One of my favorite parts of the island is the smell. Whenever you walk through the open air markets you smell all sorts of spices, and they are all tempting to buy. Nathalie and I couldn’t resist buying tiny sachets of peper, saffron, vanilla, and nutmeg. Little did we know how potent and dangerous some of the spices actually are….
Yesterday Dominique and Marlene piled us into their car to go visit a spice garden down south. The trip was great, we got a chance to stop and visit the lava flows from several years ago. It’s always exciting to think that we’ve got an active volcano on the island. In fact it’s been very active lately, they’re pretty sure it’s going to blow soon….
Anyways, the garden was not only colorful and fragrant, but our guide was very informative. I had no idea that on the island grows a tree that produces four different flavors: cinnamon, pepper, cloves, and nutmeg. Of course we ran into these spices too, only to discover that innocent enough looking nutmeg is poisonous in large doses. Our guide explained that half a nutmeg is enough to kill a man….Nathalie of course was really curious, and asked a lot of questions about nutmeg while we laughed…. Our guide in the end of the tour gave us an extra little tour of how to make vanilla, and sneaked us each a vanilla stalk, which are about a euro a pop. Ooh, we were happy to have this special organic vanilla from St Joseph…
