Boulyon

I mentioned our Saturday lunch feast a few weeks ago, but I need to describe this in more detail. All three Saturday’s we’ve been here, James (one of the staff / LCS grads) coordinates the creation of an amazing stew. He shops in the morning and comes back with bags and bags of potatoes, carrots, plantains, malanga, and kabrit (goat meat.) The “faktory boulyon” opens at about 10 am (about an hour after the breakfast dishes are cleaned up.) James coordinates the show and runs back and forth from the industrial kitchen in the school cafeteria to the one in the administration building where we live. The real cooking is done on the big burners in the huge cauldrons in the school kitchen and we do all the prep in the smaller kitchen. 4 people peel, clean and chop about 20 potatoes, 20 plantains, a pile of malanga (another root vegetable that remains somewhat mysterious to me …) James butchers and seasons the meat. Then another team of 2 or 3 makes the juice. I think my favorite thing about Haiti might be this juice. I washed and squeezed (by hand) about 30 oranges … which, oddly, are green. Then there was mountain of a fruit called Grenadian. They’re little yellow fruits full of an orange flesh and tons of black seeds. The seeds make them not so practical to eat, but great for juice because you can strain them out. But the juice making process took me and 2 other people about an hour and a half. At the end – after all that time with my fingers in citrus and bleachy water – my fingers were freakishly pruney. But this juice – with all its freshness and the PILE of sugar they add to it – is heavenly. Back to the boulyon … the finishing touch are the little dumplings that get dropped into the boiling broth at the end. The boulyon emerges from the kitchen around 2 pm and somewhere between 20 and 30 people sit down for the best meal of the week. There’s always enough for seconds, though I’ve finally learned that if you eat this stuff too fast and think you want seconds, you usually discover about ten minutes later that you’re so full you can’t move. Someone mentioned today that all the ingredients for that meal – nothing imported or pre-packaged – cost around 20 US dollars. I love Saturdays.

PS – I just noticed that all of these blog posts are about food. Um … yeah. I offer no analysis of this fact. Make of it whatever you want to!