Juti, Juti!

Juticalpa is perfect. It reminds me a lot of Matagalpa in Nicaragua. Small enough to have a community feel, where everybody knows everybody, small enough to walk from one end of town to the other in 15 - 20 minues but big enough that you can always find a new nook or cranny to explore. There are pulperias (small convenience stores) at every corner where you can buy fresco, tajaditas (fried plantain chips), and sometimes hot baleadas.

Only about half the roads are paved, the rest varying between dirt, gravel, or cobblestone, but they're all lined with the brightly colored buildings of buisnesses or homes, each a unique architectural feat. Horses and cows do wander the streets of Juti - often at their leisure, occasionally at the command of a gaucho. Olancho (the state in which Juti is located) is known for its guns-slinging cowboys, and there are some establishments where the dress code not only requires a cowboy hat and boots, but a pistol as well. If that makes you nervous, don´t worry - there are plenty of police hanging out on street corners watching everything go down while wielding enormous shotguns (Clearly, handguns would not suffice in Olancho). The police may be known for just looking on with everyone else during a rare lawless ruckus rather than engaging, but hey, at least they´re there with their shotguns for moral support.

Being a gringo makes it impossible to walk down the street without attracting attention, but at least I´m not a gringa. Meg and her American female friends constantly receive a barrage of catcalls from Honduran men - everything from kissing noises to "Oy mi amor!" to "I need your kiss!" While I have had the occasional kissing noise directed at me and have been hailed with "E, gringo!", most unsolicited comments from strangers are more innocent: kids saying hello or goodbye in English. Although ever so often I´ll receive a peeved look from a store owner if I´m butchering Spanish, overall my reception has been very warm. All Meg´s Honduran friends have been happy to meet me and accepted me right away as if I were their friend already.

Tonight Meg invited me to have dinner with one of her students´ families, Saskia. We arrived early enough to help cook - I was excited to learn how to prepare baleadas so I´ll be able to make them back home in the States. I made a decision to temporarily lift the restrictions of my vegan diet while I´m in Central America because it would be almost impossible to get adequate nutrition without eating dairy and egg products. Also, many of the dairy and egg products seem to be produced in more of a free-range, family farm style rather than a factory farm style, which doesn´t create an environment of intense suffering for the animals

Baleadas are very simple, but very delicious. They´re just flour tortillas with beans, mantequilla (not butter, but rather a liquidy sour cream type deal), cheese, avocado, and eggs. By the time we had arrived, the beans were already made, so Meg started cooking the ggs while I helped with the tortillas. We mixed wheat flour, baking soda, salt, and a little water until we got a nice, thick doughy consistency. Then we made 20 golf ball sized balls of dough. To turn the balls into tortillas you put a little oil on a plate, then place the dough ball on the plate and just push down on the edges in a circular motion until eventually the tortilla is flat and round.

To cook it, our hosts use a thin, flat metal disk that they placed over one of the stove elements, and cooked each tortilla individually. Moving the tortilla over to the pan was hard enough because they´re supposed to be as close to a perfect circle as possible, but their shape changes the second you pick them up. My first few attempts resulted in amoeba shaped tortillas, which roused hearty laughter from Saskia´s mom and aunt. That´s the great thing about this culture - If you can laugh a yourself, you´ll make friends very easily. Rather than demand perfection and put pressure on those who fall short, Olanchanos prefer to delight in the humor that comes from life´s natural imperfections.

Once the tortilla is successfully placed on the cooking surface, you wait, flip it once, wait, and then you´re done. The trick, of course, is to know when to turn it. Josmarie, Saskia´s aunt, insisted that the color change of the dough indicates when the tortilla needs to be flipped. Try as I might, I couldn´t for the life of me see a consistent pattern in when Josmarie was flipping the tortillas. They looked like a different color every time. When it was my turn to flip, Josmarie made me use a knife to raise an edge of the tortilla, then flip it with my hands rather than using a spatula (why? I don´t know - the spatula seemed to work just fine). After watching the first side of the tortilla cook I would ask her, "ya?" which literally means "already?" to which she would either reply "ya" or "falta" (which literally means "it´s missing something."

I noticed that the first side of the tortilla seemed to cook significantly faster than the second side, which didn´t seem to make any sense. The second side is already partly warm by the time it hits the pan, so shouldn´t it cook faster? After confirming my observation about the first side cooking faster with Josmarie, I asked her why this was true. "Porque sí," she replied. "Just because." This commonly used phrase has the same sentiment as when a parent says "because I said so" to a child, but "porque sí"also has a hint of humor, a self-awareness about it´s dismissive tone. Then again, maybe gringoes inevitably hear this response when we ask ridiculous questions that Hondurans know better than to ask.

Either way, the baleadas were absoutely delicious, and it was really incredible to be received so warmly and treated as a close friend right away. I think I´m going to like it here.