat). And if you thought the smell of onoto was bad to stick to your hair, try melting that....Oom Milo knows now, why Venezuelans don't live long.

At around 14:30 we started with the stuffing conveying belt. By now we were proud that we did not give up. Our aim: 10 ayakas.

To make a long story short: I got home at 20:30 that night, with 3 ayakas in my bag and it took me 3 days to soak the smell out of my hair and bags. We had a total of 15 ayakas, it took 3 people 9 hours to make them.

Joris and I ate the ayakas yesterday and they were good!! We lived to tell, so it was not just the taste.

So it wasn't Tokyo....

But is was a good day. We had wonderful weather Saturday and Sunday! On Curacao it rained more than here.
Saturday we met up with friends and had some drinks in the city and that turned into dinner at their BEAUTIFUL home. The fluffy cat even let me pet her (the more you want to, the less they allow you to touch them) :o)

At midnight I was called by my family at home, which I miss so much it hurts at times. In the morning I woke up to a decorated house with balloonshaped garlands. So I baked my famous chocolate cake and open my presents. I got this beautiful rock from Joris, with a loupe to study it. H&M giftcards and some amazing jewelry from family and friends. But the best present was my 'kos-di-plak', which I got just in time to stick the last part on my birthday. In my family it is a tradition to have a countdown calender, usually a puzzle that fits together nicely, with an extra nice final piece to tack on your birthday. My mom had made us an amazing one for the wedding as well.

In the afternoon we went out to find me some animals, in this case ducks. The look on my face on the picture below is me telling Joris : these ducks don't work, let's go find new ones.

The geese did not like my bread.

But these ones did, so we fed the duckos until Kwek arrived. We had some cake and drinks, later on some soup and famous local sausagebreads and turned in early for the new week.

Oct 4th, a day of firsts!

On Monday the 4th of October, Joris had his first day at his new job. A bit nervous, but happy to get back to work, I waved him off at Amsterdam Zuid, as he continued in the train to Schiphol.

It was also my first day of fieldwork with the faculty. As it was made clear from the beginning, that day we would be travelling by bike, so I had been practising. As I was still a danger on the road (read: still inexplicably drawn to mysteriously magnetic trees, ditches and car mirrors, unable to let go of the steering wheel (how's that thing called on a bike?) to signal or blow my constantly runny nose and deadly afraid of all approaching cars), I chose to rent a tandem. I picked the sturdiest guy in class to be my frontman, and Sjoerd did a wonderful job of not letting me fall down the whole day. And we weren't even the only ones on a tandem, as apparently we have a kid in class that is visually impaired to a degree that he can not ride a bike either. Not being able to ride a bike is a disability in Holland.
(In my world, not being able to dance is a disability. In a land where 'the women dance like they are having a epileptic shock while mopping and while listening to different music than we are' [not my words!] it's just as hard for them to understand that not riding a bike has never been a problem for me as it is for me to understand them not being able to dance.)

As Joris went through the first new-hire sessions at his work, we rode along the Amstel. We stopped at a farm to do some manual drilling in the field. I'm going to make a kick-ass scientist. As the teacher is explaining about the lay of the land, this is what I am doing:

For lunch, I had flattened hagelslag sandwiches with still some mud, manure and clay on them, while Joris was served several rounds of excellent cuisine, starting with scallops and caviar. (Verschil moet er zijn)
In the afternoon, we did some measuring of the salinity (saltiness) of the water around a mill-system (very salty). This is Sjoerd and Floris doing the measuring as I am logging the results on my clipboard.

After some more biking and then some, we went back to school, where Joris and I met up to go back home. I had mud up to my knees, had hugged several cows, and logged a lot of things on a clipboard and Joris had introductions in several of the areas he will be working in in the future. He had his new blackberry, his new laptop and a welcome basket and many, many stories to tell.
We were both really happy with our days.