Naturalist Newsletter: Oct 24/ Tortilla Coffee

[Rob]

JIM CONRAD’S NATURALIST NEWSLETTER
Issued from Hacienda Chichén beside the Maya ruin of
Chichén Itzá in the central Yucatán, MÉXICO

October 24, 2010

*****

TORTILLA COFFEE
When Luis, one of the waiters, mentioned the
possibility of brewing a decent coffee concocted from
roasted, ground tortillas, Marcela, a visitor from
Argentina, wanted to try it. I was the only one around
with an appropriate campfire, so we tried it in my
hut.

I built a fire, let it burn until chunky, glowing
embers formed, and atop two logs put a wire mesh with
some tortillas atop it. It looked like what's shown at
http://www.backyardnature.net/n/10/101024tu.jpg

Notice that flames aren't lapping at the tortillas;
heat from glowing embers is baking them.

Maya folk who do this in their homes roast their
tortillas on a traditional comal, which is a flat,
thin, metal disk suspended over flames on three rocks.
We didn't have that, but our wire-mesh-over-coals
technique seemed to work OK.

We made three tries at it. One attempt produced almost
totally black tortillas. The black dust scraped from
them made a flavorless brew tasting the way you'd
expect charcoal and water to taste.

Another try with tortillas that turned out hard but
only slightly browned produced a drink tasting like
roasted tortillas, which wasn't bad, but there was
no coffee flavor.

The best result was by slowly roasting tortillas until
they were hard and brown, with only a little black
charring. You can see part of such a tortilla at
http://www.backyardnature.net/n/10/101024tv.jpg

Such a tortilla crumbles easily into the bottom of a
cup, then you can use something blunt to smash the
crumbles into powder. The resulting powder can be used
as if it were instant coffee. Add hot water, sweeten
and add milk if you wish, and, by golly, if you get it
right it actually has a robust coffee taste and you
just sit there sipping, amazed that you've produced
decent coffee from tortillas.

I've parched corn kernels in a similar fashion, with
similar results, so if you don't have tortillas but do
have loose corn kernel, try browning them over embers,
then grinding them into a powder. Up North most
tortillas sold in stores are wheat tortillas, not corn
tortillas like ours. I don't know whether wheat
tortillas would do or not. I suspect that roasted
wheat tortillas might make a flavorful drink, but I
doubt it'd taste as much like coffee as a properly
roasted, corn-based brew.

*****

LONGTAIL SKIPPER OF UNDERSIDES
Around noon on a hot, sunny day when all the world
seemed in the mood for a siesta, suddenly a nervous
little packet of energy flitted by and landed upside-
down beneath a Jacquemontia's blue flower, as seen at
http://www.backyardnature.net/n/10/101024sk.jpg

Before he got away I put the camera beneath the down-
hanging blossom and shot skyward, hoping the camera's
automatic focusing was working, and got the shot at
http://www.backyardnature.net/n/10/101024sl.jpg

We've had longtail skippers before, but this one
struck me as different. You might enjoy savoring
variations on a longtail skipper theme by comparing
the above shot with the White-tailed Longtail shown at
http://www.backyardnature.net/yucatan/mariposa/butt032.jpg

Bea in Ontario pegs our new longtail skipper as the
widely distributed Asine Longtail, POLYTHRIX ASINE,
native from northern Mexico (rarely wandering into
southern Texas) south to Perú. I read that its
caterpillars eat leaves of members of the Bean Family,
which are abundant here, and live in nests formed of
rolled or tied-together leaves.

Also I read that adult Asine Longtails land with their
wings spread across the undersides of leaves. That's
exactly what I saw myself, and it's worth noting that
in the picture the skipper is feeding upside-down as
well. From my limited experience with this species it
looks like it specializes on the undersides of things.

That's interesting, because it's a basic tenet of
population ecology that two taxa can't occupy exactly
the same ecological niche for long without one species
eventually displacing the other. If one of two
otherwise identical species visits upright flowers
while the other goes to dangling ones, that's enough
to maintain both species in the same area. I don't
know that that's the case with the Asine Longtail and
its look-alike fellow longtails, but the concept comes
to mind when you see this one's passion for
undersides.

*****

AFRICAN SPIDERFLOWER
Next to a stone wall along a little backstreet on
Pisté's south side I spotted the curious weed shown at
http://www.backyardnature.net/n/10/101024gn.jpg

One curious thing about it was its long, slender
fruits held more or less horizontally below the white
flowers at the inflorescence's top. A fruit close-up
is at http://www.backyardnature.net/n/10/101024go.jpg

If you know your Northern wildflowers you'll recognize
that the fruits are similar to the long, slender
capsules often produced in the Mustard Family.
However, certain features of this plant are very un-
mustardy. For example, Mustard-Family fruits don't
arise from such long, stiff stalks, and I don't recall
any mustards with palmately compound leaves like these
-- leaflets arising together at the tip of a petiole,
as with Horsechestnut and Virginia Creeper leaves.
Maybe you also know that the huge Mustard Family is
mostly found in temperate and subarctic environments,
not here in the tropics. Therefore, it looks like we
have something close to a mustard, but not.

When I got off my bike and looked closely at the
flowers it was clear that I had something other than a
weedy mustard plant. You can see what I mean at
http://www.backyardnature.net/n/10/101024gp.jpg

The flower is bilaterally symmetrical (zygomorphic),
with each flower bearing four white petals held
skyward, while Mustard Family blossoms are radially
symmetrical. The slender but thickened and fuzzy thing
at the left in the picture is an ovary, or future
fruit, which would look OK in a mustard flower, except
for the fact that several matchstick-like stamens
arise from the ovary's stalk (gynophore). Mustard
flowers just don't do that. Stamens arising from the
middle of an ovary's too-long stalk just look crazy to
anyone unfamiliar with this family.

Once I'd seen the zygomorphic flowers and long
gynophores I knew that we were dealing with something
in the Caper Family, the Capparidaceae, very closely
related to the Mustard Family. If you've ever eaten
capers, you've eaten pickled flower-buds of a member
of this family. However, what we had here wasn't the
caper-producing species.

It was the African Spiderflower, GYNANDROPSIS
GYNANDRA, an Old World species now widely distributed
as a weed in the world's tropical and subtropical
regions. In Africa a form of this species is
cultivated as a leafy vegetable, though it needs
repeated boilings to make it palatable. Sheep and
goats relish it. In India the seeds are used as a
substitute for mustard and yield good oil. In some
parts of the world it may be a serious weed but around
here I've only seen it next to that one stone wall in
Pisté.

There's a second species of genus Gynandropis native
to Central and South America, Gynandropsis speciosa,
but that species is hairless, or "glabrous," while our
Pisté plants are definitely very hairy.

*****

JAMAICA WEED
If you bag several dozen Royal Palm seedlings -- which
come up like weeds around here -- and regularly water
them, what kind of weeds eventually appear in the
pots? Of course there's a variety, but I was surprised
that the most conspicuous and luxuriant one was the
springy-green annual herb shown overflowing black bags
at http://www.backyardnature.net/n/10/101024nm.jpg

At first I thought that this was Corn-Salad,
Valerianella olitoria, an eminently edible Old World
herb that I used to pick and eat a lot of during my
Germany and Belgium salad days. However, with the
appearance of the weed's white, slightly irregular
(bilaterally symmetrical) flowers -- just like
Valerianella's blossoms -- I had something else. Corn-
Salad flowers bear the unusual number of three stamens
while flowers on our pot plant bore the more typical
five. You can see a 1/8-inch long (4 mm) corolla split
open to reveal five stamens attached to the corolla at
http://www.backyardnature.net/n/10/101024np.jpg

A picture showing an undisturbed flower snuggled in
the angle of a hairy, dividing stem is shown at
http://www.backyardnature.net/n/10/101024no.jpg

Another feature of this plant making it unlike Corn-
Salad was how it formed something like a rosette,
growing outward from a central point, and keeping very
close to the ground. You can see that at
http://www.backyardnature.net/n/10/101024nn.jpg

This is a widely spread tropical weed distributed from
southern Florida and Texas south through here all the
way to Argentina. It's NAMA JAMAICENSE, traditionally
placed in the Waterleaf Family, the Hydrophyllaceae,
but now many experts lump that family into the Borage
or Forget-Me-Not Family, the Boraginaceae. That
lumping is fine with me since I've never seen much
difference between the two families. In Florida
sometimes Nama jamaicense is called Jamaica Weed, and
sometimes the 45 or so species in the genus are called
Fiddleleafs. It's one of those cases when the English
name hasn't been well agreed-on yet.

I don't find mention of Nama jamaicense's edibility,
but Paul Standley reports it being used in the Yucatan
as a "remedy for inflammation and blood vomit."

*****

PLUCHEA
In fact it's a pretty good time to be enjoying weeds.
After the long, hot rainy season they're lush and
healthy, and as we rapidly enter the dry season when
most herbaceous and shrubby plants die back or lose
their leaves, now they're often full of flowers and
fruits. For example, along weedy roadsides around here
sometimes you see an eight-ft-tall (2.5 m), much-
branched shrub, a small portion of which is seen at
http://www.backyardnature.net/n/10/101024pu.jpg

It's clear that this is a member of the Composite
Family as soon as we see the pea-sized flower heads.
In each head many tiny flowers are packed side by side
within a goblet-shaped structure composed of numerous
overlapping scales, the involucre, just as with all
composite flowers. You can see some heads and a messy,
fuzzy mass produced where mature heads split open and
release hundreds of tiny "seeds" topped by wind-
catching "parachutes" consisting of tiny, white hairs
at http://www.backyardnature.net/n/10/101024pv.jpg

This is genus Pluchea, either P. camphorata or P.
odorata. With those names, you can guess that if you
walk up to a leaf and crush it between your fingers
it'll issue a strong, oily, medicinal smell. Most
people say it stinks but in fresh air and dazzling
sunlight I rather like its no-nonsense pungency, if
only because it has character. I figured that Plantas
Medicinales de México would have several pages
dedicated to this plant's medicinal uses, but there
was only slight mention, mainly for the vague symptoms
of neuralgia and rheumatism.

So, is this Pluchea camphorata or Pluchea odorata?
Judging from pictures on the Internet it looks more
like P. camphorata, known as Camphorweed up North,
where it's native to the southern two-thirds of the
eastern US. However, the literature describes P.
camphorata as inhabiting marshy soil, while P. odorata
is more generally found. The one in the picture was in
thin, dry soil at the edge of a limestone quarry,
where P. odorata might be found. The Online Flora of
North America says that the two species hybridize, so
maybe the two species blend into one another so that
it's pointless to debate which one it really is.

*****

WILD AGAVE ABOUT TO FLOWER
At http://www.backyardnature.net/n/10/101024ag.jpg you
see a wild agave on the right sending up a giant-
asparagus-like flower stalk on which flower buds
haven't yet developed. The inset at the left shows the
same plant from a distance, with an old, dead flower
stalk to its left. You can see that the flower stalk
rises well above the scrubby forest around it. The
stalk stands maybe 15 feet tall (nearly 5m). The
picture was taken along the quiet little road about 10
km south of Pisté.

So, which agave is this?

Figuring out Mexico's agave species can be hard. One
reason is that prehistoric man carried agave food and
fiber, and live agave plants, all over the place. They
may have carried exotic species and cultivars into our
area from far away, and the descendents of those
plants might be hanging on as forest-living relicts to
this day. The matter is discussed a bit down the
online Flora of North America page for Agave at
http://www.efloras.org/florataxon.aspx?flora_id=1&taxon_id=100796

I'm not sure I could distinguish what's in the picture
from Sisal or Henequen Agave, Agave sisalana, which is
much planted farther west from here, around Mérida.
Henequen fiber used to be a very important crop there,
where it's a bit more arid than here, making it better
for henequen production. However, I know the agave in
the picture isn't a Sisal Agave because of what's at
http://www.backyardnature.net/n/10/101024ah.jpg

Those are old, split-open fruit capsules of the dead
agave at the left of the inset in the previous
picture. The capsules are well formed and look as if
they've dropped a good crop of seeds. According to the
Flora of North America page for the cultivated Sisal
Agave, "The plant is not known from the wild...
capsules and seeds of this species are unknown." So,
what's in the picture isn't the Sisal Agave.

I'm supposing that the best name for the illustrated
agave is AGAVE DECIPIENS, because that species is
known to live here, and our plants match pictures of
that species on the Internet. However -- especially
here at Chichén Itzá where once major Maya trade
routes connected -- it's just no telling what curious
agaves may be hanging on in local woods, relict
descendents from who-knows-where?

*****

RUNNING IN STARLIGHT
I go jogging well before dawn, when stars are bright
and twinkling, and grass is wet with dew. Early this
week there was no Moon at dawn. It's surprising what
you can see just by starlight, though.

In fact, even inside the hut where only a formless
hint of a glow marks the open door, each morning I
manage to get from inside the mosquito net, put on my
running shoes, shorts and sweatband and do warm-up
exercises, all in apparent total darkness. I know
where things are, and I've learned to pay attention to
sound and touch in ways that reveal a lot.

Sometimes as I run I think about how we humans deal
with and judge reality based upon our senses which, in
the end, are pretty limited. This insight first
vividly occurred to me when I was a fifteen-year old
ham radio operator, WA4PGA, back on the farm in
Kentucky, talking via shortwave to people all over the
world.

What struck me was that innumerable shortwave radio
signals from the most exotic places were passing
through our bodies all the time -- from Lars on the
banana boat between Maracaibo and Stockholm, from
missionary John in a hut in Tanzania -- yet we never
knew about those signals unless we had a shortwave
receiver tuned to the exact frequencies at the right
time.

As I jog beneath Orion and his dog these early
mornings sometimes I wonder this: How would my self
perception and spiritual framework change if along
with smelling, tasting, seeing, hearing and feeling I
could detect and process the entire vast spectrum of
electromagnetic emissions, such as shortwave signals,
ultraviolet light and gamma rays, as they pass through
my body?

What if we could sense the Earth's irregular and ever
changing gravitational fields as they interrelate with
fields of the Sun, the Moon, other planets and the
stars? What if it turns out that life itself is
something like energy or magnetism, and we could walk
through the forest sensing the full diversity of
lifeforms around us, feel their interactions, their
blossomings, their yearnings and their dyings? What if
we could see the Creator's creative impulses as they
happen, not just a few of Her creations? Would that be
like a rainbow, the roar of a great waterfall, a
child's laughter... ?

When you think of all the goings-on in the Universe we
can't detect with our five senses, and which we don't
really understand with our minds, it's a good bet that
we humans have a much distorted view of things,
including of ourselves and our spiritual
possibilities.

However -- and this is the insight I always end up
with after thinking the situation through -- even if
we could sense all those things and thus see the
Creation much more accurately, it still wouldn't
change much for us. We'd still be spiritual beings
yearning to grow and know and be more, stuck in
gradually decaying animal bodies.

Pat, pat, pat, running in starlight...

*****

Best wishes to all Newsletter Readers.

Jim

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