Leaving on a Jet Plan

It is very nearly time for me to go back to U.S and I feel like I just got started here. The two months really flew by, and just as I started to settle into a good work rhythm, I'm getting interrupted by a whole slew of traveling. It is probably pretty good timing though. I need an opportunity to stop and take stock of all the interviews I've done and decide what direction to take my research. I'm still unsure of what the central question of my thesis will be, and it is getting difficult to move forward without a very clear focus. I'll be spending a few days in Boston hopefully getting some feedback from friends and professors and preparing some grant proposals. Then, most notably, I get to go to japan for two weeks. This came about after applying for a travel grant to attend a short course on sustainable development through the university of Tokyo. The theme is sustainable forestry and regional development in Asia, which has only a general relation to the research that I am doing, and MIT was giving complete funding for one person to attend. I decided to apply even though it was a stretch, and am really glad I did, because I ended up getting funded. Mostly graduate students and some undergrads from all over Asia and the world will be attending. Many participants from Japan, Thailand, and Southeast Asia, and some from Europe and Australia. It should be a really amazing experience to meet and learn about sustainable development with people from all over. I am also excited to squeeze as much good eating into the the two weeks. There is a cultural show night (Natsu-Matsuri, in Japanese apparently), for which perhaps I will try to cook something typically american. I'm having a hard time deciding what, becuase I'm sure everyone the world over has had the most typical hamburgers, french fries, etc. I thought maybe something mexican would be good, but I bet I'd have to take the ingredients, and mexican always takes ridiculous amounts of work. I also don't know whether to perform something Paraguayan or something American (a folk song perhaps?). Japan has been one of my top culinary tourism fantasy destinations for a while now, and while the motive of the trip is not eating, I certainly don't plan on letting this opportunity slide. Let me know about any can't miss food destinations in Hokkaido or in or around Tokyo.

We have continued to eating well here, and I think we got our food budget a little better under control. Here have been our meals for the last couple weeks.


1. Spaghetti Capricciose with oyster mushrooms, sweet vermouth, and arrugula. We made this with some mushrooms we bought from the agroshopping. It was a Mario Battali recipe and was very good.


2. Spinach Salad with strawberries and toasted almonds. I made a dressing out of balsamic vinager and what I thought was honey, but turned out to be royal jelly. I don't really know what people use royal jelly for, but I don't think I'd put it into a dressing again. It has a stronger, molassesy and kind of funky flavor. I ended up cooking the dressing to try to get some of the raw flavor out of the "honey" and wilting the spinach with it. In the end it tasted good, but I think royal jelly is probably is better used to trigger the development of a queen than to dress a salad.



3. Mostaccioli with peas, ham, new potatoes and minted cream. Much like the corn, the peas here aren't sweet here. Even when they are fresh they are very starchy and need to be boiled for at least 20 minutes to eat.


4. Mushroom omelet with smoked provolone.


5. Watercress and potato soup with yogurt and chives. I've never cooked watercress before, but it was too cold to eat salad and tried it out in soup. It really was very delicious and refreshing.


6. Broccoli with toasted garlic and sesame.

7. The elusive mangosteen. A fruit that has eluded eager consumers of tropical fruit in the U.S. for nearly a century. Attempts to cultivate it in the U.S. have failed, and the first mangosteens to be imported legally into the U.S. arrived in early august, after attempts starting in 1925. I had always read about how delicious and coveted this fruit was, and I had the chance to taste it (imported from brazil) myself after noticing the strange fruit in my supermarket next to the chirimoya and figs (also strange delicious fruits). It really was remarkable. I don't know if it was worth the 82 year wait, but very sweet and flavorful with a very agreeable texture indeed. It would make a very elegant desert for a dinner party served with some sorbet and perhaps a splash cointreau.


8.Fakejoada. I made some approximated feijoada with sausages and a smoked pork chop. It was very good, but didn't really boil long enough to let the flavors develop entirely. The sausage was amazing though, with a strange and delicious melt-in-your-mouth quality. Tomorrow, I'm making the real thing with pork ribs and more of that sausage for a goodbye party with my family.


9. Sesame Beef with pea pods. The pea pods had sat in the fridge for about two weeks, but were still really sweet, and crunchy.


10. Grilled chicken with Tandoori spices. I made this during our grill fest in June, and thought it would make a nice alternative to the sunday chicken stew my tia silvia usually makes. Now we have access to this beautiful built-in grill in our yard whenever we want. I definitely plan on taking advantage of it. Everyone loved this, eating seconds and thirds. We spent the rest of this sunday playing Canasta with my cousins until late at night.


11. We had to make homemade coconut milk because, as close as we are to brazil, there is no prepared coconut milk for sale in our grocery store. I had never done this before, but it is simple enough and requires simply blending the broken up flesh with hot water, and straining it through some cloth.

12. We made some beef masaman curry with the coconut milk and a can of curry paste we brought with us. Its accompanied by some soy braised red cabbage.


13. Finally, a salad of fresh beans with fresh mozzarella and mustard vinaigrette. I started to cut up some tomatoes for a caprese salad, but just couldn't go through with it. They were all mealy and dry as tomatoes in winter a wont to be. I plan on gorging myself on heirlooms tomatoes during the few weeks I'll spend in the U.S.

Eternal Winter

The main drawback coming to Paraguay when we did is that we missed out on the summer in the U.S., including the nice weather, the summer and fall produce, and the non-cold season. Today I woke up with a very sore throat, making this the second cold I have had in a single month, both of which I caught from David. I didn't believe him when he said he was getting sick again, because I thought it was ridiculous to catch two colds in three weeks. But I was careful to keep at least 10 feet of distance from him at all times, and I still woke up sick today just as he was getting over it. This comes after a winter in which I had 3 particularly virulent colds, also with David serving as the vector. I don't know what it is, but he gets more colds than anyone I know, and when you live with someone its hard to avoid getting infected.

So, we finally got internet in the house, and while it is a bit slow, it makes my life a lot easier here. Something that would get done in a single day, takes a week to get done without regular internet access. Partly, this is because people aren't great about answering their phones, or being in their offices here. At any rate, all is well, aside from my cold. My work has progressed somewhat, and I am feeling better about it, but time is running out and I haven't gotten nearly as much done as I would like. Today is a holiday though and all the offices are closed, so at least I have an excuse to stay home in bed today. It is the anniversary of the founding of the city of Asunción, which was founded 470 years ago today, is one of the oldest cities in South America, and served as a Spanish base for the second founding of Buenos Aires and other cities in the Spanish empire, which is why it is known as the "mother of cities," or sometimes the "cradle of America" Yesterday there was a modest display of fire works and an outdoor concert in the main plaza downtown.

We've been eating lots and lots of meat, which we are not really accustomed to, which has made me realize how large a proportion of our diet in Boston was made up of shellfish and their relatives. I'm not terribly confident about cooking meat, especially when it is just for two people, rather than a roast for a dinner party or something. On top of that, the cuts here are different, and looking at the meat counter at the super market just bewilders me. I made my best guess for what might be skirt steak, and it turned out I had gotten one of toughest cuts of meat that is only good for puchero, a beef soup that boils for hours. So in the meantime, I feel guilty to say, I haven't adjusted my cooking to local ingredients as well as I imagined I would. There are several reasons for this, 1) my tia Silvia cooks a lunch (the big meal of the day) of delicious Paraguayan food for us every day, and when planning dinner I always feel like we should eat something different; 2) Traditional paraguayan food ingredients are cheap, plentiful, and fresh, but they require a lot of preparation and time that I don't really have-- Beans have to be cooked, meat has to be boiled, cornmeal has to be made into something 3) my mom left a whole cabinet full of non-Paraguayan ingredients here a few months ago that I have found pretty handy in coming up with quick and tasty meals based on the techniques and recipes I am used to; 4) I feel far out of my element here. I don't have my own highly personalized kitchen any longer and I am not surrounded by the groceries and specialty stores that I have grown very used to. You'll also notice, perhaps, that lighting is an issue in the pictures. We haven't found a good place to take the pictures and the flash makes things look terrible. We don't really have a table to eat at either in the part of the house we live in, so we end up sitting on the edge of my bed in front of the tv with our plates in our laps and putting the serving dishes on a chair.


While what we've been cooking has been tasty and convenient, it has also been pretty expensive. I am kind of shocked at the grocery bill we are running up. I'm hoping with time we'll develop more frugal shopping habits, and figure out how to do more with the more common and economical local ingredients. Here is the run-down, starting with our last meals in Boston, using farmer's market produce:

1. This was a black pepper linguine (which somehow ended up being one of my favorite flavors at Capone's) with garlic scape pesto, garnished with fresh basil, lemon zest, and parmagiano.




2.The foto of our "eat up our food and drink all our alcohol party." We invited anyone who was left in Boston to eat a meal that I made out of what was left in the house. At the very top are some fingerling potatoes roasted in duck fat with rosemary and sea salt. Clockwise, are the long-promised empanadas (these were as guilt free as I've ever made with free-range beef and eggs); next a simple salad of red romaine; a pear tart using some puff pastry I'd had in the freezer for much, much too long; and finally free-range beef ribs braised with ancho chile and coffee. These were amazingly rich and flavorful.


Here is a close-up of the beef ribs, the picture isn't great, but it gives you an idea. I found the recipe on line:



3. Our final meal in Boston, prepared and scarfed down in literally in less than five minutes while we called the cab to go to the airport. I had bought the ripest tomatoes available and put in them in a brown bag a few days earlier. I couldn't miss out on at least on Caprese salad.


4. Our first meal in Paraguay was in fact all local. A salad of watercress, heart of palm, and hardboiled egg. David loves watercress and heart of palm, both very paraguayan ingredients.



5. Our next meal was also fairly local, given that Paraguay has substantial german influence in its cuisine: Sausages and Sourkraut. They make very high quality wursts in Paraguay, which are usually grilled as the first course of a barbeque and eaten with mandioca. They worked perfectly in this application as well. The funny part is that when I was packing up the kitchen, I debated whether to bring the juniper berries and decided I would never make SourKraut here. It turned out to be practically the first thing I made. Luckily my mom left some caraway seed, so it tasted fairly authentic, and I have since found juniper berries at a gourmet store.

6. This meal was all local. I was inspired by the fresh vegetables at the supermarket to make an Indian curry. Lacking a spice grinder, and too lazy to grind the spices by hand in the mortar and pestle I relied on some curry powder my mom had left in the cabinet. It did the trick, but not as well as home mixed spice powder. The yogurt here is absolutely delicious though, and after years of making our own yogurt, I think we'll be taking a break here.


Here is the finished curry.


7. This was a not entirely successful pasta carbonera with smoked pork loin. I had to improvise the recipe to the best of my memory and knowledge, because I did not have internet access. It would have been fine, but I ended up putting far too much black pepper. Again for lack of a pepper mill I had david grind it in the mortar and pestle. Not realizing how much was in mortar I added it all to the sauce and had to cook some of harshness out of it, inadvertently (but not surprisingly) curdling the egg yolk. All things considered, it was still pretty tasty.



8. Another example of how far out of my element I am. This was corn chowder with smoked pork loin and red bell pepper. I intended this to be a quick and easy meal, but I did not count on the drastic difference between sweet corn in the U.S. and sweetcorn here. I think I have commented on it before, explaining that US corn doesn't work as well for Chipa Guazu. But it turns out that Paraguayan corn isn't so great for U.S. recipes either. I had to boil it for almost an hour to get it tender enough to drink in a soup, and there really is no need to leave any whole kernels for texture here, the tremendous amount of fibre in the blended corn kernels is more than enough.



9. Spaghetti with Tomato Sauce and Italian Sausage. It was very good.



10. Here we used up some leftover beef (the cut is called vacio, which I suspect is flank steak, translation anyone?) To make a sort of asian beef salad with watercress, tomatoes, and cashew dressing. We didn't have any soy sauce or sesame oil, but it worked out anyway.



11. The leftover cauliflower went into another curry with some potatoes and onions, this time without yogurt and with hand ground spices. It was definitely worth the trouble.

12. Cellophane noodles with shrimp, red cabbage, and sesame seeds. While the cellophane noodles and shrimp are certainly not Paraguayan (and the shrimp were pretty pricey), the sesame seeds actually are. Over 35,000 small farmers are now growing sesame seed, as the result of a Japanese companies effort to create a supply base in Paraguay. It is one of the few positive examples of agricultural diversification with a substantial socio-economic effect, and details about this case might just find themselves a place in my thesis. This was really good.




13 Finally, arrugula salad with goat cheese, candied pecans, and apple. This was after we went to the "agroshopping" for the first time. It is basically a farmers market styled after those in U.S. and Europe. It was a development project of the Japanese Development Assistance Agency (JICA), to give small farmers direct access to some of the country's most affluent consumers. Every tuesday they set up in the first floor of one of the fancy shopping malls (Mariscal Lopez Shopping) in a ritzy neighborhood. I was surprised to see that there is in fact a variety of high quality produce and farm products, though definitely a reduced variety compared to the US. In particular there are swiss and french cheese makers that make very high quality cheese in about 20 varieties (emmental, gruyer, brie, camembert, muenster, a soft rind goat, fresh mozzarella, a manchego style, and many more). There is also a stand that sells all manner of cured and smoked meats. If I go next week I'll take some pictures. At an rate, we used some arrugula and goat cheese from the market, some pecans left by my mother, and some maple syrup we brought with us to make this salad. I love this picture too.

The hole in the world wide web

So still no internet at home. For my political economy colleagues, paraguay certainly makes you consider the upside to telecom privatization. Anyhow, things are going well here. I have started on my field work, and while it is pretty late in the game to be torn between different research projects, there is at least not a lack of interesting avenues to explore. Most of my interviews have revealed intriguing possibilities and made me excited to do this work. The problem is that it only takes one interview that seems to contradict or complicate in some way the hypotheses I am exploring to make me doubt the entire research agenda and whether I really ought to be doing a PhD in political science at all. This is really unfortunate, since I know that I´m bound to have a lot of these sorts of interviews before my fieldwork is done, and that I´m likely to get more confused as time goes on rather than more sure of what I think I know. Knowing that doesn't really help though. In general, I'm kind of shocked with how much some of my interviews confirm the view of small-producers, innovation, high-quality niche markets, and cooperation that I developed in Boston. The problem comes when someone disagrees with how I see things or challenges my proposal. Obviously, this is a necessary and generally desirable part of the process. However, its impossible to decide whether this difference comes from my infinitely inferior knowledge of local conditions and utter lack of experience in development work compared to those I am interviews, or from a difference of interpretation. It's a tough call, because in writing a dissertation, I want to come up with something new and not just repeat the conventional wisdom that is guiding people in the field, but I also have to learn from people whose experience vastly exceeds my own. You need to be confident enough to not have an existential crisis every time someone sees things differently, but not so much that you don't realize when you are barking up the wrong tree. It doesn't help that I'm "very young to be doing a PhD." I've grown a beard to appear slightly older, but still, I know people would take me more seriously if I were older. Or if i had more experience working in international development. I know that I would feel more confident, and probably command more respect if I had more experience. We all have to start somewhere, but it definitely have inklings of being in over my head as I try to get this project off the ground. Its hard to start anything though, and I guess i I look at this as the start of a new career, then I'm not doing so bad.



As for the cooking, it's hard to not have my own kitchen for the time being, but we have been cooking some. I promise I'll upload some pictures as soon as I have better internet access. I've been assured that it will not be more than two more weeks. I can also commence with a series of traditional parguayan recipes as well.