Turn the Car Around Pineapple Topping

By | 2018-08-13T13:19:05-04:00 August 13th, 2018|Categories: Recipes|Tags: , , |

Costa Rica Cost of Living Update: Pineapple — $1.50

Did you ever feel like you missed a left turn in your life? That you went straight when you should have taken the off ramp? If so, I know how you feel. And in memory of that left turn Rob and I took, which resulted in us moving to Costa Rica, I made a delicious pineapple topping for ice cream. It’s been an amazing adventure so far, and I thank all of you for reading and watching it unfold.

Ingredients:

2 1/2 cups crushed pineapple

3 tablespoons unsalted butter

2 tablespoons brown sugar

1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

Melt the butter in a pan over medium heat. Add brown sugar, and stir.  Don’t mix, just stir.
Once this is dissolved, take the 2 1/2 cups of pineapple, and pour into pan.
And you’re just going to stir and coat both sides of pineapple.
Put 1/2 tsp vanilla in.
Cook off a lot of the moisture, until it’s chewy and sticky, and it gets even chewier and stickier when you put it on top of vanilla ice cream.

Pumpkin Pie Plantains

By | 2018-04-15T18:19:12-04:00 March 14th, 2017|Categories: Cooking Show, Recipes|Tags: , , , |

Costa Rica Cost of Living Update: One Plantain— 40 cents

Rob is definitely the funny one in the relationship. He even tells funny Brooklyn stories with characters straight out of central casting: Pina Colada Pat, Frankie the Fist, Fat Joey, Skinny Joey, Ice-Pick Joey (that’s actually a terrifying guy with a not-so-funny story).

There is nothing humorous about me. I come from a long line of Eastern European/Russian ancestors that have not uttered anything comical since 1832. It is rumored that in 1832, someone blew a fart at the dinner table and a seven-year-old boy laughed. He was never seen again.

My husband is Italian, and these lunatics plan their life around fun activities. I’ve just learned to say yes to all of Rob’s ideas. “You want to go kayaking?” Sure. “Hike up a waterfall?” Why the hell not? If it were up to me, I’d sit in my room all day reading Tolstoy’s, The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Spoiler alert: he dies.

My husband will even wake up in the middle of the night and ask me if I want French Toast… just because it’s fun to eat five hundred, carb-rich calories at three in the morning. Like I said, he’s nuts.

But I can make Rob laugh when he watches me cook. So I am making these videos just to see him smile. His smile can turn a mediocre day into a pretty good one. And when it’s a good day I can ask him to remove the fourteen hornet’s nests that are growing around the house.

Today I’m making plantains. They cost 40 cents each, and anything that cost 40 cents is worth making a video about. But I know most people in the United States don’t make them because they are weird and seem complicated. Who needs that in their produce? Not me. I want it easy.  So this is an easy, cheap plantain recipe that will impress your non-plantain eating neighbors at the next block party. I bet they don’t have a sense of humor either. But they will after you make these.

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