View of the Lago from the road to Tzunana

I’m up early, before the children, enjoying the quiet of the house and the way the sunlight filters through the leaves of a banana tree this morning.  Now that the Catholic Muezzin has given up, the only sound is the gentle twittering of birds in the trees around the garden.  It’s unusually quiet this morning.  No dogs barking.  No chickens going crazy.  No donkeys protesting their morning’s burden.

It rained last night.  One of those long, soft, quiet rains that drums the secrets of the universe into the tin roof and conjures dreams of rhythmic things.  It was the kind of night that made me thankful to be tucked into our little cottage with sleeping bags to layer like quilts on our warm beds and candles to take the edge off of the darkness.

We had a quiet weekend.  Quiet seems to be the dominating theme of life here, which is just fine with us after a whirlwind summer.  We walked high up onto the hill on the road between here and Tzunana in search of a guy Gabe befriended on the boat who we’d like to have to dinner.  We found his place, but he wasn’t there. The view from the mountainside is spectacular.

Coffee growing by the house

The big project of the weekend was coffee production.  The children picked a big panful of red beans last week and shelled them, leaving the slimy green contents to dry on a towel for a few days.

Popping the beans out of the red berries

Then, we soaked the beans for three days, to ferment them.

Green, slimey coffee in the soaking pan

Next they were dried again on a towel in the sun.

Removing the papery skins from some of the green beans

Finally, came the roasting.  We weren’t sure whether to roast them with the skins on, or removed the skins first, so we shelled half and left half in their papery outer layer and tested both batches.

Roasting the coffee

Tony roasted the beans in a non-stick fry pan in small batches.  It really doesn’t take very long.  A website we’d read recommended a hot air popper for roasting and removing the skins in one step, but we don’t have one of those.

Removing the skins from the roasted coffee

The verdict: roasting with skins on and then removing the skins by rubbing the beans between our hands was the best approach, although the skinned beans roasted up just as nicely.  Peeling all of the papery layers from hundreds of beans when they’re still green is a lot of work, so from now on we’ll roast with the skins on.

Finished coffee

An interesting fact we learned in our research: roasted coffee beans off-gas CO2.  This is why when you buy beans bagged at the store there is that little dimple hole in the front of the vacuum sealed bag.  It lets the CO2 out, without letting air in, which would spoil the roasted coffee pretty quickly and reduce it’s shelf life for sale.

When coffee was first sold around the world, it was sold green and roasted at home (or quite locally.)  The first company to sell bagged roasted coffee discovered that coating the roasted coffee with egg white would preserve it without affecting the flavor, but they had a hard time making people believe it and marketing their roasted product became quite a challenge.  They eventually sold a peppermint stick inside each bag as incentive!

Our coffee smells great.  It’s in a sealed ziploc bag on the counter.  We wanted to see just how much the bag will inflate as the beans off-gas. Not much so far.  They have to sit three or four days to mellow, so that the flavour isn’t bitter when they are brewed up.  This gives me time to find a coffee grinder in a market somewhere!

It’s Monday morning.  In a few short minutes the little bears will emerge from their cave, looking for something to eat.  Tony will have to move the gas canister from the water heater around to the kitchen side of the house.  Our, supposedly “full,” container of cooking gas ran out in the middle of baking bread yesterday afternoon.  So we’re moving the one can back and forth to shower and cook until Adang, the gardner, arrives today to replace it.

We’ll dive into school and our second week in our new home.  It’s funny how slowly time moves here.  Our one week feels more like a month already.

The children will pick more coffee today, swing on their vine (Hannah has declared vine climbing to be her daily upper body work out) and likely swim.  Tony, thankfully, has work coming in that will fill his day and the coffers.  I will make cheese (mozzarella for lunch, and cream cheese to add to the potatoe leek soup I hope to make this evening) bread and yogurt while teaching school, and somewhere in there, I hope to write.