A Peek into our Refrigerator

I am a bit of a voyeur. I love peeking inside people's houses, noticing what the person in front of me is buying at the grocery store, and listening in on others'conversations on public transit. I also love looking inside people's refrigerators. I know, weird. I distinctly remember as a teenager gazing in wonderment into the fridge of a family friend at their Costco loot: giant tubs of blueberries and raspberries, big salad kits, over-sized containers of artichoke dip, items and quantities my mom would never buy. I have a friend with a disastrously disorganized house but a pristine fridge, featuring custom-labelled glass jars organized meticulously in rows by color and size. Another friend has a fridge that is always so jam-packed and overflowing with unlabeled items, I have no idea how they find anything. My fridge at home, my mom would be the first to tell you, is too often inhabited by moldy leftovers. Also, I almost always have goopy old cilantro in one of the vegetable drawers. Embarrassing but true.

In honor of my own voyeurism, and as a vehicle to share a bit about what we are eating here, I thought I would share our fridge contents with you. Mind you that Paul and I are very happy to have a fridge at all. It happened to be here in the house when we moved in, and it's rusty and old and crotchety. However, we are grateful for its presence, despite the fact that the freezer is one giant ice ball, and a few power mishaps have made it defrost at least three times in the last month, leaving a giant puddle in the middle of our house. That being said, sharing my fridge contents is a bit vulnerable. It highlights my lack of organization, a dearth of storage containers, and my deficits in culinary sophistication, so judge all you want, just be sure I'll be looking inside your fridge the next time you invite me over. :)

Note that eggs, a huge component of our daily diet here, are not stored in the fridge. Turns out the US is the only country that regularly refrigerates eggs, and I believe it has something to do with our fancy sanitization processes, which make eggs more vulnerable to spoiling. We have taken to buying one cubeta (container) of thirty eggs per week, and sometimes we go through more than that allotment. Jonah defaults to scrambled eggs and Brynna to hard-boiled when they cannot think of what else they want to snack on, particularly since we are carefully rationing our Skippy peanut butter until the Okura-Baileys arrive in October. If you have any good egg recipe ideas, we'd love to try them!

Without further ado, here is our fridge, contents numbered for your reference below. No items were moved to create a better presentation or removed to hide anything shameful or embarrassing. Special thanks to Dillon for manipulating my phone and figuring out how to add numbers to the photos.

1) Grey tub of mora, Ecuadorian blackberries. These berries are quite different than our blackberries. They are larger, longer, firmer and wayyyyyy more sour. They are so sour that you cannot just pop them into your mouth and eat them, but they make great fresh juice, and I throw them into yummy muffins about once a week. They grow in the hillsides coming down from the Andes not too far from where we live. These containers are universally used to sell mora as well as seco de pollo (or rice with chicken, sold on buses during the lunch hour).

2) Big bag of habas, fava beans. Both dried and fresh habas are readily available at any market and widely used in soups as well as eaten fresh, boiled in salted water with potatoes. I cook them right in the pot with hard-boiled eggs for lunch a couple times per week. I also recently re-learned to make a traditional cheese dipping sauce with garlic, milk herbs, and queso fresco, and Dillon and I love eating habas this way. Paul will sometimes munch a few. The other kids, not so much. It brings me joy watch Dillon, now a much more adventurous eater than even a year ago, as he makes a potion of habas and cheese sauce, and it gives me hope that my littles will someday get over their pickiness.

3) Naranjillas. As far as I can tell, no translation into English. I wrote about these in my post on tropical fruit. They are really delicious tangy orange fruit, and I am using them to mark my family's gradual acculturation to Ecuadorian food. The first time I made naranjilla juice, it was a total bust. The second time, they were more interested. The third time, they asked me to make it again. Note to self: don't give up after a first taste.

4) Ecuadorian Tamale. My kids absolutely love Mexican tamales, and we eat them regularly at home. Unfortunately, they haven't taken quite as quickly to Ecuadorian versions, which are either made from maize corn or often mushed yuca, and to be perfectly honest, are not as tasty as Mexican tamales. This particular tamale was gifted to me by a neighbor and was may be the best corn tamale I have had in these parts. Inside we found chicken and peas. Even Jonah liked the masa.

5) Fideo. Noodles. The quality of available noodles has improved in the last few decades, and it seems Ecuadorians eat pasta more regularly than they did twenty years ago. My little kids are noodle-holics, and when I run dry of dinner ideas, I just make a super simple noodles with butter, cheese and broccoli. These are the leftover from one of those not-exciting meals.

6) Ají. Ecuadorian hot sauce. Ecuadorian food is never spicy. That is why you need ají The ají pepper is similar to a jalapeno, and in much of the country, ají sauce (a hot sauce made from ají pepper, tomate del arból, lemon, onion, hierbitas) is sitting on tables to allow people to spice up their own food. In recent years, Dillon has taken to enjoying more spice in his life, and he has definitely enjoyed trying different versions of ají sauce when we were out and about. The sauce does vary considerably geographically. This was my first (semi-successful) try at making our own ají.

7) Papaya. I have written about this before. No one in my family likes papaya, but they are frequently given as gifts (which we receive graciously) because papaya trees grow all over the place. I need to try making papaya bread. Maybe then we could all tolerate it.

8) Carrots. These are also widely available, used in soups, lentils and other stews, and while Ecuadorians do not eat carrot sticks, my family definitely does! Turns out when I cut up a bunch of carrots and leave them on the table, Jonah in particular will partake. When Ecuadorians see us eating carro sticks, they call us conejitos (rabbits). There are worse things to be called.

9) Melcocha. This is our leftover panela candy with peanuts wrapped in a banana leaf that it turns out is too sweet to eat with any regularity. Jury is out on whether or not we actually like it or not (see post on the molienda).

10) Panela. This is also the bag of our share of panela from our day at the molienda. I use panela almost exclusively for my baking, particularly in muffins, cookies, and cakes. We also use it to sweeten our tea. While white sugar is readily available, panela is cheaper and easier to get. Plus, it makes everything taste like Ecuador.

11) Yogurt. This is a repurposed 1 liter Toni's plain yogurt container that does actually have yogurt inside, but it's not Toni's yogurt. This is homemade yogurt made by my friend Narcisa, who is the best yogurt maker in town. She receives fresh milk from families all over town and makes and sells yogurt, ice cream pops, mozzarella cheese, and other milk-based food products. Her homemade yogurt is definitely my favorite, and my kids seem to like it too! On my to do list for us to make our own yogurt, but it's easy to be lazy when good yogurt is steps away.

12) Broccoli. Thank goodness there is an ample supply of broccoli at markets these days! It's not something eaten regularly in Ecuadorian households, but it seems to be used enough that almost every market stand has good, fresh broccoli. Broccoli is my kids favorite veggie, so that's convenient! The only problem is that it seems only to last a day or two even in my fridge, so I have to cook it almost immediately upon purchasing it, or we eat yellow-ish broccoli.

13) Cauliflower. This too is readily available on market days, which brings me joy. I LOVE roasted cauliflower (with olive oil, salt and pepper -- tastes like french fries to me), and my family doesn't mind it. Luckily, my little oven and I have made friends with one another, and I figured how, mostly, how to successfully roast cauliflower once or twice a week, despite having no temperature gauge and a dumb roasting pan.

14) Miel de Panela: also from our day at the molienda, this is the syrup portion of our panela. It's pretty good -- we are using it on pancakes -- but my kids are missing maple syrup for sure.

15) Tomatoes. Tomatoes are a staple in Ecuadorian "salad" (usually a mix of tomato, onion and lemon juice, a dollop served on the side of a plate of rice and meat). At this time of year, we are usually drowning in delicious Santa Rosa grown tomatoes from Paul's garden, so hard to compare, But we all do love tomatoes and find different ways to use them: tomato sauce (for pizza, which I am getting better at making), sliced tomato for sandwiches, pico de gallo for taco night, and more.

16) An orange lemon. It's funny here, oranges are not orange, but lemons are! These are delicious lemons that grow right here in La Josefina and we squeeze on just about everything. Yesterday we bought some lime-looking limes to try for taco Tuesday.

17) Apples. I have been quite impressed with the quality of apples here. I don't remember apples being widely available in the past, but they are now, and they are surprisingly tasty. They are small, sweet and usually crispy. We eat them often as a snack, sometimes (if we are feeling indulgent) with peanut butter.

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If you've made it this far, you must be sucked into my fridge. So I'll keep going. The picture below is my fridge door. Some of the things I am storing in the door of the fridge are not necessarily things I would store in a refrigerator at home, but we are living in the humid, buggy tropics. Things go moldy and mildewy (fast). Bugs get in (frequently), and the moisture in the air is literally visible some days. For most things, it makes sense to buy things frequently in small amounts so as to not be too traumatized when they get spoiled. It's a definite balance between getting enough for the week in La Maná that we literally cannot get in town vs. getting something that just goes bad before we can use it.

1) Butter. Turns out Ecuadorians use margarine for almost everything. In fact, it took us a couple of weeks to actually find real butter. This seems a little strange, since we are surrounded by dairy farms, but butter is just not something that locals consume or use for cooking. We all agree this butter is better than the margarine we had for the first few weeks, but it has a different flavor than butter from home.

2) Fresh ginger. Used in local soups, so widely available. We got some this week to make peanut curry pasta. Yum.

3) Baking Powder. I brought this from for baking home because I distinctly remember having trouble getting baking powder here in the past. However, turns out you just have to know what to call it. Here they call it "Royal", basically like we call tissues Kleenex. Royal is the brand name.

4) Chocolate chips. Yes! We found chocolate chips. Cookies are saved.

5) Queso fresco. La Josefina fresh cheese. This is made right here in town at a small cheese factory, and I think it's almost the best cheese around (if you want queso fresco, that is). It has just the right saltiness (many of the local cheeses are sour and overly salted). This cheese doesn't melt nicely, but it tastes good in sandwiches, on crackers, with tacos, etc. Everyone loves it. The only problem is it's not always available -- Paul wandered around town today looking for some and got the last pound right at the cheese factory, which doesn't exactly look like a cheese factory. For all intents and purposes, it's just someone's house that you have to yell up to the balcony to ask for cheese.

6) White flour. Omg how much white flour can one glutinous family consume? Answer: Lots. I haven't kept actual track of how much white flour we are consuming, and I DO mix whole wheat flour in with almost everything, but even still. . . English muffins, crepes, pancakes, tortillas, freshly baked cookies, muffins of all kinds, pizza dough. We make white flour disappear the same way Ecuadorians make white rice disappear. Glad no one in my family is gluten sensitive!

7) Mermelada. Jam. This particular jar is frutilla (strawberry). As you may have already deduced, my family loves peanut butter, and we like pb&j too. We quickly discovered that no one likes pineapple jelly. Guava jelly is also not a favorite. I'd say our favorite to date is frutimora, which is a mix of strawberry and mora (see above). At home, we usually eat from an endless supply of homemade peach and plum jam, but no such luck here. I have to say that Brynna seems to be the most attached to her pb&j. Dillon thinks it is because she hasn't had pb&j enough times in her life to get tired of it. He has moved onto La Josefina cheese and jam sandwiches as a default.

8) Panela. This is the last of our store-bought panela. The big bag of homemade panela will soon take its place (see above).

9) Avena. Oatmeal. Jonah generally loves oatmeal for breakfast. It reminds him of his Grandma and Bapa, and it's definitely a comfort food for him. I made my favorite oatmeal cookies last week, and those were a hit. I tried making oatmeal for Jonah yesterday, and it was a bit of a flop. The milk wasn't what he was used to, the panela flavor was overpowering, and the oatmeal texture was not right. In his defense, I don't like oatmeal and have not ever cared enough about it to try to master the art of making it. Maybe I will add that to my list. Needless to say, Paul ate a whole bunch of it.

10) Azúcar impalpable. Powdered sugar. This was a surprising find at the La Maná Tía, which Dillon and I decided is definitely akin to Target. Tía has a bit of everything (this is where we found the butter. And last week, we found bacon, prosciutto, and salami from Spain as well as a pizza pan and a really nice shower pouf). I reserve the powdered sugar for cinnamon rolls (thanks, Larisa, for the recipe!).

11) Granola. Our family mainstay breakfast food, replaced cereal, which was consumed in high volumes in the Jordan Poling household. We have now tried practically every granola available in the region, and we all have strong opinions. Next on the list is to try making our own granola. I do have a recipe from GG tucked away somewhere. When I am feeling particularly lazy or on an early morning travel day, we have granola and yogurt for breakfast.

12) Maizabrosa. Strange cornmeal. Maizabrosa we discovered at a surprisingly good pizza parlor in Puerto Lopez. I had already tried making pizza and English muffins a few times without cornmeal, and I was mostly successful, though definitely frustrated by the stickiness factor. We asked the pizza expert in Puerto Lopez, and she sent us back to Tía for this product. It works beautifully, and this week's pizzas and English muffins were much less frustration-inducing.

13) Raisins. Actually I thought these were raisins, but they are actually prunes (ciruela pasas, pruned plums). That will teach me to think I can quickly buy things here without reading the package carefully. I managed to slice the prunes into small pieces and slip them into oatmeal cookies as though they were raisins. No one complained, so I think I will do the same again until these are gone. I hate to waste them!

14) Ketchup. Have you ever been anywhere where there isn't real ketchup? Twenty years ago, there was literally no real ketchup in Ecuador. It was all this bright pink super sweet ketchup-like substance placed inside ketchup containers and used to dip french fries (which are very popular here) in. Now, I would say it's about 50/50. In some surprising locations, real ketchup comes out of the bottle, in others it's the pink stuff. We bought this small bottle our first week here and try to remember to take it with us when we are out and about to season our french fries. Yup, and I'm not ashamed.

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Okay, so there you have it, a tour through my Ecua-fridge. You will notice no meat. I have to say that, in general, I don't love meat and I am also not a very good meat-cooker. Living here makes meat purchase and preparation even harder for me -- basically a whole pig or cow or chicken is hanging up, and you ask for a piece of it. . .I don't even know where to start. So a few days per week, we buy cooked meat (chicken, beef or pork) from a young woman who has a little restaurant in town, and we just add it to our tacos or our pasta, etc.  We are going to try the bacon we found at Tía this week. And I do like the tilapia sold in town, but my kids are a little intimidated by the bones, so I tend to eat it when we are out and about.

Also, at this particular moment in time, there was no visible milk in the fridge, but generally Lucia gives us about half a liter every day of strained and boiled milk, otherwise straight from the cow. Paul drinks some straight (it's nostalgic for him from his Peace Corps time in Kenya), and I mostly use it to cook and bake, though recently, I started making hot chocolate as well. This morning, Brynna called it "bad milk", and I gently reminded her that we need to be careful about calling things that seem different to us "bad". After all, this is about as pure a version of milk as exists-- straight from pasture fed, hand-milked cows; it's just not the 2% milk we are used to. Time will tell if that changes. . .