I am still feeding Penelope the white cat that is Frida’s mother. Several weeks ago she approached me on an outside wall, walking over and crouching down, then meowing soundlessly, and saying, “Senora, I am desperately starving, you took my baby so you owe me.”
She was piteously thin. There were lots of little black specks of fruit flies crawling on her fur and her eyes were draining almost as if she was crying. She looked most pathetic. I took pity on her and told her I would feed her, that yes I had taken her child, and I did owe her. I went in the house and got cat food, and when I came back out and put it down I realized from the way her sides were distended that she was pregnant. So then I told her I would keep feeding her so her kittens could be healthy.
Well now she comes every afternoon and I feed her. For a week now she has been skinny again. Once I thought I heard kittens miaowing nearby, but it could just have easily been my imagination. I actually don’t know if they are ensconced somewhere or whether they were so malnourished that they didn’t survive their birth as it was pretty late in the game that I started feeding her.
She now looks well fed which means that she has the energy to hiss at me everyday as she approaches me for the food I put down for her. Her eyes are a glacial pale blue with a baleful cast. There’s nothing like a little gratitude—it goes a long way. Nothing is more humbling than caring for something that snarls, “I hate you but I will eat the food you bring me anyway.” Maybe the payback will be if I see some little kitties trapsing out to join her one day. I wish there was someway to get her fixed, but she is really wild and untrusting and she would just as soon bite the hand that feds her.
October 28, 2008
October 23, 2008
Life Goes On
Today it is quite windy again and doors slam shut with the breeze that rifles through the house from open windows. I just reread John Steinbeck’s The Pearl last night which is set in La Paz. He describes the wind blowing the sand around just like it is doing today, although he doesn’t mention all the white caps on the sea. His prose is always so good and his stories are always so depressing.
The gardener has stripped the Virginia Creeper off the tall wall that angles around the kitchen so now I have this huge blank canvas starring me in the face. My first thought is to paint the wall blue and put a mermaid on it that would face the kitchen window.
Such an exciting thing happened yesterday! Sr. Jueves my errand boy and grocery runner found a big bag of beautiful Salinas, California, grown romaine lettuce (we can generally only get abused heads of iceberg) and a 2 pound box of fresh mushrooms. I am vacillating between making clams and linguine or a mushroom tart so that I can use them up before they are over the hill. To bad Esperando won’t be back until Sunday as I don’t believe they will last that long.
The cook seems to have a knack with my dessert recipes, so I have been continuing to feed her new recipes. This part is really nice because I don’t make desserts at home as we are always dieting. It is nice to have someone else make them and have them turn out well, you don’t have to do the work of making it, just sampling it. And since my guests like desserts I can feed it to them and have a taste along the way. Today we are making a coconut cake—something I always drool at in magazines but never make since I am the only coconut lover I know of in my immediate family.
Little Frida has taken to wetting on our sitting room couch. Fortunately I caught it before the couch was ruined and our room inundated with the smell. I have a cloth throw over the couch to control animal fur, but had not anticipated the excitement of added new fragrances as well. I have been putting a split garbage bag down under my cloth throw, but after last night—no more. She is banished to the bathroom permanently. I washed the throw three times yesterday after multiple episodes, and then she and Sour Pickle started tussling on my bed at 4 AM. Then she started pouncing on my feet. Somehow she doesn’t realize that the top of me, which frightens her, is attached to my feet when they are covered with a blanket. I finally put both of them in the bathroom so the dog and I could have some quiet sleep. I have decided to call her Little Pickle. She may end up an outdoor cat after all once she is spayed if we can’t get on top of this peeing thing.
The gardener has stripped the Virginia Creeper off the tall wall that angles around the kitchen so now I have this huge blank canvas starring me in the face. My first thought is to paint the wall blue and put a mermaid on it that would face the kitchen window.
Such an exciting thing happened yesterday! Sr. Jueves my errand boy and grocery runner found a big bag of beautiful Salinas, California, grown romaine lettuce (we can generally only get abused heads of iceberg) and a 2 pound box of fresh mushrooms. I am vacillating between making clams and linguine or a mushroom tart so that I can use them up before they are over the hill. To bad Esperando won’t be back until Sunday as I don’t believe they will last that long.
The cook seems to have a knack with my dessert recipes, so I have been continuing to feed her new recipes. This part is really nice because I don’t make desserts at home as we are always dieting. It is nice to have someone else make them and have them turn out well, you don’t have to do the work of making it, just sampling it. And since my guests like desserts I can feed it to them and have a taste along the way. Today we are making a coconut cake—something I always drool at in magazines but never make since I am the only coconut lover I know of in my immediate family.
Little Frida has taken to wetting on our sitting room couch. Fortunately I caught it before the couch was ruined and our room inundated with the smell. I have a cloth throw over the couch to control animal fur, but had not anticipated the excitement of added new fragrances as well. I have been putting a split garbage bag down under my cloth throw, but after last night—no more. She is banished to the bathroom permanently. I washed the throw three times yesterday after multiple episodes, and then she and Sour Pickle started tussling on my bed at 4 AM. Then she started pouncing on my feet. Somehow she doesn’t realize that the top of me, which frightens her, is attached to my feet when they are covered with a blanket. I finally put both of them in the bathroom so the dog and I could have some quiet sleep. I have decided to call her Little Pickle. She may end up an outdoor cat after all once she is spayed if we can’t get on top of this peeing thing.
October 19, 2008
Mystery chef
It is certainly an advantage to have a good cook at Casa Boleo, and we have been enjoying her cooking now for almost 3 months. Yesterday we had a great mystery. She posted the menu for supper—sopa de calabacitas (zucchini soup), arroz chaufa (Chinese rice), and a green salad. I didn’t anticipate the addition of soup to the menu since I had designed a fairly light, diet conscious supper. She worked late the night before and it was Saturday night and Esperando, the Storyteller and I didn’t want to rush dinner, so I told her she could leave the meal ready and we would just reheat it. Before she left I noticed the squash soup in a skillet where she had apparently cooked the vegetable part and I anticipated would add the stock to it. Esperando also had a look at the squash soup and came and told me that it had meat in it too. We argued about this for a while and eventually I sent the Storyteller into the kitchen to see what he thought it was, but all he saw was what she had prepared for the Arroz Chaufa because the fabled squash soup had disappeared. Then she left.
When we finally decided to eat I went in the kitchen to reheat stuff only to discover that she had cooked everything for the Arroz Chaufa to a point, but left the final assembly to me. The rice was soggy and standing in water, but I was able to drain it and make do. She apparently doesn’t understand how to run the rice cooker. She can follow any Mexican cookbook recipe and things taste fine, but most of my gringa recipes suffer in the translation. I looked around for the squash soup and could not find it, although Esperando and I had both seen something on the stove that we thought was squash soup. The salad was also not to be found anywhere.
The next morning I made a concerted effort to find the missing squash soup, but all I could see was two containers of a reddish sauce. Finally this evening I opened one up, it was the only thing I could see that was new in the refrigerator since yesterday. I saw some solid stuff had settled in the bottom of the Tupperware container that could be squash, but lo and behold it was hominy!! Eureka, she had made posole, so I had some for dinner and it was quite good, but the squash soup is still missing.
We have an independent cottage industry of foods here that I am starting to get to know a little. One of the maids came to me Friday and said that she had a good tamale maker and did I want to order some tamales for the weekend, so I said sure—two dozen! Turns out I got one dozen for $12. I think we are paying gringo inflated prices, or the maid is marking them up. They are tasty but not spicy and each tamale has two green olives cooked in it.
Then as I was coming back from an errand the other day, two Mexican ladies drove by in pickup truck and stopped to tell me that they had just come from Mulege where one of them has owned an ice cream store and pastry shop for the past 30 years. The back of their truck was loaded with dessert empanadas (mango, guanabana, and cheese), oatmeal cookies, coconut candy and sweet dinner rolls. So I had a variety for tasting and they gave me some extras to try too. It seems they come here every Friday, so they will call before they come and see if I want to place an order.
When we finally decided to eat I went in the kitchen to reheat stuff only to discover that she had cooked everything for the Arroz Chaufa to a point, but left the final assembly to me. The rice was soggy and standing in water, but I was able to drain it and make do. She apparently doesn’t understand how to run the rice cooker. She can follow any Mexican cookbook recipe and things taste fine, but most of my gringa recipes suffer in the translation. I looked around for the squash soup and could not find it, although Esperando and I had both seen something on the stove that we thought was squash soup. The salad was also not to be found anywhere.
The next morning I made a concerted effort to find the missing squash soup, but all I could see was two containers of a reddish sauce. Finally this evening I opened one up, it was the only thing I could see that was new in the refrigerator since yesterday. I saw some solid stuff had settled in the bottom of the Tupperware container that could be squash, but lo and behold it was hominy!! Eureka, she had made posole, so I had some for dinner and it was quite good, but the squash soup is still missing.
We have an independent cottage industry of foods here that I am starting to get to know a little. One of the maids came to me Friday and said that she had a good tamale maker and did I want to order some tamales for the weekend, so I said sure—two dozen! Turns out I got one dozen for $12. I think we are paying gringo inflated prices, or the maid is marking them up. They are tasty but not spicy and each tamale has two green olives cooked in it.
Then as I was coming back from an errand the other day, two Mexican ladies drove by in pickup truck and stopped to tell me that they had just come from Mulege where one of them has owned an ice cream store and pastry shop for the past 30 years. The back of their truck was loaded with dessert empanadas (mango, guanabana, and cheese), oatmeal cookies, coconut candy and sweet dinner rolls. So I had a variety for tasting and they gave me some extras to try too. It seems they come here every Friday, so they will call before they come and see if I want to place an order.
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