Warning: Vegetables May Be Hazardous to Your Health

So here is the three step process to preparing vegetables in a developing country:

1. “Wash” them, or more accurately, remove the visible dirt from them by rinsing them in water.


2. Boil, fry or steam the life out of them


3. Continue to boil, fry or steam the life out of them for at least ten more minutes.

Then, your veggies are ready to be eaten in such a way that most likely will not cause harm to your person. The disclaimer here is most likely, because, to be honest, I’m sure there’s a more exact process out there, like how when I was in Guatemala, the general standard was that you should boil your water for no less than 20 minutes. By then it tasted so god awful due to smoke from the fire that was boiling it, you didn’t want to drink it anyway. But you knew, more or less, that it wouldn’t cause you to get sick.

There were similar rules to follow for fruits and veggies. I believe the common mantra was to never eat anything that wasn’t baked, boiled, or peeled. It definitely cuts back on your selection.

So I just got done steaming the shit out of some spinach, and now it’s cooking for about 45 minutes at 350, along with the other companion ingredients in a lasagna. That probably sounds pretty impressive. You should have seen what I was going to cook for dinner. It involved ingredients in the following picture.

But what I ended up eating (because the lasagna would be done too late to eat tonight for me) involved ingredients in the following picture.

Yes, I wimped out. See, the altitude plus the fact that I think I am fighting a bit of a cold have combined to sap all of the energy out of me. The idea of having to think about what to do with all of those ingredients plus prepare it all in such a way that it wouldn’t kill me, well, it was just too much for tonight. I’ll try to tackle it tomorrow night when I have more energy. But for now, I will wait for the lasagna to be finished, and I will look forward to eating it some other time this week. Maybe tomorrow while I’m boiling ingredients for my next Bolivian culinary adventure.