Making chocolate and a few other things...

For me, one of the most exciting things about being away is seeing different plants.... especially ones that end up on our dinner tables in the UK and half the time I have no idea what the original plant looks like or the process it’s gone through before reaching me! In the garden behind our volunteer house in Esperanza there are a plethora of exciting plants... halaconias, birds of paradise, shampoo fruit, bananas, sugar cane, oranges, lemons, guavas, annonas, manzana de agua (both of these last two were new to me), papaya and cacao trees.

We thought it would be exciting to try to use the cacao to make our own chocolate. Here’s how the process went....

The cacao pods grow off the branches of the cacao tree and are ready for harvesting when they turn a browny-orange colour. When you crack the pod open, the fleshy (rather slimy), sweet, white coating around the seeds is the edible part. We fermented both the flesh and the seeds for a few days and then dried them in the sun.

We then took the thin shell off of each seed. I’m not sure the seeds were quite the right dryness however, as shelling took ages and was no easy feat for my finger nails!



Once this was done, we whizzed the dried, shell-less cacao seeds in the Vitamix and ended up with this amazingly fragrant, gorgeously purple tinged cacao powder. Now we just need to add milk and sugar and we have chocolate as we know it! Next time I purchase a luxurious bar of Dairy Milk, I’ll definitely appreciate it all the more now that I know how much work went into just getting the cacao alone!

Apart from trying our hands at making chocolate, we’ve been busy on the farm preparing beds in the greenhouse, planting seeds, transplanting saplings and Ethan has been occupied fixing anything and everything wooden from the chicken house to the farm house window frames.

Fixing the chicken house proved interesting when Ethan found a rather large boa snuggled up next to the chickens. Luckily Marcos was on hand to help catch it. I certainly wasn’t going any nearer than necessary to take the photo!

And cleaning the nursery had a little added excitement when Ethan decided we needed to get rid of the hornet nest!

We’ve also been reminded of how powerful nature is this weekend. Yesterday it must have rained for at least 36 hours straight, which meant the streams that ordinarily bubble across the road with glistening clarity turned into fast flowing, brown torrents that flooded our boots as we endeavoured to walk home. The river at the bottom of our garden raged with all of the extra water it was being subjected to and we could hear river boulders crashing against one another 100m away from our house. Definitely a force to be respected!

So yet again, life here excites me and at the same time petrifies me. There are so many things that we can grow, make and at least start to understand. I’m not sure that I’ll ever grow tired of the excitement of seeds germinating or eating freshly baked bread. All of these things are fragile though in a powerful world that we seek to work with, rather than tame. We could plant thousands of trees and the river could rip them all out in seconds in a flash flood. And it’s not just nature that terrifies me here, it’s the responsibility.... to our potential employees, our local community and people who are supporting us along the way. I guess my conclusion is that not to take the risk, not to try and make a go of things here would be to stick my head in the sand. As long as we do the best we can, endeavouring to be well informed, listening to people, respecting the powerful forces around us and being willing to learn from our experience (and in the best case scenario that of other people too!), then we should be able to be proud of how we live. And along the way it’s important to cherish every moment of beauty, excitement, accomplishment and love, ensuring that we’re journeying towards a life that we want to live rather than leaving somewhere we don’t want to be.