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| Costa Rica Expertise Ltd http://crexpertise.com E-mail info@crexpertise.com Tel:506-256-8585 Fax:506-256-9393 |
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Fourth newspage is HERE! Go home HERE! |
| Robbers target bank
that weathered rumor By the A.M. Costa Rica staff BAC San José suffered a loss of some $44,000 Thursday morning when two armed men stuck up a small office in a Paseo Colón building. BAC San José is the same bank that was the victim of an insolvency rumor earlier in the week. A spokesman for the Judicial Investigating Organization said the two robbers took 15 million in colons ($34,000) and some $10,000 in dollars. The men were able to get through an electronic door about 9:30 a.m. and get the drop on an armed guard, agents said. College area suspect
By the A.M. Costa Rica staff The so-called Calle de la Amargura, the street of bitterness or grief, is Costa Rica’s version of a college town. The street runs from the University of Costa Rica to downtown San Pedro. Bars can be found on both sides, and the area is very popular on weekends. But police know of a darker side. The bitter street has taken lives from drug overdoses and other anti-social activities mix with the college crowd. Anti-drug police conducted raids Wednesday night and arrested the man they claim is the principal supplier of cocaine and marijuana along the street. They said that the man, identified by his last names of Monge López, directed five salesmen who frequented the bars not only on the Calle de la Amargura but as far west as the Fuente de la Hispanidad in front of Mall San Pedro. The man had been under police scrutiny for months, and the Policía de Control de Drogas raided living quarters in San Pedro de Montes de Oca and in Vista del Mar de Ipís in Goiecoechea. They arrested two other men, said to be employees of Monge. They were identified by the last names of Delgado Sequeira y Corrales Chacón. A woman with the last name of Donato also was held. Police confiscated cocaine, money and marijuana, they said. Mother’s Day Sunday
By the A.M. Costa Rica staff Sunday is Mother’s Day in Costa Rica, one of the biggest holidays of the year. Mothers will be pampered and presented gifts, flowers and dinner invitations. To get ready, the Central Cultural Costarricense-Norteamericano is holding an exposition of the glass works of artist Sylvia El Laks at the La Sabana gallery Saturday from 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. The center is 100 meters north and 100 meters east of the Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad in Sabana Norte. Nicaragua may move
By the A.M. Costa Rica staff The chancellor of Nicaragua said the country will invoke international treaties to prevent the operation of an open-pit gold mine near the San Juan River. The chancellor or foreign minister, Norman Caldera, made the statements on a morning television interview show. Nicaraguans are upset that the open-pit mine will use cyanide to leach gold from the rock that contains the precious metal. The mine will be 3 kms. south of the river in Costa Rica. That’s less than 2 miles. The mine is a project of Vanessa Ventures, a Vancouver company, and its Costa Rican subsidiary Industrias Infinto. The company has submitted a revised environmental impact study to the Ministerio de Ambiente y Energia. Last week, as part of the study, the company hosted a public meeting in the Northern Zone. |
Long-time newslady
is 100
Special to A.M. Costa Rica Anona Kirkland is 100 tomorrow, and there will be a special Mass for her at St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Ancon, Panamá, at 9:30 a.m., according to newspeople there. Ms. Kirkland was for many years the person who did the society page
for the old Star & Herald.
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In Costa Rica: From elsewhere: A.M. Costa Rica
Consultantes Río Colo.
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The last and choicest mountainside 35.387 m2 (8.7 acres) development property offered at wholesale price Only $28 per square meter with easy bank & owner financing! Breathtaking 270º views Central Valley, Ciudad Colón, unpolluted fresh air & climate only 8 minutes from FORUM Office Center, quick access Prospero Fernando Freeway, shopping, new hospital, 20 minutes to San José. Zoned and ready to go. Contact Captain Haines, globaltrade@racsa.co.cr Tel (506) 249-4758 Fax (506) 249-1559 |
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A.M. Costa Rica today introduces a new food writer, Lenny Karpman, a retired cardiologist from California. In addition to his professional knowledge about
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traditional cuisine by popularizing
the works of imaginative chefs, reviewing restaurants that reputedly are
different and by offering ideas and recipes of his own.
He lives on a small farm in the eastern end of the Central Valley where he grows fruit, vegetables and herbs for his kitchen. Karpman writes food and travel stories for American newspapers and magazines and said he hopes to combine his experience with nutrition, technique, travel and local ingredients to entertain fellow food lovers from time to time here. As with all writing in A.M. Costa Rica, food reports are not influenced
by advertising expenditures.
Karpman may be reached by e-mail via editor@amcostarica.com. |
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A.M. Costa Rica food writer Paseo Colon became a parking lot one lunch hour with broken glass and dented fenders. We inched over into a legitimate parking lot in front of Satto, a Korean and Japanese restaurant near La Sabana. What good fortune. My wife Joan and I spent weeks feasting in Korea with an American couple who worked for the Defense Department in Seoul. We loved the cuisine. I particularly liked the steamed beef and pork filled dumplings called
When he can’t get Asian imported wrapper pasta, he makes his own. The filling contained ground pork, green onions, cellophane noodles, bits of carrot and herbs and spices nicely blended. The dipping sauce, too, was perfection, a little red chili paste, quality soy sauce, sesame oil and a dash of vinegar. We also shared a typical rice bowl decorated with marinated grilled strips of beef and vegetables and crowned with a fried egg, called bi bim bop. Joan asked for more of the Korean smoky red chili paste to add to her rice. She asked the owner where we could buy some. His was home made, and he insisted that we take a jar as a gift. Serendipity. Later we joined a group from the Women’s Club of Costa Rica at a new Japanese restaurant in Escazú. It had previously been a popular Mexican restaurant. The tasteful architecture and comfortable ambiance persist. Nera is on the Golden Mile, up the road from Samurai, across the street from Chango. The menu is both Korean and Japanese. Our group loved their seafood sushi platters, tempura, teriyaki, grilled squid and complimentary flavorful rice and octopus pancakes and tropical fruits. Many of the offerings are paired with pictures on the menu. I mistook a picture of wantons for a plate of mantu, which I didn’t see on the printed part. The charming Korean woman chef admitted that they weren’t on the menu but said she always had them available. I ordered minced pork chin-mantu and got steamed Chinese pot stickers. Half were filled with savory pork and half with a dry, bland chicken tofu mixture. The pasta was thick and stiff. The dipping was the same as the sauce for the pancakes, tasty, but more Japanese than Korean. Trifecta! Little Seoul, a block north of Plaza Major in Rohrmoser, serves mantu steamed and fried. The chin-mantu is a rice flour bun rather than a pasta pocket. Typical of Chinese dim sum, it is served with a soy dipping sauce. The filling is a finely chopped and well-seasoned meat mixture. Han, the owner, has been here for 20 years. Many of the other 10 or so Korean eateries seem to be attempts to duplicate his successful style and menu, the highest tribute in the trade. He tells me that the Japanese version of mantu is manju. He explained that there are no Korean markets in Costa Rica. Guatemala has several, but the Korean population here is too small to support one. Only Chinese ingredients are available locally. The world-wide mandu family tree contains hundreds of cousins. Dough-wrapped packets of seasoned ground meat are simmered in Kabul and served with yogurt and vegetables, and steamed in |
baskets in Seoul and served with spicy dipping sauce. Around the globe, savory meats wrapped in a panoply of dough variants are baked into little pies, fried into fritters, boiled or steamed into dumplings and rolled into blintzes to the specifications of local palates. Consider wantons, empanadas, fritters, crepes, filo triangles and ravioli as variations on the same marvelous theme. The ingredients are so similar, and the morsels so deliciously different. The origin of the word mandu seems to be mantou, an old term from the lamb and mutton eating regions of northern China. In ancient times it was the name for a packet of meat stuffed into a casing of sheep intestine. If we look for similar names, mandu, mantu, or manti, we find them in the kitchens of Eastern and Central Asia, Eastern Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. There seems to be a pattern. The meat-filled dumplings with similar sounding names survive to this day in many of the major cities along both the northern and southern arms of the original Silk Road that connected China and Europe. Dumplings from China called mantu are even mentioned in the Koran. In Ankara, they were called by their Silk Route name, manti, and when they migrated south down the Arabian Peninsula and across North Africa they were mandu. Superimpose the waves of conquest by Mongols, Islamic armies, the Ottoman Turks, and the mandu connection reached from Siberia to southern India and from the Sea of Japan to the Atlantic. Eastern European and Central Asian borek (burek, bourek, boorak, boreg) share the same thin dough as Turkish manti. Similar, but a little thicker is the wrapper for Russian and Polish pirogi. Thinner dough brought us filo in every conceivable shape filled with everything from lamb to nuts. We had baked manti in Ankara, boiled manty in a Siberian restaurant in Moscow and baseball sized pork and beef filled manti at an Uzbekastani birthday party in Saint Petersburg. In Slovenia they dice pumpkin with meat in dumplings of the same name. Although better known for his novels, Alexander Dumas wrote in his "Dictionary of Cuisine" 150 years ago about the most extravagant of all mandus: "Heliogabalus, that emperor who came from Syria and entered Rome on a chariot drawn by naked women, had a historian just to describe his meals. He never had a meal that cost less than 60 gold marks (about $10,000 or 4,350,000 colones). He had petite pies made of the tongues of peacocks, nightingales, crows, and parrots." Not quite four and twenty blackbirds, but a mandu cousin none-the-less.To savor real mantu, visit Satto on Paseo Colon, a short block from La Sabana. |
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| Another
reason to have mosquito worries |
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Brush, then squash. Remember those three words and that technique the next time you catch a mosquito dining on your arm or leg, and you’ll go a long way to protecting yourself from a potentially lethal parasitic micro-organism that may be in the mosquito, and is especially dangerous to those with weakened immune systems. That’s the word from a researcher at Rutgers University in New Jersey. A study by Rutgers-Newark biology professor Ann Cali and others published in the New England Journal of Medicine in July says that microsporidia, a group of opportunistic single-celled micro-organisms that can invade and devour virtually any kind of human cell, may have entered and broken down the muscle tissue of a Pennsylvania woman when she crushed a mosquito over the site where it had been drawing blood. The woman later died as a type of microsporidia called B. algerae, known to reside in the tissues of mosquitoes, systematically consumed muscle fibers in her body, leaving the muscles unable to contract and respond to mental commands. Professor Cali, who serves as a consultant for the Centers for Disease Control and the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology at Walter Reed Army Hospital, theorizes that the B. algerae in the mosquito may have been ground into the wound left by the insect’s hypodermic-like feeding tube. Mosquitoes secrete an anti-coagulant to keep blood from clotting as they drink, temporarily leaving a clear passage directly into the bloodstream. New research by Professor Cali and one of her graduate students will be aimed at identifying how prevalent B. algerae is in mosquitoes through the collection and examination of specimens across New Jersey. "Microsporidia kill people because they stay below the radar," Professor Cali said. Studies spearheaded by Professor Cali have identified many of the dozen kinds of microsporidia now known to infect humans. About 1,500 species of microsporidia have been found infecting a wide variety of life forms. Their spores — a dormant stage in the creatures’ life cycle — inhabit virtually every surface water source, becoming active |
microsporidia once they have been
ingested by an animal susceptible to infection by that particular species.
Until research by Professor Cali and her co-authors proved otherwise, the conventional scientific wisdom was that B. algerae, a microsporidium found in some mosquitoes, could only invade cells on the surface of the human body because it couldn’t survive in the higher temperatures of deep tissue. Several types of microsporidia can be lethal in human beings, although a healthy immune system is usually an adequate defense. Professor Cali notes that AIDS patients, organ-transplant recipients and cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy, who have a low white blood-cell count, need to take extra care to avoid ingesting microsporidial parasites. She recommends that they always boil tap water before consuming it or stick to bottled water — as long as the source of the bottled water is deep springs or wells where microsporidia are unlikely to be present due to the absence of food sources. "Prevention is so much better than cure," Professor Cali said, adding that although treatment for some types of microsporidia shows promise, "Whenever we start dealing with parasites in our cells, it’s very difficult to kill them without upsetting our body’s other processes." Professor Cali recommends some simple, common-sense approaches to avoid mosquito bites and resultant infections in addition to her brush-then-squash technique, which moves any B. algerae in a mosquito’s body away from the vulnerable wound site: If people are concerned about spraying insect repellents on their skin, they can wear lightweight, long-sleeved shirts and long pants, and spray the repellent on the fabric instead. Taking garlic capsules, which cause the release of an odorless vapor through the pores that insects find unappetizing, also can be effective. Another approach involves coating exposed skin areas with a bath oil product called Skin So Soft, which has proven so effective that U.S. armed forces operating in swampy, mosquito-rich areas now routinely carry it with their other gear. Avoiding being outside at dawn and dusk, when mosquitoes are most active and prevalent, is another effective tactic, she adds. |
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Bismark Pacheco, Costa Rica’s top detective, is back in another Max Blue mystery, "Luz Stella's Tale." Blue is a pseudonym for Paul Fritz, a frequent visitor to Monteverde from New Jersey. Costa Rica
Much of this novel takes place in the United States, including a Florida gambling ship and Birmingham, Alabama. However, the influence of Latin America and Colombia drives the plot. This book is published by iUniverse, as were the two other Bismark Pacheco novels, "Murder At The Cat" and "Cielito Lindo." The Cat refers to CATIE, |
the Tropical Agricultural Research
and Higher Education Center in Turrialba where Fritz, now a retired Penn
State professor of plant genetics, worked from 1992 to 1995.
Wilson Abut is listed as a co-author. But the book has a character by the same name, so it is unclear if Abut is a real person or another pseudonym. The character Abut is described as a former quarterback and current journalist. iUniverse says it is one of the largest book publishing companies in the United States. It specializes in short press runs and new authors. The Pacheco novels always have a lot of strange characters, but probably no stranger than a sampling of North Americans in San José. The book is available hardcover ($24.95) or paperback ($14.95). Ms. Betancourt herself has written a book "Until Death Do Us Part — My Struggle to Reclaim Colombia." A release quotes author Blue saying: "I would have dedicated the book to her but for the fact that my fiction
pales in the face of her reality. Luz Stella is not Betancourt. Who could
be? But ‘Luz Stella's Tale,’ told against the fictional background of a
Bismark Pacheco mystery, tells something of
Ms. Betancourt still is a hostage in Colombia. |
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