Grease Junkie by Edd China

Author:Edd China
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780753553558
Publisher: Ebury Publishing

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The last month of our trip was spent building an eco-school-house, deep in the jungle, in the north of Belize near a town called Orange Walk. To get there, we canoed for miles up a river system to a tiny hamlet. The building was big but made entirely out of materials from the surrounding jungle – we used 80,000 palm leaves for the roof alone. It was a lot to build in a month so there were two groups working on it.

As my birthday approached in May I was determined to have a fitting feast and I fixed the rota so that I would be preparing the food that day. We had been living on porridge and rice and beans for nearly three months so I figured we needed to liven things up.

Also, for my birthday breakfast I really wanted some toast and marmalade. We had packets of yeast and plenty of flour, so I made up some dough and placed it in a couple of rectangular, army style canteens to prove. Now, I needed an oven.

I used a pair of our standard issue, catering size, aluminium cooking pots; I put the biggest pot on the camp fire with a couple of inches of sand in the bottom and placed the canteens of proved dough on top of the sand. Over top of those I inverted the slightly smaller pot, its rim nestling nicely in the sand, sealing the oven, keeping most of the smoke away from the bread.

In the middle of our camp was a huge old mango tree that was excellent for climbing – from the top you could see for miles. The mangos wouldn’t be ripe for many weeks yet but, although green, they seemed fully formed. I picked an arm-full, chopped them up and added an equal measure of sugar, covered the mixture with water and left them to simmer for a while. It worked! I had created a wonderfully tart ‘mangolade’ that tasted perfect on our morning toast.

For supper I wanted to create pizzas for everyone, all 45 of us, which meant I needed proper cheese. We couldn’t exactly pop out to the local deli so, after a cheeky radio call, the BATSUB came to the rescue and delivered our mozzarella by helicopter! Grazie mille!

Of course, no birthday celebration would be complete without a cake. Unfortunately, the lack of fridges in the jungle meant we couldn’t store fresh eggs, and we had no chickens. However, I noticed a tub of custard powder, which contained egg, so used that instead. Plenty of cocoa powder made it into a luxurious chocolate cake.

There was so much mix, it took around four hours to bake, and in the end the fire got so hot the bottom of the oven melted away. Thankfully the base of our cake was only slightly charred. My mate Alison started a rumour that the cake had a ‘special’ ingredient, which of course it didn’t, but it added to the evening’s merriment as half the camp were convinced they were high.

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