Costa Rican Not-Really-Cooking Cooking Class

On Wednesday Spanish Aimee pulled out her inner Phonecian and cut off two otra estudiantes & got our names up on the board for the "cooking class" this week. Turned out only four people signed up anyway.

This anxiously awaited cooking class turned out to be what we call the clase de cortar. We told our profesor it wasn't really a cooking class, we really just learned how to cut things. ...then Aimee laughed & elaborated that the things were actually food, not random things.

Lets just start out by saying there was a class ahead of us. One of the "groups" and the kids were walking out with sour faces & talking about the food they didn't like. Snacking on watermelon...ok what food do Ticos eat that you need to have watermelon as a palette cleanser?

When it was our turn we went in & learned that we would be making a traditional Costa Rican dish called frescos frutas...not fruit salad because that is apparently something entirely different. The lady who teaches the classes elaborated on this in depth...in Spanish.

The entire class was in Spanish. (as are most things) Surprisingly I could understand the gist of what she was saying. And by gist I mean select vocabulary words. She was very expressive. She talked to us about the difference between Frescos Frutas & fruit salad. Then she demonstrated how to cut the papaya, pineapples & bananas. The recipe is really these three fruits, a special syrup & water; these sit for about thirty minutes. We then tried some that was already prepared. After we cut the fruit she had us try several different kinds of frutas tropicales. More on this later.

She told an amusing story about a girl who had mistaken a platano for a banano. I don't know if you are familiar with platano but everyone here seems to think its easy to mistake them, its not. Platanos are huge in comparison to bananos & usually darker in color. This is something Aimee & I were laughing about later on the bus. Aimee says, what was this girl thinking. Man I'm so hungry that I think I'll eat this gigantic banana.

The tropical fruits. There were familiar ones that we discussed such as guava, papaya, coconuts & star fruit. We also tried, yes I tried every single thing offered, pejibaye which was an orange fruit with the texture of a potato. Ticos eat it with mayonnaise limon, muy rico! The other really yummy food was mangas con salsa. Surprise but that was muy rico tambien! I'm going to find out if this salsa can come home with me. The only food that was really disgusting were the nancys. Yuck! Very bitter. Turns out they are used for moonshine!

Hope you enjoyed. I'll be making this when I come home if I can find the syrup. Oh & we met some students that I'm calling Los Solos. Read later about what Aimee & I said that slapped a huge nerd sticker on us.