Fruit Trees

There are a number of fruit and walnut trees on our hosts’ property. This is great news for us as food-consumers, but not-so-great news for us as alpaca-sitters. Hilary suggested that too much fruit was bad for the alpaca’s diet, and we’ve learned the hard way that choking down large chunks of fruit (ie, a whole apple) could lead to something getting stuck in an alpaca’s long throat.

We noticed a small, fluffy, miserable-looking female alpaca spitting up the other morning, and upon over-the-phone advice from Hilary we forced the poor thing to swallow some children’s tummy medicine. It made her puke even more, which apparently dislodged whatever she had tried to swallow, because she recovered very quickly after that. Alpacas can’t cough, you see, so they vomit instead.

Fortunately for us, our goal as food-consumers (to collect all of the apples, figs, plums, and walnuts for ourselves) goes along very well with our goal as alpaca-sitters (to protect the alpacas from the evil food that falls from the trees in their paddocks and tempts them to fight with one another and gobble at a choking speed).

Nicola and I fighting over the fig tree

Our first day’s harvest

Also fortunately for us, we are now living on our own in a fully modern kitchen, complete with cookbooks and internet access, free to experiment with lots of new dessert recipes, like fig cobler.

Alan’s apple cobbler – yumm!

We’ve been cooking food-food too, promise. Alan had an unfortunate experience when making a calzone. It had taken us FOREVER to find yeast at the supermarket, but what we did find was labeled Ammoniaca. We don’t know Italian; it’s probably a brand name or something, right? NOOOOOO! Some googling has led us to believe that it is yeast for ammonia cake? Anyway, the calzone smelled and tasted like chemicals, and poor Alan scooped out the filling and ate it on toast, which actually is a pretty good way to eat calzone filling.

Innocent-looking yeast package, right?