Heart Healthy Food in Paraguay- Sopa Paraguya

Yesterday and today I have been in Caaguazú with my host family celebrating my host mother’s sister’s (so I guess like my aunt’s) 70^th birthday.  We came into town yesterday and cooked up a storm all day getting ready for the party.  The pictures below take you through how to make Sopa Paraguya which normally sopa in Spanish is a soup but here is a sort of corn bread.  This is not the first time that I have helped make sopa here but this is the largest scale that I have helped make it at.  Enjoy the pictures and recipe.

Step 1: Get a lot of pig fat like 2 kg and add it to a laundry wash bin, and mix very well.

Step 2: Add 2 dozen eggs.

 



 

Step 3: Add one slab of 2 kg of cheese, but make sure you have two more to add later!  This is the cheese that I help my family make every day and usually we are able to produce 2-3 kg per day so we have been saving up for this.

 

Step 4: Add 6 kg of corn that has been dried, boiled, cooled, and then ground into flour. This is corn that we had picked and then dried, and then taken off the cob.

 

Step 5: Add 4 liters of a liquid.  I’m not sure what the English name for it is but it is the milk substance that is left over in the container when we make the cheese that we usually feed to the pigs but saved this week.  Also later on she said we needed more liquid so we added about one more liter of fresh milk and ANOTHER liter of vegetable oil (in case we didn’t have enough with all the pig fat!)

 

 

Step 6: Stir like crazy, my mom said this is what makes it the best sopa is to stir a lot and she says it’s a good arm work out.

Step 7: Add about a cup of salt, my mom doesn’t use measuring cups or anything just keeps adding things, tests it and then says what it needs more of.

 

 

 

Step 8: The other 4 kg of cheese left from step 3.

 

 

Stir for about ten minutes, taste and then get your pans ready to go.  Every time we make sopa we have to visit a banana plant and cut off the leaves and put them in the pan to keep the sopa from sticking to the side.  You then pour the batter into the pan and then cut the banana leaves down because you don’t want them to burn too much in the outdoor oven. 

 

We had six large pans of sopa by the time we were done.  We had to walk it all over to the neighbor’s house because they don’t have an outdoor oven here. 

 

So after an hour getting that prepped (which we started before we started making the sopa, we had to get rid of all the hot coals and then put in the pans in.  We covered both entrances and let them cook for about 20-30 minutes and then pulled them out.   

 

 

The finished product!  I have no idea how many calories one piece of this has but with 2 kg pig fat + 1 L vegetable oil+ 6 kg cheese and everything else we probably don’t want to know.

Also before we left home in Yukyry Central we went on a little killing streak with our farm animals and here when someone has a birthday you give them gifts just like the states.  Here though you give people dead animals so we came with a small pig and chickens.  The meat my mom had worked on in the morning and just let sit in the salt and lemon juice all day.  After the sopa was done we restarted a fire in the oven and let that go for about an hour while we took the sopa out, cut it up, and then put meat in the pans.  So by the time it was all said and done we had one small pig, and about 9 chickens that went into the stove.  It doesn’t take meat very long to cook in the oven because it is so hot and cooking from all sides but it turns out wonderful. 

 

 

This is a picture of a very upset mother chicken because it was after dark when we were trying to cook the meat and she was trying to put her chicks to sleep but we kept interrupting them because she put them right next to the stove and we had to keep disturbing them to go back and forth but I was just amazed by how many chicks (9!) she could fit under her wing and around her.

 

 

 

This is a picture of my mom on the left followed by her sister and then me.  Also Paraguayans don’t smile very much but I love the picture because my mom isn’t smiling at all, the sister is a little bit, and then I have a huge smile on my face. 

We also had a wonderful mariachi band show up for a performance.

Overall it was a wonderful day full of working hard cooking and getting ready for the big party but all of the food turned out wonderful and everyone had a good time.

Heat Wave in February!

Well the last few weeks have been very tranquillo here in my community.  Mainly due to the fact that it is too hot and no one wants to actually do anything.  Every day so far this month has been over 100 degrees!  My schedule pretty much just involves getting up early and going for about an hour walk in my community and just saying hello to everyone, coming back and sitting under the shade tree for the rest of the day with my host family.  I have also been spending some time on Google Earth looking at my community and how it has changed over the years, the last picture was taken in 2009 and even since then there have been a lot of changes.  I have also been working on getting my interviews ready so I can begin those over the next couple of weeks once I get PC to look over them and help me with my language.

I have an interview written up for the teachers at my school so I can see who is interested in working with me and what types of things they might be interested in me helping with.  My big project for this school year is going to be getting the school garden cleaned up and running again.  I also have another questionnaire that I will be going over with all of the students in my school to get to know them as well as to just get a baseline about what they might already know about the environment/conservation so then I can give them the same survey at the end of the year with the hopes that they learned something!  The last interview that I have been working on is for every house in my community which is called our community needs assessment to see what projects people are interested in and what environmental problems they see with their community and what they would like help with.  School will be starting for us around the 24^th of this month if everything goes as planned and I am anticipating working in the school 2-3 days per week.  Also there is just one school in my community for everyone and have different classes in the morning and afternoon.  So if any of you teachers have any tips out there for teaching in a school let me know because not only have I never taught in a school before I will now be teaching in a different language, which I am a little bit nervous about.

The other excitement that I have had a couple of weeks ago right after my site presentation involved a wonderful little insect larva that decided to call the ball of my left foot home.  I am not all that familiar with all of the wonderful insects and such down here yet so for a few days it just looked like a blister so I was treating it as such.  Finally though I asked my host mom about it because it just didn’t look right and it began to hurt pretty bad.  She doesn’t have the best eye site for that sort of small object so she called her son over and he started freaking out about it telling me that it is pique (a sort of flea) that lays eggs in your foot and that usually they never get this big because they all know what to look for (small black dot) and they usually remove it before it gets too big.  I had to remind him that I am not familiar with such things and no one had ever told me about it.  He was too freaked out to try and remove it so we got the other older man that lives with us to take it out for me.  Fortunately after about ten minutes digging in my foot he was able to get it out but he used his knife that he carries with him every day to do everything with but he assured me he had cleaned it that day.  I was just amazed at the size of the flea larva and disgusted at the same time that it came out of my foot.  I took some pictures of it once it was out so you can see those below.  So now that I know what I am looking for I spend time every afternoon looking at my feet and getting rid of them before they burrow into my foot because I would prefer to not have to dig any more out.

Since we are in the middle of the summer right now we have had some beautiful flowers in bloom, which you can see below.  I have also begun to see many different flocks of birds that are on their migration including many different parrots.  Other than that it has just been very dry here and we have only really had one rain event the past few weeks where we had a strong storm come up and dropped a lot of rain very fast and then was gone again.  I have been enjoying everyone’s pictures of the snow and ice that you all have been getting at home.  I hope that you all have a wonderful week and happy valentine’s day! 

The wonderful larva I got out of my foot.



Some pictures of a wetland/grassland just outside of my community.

I think we might have a problem with erosion in my community.

A mother bird guarding her nest.

What all of the roads in my community look like most of the time about 6 in or so of very sandy soil, if I close my eyes and walk it feels like I'm on a beach just minus the cool breeze and water.