Spoiled Rotten

I always tell my community members that they are lucky to live in a place where plants grow year round and one can harvest food in any month of the year.  Due to the distinct rainy and dry seasons, there are specific times to plant and harvest specific food items.  Now that I have been through the food cycle almost twice, I will share my reflections.
 

January (start of dry season): Start of fresh beans, both tree and vine variety.  So tasty fried in oil and then cooked with rice!  They’re still hard to get.

February:  People give me a bag of unshelled beans as soon as I step foot out of my house.  I’ve tried currying, boiling, sautéing, and making chili out of these beans.  But beans for breakfast isn’t doing it for me anymore.

 

March: The last of the beans are drying up! Hurray! Kids are knocking green mangoes off the trees, which are quite delicious with salt.  Rice and bean planting.

April: Ripe mangoes. Yum. 

May (start of heavy rains):  A glorious time when avocadoes are available. I pay my neighborhood boys 15 cents to climb trees and get them for me.  There are rotten mangoes on the ground everywhere with worms in them.  Mangoes, go away!

June: Corn harvest means lots of corn juice and mashed up corn boiled in a leaf. Pifa (a palm nut) is given out in large quantities, not bad with the most exotic spice available: salt.

July: Pifa becomes my dog food because I can’t eat anymore of it.

August:  Pifa, please go away.  Some vine beans and corn are available. 

September: First rice harvest.  After 10 months of eating processed white rice, the whole grain stuff is so, so good.

October: There is enough harvested rice around that sometimes I can even buy it from my neighbors!

November: End of new rice, so sad.  ORANGES!

December: Oranges never get old but sometimes I eat so many that my lips get raw.

Throughout the year, some items are generally available such as yucca (and other starchy root vegetables), plantains, and bananas.  However, whatever is in season I eat in large quantity.  The only items listed above that I have ever bought are avocadoes and rice.  The rest are strictly gifted or given in exchange for something I have.  

Two different varieties of bananas, avocadoes, spinach-like leaves, yuca, an egg.

BEANS! And oranges and a log of yuca.

Sometimes I have so many beans or yucca or mangoes on my hand that I have to secretly re-gift them to other neighbors so that they don’t go to waste.  I guess it’s not so bad being spoiled rotten by my community members.