"Halloweenas buenas"

A number of folks back home have asked me, "do they celebrate Halloween where you are?" The short answer is no - the only trace of Halloween I saw in Cajabamba yesterday was a cleverly headlined "halloweenas buenas" card from my parents, complete with a masked Soph-Soph that is currently decorating my desk:

I'm told that in our regional capital, and in the more modern coastal region of Peru, some people do dress up and the bigger stores put out decorations. But Cajabamba had not a single trick-or-treater to be seen.

As a trade-off for the lack of Halloween festivities, however, November 1st is a national holiday: All Saints Day/Day of the Dead. So, instead of working today, I went on a hike with some friends and participated in a common Peruvian Day of the Dead tradition: baking bread. A few days ago Javi came back from the farm with a sack full of freshly harvested wheat, and informed me that I was finally going to get to see our big wood-burning oven in action. Step one was to wash the wheat, then lay it out in the sun to dry for a couple days:

Once it had dried, Javi took the wheat to a mill to be ground into flour. Then, it was baking day. Around noon we lit a fire in the oven, then let the flames burn through the afternoon until the oven was hot enough to bake:

Using his flour, Javi made a big mass of dough and kneaded it for 10 minutes:

Then, while the dough was left to rise, he prepped the ten bread pans with a bit of oil and flour, to keep the bread from sticking:

Next he used a rolling pin to flatten out each pan's worth of dough, and then roll the dough into loaf-shaped logs that he put into the pans:

Once in the pans, the loafs are left to rise again, until they almost double in size:

Meanwhile, Javi swept the remaining logs out of the oven, leaving only coals and making space for all the loaf pans:

Thirty minutes after we put them in the oven, out popped ten farm-fresh, home-baked, delicious loaves of hot bread - feliz día de los muertos!