A friend from my school in Antigua and I travelled from Antigua to Panajachel by shuttle bus, then across Lake Atitlan to San Pedro La Laguna on a launch, where I spent the next week swinging in a hammock in a B&B as far out of town as we could find. Not quite true. I also practiced my Spanish with locals working near the B&B and around town, checked out Spanish schools, and attended a cooking class because we realised that we didn’t really know how to cook with the products we found at the market. Sure, there were carrots, onions and a number of other vegetables we recognised, but the chickens were just sitting whole on the counter, and we would still need a sauce of some kind.
Mayan Kitchen has a perfect rating on TripAdvisor, so while the cost was somewhere near a week’s worth of food, we decided that was a worthwhile investment. Not surprisingly, the ‘simple’ dishes we chose were still normally reserved for festivals and celebrations, so they might be a bit much for us to cook on a daily basis, but the experience left us more confident.
Our instructor, Anita, met us near the wharf and introduced herself as we walked up the steep hill to the market. She was a local girl who took every opportunity life threw at her, including learning to speak English from tourists, becoming a guide, then being mentored by the Americans who owned the tour company she worked for. In the process, she has created a cooperative for single women across the many towns around Atitlan to make and sell textiles, she has set up the cooking school, and gives back by teaching English to school children.
The locals all know her and she explained that she never bargains because she knows they’ll only sell her quality produce. We buy a chicken, avocados, large green squash, herbs, tortilla dough and enough other items to fill three large shopping baskets before heading back to her kitchen. Anita rents the whole building, setting up the cooperative shop on the ground floor, lives above that, and has her kitchen at the top. She gets a kick out of watching our reactions as we turn the last corner on the stairs and take in the view of the lake through the open wall. Until her mentors suggested turning this space into a kitchen, it was a storage area.
Anita masterfully guided four students through the various steps required to make jocon de pollo, guacamole, mole de platanos and slipped in a snack of spiced mango that we ate during a morning break. At the end, we each only had a piece of the puzzle, but she sent us all the recipes so we can try it ourselves later. We did get an amazing three-course lunch with breath-taking views, and a better understanding of how to open an avocado by hand and how to use those big green squash thingees. Now if only I could pat the tortillas into discs without tearing them.