I am not sure if I have written much about pupusas, but I do love to eat them! Since today, November 14th is National Pupusa Day in El Salvador, I decided to search the word "pupusa" in my Google photos to see what I would find. Although Google could not really tell the difference between my photos of pupusas and those of tortillas, I was sort of impressed that the search feature identified any pupusa photos at all. If you are not familiar with pupusas, I am sorry. They are delicious. The basic idea is to put soft, white cheese and other optional ingredients inside a tortilla and cook it on a griddle. Common options are plain cheese, bean and cheese, cheese with shredded ayote (sort of like zucchinni) or chipilĂn, or cheese with beans and pork rinds. You can really put anything inside a pupusa. Once, at a pupueria in Washington DC, I had a lobster and cheese pupusa. The masa or dough can be made from corn flour or rice flour, and depending on where you are in El Salvador
El Salvador has a trash problem. This is not a new situation. This is not a new story. If you walk around El Salvador, you spend a fair amount of time walking over stuff like this. I have been thinking about trash, storm drains, rain. I cleaned out the storm drains near my church in the US this weekend - always needed after a windy day. Our alley sometimes floods, and it's better to be proactive than to mop up water in the church kitchen. Storm drains along paved roads in El Salvador are no joke. They are gigantic openings where curbs should be and are never covered by grates. In a rainstorm, a small cow could literally be swept down into one of those things. Naturally, as a convenient hole that goes to who-knows-where, people see the storm drain abyss as an excellent place in which to sweep street trash, especially along the busy thoroughfares in San Salvador. (Someone told me once that this is actually illegal, but I still see people do it.) In small communities trash gets swe
Tales of mysterious encounters with a headless priest in the dark of night are not uncommonly told among the Salvadoran people. After the time of the Spanish invasion, when conquerors wielding swords or carrying Bibles established their power, there emerged a legend of an imaginary priest who wanders in the streets and pathways as a lost soul. He appears to those who are out walking in the evening. He is searching for his head. He, or perhaps his head, lets out screams into the night. Those who see him feel cold and are sometimes paralyzed with fear and cannot speak for days. The story of the Priest with no Head is well-known and frequently told in Tonacatepeque. Some say the ghost of El Padre sin Cabeza (the headless priest) is real. Some say the story was invented by the church in order to scare indigenous people into becoming Christians. Some who study traditional, Salvadoran tales say this legend was created by enemies of the church. A painting of the Padre sin Cabeza (headles
Comments
Post a Comment