Green Papaya Compote

What should we do when we have soo many green papayas on the tree?




Green Papaya Compote, of course!




We don´t have real winters in most of Brazil, so no need to preserve seasonal fruits or vegetables - we have them all year round. When we do, it is because we want to eat it for our afternoon snack (we call it "afternoon coffee" - café da tarde). Green papaya compote is one of the most popular, as papaya trees can grow anywhere taking up little space.

RECIPE: get a fully grown green papaya (not baby one, but before it starts to ripen) from the tree. Let it stand one night to draw out milky sap. The next day, peel it, cut it into pieces. Thicker pieces make creamier ones. Let the pieces soak overnight in water with one teaspoon of baking soda (for a crispy outside and creamy inside). Add sugar (less than a kilo of sugar for a kilo of green papaya) and about 2 cups of water to make syrup. Cook all the ingredients together with cinnamon sticks and cloves. Optional: add 2 fig leaves for aroma. This is a homemade recipe. You can have syrup in various degrees of thickness, color, or sweetness.

Green Fig Compote

I have a young purple fig tree with lots of green fruits...





So I had a good idea!





Made into green fig compote and served with Gorgonzola cheese...



Today I sliced the figs, placed over crackers, and sprinkled with Gorgonzola cheese for our afternoon tea at the church. It was rather an exotic plate for the type of cheese. Brazilians usually like to combine homemade preserves with fresh farmer´s cheese.

RECIPE: A bit laborious but well worth it. Pick green figs with gloves (or the milky sap may cause allergy), wash them, and put into boiling water for 10 minutes. Put them into the freezer until rock hard. Under the running water, peel each fruit (unless you don´t mind the skin). Drop peeled figs, some whole, some cut into half (your choice), cover with water, and add coarse sugar (granulated sugar is fine) to your taste. Usually, 1 kilo of fruit calls for 500 grams to 1 kilo of sugar. I used something in between. I allowed the fruits to cook and added a little more water to keep the syrup level at fruit level (that is, plenty of syrup). To make the compote taste and smell like figs, I added 3 leaves while cooking. Very often, we make green papaya compote (same process) but add fig leaves for the aroma. We like to add cinnamon sticks and cloves.

January 2nd, 2012 – Last Few Months

In Brazil, Summer break starts sometime in December and it usually goes until after the Carnival – a religious holiday that transformed into a big national event. Being so, I don’t go to town twice a day as I used to, but I still need to run my errands a few times a week. With extra time on my hands, I started to walk on a road I used to run, a little less, as my dogs bark at motorcycles and even to cows belonging to somebody else. To avoid any situation, I interrupt my walk. They are so many (6) that I won’t have enough time to strain all of them before I leave. One Sunday before Christmas another puppy joined our pack. It was said to be a Pinscher Border Collie mix. To me, it is another mutt. Every morning and every afternoon, I sit on my veranda chair to relax. The cool fresh morning air, contrasting with hot bitter coffee, I sit there enjoying myself. The dogs come to greet me, the puppy wants extra attention, and I raise my legs to a leg rest and rest. In the evening, after the sun has set, I also sit there remembering how much my back porch has improved. It used to be the portrait of a decadence. My father’s lack of financial resources to give it a little lift. After his death, I sold many farm equipment, as I decided to lease out the land instead of working on it (I tell the reasons later). With the money dripping in, I started to fix up the house, and after three months, I have the whole house fixed up and re-painted. Some areas such as the kitchen got a total makeover. I had the tile floor and wall changed, bought new appliances, and above all, took all the old stuff out of the house. My mother and sister used to oil paint canvas. We had several of them stored for decades. I hang them up on walls, making the house looking cheery. The biggest effect of the fixed up was the impression that it is not a dying place anymore. Yes, it had a solution for something that I thought could never happen. Sadly, it took my father’s death to make his inheritance take value. I live now in a newer, clean house. I didn’t have to make any major purchase, except for the kitchen, but lots of little ones made a difference. For instance, the drawer chests had a piece of fabric replacing the original knob since my childhood. I spent a few reais to buy new knobs on the furniture to take on a new look. Besides new painting giving an impression of clean walls, which were not only dirty but crumbling, the tiles cracked or simply missing on several spots in the house, the removal of old curtain tracks (yes, it was not a modern rod) for newer rods and curtains. I had two men coming to do the job. They are dona Rosa’s brothers. During sugar cane harvest, they have work, but between September to March, they go unemployed. Even though they are not professional carpenters, they bravely took the job. Of course, many things were far from perfect, but I enjoyed the company. My biggest concern was to have a stranger working inside the house while I was out, but it turned out that they didn’t touch anything that shouldn’t be. They must come back to fix up the fence around the house – strangely, the fence was my first concern, but became the last one on the list. Inside and outside of the house finished, including the set up of my wood-fired oven coated with red mud and cow’s fresh manure, I am working on my new interest: flower garden! I have already spent some to buy two palm trees and other plants. My main interest lays in forming a tropical garden with heliconias, bromeliads, ixoras. The plants that survived my mother’s illness (she used to have a very diverse plant material all over the garden, including a collection of orchids) were a few. Indeed they were sturdy, surviving lack of water or fertilizers over ten years. I felt sorrowful in eliminating what was there to give place to a whole new garden. I couldn’t cut down all the hibiscus, gardenia, dracaenas, rhododendron, zedoary, grass, hydrangea, ixora, bougainvillea, pata-de-vaca - a Brazilian native beautiful tree with perfumed white flower -, and many more, including a native berry tree. How could I make a beautiful landscape preserving all of those? After some research, I decided not to eliminate them, but crowding the spot with more plants, especially tropical ones, without any rigidity of a French garden, but rather more organic and natural – letting nature do it. Lastly, my next upcoming project is to revive my organic vegetable garden. The old spot is full of weeds, dry, and rock hard. But it was once a lush garden, so it can be it again. This time, though, I am going to build a shade, as the sun is the inclement most part of the year and no leafy greens can survive. The deep sadness that I feel with the loss of my father brought up new hope for living on the farm that I had once given up upon.

Fixing Up the House - December 4th, 2011

Life has taken precedence over writing the last few weeks. I have been very busy fixing up my house. It was a huge project, since my father could never keep up with the maintenance. He liked to do things by himself and not hire anyone, but the house was the last thing on his to do list.
We had a problem with rain water infiltration, which ended up creating mold on the ceiling and the walls. The walls were cracked, for the house had a problem with a foundation which got fixed, but the cracks remained for years. The tile floor had many missing pieces, and one of the worst problems were old appliances lined up in the kitchen. It was not only an unpleasant view of the house, but the cat was doing a bad job of keeping the mice away.
After my father’s death, with the fear of living just three women on the farm, I decided to change the kitchen doors that lead to the outside, as they were totally rusted, and one of them was being locked with an old belt. Slowly I asked them to do extra jobs, and ended up fixing up the whole house. They finished inside painting last week, and are still working on exterior.
It was a tremendous step for me, as fixing up the house (and spending all the money) means that I am to remain on the house and possibly, with the farm. The house now is the center of my life. I never took good care of any place I lived, as I always thought not to be permanent. When I was single and living in America, I spent the least money on decorating the home, always buying mismatched things at garage sales. Only when I got married and moved to a house, my husband allowed me to buy new furniture. I shopped many things at Ikea, to soon sell them all as we moved to Brazil. Here, we bought our first home, paying it off cash. Everything was new, but the marriage started to fall apart. Once again, we moved back to America, to Florida, this time. We had all used furniture again. Later, we financed a home, but the sparse furniture were the same. The only thing I did was to paint inside the house, using a technique I learned on TV. My bedroom resembled an old Tuscan home, with rusted golden color and unfinished wooden furniture. I loved the dark red with golden embroidery on a bed cover and on the curtains. I decorated the walls with black iron candle holder on the walls. Again, with the end of marriage, I sold them all. I returned to Brazil bringing only newly bought home appliances and some bed and bath items. Once settled in a small resort town I chose to live before I moved back with my parents, I furnished the house, spending again all the money I had brought.
The idea of settling myself here is starting to spring up in my mind. I feel happy and at peace. I have everything I need in this little town.
While I took away all the old kitchen appliances (3 refrigerators, 3 cabinets – actually one book shelf that worked as one, and a stove), three of six tables, and many more items, specially things that were cluttering the house, I hanged old canvas my mom and sister oil painted several decades ago. With a clean home, decorating it is an indescribable pleasure.
While before I was embarrassed to have people over, I now invite friends to visit me.
But my plans don’t end at finishing the house, but they extend to transform my yard into a nice garden. My plan is to transform part of the farm into “green savings” (plantation of trees for future wood harvest) and other part for reforestation. I will love to plant native trees, shrubs, herbs, flowers to be my own private forest. The reviving of the garden is in my mother’s honor, as she used to have a large collection of plants around of the house. Part of it died when she travel as seasonal worker to Japan and others died when she was unable to care for them. A very few plants have survived, and I am now wanting to run around to form a lush garden all over again.
Living on a farm is to live with living things. They always make me want to live another day, as if they depended on me.