Wednesday morning was a little rough on the “over 40 crowd”. The prior day’s stairsteps took an awful toll on muscles. In particular is one muscle group you may not be familiar with: the tibialis anterior. Of course, the quads, hamstrings, and gastrocnemius muscles were also tight and sore.
So we hobbled to breakfast at La Terraza (where we had dinner the first night) and stopped to say ola! to the boa next to the bridge. Breakfast here was a buffet – they did a really nice job having gluten-free (libre de gluten) options set off to the side. They had a lot of pastry options including one Chris just had to try: guava ribs. It was a flat pastry made of layers of dough and butter (similar to how you make a croissant) and on the inside was a smear of mashed guava. On top was large crystals of sugar. Very tasty! The pineapple juice here is out of this world!
We went down to the main lobby after breakfast to wait for our tour for the day. Fortunately for the senior members of our crew, we had decided to do something a little lower key this day: local chocolate and coffee tour! We were supposed to be picked up at 9:30, but there was a lot of stuff going on in the lobby, and so about 9:42 Chris went up to the front desk to ask where our ride was and guess who was there? No, not Isidro, it was George Santos! THE George Santos! The one that invented the internet! and ran with the bulls! Not the cattle, the 90’s Bulls! The ultimate master of disguise! HE came to help US get on OUR tour! What a nice guy!
Okay, so maybe the guy at the front desk wasn’t George Santos (but you can’t prove it wasn’t, so it had to have been!), but I’ll be damned if it didn’t look like him.
Anyway, the van pulled up and it was from a local producer of cacao and coffee called Don Juan. So they drove us a short trip there and we started the tour. Hour 1: Chocolate. We probably enjoyed this hour the most because we both like chocolate and because Chris isn’t a know-it-all about it, like with coffee. NOTE: it has oft been stated that Chris does not like chocolate. The truth is he does not like cheap chocolate.
They told us that we would be wise to put on bug spray before we started. Turns out the natural pollinator for cacao are mosquitoes, so on the property they have an environment that is hospitable for them. Our tour guide was Rafael – he was a late-40s thin Costa Rican man with a lot of energy. He led us down a path talking about how they organically grow cacao – the bean from which chocolate is derived. He stopped, and cut off two little twigs that each had clusters of very small green berries. They looked like grapes but they were too small. They were peppercorns! Chris tried one and it was the most intense peppercorn flavor ever, followed by this long-slow burn. It was a different kind of burn, though, not the same as the one you get from capsaicin. It was agreed upon that it would have been ill-advised if Adrienne had tried one.
Near the end of the Cacao tour, we ended up at a long table and Rafael ground up cacao nibs with a hand grinder and passed around ingredients and let us each make our own chocolate bar. The cacao bean has enough butter in it to make the bar on its own, but commercially the cacao powder is separated from the butter, then palm oil is substituted. The freezing point of cacao butter vs palm oil is the reason a commercially produced chocolate bar will melt in your pocket but a naturally produced one will not.
At this time, we rounded a corner and started the coffee tour. Rafael is a bit of a sommelier of coffee, probably on a higher level than Chris, but this tour was a lot of fun. And, at the end, he brewed some coffee for us his way, the Costa Rican way. They mix water and freshly ground coffee in a large pitcher and mix vigorously for two minutes. This process Chris noted was immersion, although Rafael did not use that term. Then, he had a wooden structure about 18″ tall with a cotton net sticking out over another pot. The hot water with coffee grinds were then poured through this cotton filter (Chris referred to this as pour over). The advantage of this method of brewing coffee is that you get some of the best of both methods – immersion is a reasonably fool-proof method with a wide window of finished brewing, pour over is preferred because it is clean and has a high degree of clarity. Chris noted that he has a similar brew method at home called the Clever Dripper.
Jumping back to the cacao part of the tour, Rafael made us a drink that was, without question, one of the most important things we will bring back with us from Costa Rica and we both knew it as soon as we tasted it. Rafael called it “the Gods’ Drink” and it was a mixture of cacao, cinnamon, pepper, and a few other spices. As soon as we get home, Chris swears to the Gods that he’ll get the recipe perfected, so if you’re interested you’ll have to message us and set up a time to come over and try it.
Thankfully, this was a (relatively) short tour, we caught the bus back to the hotel in time for lunch at Mis Amores. Here, we each ordered a pizza – Adrienne:Pepperoni::Chris:Mushroom. We each had another Coca Cola in a bottle, went back to relax and soothe those sore muscles in the private pool for the afternoon.
By the time dinner came around, it had started to rain. It rains a lot here. They tell us this is the dry season, but it’s the wettest dry season I’ve ever encountered. Every building at its entrance (from hotel rooms to restaurants to lobbies), they all have a place for umbrellas and it’s always stocked. So we grabbed our umbrellas and started walking, but by this time it was dark, and raining, and we didn’t know where we were going, and there might have been a brief argument, but we passed a very wet man covered in towels who was able to point us in the right direction and we found our way to Asia Luna, which is English for Asia Luna.
This was a very small restaurant – like, I think they’re going for artificial scarcity on this one. For an appetizer we had chicken skewers with a macadamia sauce. For dinner, we split two sushi rolls and a chicken noodle wok. Drinks were fruity. Before leaving the restaurant, we made sure to clarify with the waiter where we were going and how to get there. He was a very young man and did not seem to know anything about the boa (it’s little more than a stone’s throw from our front step) but he gave us immaculate directions, better even than Google Maps, and we got home, and Chris did some serious leg stretches and we climbed into bed very sore and rather tired and just a little bit wet, ready for another adventure tomorrow.
Pura Vida!
Adrienne the Planner and Chris the Blogger
Dining With Dr. Baltes 