Se Hace el Camino en Anda: Making Bread

I haven't been able to get online most of this week. There was another fire on a different mountain, the mountain where all the antennas are - so there was no internet anywhere for awhile. Thankfully this week's fire wasn't as big as the one on Qoriorko, and the internet is running smoothly (or as smoothly as it runs here) once again.

Last weekend was a packed weekend. It was all saint's day, día de la canción criolla, Halloween, and day of the dead. One of the traditions for the weekend is for kids to make special breads. The girls make pan wawa (baby bread) and the boys make pan caballo (horse bread). Afterwards I think they just eat it. Offerings for the dead are usually different foods.

I was invited by Mari and Bobby to join their family* at the oven for bread making. It was a joy to step inside the work room and see a long wooden table covered in flour, a stand mixer sitting in the corner with bits of dough stuck to the sides, and small chunks of bread dough sitting on the table waiting to be shaped. Maybe I was thousands of miles away from 27 Corinth Street, but I was right at home. I washed my hands and got to work patting the chunks of dough into flat circles to make the round single serving bread typical to the Andes.

There was also the nice surprise of seeing Sra. Estella. She's the head of the kitchen at the parish, so I see her most days, but I don't see her outside of work all that often. Bobby is her son, so she was there overseeing her children, grandchildren, and daughter-in-law as they shaped their various breads.

The breads came out delicious, and Bobby filled a small plastic bag with breads for the Mountain House. It was a wonderful day with my favorite family in Andahuaylillas.

More pictures after the jump.

*This is the family I talked about in my last Quarterly Review