A Food Revolution in Honduras

When I moved in to my own apartment about four months ago I realized that I had never had to cook for myself before, I didn’t know how to cook very much by scratch and I didn’t have any recipes. So, I sent out a call for recipes to my friends and family and didn’t get very far (not even my mom sent me recipes). Although some of you did indeed send me some good stuff, so I thank you. Then for my birthday Katie, my site mate in Santa Barbara, gave me a Peace Corps cookbook with recipes accumulated by PCVs. That served me well for a few months and I started to figure things out. I cooked beans for the first time in my life (which takes forever! No wonder people buy beans in a can) and started shopping in the market.

Then one day I get a package in the mail that I had completely forgot about…Susan Garcia, a friend from my samba group in Cleveland sent me The New Laurel’s Cookbook! For those of you who have or are familiar with this cookbook you know how amazing it is. For those of you who don’t, it is a vegetarian, health food cookbook that has tons of wonderful information. I have spent hours just sitting and reading the cookbook and imagining all the wonderful things I am going to make. It is great because it has information about different vegetables and grains and how to cook them and what nutrients they have in them. The book totally inspired me to eat and cook with tons of vegetables and whole grains. Also, I realized that my two years in the Peace Corps was a wonderful time for me to learn how to cook because I probably have more time now than I ever will in the future and I have a fresh vegetable market available to me every day. I don’t have much choice but to buy local, in-season produce. Yet, at the same time it also made me a little sad because some of the amazing things that they talk about in the cookbook I just can’t get here, like whole grain flour and brown rice and tofu and lentils and cottage cheese and yoghurt, etc. Basically my options were white rice and beans. I longed nostalgically for health food stores in the states.

Then another amazing thing happened, I discovered that I could buy flax seed and soy beans in the market and that every once in a while the mini-supermarket has lentils and garbanzo beans.

And then, yet another amazing thing happened, a vegetarian, health food restaurant opened up in Santa Barbara!!!! The owner is an American man and they make veggie burgers and whole grain bread and soy milk and all sorts of other good stuff. What’s really great about it is that they use brown rice and whole wheat flour which they are willing to sell to me, so I will actually be able to cook with whole grains. Honduran food is not generally very healthy and usually involves meat, so a vegetarian health food restaurant in a small town in central Honduras is a pretty progressive thing. So far people seem to like it though, so maybe the whole idea will catch on.