Eliot comes to visit

Everyone knows that having visitors makes you do all the touristy things in the place that you live that you never have time to do because you live there. I didn't go to the top of the Empire State Building until about three years ago (with a friend who was new to the city), and I'm pretty sure I've never seen the Statue of Liberty from a distance closer than the BQE. (Although, over the past few years, my list of attractions for friends coming to New York included more about the best places for doughnuts and where to find bars that have both good beer and video games than any sort of cultural or historical landmarks...so I'll probably never get to touch Lady Liberty, even if friends are in town.)  The comparison of New York to St. Kitts doesn't go too far, though, because there isn't much to do here besides go to the beach and pay hugely inflated sums for mediocre food.  Leah usually doesn't have time to go to the beach, and we're both too cheap and yes - too snobby, I guess - to not make all of our own meals, but our friend Eliot came to visit this past week, so we acted a little like we were on vacation, too.

There was a ton of beach-going, mostly just for me and Eliot, because Leah was at school.  We started off the beach trips with a ferry ride to Nevis, and unfortunately, we got stuck with the dumpy, smelly ferry that made me think I was on some sort of hidden camera commercial for Dramamine:

this is a flattering picture of the Mark Twain himself. In person he is  even shabbier.

view out the window - oof, so nauseating

Once we arrived at the beach on Nevis, though, everything was instantly better. I righted my sick stomach with a "killer bee", the signature drink from the much talked-about bar on the beach, an amazingly alcoholic passion-fruity rum punch with a dash of bitters and grated nutmeg. I had to wait before going swimming because I was crunked. Eliot is better than me at drinking (he's English, after all), and he set off to use his newly purchased snorkel and fins:

While I waited to sober up I tried to take arty pictures of the beach:

this was when He carried me

The ferry back was open-air, much more pleasant. We left just in time to see the sunset on the water, and I got to appreciate it with the new friend I made on board, a middle-aged man from Texas with a timeshare at the Marriott who told me all about his three grown sons.  So I was still a little drunk, maybe.

There was a big soccer game on Friday, a World Cup qualifier between St. Kitts and Canada. I've never been to a real soccer game - match? I don't know. Anyway, it was pretty neat! I love a sporting event; everyone is so excited - wearing the colors and standing to shout things! The concession stand was also noteworthy - what seemed like a family brought their deep fryer, portable electric range with skillet, and toaster oven and were frying chicken wings and kingfish fillets and johnny cakes (which are like hush puppies), and for really cheap, too. There was a guy selling boiled peanuts up and down the stands, too, but by the time I saw him, Leah and Eliot knew I had visited the concession family twice already, and I do have some amount of shame. 

this is blurry, but i'm putting it in here anyway because HOLY SHIT. 

And for his final day here, we took Eliot all the way around the island and stopped at a fancy restaurant on what was an old sugar plantation. The food was actually really good, and the grounds are so beautiful, with gorgeous views out onto the Atlantic.  There's a short trail through the rainforest on the property, too.

whoa. 

cheeseburger in paradise.

eliot took this picture - see the reflection of the pool under the arch there?

there were anoles everywhere - Leah was thrilled and kept repeating, "you guys- you guys - there are lizards everywhere! oh my god there are lizards everywhere." seriously, like she was on a loop.

many of these trees are mango trees, so there were thousands of mango pits scattered on the ground.

Thanks, Eliot, for visiting - and for letting us feel like we were on vacation with you!

mozzarella and strange powers

Laura and I once mentioned to my parents that there didn't seem to be any cheese in the grocery stores here that wasn't multi-ingrediented and/or pre-shredded. Their reaction - bless them - was to mail us milk powder, citric acid, and rennet.

The dried milk had to soak for 24 hours, so we started that yesterday before the beach. This morning we added heavy cream and citric acid, heated it to ninety degrees, and made like a calf's abomasum.

 Creamy!

Supernatant-y!

Silky!

 Curdy!

Stretchy!

At one point during this process, Laura looked over and saw a rotten banana by the toaster. What follows is proof that she is the one.

Mind control

This morning after breakfast, I noticed the brown banana on top of the refrigerator (where we keep our fruit and other semi-perishables) and thought: "I'm going to move this rotten banana over in front of the toaster. Laura will think that I meant to eat it, but decided against it at the last minute because it's so brown. And what do you do with a brown banana when you need the counter space it's on? Move it back where it came from? Throw it in the garbage? No! You bake banana bread at the earliest opportunity! I am so sneaky." 

Readers, she saw right through me. I considered denying it, but there was really no point. 

Everybody wins

roasted whole red snapper

The past week has been a bit of an anxiety-racked mess.  The first semester students had their second round of exams, which meant Leah was studying more than usual, even, and with a panicked intensity that gave us both shortness of breath and some heart palpitations.  After her day was finished on Friday, we split a bottle of the wine we always buy at home - I've been very homesick this week, so this was nice- and watched stand up comedy clips until we passed out, Leah grateful for a break (and me just because I'm the best sleeper ever).   This professional school thing is pretty, like, hard, I guess.  I thought I would cook something celebratory for her, so I made this whole fish (red snapper with ginger, garlic, cilantro, hot peppers, green onions and lime) in our toaster oven.  Cooking animals whole means it's special, right? :

isn't it creepy? 

I've been using that  ginger/garlic/scotch bonnet combination to season most everything I've been making the past few days.

In the early evening, we met up with some friends at "The Strip" (a row of bars along Timothy Beach)  for a bonfire party, and we got there just as the sun was starting to set.

glory!

I'm not sure if it's because we're so close to the equator here or what, but dusk lasts all of like, five minutes. The sun goes down, amazingly gorgeous - and then, pretty suddenly, it's night-time dark. This picture was taken about five minutes after the first one: 

And some pictorial highlights of my week:

Hello, chick, chick, chicken!

scary wasps' nest under the trim of the house. There are eight (!!!) more of these things around.  

Caroline and I were wearing matching outfits! We were both way too excited about it.

Halloween

I was talking to my almost-3-year-old niece the other day about Halloween, and it seems she's totally got the right idea.  When I asked her what her plans were for the holiday (which she pronounces "haah -aah-ween", I think just to manipulate us - and it works, gah, how cute is that?), she just said "candy".  Well, actually, she repeated the word "candy" over and over.  And man, she is so right.  I've been craving a Reese's peanut butter cup (without question, the holy grail of trick-or-treating for me) for the last couple of weeks, so I went ahead and made some, because they're super easy.

This took me back to working at Harrison St. Coffee Shop, where we'd have to make dozens of pb cups every day. they were vegan, and loaded with crisco, and people loved them.  These ones do not have crisco in them (I used a little bit of peanut butter in the chocolate instead).

Fingerprint on top because we couldn't wait for them to set completely.

Leah's mouth is blurry because it's moving. Also, she is so good-looking.

Speaking of Leah, I am the author of most of these posts because she is studying all of the time - like, really, seriously, all of the time. How amazing looking are her notes?

And this weekend I finally got myself to a "hash" - there's a running club on the island (I think it may be an international thing, though) called the St. Kitts Hash House Harriers, and every three weeks, they organize a run/walk somewhere on the island, usually up into the mountains. What's unique about the runs is that the runners don't know where they're going - it's like mystery dinner theater for athletes. The leaders of the run, called "hares", mark the trail with sawdust - a pile of sawdust means you're on the right track (and fellow hashers will yell, "On, On!" to let the rest of the pack know to continue); an "X" in sawdust means you've gotten yourself on the wrong trail and you have to turn around ("On back!").  People love these runs - you get to see parts of the country that you never would, it's a really fun crowd, and a great opportunity to meet cool locals. The St. Kitts chapter of the Hash Harriers has a reputation for being really inclusive too - so it's a fun thing for families (and dogs! A lot of cute dogs, wheezing up the mountain) and people of all fitness levels. Also, when you've finished the run, there's a barbecue and they make you chug beers. It's awesome. (Thanks to Sam and Diedre for remembering their cameras!)

rainbow at the end of the trail

After the race, down on one knee, waiting with the other first-time hashers to be "blessed"

this "blessing" turned out to be getting beer poured on one's head.

And one more thing about running - sorry, this isn't very exciting, I know - I completed my first ever double-digit jog: I ran 10 miles! In a row!  I couldn't have done it without these shoes, which my mother-in-law (almost) just sent me:

I almost didn't want to wear them because they are the most perfect things I've ever seen.

Really cool/gross consequence of that ten-miler - my toenail fell off! I've got it covered with a band-aid right now and I'm just going to avoid dealing with it for as long as possible.

Butternut Squash Ravioli

Autumn-envy has set in, pretty hard. I'm seeing pictures of friends' fall foliage tours and pumpkin-spiced facebook status updates, and I'm starting to feel really homesick - New York is at its most beautiful now, I think, when the sky is impossibly blue and clear and everyone is wearing cardigans. Oh, man, do I miss cardigans, and layering clothing in general.  And Autumn is when you can still drink beers with your friends on decks and patios, but you don't get too sweaty when you ride your bike home. That Christmas carol has it totally wrong - this is the most wonderful time of the year. I mean, look at tomorrow's weather forecast for Brooklyn:

But I guess the grass is always greener - or the leaves are always more vibrantly red, yellow, and orange? Har.  One thing I associate with autumn, though, St. Kitts has in abundance: nutmeg. It's one of the few things that is produced locally.  A neat thing about the way nutmeg is sold here is that they don't remove the outer shell - that's mace, right? -before packaging. So it's a total deal, two spices in one. [edit: I was wrong, this is not mace. see Anna's comment below - what mace actually looks like is waaay more awesome.]

mace, brainy nutmeg

Winter squash is consistently available at the grocery stores, too - always calabaza, but sometimes there are other varieties. So I added a bunch of nutmeg to roasted and mashed butternut squash and used the leftover potsticker wrappers to make ravioli, fried some sage in browned butter and we sat next to the air conditioner and ate the hell out of it. It felt almost like Fall....but alas, definitely sweatier.

toaster roaster 

we roasted these too, uh huh.

Pie Sale

When I first signed on as a volunteer at Ade's Place (the organization I mentioned here), I agreed to work a couple of days a week focusing on fundraising and marketing, and I have done a bunch of work so far towards those broad goals - I've started a website for them (my first! It has been humbling - no, humiliating. The "user-friendly" wordpress template continues to confound and frustrate me).  Mostly I've worked in the office doing tedious administrative stuff, and I've also made many really shitty flyers with hilariously bad clipart.  This week, though, I've been completely consumed with organizing a pie sale to benefit the center. [One thing to note, here: the term "pie" in St. Kitts refers to not only the round, crusted, possibly lattice- topped confection we know, but also to any kind of casserole. So, for example, lasagna is called a "pie". Macaroni and cheese is "macaroni pie".  Totally weird.]

To say that we received more orders than we expected would be a huge understatement. We thought that we would make a few pies - maybe twenty? Maybe we'd get just an overwhelmingly positive response and have to make, let's say, thirty - but we could do it! It'd be fun, even! Well, people were awesome and kept calling and emailing orders until we finally decided to cut it off when we reached 107 pies. We were freaking out a little and Michelle, a younger staff member, was discussing ways we could cut corners: the chicken pot pies, for example, didn't need a sauce - you could just throw the chicken (thigh, not breast!) in there with some (frozen!) mixed vegetables (with corn and lima beans!) and some (gasp!) bell peppers and make a "short crust" with flour and water! Now, a normal person would have maybe thought the above sounded pretty gross but oh, well, and then - I don't know, thought about something else. I couldn't behave like a normal person, of course: I was obsessively horrified and blurted, "I can do the pot pies! Yeah, it'll be no big deal, I'll do them."

So, I made 26 chicken pot pies in a dorm kitchen, which sucked as much as you think it would. I borrowed pots from friends, made chicken stock from chicken necks (they sell those everywhere here) and I cleared off the desk downstairs for rolling out the pastry.  I used Ina Garten's recipe, substituting butter for the shortening in the crust because shortening is gross.

I shouldn't talk too much about how, when I thought I was finally done and baking the pies off at the center, Michelle went to rotate the many tins on the bottom rack of the oven and TIPPED THE WHOLE EM-EFFING RACK OVER,  and then I had to go home and spend four more hours doing the whole thing over again. No, let's not get into that (suffice to say rage is a good motivator for the "faster runs" of the race training schedule, and that the almost entire bottle of wine since getting back from that run has helped, too).

two of four giant pots of filling. i rouxed the day.

I had to sit outside the student union three times this week to collect money for pie orders. 

half of 'em

Sardines and Skype

After talking so much shit about Deb for slacking on her blog, we'd be hypocrites not to make this a regular thing. But we haven't taken any pictures since the last entry, and what's this blog without pictures? Just a bunch of witty, fascinating words? 

It's the end of a lovely weekend of drinking in the ocean, studying, and sweaty eating - all sadly undocumented.  We got home from Shipwreck last night around dinnertime, hungover from day beers, and Laura made a pasta masterpiece with capers, hot sauce, breadcrumbs, garlic, onions, and sardines: as gloriously Claus Ravenish* as it sounds, and twice as delicious. (Is there any appropriate way to talk about how I ruined sex this morning by sneak-eating the cold leftovers after breakfast? No? Okay.) Then we tried to watch some newly-legal-in-the-Caribbean Netflix, but discovered that everything our $8 can buy down here streams either dubbed into Spanish or subtitled in Portuguese. ¡No hay problema! Laura's just getting into the WTF podcast, so we listened to the one where Sarah Vowell talks about her Hawaii book. 

We were Skyping my parents tonight when I suddenly realized how to snatch a blog post from the fishy jaws of defeat: 

"What an age we live in!"

* My grandfather, Claus Raven, was once busted at customs coming back to New York from Austria with his ski boots filled with Landjägers.