Capers

The owner of our small hotel, Maria, went out the other day to pick capers. She was gone for about 20 minutes to a secret place (which must have been really close by) and brought back a grocery sack full of parts of the caper plant. We were sitting in the courtyard with friends Willy & Robert (from Holland) and got to help prepare the capers (pick them off the stems). We all got busy and started telling stories of doing similar tasks in our youth - bean snapping, tomato picking, pea shelling, peanut shelling...etc. I didn't even know they had peanuts in Holland. Not only do they have peanuts, but there is famous Dutch Peanutbutter, good stuff.

Back to the capers, they grow on bushes out in the wild, you can usually find these bushes near the sea. The part that you pick as the caper "fruit" is the flower bud. After the capers are seperated from the stems, you wash them, put them in a container with a lid, throw in salt and seal it up. You then shake it a few times each day for about 2 months until the capers are "cured". That's it. Easy - hu?

Robert is a graphic designer and took the opportunity to snap a few photos and put this together for us.