Ferns

The past two weeks since my sister Barbara died has been tough for me emotionally, and also logistically. Underneath the grief and sadness, I have been experiencing lots of head-banging in dealing with the logistics of getting to be fully functional here. I am no stranger to cumbersome bureaucracies in developing countries, but this place is really on the far edge of the continuum. The last month has been a process of two steps forward, one step back. Or one forward two back at times. Dealing with everything all together has been hard.

But that also means I get to celebrate my successes, of which there have been some! I want to share one of those, from the night before Barbara died.

 

Jay and I have made friends with a young woman who runs her family’s stall at the market. One or both of us goes to the market quite often, as it is a 10-minute walk from our house, so we go get fresh veggies frequently. And it is open every day into the evening. People keep telling us that local produce (“organic!”) will be available soon - they are very proud of the fact that everything grown in the country is (supposed to be) organic.

I learned that our friend Bhum finished 12^th level in school, finishing high school, and she is supposed to go to India to study nursing in June. But she is not sure she wants to go, because she is reluctant to be apart from her family. I’m hoping to convince her that while it seems scary, it is a good thing for her to do, because - as she has said and knows quite well - she doesn’t want to sell beans and bananas in the market for the rest of her life.  

 

On a recent day, as I was walking into the market, she was walking out, and grabbed my arm saying ‘come with me’. When I asked where we were going, she said “To get fins”. That didn’t sound like veggies.

We walked over to the parking lot across the street, stopping at one of the big trucks parked there surrounded by large baskets and bags of produce. She chatted with the people there while rooting around in the bags. Finally she pulled a bunch of something green out and showed it to me: it was a cluster of fiddleheads, the new shoots that curl out of the middle of fern plants. They are commonly eaten here (as they are in the Northwest!), and of course spring time is when the plants produce the new shoots. She was very proud of this find as we walked back into the market, and, as I finished collecting up what I needed, she put the ferns in a plastic bag and stuffed it in with my collection of onions, potatoes, and bananas. I protested, but she just smiled and handed it over, and I thought, ok I am learning how to cook ferns tonight. 

 

The first thing I realized is that because these are plants that come from the forest floor, they are filthy with dirt, sand, and woody debris. I spent more than a half hour trying to wash them, unfurling each fiddlehead to get the dirt out from inside the curled-up shoot. Then I had to decide when they were clean enough to switch from tap water to filtered water to finish washing them, because we don’t drink the tap water.

 

I also realized the stems were quite woody, so I thought I’d treat them like asparagus, and snap the stems at the point where they easily break, which meant most of the way up the stem to the fiddlehead. I learned later that people split the stems to make them more tender when cooking, but I think my way was more efficient.

 

After fussing with these little things for almost an hour, I decided they were ready to cook. Bhum had said the best way to cook them was to fry them, and put cheese on them, and I thought ‘no way!’. So I just sauteed them in a little olive oil, a little salt, and voila! Fresh veggies for dinner.

 

They were really good 