Sweden is getting hotter

.....but not the weather. It's the food. My favorite mustard is made by Johnny's, and look what I found in the store!

Mustard with mango & habanero, mustard with chipotle & black pepper, ketchup with habanero and hamburger sauce with red onion & bacon. 

I will have to try them!

Want some ants with that?

LA and I have spent the day exploring the area around Las Cruces Biological Station in Costa Rica, where we will stay for a few days. The day started very foggy, but eventually the sun dried up the forest. This is a moss in my hand, like a little branched fractal.
Before lunch we went on a short hike into primary (=old) and secondary (=not so old) rainforest down to Rio Java, which actually is not filled with coffee even if the name implies this. On the way we saw several trails of army ants, which I unsuccessfully tried to take great photos of. Oh well, I have some less than good, so still proof that they were there. Now they have moved on, probably. They are nearly blind and only care about getting to where they going, so they won't disturb you if you leave them alone.
We also saw a really cool green fly that had legs on stilts, and here is a photo of that for my Dad. I am having problems uploading my photos to Flickr, I think I have to be closer to the router here at the station to get better connection, but the blogging works. I'll try to get some photos up here, directly to the blog.
The funny thing with rainforests are that everything is green and it is hard to see anything. Few flowers, fruits, birds, insects, mammals... it is just green, and very dark. Photographing is a challenge. But I love rainforests, you never know what you will see. But it certainly is hard to see the plants for all the green, and so far we haven't found any of 'my plants'. We will keep looking.

There are birds everywhere. In the morning you hear a giant cacaphony of birds you can't see, but they certainly tell you that they are around. Then when the sun comes up, you see some, and many are so brightly colored that it looks like a Disney movie. Today we have seen Cherrie's tanager, euphonias (one was Swedish - blue on the back, yellow on the belly), golden-hooded tanager, blue-crowned motmot (guess how it sounds? yes, 'mot mot'), chestnut-mandibled toucans, green honeycreepers and others I haven't identified yet. I am skipping all little and big brown birds and concentrating on the colorful ones as you can see. I have photos of some of these with the Olympus camera and the telelens but I can't download them until I get home. So my own (slightly less) gorgeous bird photos will come later.

This is the dry season, so of course it is raining for some strange reason. Seems like the weather is off everywhere in the world. Minus 27 degrees Celsius in Stockholm and one meter of snow, a little warmer and wetter snow in NJ, and now rain here (and 20 degrees Celsius). It is raining right now (9 PM at night), but it was nice until 4 PM, so we got lots of time in the Wilson Botanical Garden in the afternoon. The garden is the center of the research station, and to get to the rainforest you have to hike 1 km and more away. There are hundreds of different kinds of gingers, palms, ferns, and many other plants here. Heliconias are great, I love their bright shapes. Butterflies are common too, many many species.

And finally food. It is served family style here, lots of dishes on a large table and you sit down and eat with others and chat nd have a great time. Every meal, breakfast included, includes rice and beans (sometimes mixed, sometimes separate, sometimes black beans, sometimes red or refried). Then add suitable accompanying dishes - breakfast was bacon, yogurt, fresh pineapple and papaya, bread and jam - lunch was two different kinds of salads (cabbage with cheese and a pasta salad), cooked zucchini and orange juice, so VB6 (=Vegetarian before 6 PM) - and dinner was panfried chicken, salad, and hearts of palm salad that was cooked, not from canned hearts of palms. Very good.

(sorry, no food pictures yet)

One of the people here had a giant jar of salsa for the table, about a foot high, with extremely spicy peppers inside. PP would have like it. I ate the salsa but put the pepper pieces aside after having one, it was enough endorphins for the meal. There was also extremely hot pickled peppers that were from the "Cerro del Muerte" (mountain of the dead), but the area isn't named from the peppers but from a dangerous road that goes through it. But I didn't even try those :)

My favorite condiment is a local Worchester-like hot pepper sauce named Lizano that they tell me exist in every house in Costa Rica. I will see if I can find a bottle and bring home. It is great, great. Wish all my friends and family could be here and see all the gorgeous things.

As promised - chile rellenos in the kitchen

Here you go, we actually remembered to take phtoos of our chile rellenos making!
Roasted chilies, stuffed with cheese, and dumped into flour.


Then dipped into fluffy whipped eggs, and put in a frying pan with hot oil. Mmm, sizzling!


And for dessert, my Tarte Tatin that doesn't look to great but tasted delicious!

How dogs became pets...

Right now I am reading a really interesting book called Catching Fire, about how humans probably have large brains because they started to cook, not because they started to eat meat. I am still only halfway through, so you will hear about this later. About the dogs - new scientific data has shown that dogs have become domesticated (=pets) many times from wild species, so I bet there was something that attracted them to us rather hairless strange humans. Maybe cooked meat?

However, I thought I should share our dinner plans:

• Chile rellenos (stuffed poblano and green New Mexico peppers, locally grown of course, and the stuffing is cheese, then they are dipped in flour and egg and fried - oh my god so good! but a lot of work)
• New Mexico red chili sauce (not hot sauce, this is a sauce you spoon over the chile rellenos)
• Spanish yellow rice
• Refried beans with chopped onion and cilantro

and for dessert

• Tarte Tatin - upside down apple cake that I will try to make for the first time.

Do you want to come over for dinner? I'll try to remember to take some photos, but I might be busy eating...

When life gives you habanero chilies...

... and your habanero-nibbling brother (OK) is not around, and you need to dispose of 30 hot-as-hell chilies in some fasion, you make JERK. Jerk is not some kind of misbehaved right-winger in this case, but a Jamaican seasoning that is fantastic on shrimp or chicken. And it freezes well, so you can make a lot and it will last forever. Habaneros are among the hottest of all chilies, so this is not the kind you can put in your salad or quesadilles. Or rather, 'you COULD do that', but it would not be good except the first microseconds.






You take the fiery hot chilies and remove the seeds while wearing latex gloves, nostril pluggers, and safety goggles, plus plastic bag and waxpaper on the cutting board - all to avoid unpleasant surprises later when you touch your eye or cut a good cheese on the same cutting board. (The recipe here is not exact - if you want the exact recipe a la our friend Dana, let me know in the comments. )










In a blender, a most magnificent innovation, you then dump the chilies (no seeds!), lots of scallion, lots of cheap yellow mustard (think hot dog kind), fresh ginger and garlic, and spices (coriander, cumin, allspice and LOTS of black pepper), and salt. Thanks LA for grinding 9 tablespoons of black pepper! Sorry about your bleeding thumb. You run the blender fast so it all gets mixed into a thick gue.

OK, it doesn't look tasty, but it is. Depending on how many peppers you put in, you might or might not be able to taste it without burning yourself. You freeze the jerk paste in little plastic bags, about 3 tablespoons in each, which is enough for a pound of shrimp or chicken. When you want to use it, take a bag out, dump the seasoning onto the meat, let sit for a few hours, and then grill. So incredibly good, and HOT.

OK, maybe we can find a way we can send this over to you in Sweden, for your yearly habanero dosage...