We Belong Together? (BoyxBoy)

Twenty Five

Twenty Five

Happy New Year you guys! :D

Hope you have a very happy New Year and that you don't party too hard, and that you enjoy,

-> Desyre

Daniel

I had promised Nate that I would be good and I had done my truly bestest to be. I had not entered the kitchen to steal food at all, and I had even started to help Nate a little. For example I knew that whenever he left the house he liked a mug of steaming tea to warm him up when he came back, so when he'd gone out to buy last minute things for the Christmas dinner yesterday I had been there to welcome him with a cup of tea with milk. And today I had gotten early to wash all the dishes so he had everything clean for when he woke up and started dinner preparations. We had been working hard at this dinner for almost two days now. Yesterday in the morning we had all come down to chop all the stuff we'd be needing, put the pork, beef, and chicken to defrost, and then set it to marinate until today. Nate was supposed to wake up before all of us, and set everything to stew in three different pots before putting them all to stew in the same pot, and let them cool down before the actual dinner preparations started. But I had woken up before him to wash the dishes and set out the trays in which the three meats were marinating, set out the wine, the vegetables and everything he'd be needing for the stewing process. When Nate came down he found that he only needed to put the stuff in the pots and let them cook because everything else was done. He had squinted at me and I had given him my most innocent look. He told me I wasn't earning any brownie points with him by doing all this and that I was not buying my way into helping them cook the Christmas dinner today. I chuckled and told him that I already knew that. I just wanted to help him. I really did.

Now, at almost nine in the morning and after having had a very, very early lunch, the stew had cooled down enough and the preparation was ready to begin. Making hallacas was no easy thing. You almost needed a production line to get the stuff done quickly, otherwise it took a really very long time to get the things done. As it was we were a three-person production line. Claire balled up the... What would be the word for this? Dough? No. That sounds like it implies wheat flour and milk and egg, like when you're making bread, or cookies, or cake. Mix? No. That didn't sound quite right either. That implies a lot of ingredients mixed in together, and all this has is corn flour, salt, water, and sunflower oil that had been marinated and cooked with annatto seeds. So what to call it then? Well. Whatever. I'd call it dough for now. So Claire made the dough into balls and then flattened them, to look like thick discs before she passed them to Nate. Nate was the one that set the banana leaves and then spread the sunflower oil cooked with annatto seeds that now had a deep orange color on the leaves before he grabbed the flattened dough that Claire set apart for him and flattened it further on the leaf until it was spread out, thin but not enough that the green color of the leaves could be seen through it. Then he grabbed some stew and spread it on the middle of the spread out dough, and then added, olives, peppers, chili, onions, raisins, and capers. Then he grabbed the banana leaves and folded them over, folding the dough over as well, so it covered the contents and continued folding them, wrapping the dough like a package, adding other leaves if needed to keep the leaves he'd just folded from unfolding.

That's when I came in. I was the one in charge of adding the final wrapping and tie the folded leaves with string, to ensure that they didn't come undone when I boiled them later. Oh that was another part of my job, boiling the whole thing for about twenty minutes so it cooked completely and then take them out and set them to cool before putting in another batch. The thing with cooking hallacas was that no matter what you did, you always ended up with more that you actually needed. No matter how well you deemed yourself on the eye calculating area, you'll always get the number wrong and end up with either more than you actually needed or running out on something. We had the luck that we didn't run out on anything, because that was really a drag if we ran out of stew and had a lot of mix left, but we ended up with about double of what we'd planned on doing. Instead of getting twenty or thirty hallacas at most, we wound up with sixty. What were we supposed to do with sixty hallacas?