Or can he? Evidently there is MUCH more you can do with corn than just eat it on the cobb or creamed or on the side of a plate. Did you know that you can roast it, scrape it off the cobb, ground it and use that ground meal in a variety of ways? Clara, our ministry contact’s wife, helped teach us to cook it with sugar, butter, cream and a touch of salt. We used the same mixture spread flat between banana leaves then roasted them like flat pancakes over the stove. Then we spread the mixture into corn husks and rolled them up like burritos and placed them into a pot of water that we boiled over the stove.
The outcome was two very different tasting foods from the same original stuff. We have yet to learn how to make corn tortillas but I am sure it is only a matter of time until we become experts in that as well. While in El Tizate, we have learned to use inexpensive products to fill the belly. This is the main staple of the Guatemalan diet in addition to beans. Fortunately I still love them but we’ve got two more months of this type of food. We’ll see if there comes a point that I never want to see a corn tortilla again. For now, here are the two dishes we prepared our first day in El Tizate:
(banana leaf dish is called elotes & the corn husk dish is called tamal)
