Vintage post cards

I found these circa-1985 vintage St. Lucian postcards at a shop in Castries.

And then doing some online searching I found this one:

This one is definitely pre-independence, which means Pigeon Island was still and island then.  It was connected to the rest of the island sometime in the 1970’s.  While those of you that know me probably association “BWI” with “biking while intoxicated”, in this case I think it must stand for “British West Indies”.

I love these old postcards!  If I find any more I will be sure to share them.

 

 

Beach Corps! Posh Corps!

 

So,  back when I was a real Peace Corps volunteer in Benin, West Africa (RPCV 2003-2005) we used to make fun of people at Peace Corps posts in places like the Dominican Republic and the Ukraine, saying they were serving in Beach Corps or Posh Corps.

I had one of the better posts in Benin – Athiémé having fairly regular electricity and only being a 1 hour bike ride to the nearest Internet cafe and 4 hours to the capital where I could luxuries like cheese and butter.  People posted in more remote parts of the country (like didn’t even have electricity, and their closest Internet access was perhaps 1/2 day travel away by car.  Some people like Ashley Thompson had to travel by canoe to get to and from their villages to the nearest bank or telephone!

Yes I was only about 30 kms from the nearest town with a beach, but that was Grand Popo, and the currents along the West Coast of Africa are very deadly.  In fact during my service the husband of a Swedish woman who lived in Grand Popo drowned while we were swimming at the mouth of a river.  Another volunteer’s shoulder was dislocated by a wave that threw her to the sand.  So, no, Peace Corps Benin was not Posh Corps, nor was it Beach Corps by any stretch of the imagination.

When we would read reports of volunteers who had Internet in their houses (WTF!?!?!) and would spend their weekends at the beach or a fancy resort we totally knew we were better than them.  We were real Peace Corps volunteers!  We were badasses.

In 2014 I spent 1 month in Samoa and met quite a few Peace Corps volunteers there (it’s great being part of an extended Peace Corps family wherever you go!).

They fully admitted to being Beach Corps – the beaches in Samoa are beautiful, and the Samoans go there all the time.  In fact a lot of RPCVs returned to Samoa and worked or settled there because they liked it so much.  Samoa is a beautiful country and if I had been posted to Peace Corps Samoa it would have been like a dream come true!  However, all the volunteers in Samoa had to live with host families, because in the villages people simply do not live alone (see my forthcoming article on Fa’a Samoa to understand the role of kinship and family in Samoan culture).

Then I came to St. Lucia.

Admittedly, I work in the capital city and am a rRsponse volunteer, so I have a slightly different perspective than some of the volunteers living in the smaller villages. But seriously, these guys have it made.  This is totally Posh Corps Beach Corps!

So I feel like I have served my time the sweltering malarial swamps of West Africa and now can fully appreciate everything a Peace Corps role in the Caribbean has to offer, including lots of hanging out on the beach, drinking fancy cocktails, infinity pools, watching the sunset on board a yacht, and generally being a Posh Beach Corps volunteer!  I have absolutely no shame, and given the lack of ability for the staff at the Central Library to make any real progress on any of the tasks I was sent here to help them with, I am looking at this as a paid vacation and making sure to enjoy every last minute of it to make it worthwhile for me having resigned from my secure and well paid job, left my sweetheart, and given up all of my favourite hobbies (cycling, potting, sewing, etc.) and my $1500 ice-making fridge to come here and ride in a sweaty bus to and from the library 5 days a week.

So here are some photos from my spending my weekends enjoying Beach Corps!

 

 

Creations and frustrations

I have had some fun with creative projects lately, including a surprisingly good ikat shawl, and a bedazzled bum bag.

 

The weaving turned out better than I expected, considering I only had a rigid heddle loom strung up in my lounge, without any fancy gear at all.

 This is the loom threaded with the it dyed warp, and strung up to the burglar bars on the window in my lounge.  The other end was tied to a chair upon which I placed a gallon jug of water to weigh it down so it wouldn’t move while I was weaving.

It didn’t look very promising while it was strung up, so I wasn’t expecting great results when I finished, but actually I am very pleased with the final product!

I used a  white crochet-weight cotton thread and used cut-up plastic bag resist ties to make the chevron pattern, and dyed it using Rit Navy Blue fabric dye.  If I were to repeat this project I would have used a different kind of resist ties, maybe a stronger plastic (this person successfully used cassette tape) because the plastic bags I cut up were not very strong and not only were they a pain to wrap and tie, they broke, and then probably melted in the dye bath.  So I would have liked to have larger un-dyed areas but my supplies were a bit limited.  I need to source a different material for the resists on my next attempt.

This project took me about 6 weeks to complete, but the caveat being that the lighting in my lounge is not very good and so I could really only work on it during daylight hours.  Being close to the equator we have sunlight from about 6 am to 6 pm, and usually I don’t get home from work until about 5:30/6, so I was really only able to work on my weaving on the weekends, which is why it did take me so long.

Actually the lighting in my flat is so bad that I really can’t work on any craft projects after dark.  I did do some work on my bumbag in the evenings but I also did a fair bit of work on it at the beach and while waiting for the Tuesday carnival parade to start!  It’s nice to have a transportable project to work on when you’re on the go.

I bought this bum bag for 7 EC ($2.50 USD) at the cheap Chinese shop in Castries (S & S). This is the “before” picture.

 

And fabulously after!

Covered in beads and sequins!

I also tried to add a fringe that I made of the same crochet cotton I had for weaving, which I ombre dyed (the ends are slightly darker!).

However the cotton thread doesn’t make for a great fringe, it curls up and clumps up quite annoyingly.  I am not sure how to solve this problem. I might try to plait some of the fringe, or I wonder if I could iron it or treat it somehow to stop it from twisting up together?

This project was inspired by the beautiful bum bags on sale at Beksie’s Boutique – http://www.beksiesboutique.com/home

I want them all!

Which brings me to the frustrations…

Sadly, my ginger beer is a total failure!  It tastes disgusting!!!

However, it is perfectly carbonated and alcoholic!  So I did at least 2 things right.

 

Any I will drink it despite its disgusting-ness, because not to would be alcohol abuse!

Cheers!/*gag*

 

Bottling my ginger beer

 

 

After 2 months in the fermenter my ginger beer had decidedly finished fermenting and was ready for bottling.

In the past when I have done brews it was with a much larger fermenter with a spigot and bottling wand.  I do not have access to any such equipment here and realised that if I tipped the beer into the bottles individually all of the sediment at the bottom would get mixed into the brew and end up being yuck. So, I posted to homebrewtalk.com’s forum and asked for advice.  The best advice I received was to pour the brew into a sterilised bottling bucket and bulk prime it.  I got other advice that involved siphons and ball locks and complicated shit and lots of people recommending I buy a real fermentor with a spigot and throw out my “hi-c bottle” (It’s not Hi-c, it’s a water bottle!!), but those dudes love to spend money on their hobbies and I am a broke-ass Peace Corps volunteer so I will make a goddamn fermenter out of a paperclip and a condom if I have to.   Luckily I brought an airlock with me to Eastern Caribbean so I didn’t have to use a condom, but that is how we did things back in the day the first time I did Peace Corps!

So, I started out by sterilising my bottling bucket, a funnel, and a strainer.

I put 2 tbs of bleach in about 15 L of water and let it sit for 2 hours.

More stelising – this time with StarSan.

 

I tentatively removed the airlock… it smelled beery and gingery!  So far, so good!! and no mould! 

After letting the bucket dry as much as possible to remove any bleach odour,  I gently poured the beer into the bucket trying to disturb the sediment as little as possible.

I added 30 g white sugar to bulk prime the beer (which adds carbonation).   How did I come to this figure?

I read this very detailed discussion of bulk priming (which is way more info I need) – https://nationalhomebrew.com.au/brewers-library-beer-a-guide-to-bulk-priming

Then I decided – I have 4 L of beer, and I want it to be fairly carbonated, so I went for 30 g of white sugar because that is what I had on hand.

Brown sugar probably would have worked just as well.

I decided NOT to backsweeten the beer in the end.  What is back sweetening you ask?  I wrote about it in this post.  Basically it’s where you add extra sugar to your brew before bottling.  The yeast eats the sugar and makes carbonation (adding sugar to carbonate is called “priming”), and then somehow you kill the yeast/stop the carbonation before the bottles explode, and the extra sugar that hasn’t been eaten by the yeast is still left in your brew making it sweet (instead of dry).  But stopping the yeast from eating all the sugar and exploding your bottles is a bit challenging – you wait until your beer is carbonated enough, and then either you have to heat the bottle to a high enough temperature to kill the yeast, of put them somewhere cold enough the yeast falls asleep.  Hard when you are bottling using plastic bottles (you can’t heat them – they will melt) and you have a tiny fridge.

Another common method of back sweetening is to use some kind of non-caloric sweeter that the yeast won’t eat, like Stevia or Xylitol in addition to whatever amount of priming sugar you use.  Unfortunately I can’t really get either of those here.  Again, I wasn’t sure what to do so I went to the friendly folks at the brewing forum and asked for advice.  And, I got a really awesome piece of useful advice (apart from some really useless advice like “buy this fancy yeast” that I specifically said I CAN’T GET IN ST. LUCIA! Some dudes…) which was to prime with enough sugar just to add desired carbonation level, leaving a very dry ginger beer, an then sweeten it when you open the bottle with honey or simple syrup.  *ding!* so simple, what a great solution!  Thanks Tim C from Magog, Quebec, I love Eastern Townships!!!

So, I gently filled up 10 325 ml bottles with the brew.

And in 2 weeks they will carbonated and ready to drink!  *fingers crossed until then*

And here’s the yeasty sediment left over!

And yes after all that work I only got 10 bottles of ginger beer.  I need to find a larger fermenter if I want to repeat this experiment and make it worth my time.

Also, I did not have a hydrometer at the time so I literally have no idea how alcohol this beer will be.  I will find out in 2 weeks!  I’m thinking it will be about 5%

 

Boat party

I went for a boat cruise the other day with some friends of mine who are volunteering here in St. Lucia.

It was pretty awesome – probably the best part was Lisa one of the staff who really brought the party and had some sweet dance moves!

Mango season!

It’s mango season here, and that means mangoes as big as my head!

It also means mango chutney!

 

My lovely friend Anja of Fond Estate/ATV Paradise Tours gave me 10 kgs of mangoes from her plantation not long ago, and after eating mango everyday for 2 weeks I decided I should turn the rest into mango chutney!

I followed Jamie Oliver’s recipe for my chutney, with a few slight tweaks.

Ingredients

• 2 kg mangos (firm, but ripe)
• 8 cardamom pods (I used about 2 tsp powdered cardamom)
• 2 cloves of garlic
• 1 fresh red chilli (I used about 4 green jalapeños)
• 500 ml white wine vinegar
• 400 g granulated sugar
• 1 teaspoon cumin seeds
• 1 teaspoon coriander seeds
• 1 teaspoon chilli powder
• 2 teaspoons nigella seeds (I didn’t have any nigella seeds)
• 8cm piece of ginger
• (I added about 2 tbs of raisins)

Method

1. Peel, stone and roughly chop the mangos; set aside.
2. Peel and finely chop the garlic, then trim and finely chop the chilli.
3. Add the vinegar and sugar to a large pan over a medium heat, stirring until the sugar dissolves. Bring to the boil and reduce by a couple of centimetres.
4. Meanwhile, gently toast the cumin, coriander and cardamom seeds until aromatic, then crush with the chilli powder using a pestle and mortar.Add to the vinegar pan, along with the chopped mango, nigella seeds and 2 teaspoons of sea salt.
5. Finely grate in the ginger, add the garlic and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat and simmer for 45 minutes to 1 hour until it has a thick, syrupy consistency, adding the chopped chilli for the last 10 minutes.
6. Divide among sterilised jars, seal and keep for up to 6 months.

This is an easy way of vacuum sealing a jar without boiling it.  If it’s hot enough when you turn it upside down and let it cool, it the lid button should pop down.  Then you can store it for a while… though I did this with tomatoes and they went mouldy 😦 It’s probably better to process the jars in a water bath for 5 or so minutes to pasteurise them if you want to store them for any length of time.

At first taste this chutney is yummy and very gingery…

I also made a bottle of mango jalapeño hot sauce that I have been enjoying on cheese sandwiches or macaroni pie!