Cooking like a local
By Claire Dombrowski
On our third day in Costa Rica, we attended a cooking class where we made the dinner that we would be eating later on. On our way to the cooking class, we didn’t really know what to expect. We didn’t know how many people would be cooking, what we would be cooking, and some of us didn’t even know how to cook. It was a gloomy day, and we had just come from walking around at an outdoor international market in the rain, so we were very tired, but anxious to hear what we would be doing.
When we arrived, we entered someone's house and sat at folding tables arranged around the room. The woman that would be teaching us how to cook sat up front, and our tour guide, Angie, stood next to her to translate for us. They first asked for five volunteers, and everyone was very shy, but ready to try something new. I was one of the five to go up, and we started off by making Gallo Pinto. Four of us were given different ingredients to hold, and one of us was stirring the ingredients around in a pot over a burner. When it was our turn to add our ingredients, we would just go up and dump them into the pot. It was so simple. We were all stressing out before the class on how good the meal would taste, but after making the first recipe, it showed us that when we all contributed small things to the recipe, it came together easier and it was nothing to stress over.
After we finished the rice and beans, there were still four other dishes that we had to make, including tortillas con queso, cajetas de coco, tortas de plátano maduro, and carne molida. Most of the other recipes followed the same structure where a few students would go up and each do different small parts, but the tortillas con queso was a little bit different. After the dough was mixed, each person went up and got to shape their own tortilla. To do this, each person chose a piece of dough, then on top of a sheet of plastic, they pressed the dough down to flatten it, then rounded it out with the palm of their hand. I thought that this was fun because everyone got to make a tortilla, and as we were making them, we were watching and learning from each other.
While we were doing this, there were a few people that worked there that were in the kitchen making sure that everything was set up correctly. Once it was all set up, and the tortillas were done being cooked, the food was brought out to where we were sitting, and it smelled amazing. We had so much fun making it all, and to actually see it all together and complete made us all feel so accomplished, and for a lot of us that didn’t cook very much, it showed us how cooking doesn’t have to be difficult or scary.
