Melvin #1 and the Cheese Factory

For our first excursion we drove even further up into the mountains.  

Melvin lives an hour from town and has a farm that mainly produces cheese.  We arrived at 6:30, just in time to lend him a hand with the morning milking.  He shames our weak American fingers, producing fire-hose strength streams of milk while we barely get a tinkle. Melvin is an ageless child, standing  5 feet tall and skinny, a large face and mocking grin.  Wearing knee-high rubber boots, he slogs through the mud and cowpies, directing the flow of cows in and out of the barn.  After the milking, we start with the cheese-making process.  He takes all of the fresh milk (about 2 buckets worth) and strains it into a bowl.  Melvin then adds 3 (or was it 4?)(or 5?) drops of a chemical that magically speeds up the separation of the curd from the whey.  And we wait an hour, conveniently greeted by a breakfast of eggs, tortillas, and fried plantains.  Melvin's wife and brother cooked for us, the kids amazed that they could make so much food over a tiny wood stove (with fire! and smoke!).     

After breakfast, Melvin showed us his farm.  It was like seeing a Latin American Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory guided by a shrunken Costa Rican Gene Wilder.  He walked everywhere with a machete.  We went to his sugarcane fields, where in one smooth arc he lopped off three stalks and carved them into little edible sugar bombs for the students. We toured his pigs, turkeys, rabbits, chickens, genetically-inhanced-dwarf-dogs, and horses -- making it back to see the cheese develop.  The next step is, strangely (is there really anything strange in this place?), to pour hot water over the cheese.  Somehow, the solid part becomes more defined, and Melvin carefully pours out the excess liquid.  He continually lectures us on the importance of hygeniety -- while he fondles the cheese like a piece of play-do.

Nonetheless, we taste the cheese and it is amazing with a pinch of salt.  The students are, by now, cracked out on a combination of endless coffee and sugarcane, so we leave Melvin's farm frollicking and in high spirits, ready for the second leg of our day.