Strange fruit, radio bursts, exoplanets: shameless chef is home

A hefty root of malanga awaits its fate on the chopping board.

Hello, Marian,
Yes, this installment of Spirit of Wilson is being dispatched to the usual recipients, but just to be different, it is being sent as a letter to you, a friend I've known for more than 50 years. As a resident of Maui, I thought you might be interested to know how similar Maui is to Puerto Rico, the land of Hurricane Maria.

Except for the absence of molten rock that can burn you, and the strong Hispanic culture, Puerto Rico is a lot like Maui. For each island, what we call civilization has developed detente with the jungle, but it is an uneasy truce, with the jungle always testing the boundaries.

 Puerto Rico is a mere 150 miles closer to the equator than Maui. Because of their locations, both islands have important observatories. In 1992, the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico announced the first planet to be discovered outside our solar system.

Malanga -- the new potato?

I made a far less momentous but nonetheless pleasing discovery of my own -- malanga, a root crop which is related to Hawaii's famous root crop, taro. Malanga is tasty, nutritious and filling, and kind of nutty, like the chef. If possible I intend to substitute it for the more pedestrian potato.  So far I haven't found malanga in Seattle, but I spent my last day in Puerto Rico experimenting with it as I packed and cleaned out the fridge.

Puerto Rico is a U.S. possession, with all the benefits of being possessed -- lots of Burger Kings and McDonald's restaurants to rely on when you are on the road and can't be sure a food server will speak English.  (Yes, yes, I know: if they can't learn English, why don't they go back to their own country, right?)

Plantain dish left; avocado, right.

The resort had a restaurant where I tried a dish of pork and other delicacies presented in small cups of fried plantains pictured at the right. The filling was great, but the plantains just seemed too starchy.  An exotic avocado, however, was enormous, very creamy and almost sweet. I purchased it from a vendor at the Pietra Escrita (petroglyphs) near a community called Jayuya in Central Puerto Rico. I was dubious, but it turned out all right.


A trip to Walmart made it possible to provision my condo with standard stuff a shameless cheapskate bachelor eats -- ham steaks,  lunchmeat, cheese, jam, bread, yogurt, pizza, beer,  ketchup, mustard, juice, etc. You know -- health food.

$4 for that hunk of malanga, and $3 for a bunch of bananas -- far, far pricier than Trader Joe's

It  was also at Walmart where I discovered malanga. Later, I purchased the specimen at the top of this article at the  roadside stand in the photo immediately above, while enroute to see what used to be the world's largest radio telescope.  I had already tried mashing malanga and garnished it with ketchup. Yum! This time I tried dicing and frying it. My recommendation is to stick with mashing it.

Malanga reportedly originated in South America and is now grown in the Caribbean, Central America, and certain parts of Africa and Asia. My research discovered that it is a natural thickener, and makes stews and soups creamy. However, when eaten raw, it can irritate the throat.

Honeyed ham: Yum!

The rest of the fridge cleanout involved dicing the ham steaks and slathering them with honey; eating the remaining yogurt and a ripe pineapple. Adding beer to the fried diced malanga in hopes that it would salvage it and contribute an interesting flavor (it didn't); and stuffing myself with that humongous avocado. This particular variety seemed green and quite hard, but ripened quickly. It was actually hollow around the seed, which almost fell out when the fruit was sliced, and which shed a thin jacket of tissue.

Peeled malanga, ready to be diced

On the left, fried malanga, didn't work. On the right, cooking it with beer didn't work either.

The Arecibo Observatory

Arecibo Observatory

Oh, I mentioned the world's largest radio telescope. Maybe you're curious about that. Here's a photo of it: This thing is 1,000 feet across. It rests in a depression in the ground carved in large part by ground water that naturally ate away at the limestone in the region, creating natural depressions that the telescope could be fitted into.

The undulating earth

There are many of these depressions in what is described at karst topography. The term is taken from a region between Yugoslavia and Italy. For Puerto Rico, it has resulted in places with a land form that looks a little bit like the undulations in ribbon candy, or like a sine wave. The photo below of a truck on the expressway shows how the land undulates, creating natural depressions into with such a telescope could be fitted. One third of the island has karstic topography.

Karst topography in the mountainous area south of Arecibo.

Exoplanets and radio bursts

Arecibo has the distinction of discovering the first exoplanet (a planet outside our solar system). It has served the National Science Foundation, and was able to help NASA troubleshoot problems with an earth satellite by determining whether it was tumbling in orbit. Literature at the observatory stated that the Arecibo telescope was the first to discover split-second "fast radio bursts" in the Northern hemisphere of the sky.

4 miles of cables, each weighing 10 tons, support the 1,000-ton platform above the dish.

Arecibo is no longer the world's largest radio telescope.It has been eclipsed by the much larger FAST radio telescope, in China. (However, the Chinese telescope doesn't have the distinction of appearing in a James Bond film. )The Arecibo telescope has a limited range of view, but was aimed in the right direction to help out Nasa with that tumbling satellite.  Unfortunately, the future funding of the observatory is somewhat in doubt.

Love,
Robert