Hello Everyone,
Ryan here, feeling good after another day hard at work. I’m a bit sore after yesterday’s game of pickup soccer, but spirits are high. Up on the roof, Hannah Myers, David and I finally finished all of the work on the polyhouse! There were a lot of adjustments, readjustments, and rereadjustments, but it was hard to stay frustrated when we could look out off the roof and see the surrounding mountains topped with clouds as if they were whipped cream. With the anchoring wires tightened, and the internal wooden supports drilled in, we were off the roof just in time for lunch, at which point Guerro began to apply grout around the PSD’s base that will act to drain water away from the perimeter. When that was completed, he began painting the concrete floor black which we expect to absorb lots more heat throughout the day and significantly increase the temperature reached inside the polyhouse.
As our work as Team Base was finally completed, we joined Team Madera down in the shop to help them continue the construction of the racks and trays. Hannah Ilan suggested to me that it was warmer down there in the shade because there was a “lack of airflow”, but I would like to make it publicly official that baking in the sun is more hot than stagnant air (I’m only throwing shade because she sort of ditched Team Base) (just kidding she was being a team player I just like getting a reaction out of her). Anyway, today I really realized how diffucult Team Madera’s work is. We had to take apart some of the completed racks because we realized that they were a little too tall for our Oaxacan friends to comfortably pick up and transport the trays that would be filled with mesquite beans (the average height here is really really low) (I feel right at home !). After all the afternoon’s rereadjustings, the racks were completed, and we are primed to finish the final trays tomorrow.
After work, we had a scheduled mesquite cookie workshop with the Xuchil team in Don Carlos’s kitchen. Richard had gone and bought all of our needed ingredients earlier so we could start immediately. Our first struggle was that the low setting on the electric mixer was broken, so incorporating ingredients often flung our buttery dough across our generous host’s kitchen. We also lacked any real kitchen measuring tools, so we retrieved one of the team’s scales used to measure mesquite beans, and followed the recipe by the ingredients’ weight rather than volume. 350 degrees farenheight was converted into celcius and the cookies went into the oven. We also didn’t have any baking trays, so to be efficient with our available space, two glass pans were filled with dough and leveled to create cookie brownies/granola bars/monsters, along with two trays for what we hoped would be normal circular cookies. They did not turn out to be circles, so we threw them into the cookie monster category as well. To call them ugly would be unfair, as it’s all relative. But on a defined scale of circular to ugly, they leaned towards the latter. Our mouths however are blind to shape, and tasted pretty freaking great. It was really nice to see the Xuchil members experience and enjoy a new recipe including their own mesquite flour. The thick sheets of cookie dough took a lot longer to bake than we had budgeted time, so we ran an hour late to our taquito dinner, but at least we had globs of dessert to offer our cooks as an apology.
Peace, love, salsa,
- Ryan Kutnick y Team Mexico