by Esme McAvoy

 

We’ve been in Andrés’ home town Manizales for the last few weeks, a small city in the heart of Colombia’s coffee-growing region. Yet, on the lower slopes of the surrounding Andean mountains, where the climate becomes warmer and more tropical, the coffee bushes give way to fields of bright green sugar cane which is used to make one of Colombia’s most traditional products: panela.

manna's supplier of organic fresh leaf & root vegetables.  locally produced, urban community project.  delivered by bicycle!

 

by Esme McAvoy

 

It’s empowering stuff, eating food that you’ve sown, grown and picked yourself. And I’m just talking from my own limited experience aged eight, growing strawberries in the back garden. We were self-sufficient all summer long in sugar-sweet baby strawberries to the extent that my big sis once gorged on so many in a single sitting that she almost turned into one, coming out in berry-red blotches that left her out of strawberry-eating action for the remainder of the season. Lucky me.

Fast forward to summer 2011 and, back in London for a few months, I stop in at manna for a soya latte and a natter. Roger and Robin start telling about one of their newest suppliers – a food growing co-operative cultivating organic salad leaves of all colours and flavours on the edge of Epping Forest and delivering them to customers by bicycle. I’m intrigued and it’s quickly agreed that a visit is in order.

by Esme McAvoy

 

Bananas are bananas, right? Always yellow and always, erm, banana-shaped. Well, not always.

 

Here in Colombia bananas come in all shapes and sizes. Some known as plantains are a radioactive shade of yellow-green, longer and fatter than your forearm with firm, starchy flesh that needs to be cooked first. Others are short and squat with rust-red and yellow skins. In Minca, the smallest banana I’ve seen is from our neighbour’s garden. Called a ‘bocadillo’ (‘little mouthful’) or ‘bananito’, it’s a super-sweet, baby variety barely bigger than your thumb that you can eat in a single bite and easily polish off five in one sitting. Others have skins bubblegum pink.

 

by Esme McAvoy

 

It was in Colombia that I discovered just how good hot chocolate could be.

 

Colombians prefer to drink their home-grown cacao rather than eat it and a ‘choco-lah-tay’ means a cup of deliciously thick hot chocolate rather than a bar of Cadbury's.

by Esme McAvoy

 

Life here in the mountains might be relaxed and calm but I feel like there’s so much to learn. Things that I’d never even thought to question before while living in the city, about how things grow, and when. We’re now in the height of summer and observing the countless changes it brings in garden’s plants, trees and insects.

 

The intense summer sunshine seems to have woken up every plant and tree we have, its warmth encouraging them to flower and produce fruits. There are hundreds of bunches of still-green mangoes hanging from the mango trees that are now the right size and only need to turn that delicious shade of sunset orange-pink. Unable to wait until they’re fully ripe, we’ve started to pick them green, peeling then grating them with a little lemon juice to give an extra crunchy, sweet-sour zing to a big bowl of salad. Stewing them with cloves, a stick of cinnamon and a good dose of Colombian brown sugar, panela, also puts them to good use, producing a thick, apple sauce-like compote that’s delicious on toast or stirred into porridge.