Our Wedding Anniversary

Esperando was out of town in Washington, D.C. on our wedding anniversary. Bummer! And that was the day I thought I had discovered that I had—worms! The thought that my body might be infested with an alien life form was almost more than I could handle. It made my skin crawl. I told Esperando on the phone that I didn't want to live here anymore. I made a doctor’s appointment for 11:30 am and sat in his office waiting until 1:00 pm for him to arrive. I stifled the urge to cry.

Street food vendors are always suspect

One of the hazards of living south of the border, or anywhere where the food or water can be suspect, is parasites. To avoid this problem, one is encouraged to soak any raw vegetables in a microbial water solution, don’t eat street food, drink only purified water, wash your hands after going to the bathroom and before eating, etc. Which of these I failed to do properly is hard to say, except that I did eat sushi made from yellowtail that was freshly caught here in the Sea of Cortez by The Cowboy several months ago. At the time it was delicious, but afterwards I read you could get roundworms from ocean fish and you wouldn’t be able to see them in their flesh.    

Ascaris--it said that an adult female may measure 35 centimeters

 in length and lays up to 200,000 eggs per day.

The doctor finally arrived, ushered me into his office and asked what was wrong. “I think I have gusanos,” I said. “No, here we call them ascaris,” he said. That he seemed inclined to agree with my diagnosis and confirm my worse fears was devastating. After checking me over he said that my intestines were inflamed and that I needed to follow a bland diet he gave me: lean meat, eggs, no pork (but ham was ok), white bread, plain pasta, clear fruit juices, no sodas, fruit purees and cooked vegetables, none of it with any salt, pepper or any kind of seasoning at all. Ghack! Then I was to take a poop sample each day to the laboratory for testing, because I might have more than one kind of worm. Double ghack! He told me to come back on Monday at 11:30 am and we would figure out what I needed to do next.

Stargazer Lily carries a heavy perfume but are poisonous

to humans and cats if ingested. Who woulda thunk it?

I drug myself home. When I walked in the door there was a big bouquet of pink roses and Stargazer lilies sitting on the dining table. Those were in my wedding bouquet. The room smelled wonderful from the lilies. But I was so stunned that all I could do was wallowed in self pity. I looked up ascaris on the internet and found out it comes with living in unsanitary conditions and having poor hygiene. That made me feel like I was the scum of the earth.  Then I saw a photo of a young African boy with worms coming out of his nose and mouth. That made me gag. I decided after reading over the symptoms that I had had worms for a really long time, like maybe ever since we moved down here. (Did I mention I have hypocondria in my genes?)

For the next several days I dutifully followed the diet and took my samples to the laboratory. The diet was extremely dull and I didn't even lose any weight, but in the next few days I began to feel better. Then yesterday, Monday, I went to the lab with my last specimen and told them I had a doctor’s appointment at 11:30, since they normally don’t have results until 1 pm. I didn’t know how they would handle that. They said, come back at 11:00 and we will have your results to take to the doctor. Sure enough at appointed hour I showed up and they folded up a little piece of white paper and stuck it in an envelope for me to take to the doctor. Unlike the U.S. I was to carry the report to the doctor, and unlike the U.S. the envelope was not sealed. When I got outside the clinic I opened the envelope. It said:

1– negativo
2– giardia lamblia
3– giardia lamblia

Giardia lamblia-If the organism is split and stained, it
has a very characteristic pattern that resembles a
familiar "smiley face" symbol. Is that a peculiar or what?

Aha! I did have a parasite, but it was not worms! It wasn’t a serious parasite. I’ve had it twice before when I was out of the country. It made me feel sick then too. It comes from bad water. We don’t have bad water in the guesthouse, nor in Casa Abeja as we have filters to treat the water in those places and we drink bottled water. Our ice is also made from bottled water. I must have gotten it sometime somewhere when we went out to eat. Maybe ice cubes—who knows? At 11:30 am I trotted over to the doctor’s office. This time the office was crowded with patients. Bad sign, now I would be waiting forever. The receptionist said, “What are you doing here?” “Well the doctor told me to come on Monday at 11:30.” “I don’t have you down,” she said, “He never told me. You’ll have to come back tomorrow.”

Today I went back. The waiting room was even more crowded. It appeared all these people had been waiting a long time as one woman got up and left and told the receptionist she would call to make an appointment. The doctor arrived and the whole group raced into his office. The receptionist called out to them, "no wait the Señora here has an appointment." Ah, all these people were waiting without an appointment but me. It didn’t much seem to matter because they went in and I was left out in the cold. After about 20 minutes they all came out (it seems it was one large family) and I finally got to see the doctor. He said you have a protozoa, not worms. He gave me a precription and said I would have to be retested in 15 days. He told me it was a hard parasite to get rid. Great, but I’d still rather have that than worms.

I hestitated to write this blog about such an indelicate subject, but Esperando said I should. He said this is part of life down here and you should tell people. If you don’t live here and just visit as a tourist you are far less likely to contract these weird things. It’s the daily grind that gets you.

What To Eat With Tamales?

My earlier blog tells about the origin of tamales and how to eat one, but if you want to make a supper party featuring tamales you might need some guidelines for a menu. A traditional meal in here in Mexico, the ancestral homeland of the tamale, is an accompaniment of Pinto beans (frijoles). Black beans would work well too. Where I grew up in New Mexico this meal would also include a simple tossed green salad with tomato, lettuce, a chopped avocado, some onion and oil and vinegar dressing. You would want to have a tomato salsa on the side to put on the beans. I would add a loaf of garlic bread as well. Lemon meringue pie would be my Mother’s pick to serve for dessert; I would probably have brownies with ice cream.

Pinto beans are to the Southwest what Boston baked beans are to the East Coast. In the 1930’s when my Mother taught in a one-room schoolhouse in Rocky Arroyo, New Mexico, she boarded with local ranchers. Their supper every evening was Pinto beans (without the tamales), served with fried salt pork, blackstrap molasses and sourdough bread. The beans were topped with canned tomatoes and fresh sliced onions. It is a simple meal and quite nutritious as well. Someone who didn’t grow up eating this kind of food might think it sounds awful or boring, but for me it is comfort food.

Colorado is lucky to have Adobe Milling, a grower of Pinto beans and Anasazi beans. When we are in town we bring back lots of bags of Anasazi beans that we get at King Soopers Market. They are also available from Adobe Milling on the internet. These beans have an interesting history. They are a 1,500 year old variety: the popular story behind their modern origin is unusual. In the 1980's a member of an archeological team from UCLA was looking for remains of Pygmy elephants that roamed the earth thousands of years ago in New Mexico and came upon these beans. The beans were in a clay pot sealed with pine tar and were determined by radio carbon dating to be over 1,500 years old, yet some still germinated and it is from those that we today can share the harvest of heirloom beans of ancient Americans! The beans are a beautiful splotched brown and white that taste a lot like Pinto beans but more buttery. When they are cooked they look alike.

I grew up eating Pinto beans at least once a week. My father always cooked beans with salt pork, and some people like to use ham hocks, but I tell you if you have never had beans cooked just for themselves you are missing out on a fabulous low fat meal. I consider Esperando to be a master bean cooker. Here is his recipe (--first a word of caution, we like our beans really garlicky so cut back on the garlic if that is not for you).


Esperando's Pinto Beans

2 c Pinto beans
1 bay leaf
1 T epizote (available at specialty Mexican markets and maybe Whole Foods)
1 T oregano
1 T thyme
1 can stewed tomatoes
1 T coarse ground black pepper
1 medium onion, chopped
6 cloves minced garlic
2 T salt

Pick over the beans (now and then a rock gets in there, great for tooth cracking!) and rinse them under water. Put everything except the salt together in pot, bring to boil and simmer for 3-5 hours until done, add salt at the last. Beans can also be prepared the night ahead by covering with boiling water and letting sit overnight shortening the cooking time the next day to 2 hours. They can also be cooked all day in a slow cooker. Beans should be cooked until they are completely soft and a few are showing signs of falling apart. This same recipe works for black beans as well.

Side Salsa
2 large ripe tomatoes
1 yellow onion
1 c packed fresh cilantro
1 serrano chile, stemed, seeded and finely minced
1 tsp salt
1 T olive oil
Juice of 1 lemon or lime

Put in food processor and process until pieces are bean sized.

Now you can have a tamale party! Buen aprovecho!

Flying out of Santa Rosalia--and Gingerbread

It is very blustery today. I’ll bet Winnie-the-Pooh knew nothing about rattling windows and blowing sand in the face! I hope the wind doesn’t affect Esperando’s flight. He is flying on Aero Califia out of Palo Verde today (airport 45 minutes south of Santa Rosalia) to Hermosillo to wing his way to meetings in Los Angeles. I am ‘batching’ it until Friday in our new house. Esperando had been waitlisted on the Aero Califia flight and also on Alaska Airline’s flight out of Loreto for the last month. The Aero Califia flight finally just cleared last night, Alaska Airline’s still hasn’t. We are finding it really difficult to get flights on Alaska out of Loreto anymore. Alaska Airlines flights have been solidly booked as far ahead as three months ahead with few cancellations recently. We don’t know why they haven’t added additional planes or brought down a larger one like they did last year to accommodate an obviously greater demand. I don’t think they realize how much revenue they are missing out on. Why would he want to drive 2 ½ hours to Loreto instead of 45 minutes to Palo Verde, you ask? Ah there’s the rub. Well if he gets to Loreto he will have a direct flight to L.A. When he goes the Palo Verde route he has to make a connection in Hermosillo to get to L.A., and the Aero Califia flight can often be several hours late arriving here to make the return flight back across the Sea of Cortez.

Down below at Casa Boleo, the guesthouse is full of guests from one of the engineering companies. So I voted not to have dinner with the guests but cook for myself this week. I am loving have the more privacy up here, even though Sr. Jueves is constantly knocking at my door. And I am not forgotten in the way of meals. Oh no, the cooks insist they must bring dinner up to me when I am alone. Talk about spoiled! Last night they brought a delicious meal of several new recipes including ropa vieja (shredded seasoned beef in a rich chile sauce) and a divine new recipe for gingerbread that I found online. One of the things Esperando and I were looking forward to was cooking our own meals so that we can stay skinnier. Without a lot of hurt feelings I don’t see that happening anytime soon.

Here is the a delicious recipe from the San Francisco Chronicle

Very Gingery Gingerbread Bundt Cake with Caramel Glaze
Serves 12

This is a deep, dark, moist, spicy cake that's loaded with fresh ginger and coated with a rich caramel glaze. Dark baking pans retain the heat and can cause the exterior of a cake to get too brown. Watch baking time and if sides and top brown too quickly, reduce oven temperature 25°. Thick, heavy baking pans retain the heat more than lighter ones. If using a heavy pan, begin to test for doneness after 45 minutes. I find this is better served room temperature, rather than warm, with a dollop of whipped cream on top of each slice.

The cake
1 cup vegetable oil (such as canola oil)
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1/2 cup golden brown sugar, packed
1 cup mild molasses
3 large eggs
3/4 cup peeled and finely minced fresh ginger (about 4 ounces)
2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour + more to flour pan
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
1/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
1/2 teaspoon dry mustard
1/2 teaspoon sea salt
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 cup boiling water

The glaze
1/2 cup golden brown sugar, packed
1/4 cup (1/2 stick) unsalted butter + more to grease pan
1/4 cup whipping cream
1/4 teaspoon sea salt

Preheat oven to 325°. With room-temperature butter, grease a 12-cup Bundt pan with a paper towel, smearing butter into all the pan's crevices as well as the center tube. Add spoonfuls of flour and holding the pan over the sink, rotate it to coat it with flour. The inside tube will not be completely coated. Knock excess flour into the sink by tapping the pan lightly. In a large bowl, whisk together oil, sugars and molasses until combined. Add eggs and whisk until smooth. Whisk in ginger to incorporate. In another large bowl, whisk together flour, cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, mustard and salt. Whisk in molasses mixture until combined. Stir baking soda into boiling water and whisk into batter until blended. Transfer the batter to the prepared pan. Bake for 50-60 minutes or until sides begin to pull away from pan and cake tester inserted into cake comes out clean. Remove to a rack and cool in pan for 15 minutes.

For the glaze: In a small saucepan, stir brown sugar, butter, whipping cream and salt over medium-high heat until mixture comes to a boil. Reduce heat to medium-low and stir until smooth, about 1 minute. Remove from heat. Invert cake onto rack over a baking sheet. Using a small skewer, pierce holes all over top of warm cake. Very slowly pour glaze over top, allowing it to be absorbed before adding more. Cool cake at least 1 hour. Serve warm or at room temperature. (Cake may be stored at room temperature well wrapped overnight.) The cake may be baked in a 91/2-inch springform pan. Grease the pan and line the bottom with parchment paper.

Per serving: 505 calories, 5 g protein, 67 g carbohydrate, 26 g fat (5 g saturated), 70 mg cholesterol, 391 mg sodium, 1 g fiber.

More on cookies

This weekend I spent baking more cookies while Esperando spent the day climbing up and down a ladder to caulk up the slits in the wood planking on the walls and ceiling in Casa Abeja to prepare for our moving over there in January, both kinds of messy undertakings. Guess who lost more weight?

OR






On Friday I had asked Sr. Jueves to get me some walnuts, which are called nuez here and which is also the word for nuts in general in Mexico. I showed him some pecans and said the nuts I want look similar to this, but the nuez is bigger and paler. I also said to him, before we had pecanas you used to bring me nueces, which is true. When we first arrived a year and a half ago the store carried big bags of shelled walnuts. Nobody seemed to even know what a pecan was here 6 months ago. Then I kept asking for pecanas and finally pecanas arrived. The stores are now chock-a-block full of pecanas, but no nueces. I seem to have influenced the local nut economy in ways that are a mystery to me.

I went to a different store and found one small bag of walnuts still in their shells. I snatched them up, took them home and cracked them in my molquetera (what we gringos know as a mortar and pestle) that was given to me by my friend, Don Diego’s mother. It is the first time I had ever used it and Esperando chided me for chopping nuts in it, but I have to tell you it was the perfect tool. The curved bowl held the nut from rolling away and the pestle was heavy enough to easily crack the shell. I was in love with it before I used it, but now I am even more so. Look at its cute little piggie face.

By yesterday morning I had a vast domain of some really great cookies: frosted and unfrosted biscochitos, chewy walnut squares, the Neiman Marcus $250 cookie, and lemon squares, all baked over the weekend. I bundled them all up and gave them as gifts to the guesthouse staff and my husband’s co-workers in the office downtown. That left us with just a handful of cookies. Good, I thought, we can start getting skinnier before Christmas—no temptations.

Then, I got curious about the Mexican wedding cookies that we made the first day and which had evaporated into thin air. Why was it that none of the Mexicans here knew of this cookie? I looked it up on Wikipedia and didn’t get an answer to that, but I did find an interesting history. It seems that variations on a simple cookie made of nuts, flour, egg, sugar, vanilla and anise or caraway seed used for flavoring, and called a Jumble, has been around since the Middle Ages. It is the basis for our modern cookies known variously as Russian Teacakes, Sand Tarts, Polvorones Sevillanos and, yes, Mexican Wedding Cookies. Apparently this cookie originated in Arab cuisine, spread to Spain and from there to Europe. Yesterday afternoon, looking around at my empty larder and curious about the Polvorones Sevillanos, the little devil on my shoulder caused me to try that recipe. It was a little different as it included cinnamon in the dough. The recipe I made was far too dry to stick together and so I had to add a little brandy (which was a component of a different recipe for the same cookie). Well we’ve all read the joke about making the fruitcake and sampling the liquor, and how the recipe goes to hell. And no, that didn’t happen to me, but the result is sort of the same as we have a whole new batch of temptations to sample now. Esperando informed me he doesn’t like them so I will have stuff them down my gullet alone—such a loathsome task. Hiccup!

An essay on yay!

I have been bugged for some time now about how to spell ‘yay’ this being a shortened version of hurrah or hooray. I had been spelling it ‘yeah’ but somehow that didn’t seem right. I tried 'yeh' and 'yah' but those definitely looked wrong. Today I finally went to the internet to see if I could find the answer. Since the word is a slang expression I didn’t think it would be in the dictionary, guess again bright angel!

‘Yea’ or ‘yeah’ are valid slang expressions meaning ‘yes’ while my word ‘yay’, which until this very moment I knew the sound of but not actually how to spell, means ‘hurrah’. I came across a Yahoo chat room espousing the spelling ‘yay’ and said to myself this is way wrong; that is obviously the way some illiterate person would spell this word, but then there it was in the dictionary ‘yay’ so I now stand corrected and have added it to my vocabulary. Henceforth I will use ‘yay’ except I believe hurrah and hooray are more robust words, and not in any danger of confusion.

Yay! I just returned from getting Frida her rabies and distemper shots here in town with the local vet; it cost all of US$30! (Pretty good deal if you have healthy animals, not so great if you really need serious care as his capabilities are limited). But, yay! It was cheap, cheap, cheap and we even have a shot card with her photo scanned on it if we need to take her across the border. He's great for protocol on getting animals back across the border.

Yay! Hurricane Rick has almost evaporated and is going way south and east of us. Yay! We finally had Cocquilles St. Jacques last night and it was delicious. Yay! I have the rest of the day to myself and the girls will all leave at 3pm, no houseguests, no obligations! Yay!

Yay! I get to watch my favorite show Law and Order tonight. Esperando is back to California until Friday then we will start getting ready to leave on our trip to the Mexican Mining Convention in Veracruz, followed by a few days of being tourists in Puebla, Cuernavaca and La Paz. Puebla is a city of great food and ceramics. Yay! Two of my favorite things. In Puebla, we are going to stay in a really interesting sounding old former Jesuit monastery, La Sacristia de las Jesuitas, which is decorated with antiques in all the rooms and is said to have a very good restaurant besides. Yay! Hooray, hurrah, let the good times roll!

Food for thought

Yesterday I spent researching recipes on the internet. It all started with the monthly menu I prepare for Cook-with-an-Attitude and New Cook. It is a dynamic menu because I am always adjusting the quantities and changing the ingredients based on who will be here when; what we can and what we cannot get locally due to changing seasons; and finding a middle ground to meet houseguests expectations (i.e., diets, allergies and food tastes). I keep trying new recipes—some of them turn out so-so, some are fantastic, so I add the good ones to our repertoire. After a year our repertoire is getting pretty plumped up and I have to keep a running list so I don’t forget any of them.

Last year about this time when the weather was actually becoming liveably pleasant, I asked our errand boy, Sr. Jueves to get ice cream. “Oh, Señora, there is no ice cream now, it is too cold,” he told me. “What? Impossible!” said I, “it can never be too cold for ice cream, and it is not cold at all, the weather is perfect,” so I went with him to the store and sure enough all those freezers full of ice cream were empty now even though the weather was in the 80’s and 90’s Fahrenheit. This morning I asked him if he could get scallops at the local market. “Señora,” he said, “it is very difficult to get scallops here because people really like them and buy them up quickly, but today they have scallops and I can get them for you. They also have langosta (what we would call spiny lobster) and I can get that too, it is pure meat, but I have buy at least a kilo.” Hmm, I thought, ok, why not? He returned with the aforementioned and enormous shrimps besides, all of which are cooling their heels in the freezer for use next week—

Off I went looking for a lobster casserole recipe and decided to tweak my Coquille St. Jacques recipe and turn it into Mariscos San Jack. It will lack the gruyere since that is impossible to get down here, but we can use a decent Tillamook sharp cheddar. Next I have to poll my guests to make sure that everyone likes lobster, shrimp and scallops before I have the green light to proceed. I wouldn’t want to cook all that delicious shellfish and find out people hated lobster or were allergic to shrimp, etc. The next challenge will be getting the cook to understand how to prepare the recipe. As I’ve mentioned previously gringo recipes don’t seem to translate very well. But I am so motivated by the memory of how great it tastes that I am salivating and will rise to the challenge once again.

Update.Last night’s poll did not go well, lobster, shrimp and scallops got shot down! One of our guests is allergic to fish!! Such are the trials and tribulations of running the guesthouse. I went and massaged the menu again. Beef—its whats for dinner. The Mexican equivalent of the Beef Council will be proud of me!

Big appetites

Carmen came back last night at 3:30 AM. I heard miaowing outside at our bedroom door that opens onto the patio and saw her sitting there outside. The other two cats were sitting on top of my printer so they could look out the window and see her. I went into the bathroom and got some cat food, then I opened the door to see if she wanted in but the sound of the door opening frightened her and she ran away. I put the food on the ground. She never came back to eat it. Maybe eventually she will get hungry enough to come forward and let me feed her.

I don’t know if she will show up again tonight, but I am in Loreto at La Mision Hotel and won’t be able to answer her entreaties. I left some cat food with one of the vigilantes, Juan Manual, in case he should have better luck feeding her, not needing to open a door. How will I know this cat he asked? Well she is gray, has a bent tail, and I will give you a photo, I said. Then he told me he had talked to the cat in person the previous night and what she really wanted five hamburgers to start with or beef machacha in a flour tortilla—it is amazing what similar tastes he and the cat share in food.

The outfall of former Invest 91, now Tropical Storm Olaf, has reached Loreto where it has pretty much been raining all day. I think Esperando’s plans for a scuba dive and mine for hanging out in the sunshine may have been washed away for this weekend. When I looked at the weather report for today it was 40% chance of rain, tomorrow is 50%, and Saturday is 100%. How dismal!! In any event we will stay another night in Loreto, cruise the appliance store for a stove and refrigerator for Casa Abeja, do some food and curio shopping and have the chance for another gourmet meal here before heading back to Santa Rosalia. It is a nice break. Esperando returns again to Mexico City and the Bay Area for the rest of next week.

Cook-With-An-Attitude Goes on Vacation

New Cook (left) and Cook-With-An-Attitude (right) preparing food for a party at the guesthouse.

I prepare a weekly menu for supper at the guesthouse. When we have a full house and are entertaining visitors, I try to make the meals more elaborate and don’t watch the calories too seriously. When it is just the three of us who live here most the time, we are constantly dieting or at least trying to keep from gaining weight, so our meals consist of a starter of light soup followed by chicken, fish or shrimp served up with some vegetable. It gets pretty boring, but if we stick to it we do pretty well weight-wise. This week with everyone gone to meetings in the USA it was just me eating here alone.

I think I mentioned that we have New Cook for the interim since Cook-With-An-Attitude (the regular cook) is on vacation. New Cook cleans the kitchen scrupulously including the floor, throws out old food, and bags up new food so it won’t go bad fast—a big failing of Cook-With-An-Attitude. However it is probably a good thing we don’t have any guest guinea pigs—just me, for her cooking is untried! New Cook is a very large lady, who dwarfs Cook-With-An-Attitude (who is not a petite little thing). New Cook went on a diet, I don’t know when but I think somewhat recently, and lost 50 pounds so she is full of dietitious ideas for making low calorie meals and keeps proffering them to me. In the spirit of seeing what her recipes taste like I have been sampling some of her offerings and varying the menu a bit.

Yesterday I decided to blow the diet for the day and had requested chile relleños, a good test to compare their cooking I thought since Cook-With-An-Attitude makes excellent chile relleños, seemingly effortlessly. If you don’t know what a chile relleño is, it is a tasty Mexican dish where the chiles are roasted, skinned and seeded; filled with cheese; coated with a beaten flour-and-egg batter; and sautéed until the batter is golden and the cheese has melted. They are then covered with a tomato-chile salsa. While they aren’t skinny food, they could probably be much worse. My mouth was all set for my chile relleño lunch.

Earlier that morning Senor Jueves, our errand boy, came to me to ask for help. One of the perks for the maids and him is sometimes breakfast (usually cold cereal) and a hot meal during the day prepared by the cook. However no one had told this to New Cook and she was declining to prepare any food for anyone. I had to go out to the kitchen and explain to her that she had to feed everyone a lunch. “Oh,” she said, “no one told me.” I thought this was a little strange as she has been here subbing as a maid for the last two months and would seemingly have been included in these meals that Cook-With-An-Attitude was preparing for everyone else.

About an hour later I went out to the kitchen where New Cook was assembling a ground beef filling for five bell peppers, freshly cleaned and standing at attention on the counter. Hmm, I thought, still not taking it all in and mentally counting on my fingers, why five? There are two maids, Senor Jueves and her. Then I told her the guard is not included in the people we feed for lunch. Ok, she said. A bit later I could smell chiles roasting so I still felt reassured my chile relleño was on track. Lunchtime rolled around and I was presented with a stuffed bell pepper, which we had already eaten earlier in the week with my recipe. “This is different,” she said, “this is my recipe.” I should have kept an open mind, but I was annoyed. It has made me really appreciate Cook-With-An-Attitude, whose sometimes pouty way of behaving is compensated for by cooking what I tell her to.

“Ah,” I said, “but I wrote chile relleño on the menu, not pimenton (bell pepper) relleño. They are different things,” I said. “You need to prepare what I put on the menu and not change it.”

“Oh,” she said, “I didn’t know, I thought you wanted diet food.”

“No,” I said, “sometimes I don’t want diet food, you need to follow what the menu says. See here on the menu I wrote chile relleño!” I explained, “A chile relleño is a roasted poblano, filled with cheese, dipped in egg batter and fried—it is not a bell pepper stuffed with ground beef.”

She looked at me like she’d never heard of a chile relleño before. “It is a Mexican thing,” I said, “comida tipica.”

Again I got the deer in the headlights look, but she said, “I know how to make those too. You always want to be skinny so I made this instead.”

It just didn’t seem to be sinking in. I felt like I was beating my head against the wall. I went back out to the dining table and begrudgingly ate my stuffed pepper. It was way too much food and there was lots of cheese in it. It certainly did not have any fewer calories than the chile relleño would have had, and in my anger I ate it all. I had gained a pound the next morning. Fortunately Cook-With-An-Attitude will be back early next week and I will welcome her with open arms. I won’t have that food Nazi, New Cook, trying to re-organize me and my recipes.

Plagued in Santa Rosalia

Esperando is traveling—he was in Vancouver last week, the Bay Area this week, then back home on Friday. Life is not dull though, no sir. When he is gone, that is when we like to have the unusual crises arise. It’s much more fun when I get to solve problems all on my own (I wonder if this is why I’ve had a nervous tic in my eye ever since he left town?)

Last week one of the maids came to me and said, “Senora, there are beetles in the bodega.” As proof she brought me this dead little bug that was about ¼-inch long and black. It didn’t look too terrifying. She didn’t act as excited as I did when I saw them all. All the bags of beans in the bodega were infected with these horrid little beetles which were chewing their way out of their bags and flying around the bodega and laundry room crawling up the walls, and biting the maids when they tried to clean them up. We’re talking hundreds of the little suckers, what they call a plaga (plague) down here. I always wondered about plagas when you read about them in the Bible they sort of make your skin crawl and we do get them in the USA, but they seem much more in-your-face down here. Apparently one of the girls in the office downtown got a good price on bags of beans a month ago or so at some local discount grocery store and purchased a bunch for the guesthouse, so we had about 8 or 9 one-pound bags of beans stacked in the storeroom, hatching out simultaneously before our very eyes.

I tried spraying them with some insecticide we had, but it had no effect on them, they continued milling around in circles on the shelves, spreading around the room and flying into the laundry area. I raced to the kitchen and called Esperando’s secretary.

“Quick, we need Fumigator Man! There are beetles hatching out all over the bodega.” I said with great passion.

“When do you want him there,” she asked.

“Immediately!” I said, “This an emergency.”

“Ok, but when do you want him to come?” She asked.

“As soon as he can,” I responded, wondering what about ‘emergency’ and ‘immediately’ did not indicate that he should come as fast as he could.

“Ok, but when, well, ok, it’s urgent, I will call and see when he can come.” Said she, ‘Thank God,’ I thought, ‘I finally got through to her.’

So we cleared shelves and shelves of food out of the bodega, threw the bags of beans away, and got Fumigator Man in at noon. According to him he had already been over to that same store that the beans were purchased from sometime before, spraying it for the same bugs. They were not so common a pest that he sees here, so he put 2+2 together about where the beans were purchased. It’s kind of cool having a Fumigator Man that knows all the hot gossip about whose got plagas and stuff. I guess he is not bound by any code of ethics not to reveal these things, as say a doctor might be. He told us never to buy beans, rice or sugar at that store. I don’t know why we even shopped there in the first place, I always think we are going to the better grocery stores so I was appalled to find out the control of food in the house has slipped between my fingers. (Well I was gone for 3 months, so it is hard to control things when you are gone—and I probably would have been happy for those beans being a good deal, not knowing what I know now about them.) The girls told me after Fumigator Man left that this was a bad store, so I guess everyone else in town must know this. Why did we buy beans there in the first place if everyone knows this?

After he sprayed the house (it was Friday noon), I sent the maids and the cook home. The fumes were overpowering and reached almost to my bedroom and made one of the cats throw up. Saturday it still smelled strongly so the girls didn’t come then either. Fumigator Man said not to clean the laundry room until Monday. That meant I paid two days of wages for no employees, plus the cost of fumigating, plus the cost of taking all the food off the shelves and then putting it all back again. Kind an expensive price for rotten beans, huh?

How to eat a tamale, really!

Tamales Santa Rosalia Style shown below

It surprised me to know a lot of my readers want to know how to eat a tamale. If you want to know what to eat with a tamale, click on this entry. Otherwise herein I will tell you exactly how to eat a tamale since it strikes me that there might be people out there in the world that have never seen, much less eaten a tamale. How sad! Or having been presented with one, they didn’t have some perceived etiquette down pat. I can’t keep them in suspense any longer.

Tamales are an ancient food. They were probably invented by the Mexican people (as in Aztecs or Mesoamericans) and now days follow a southerly flow from the southwest USA through Mexico down to Central and South America. No one knows for sure when or who invented the tamale, but we do know tamales have been written about since pre-Columbian days. In the 1550's, the Aztecs served the Spaniards tamales during their visits to Mexico. The tamale changes its name, appearance and flavor in each country until it gets to Chile where it loses any resemblance to a real tamale but just becomes a lump of masa without any filling. This story is not about those other tamales, but about the ones you find in Mexico and the southwest USA.

Tamales are a labor of love. They are generally made in larger batches of say 12 dozen or more if someone is selling them, or 3 to 6 dozen if made for one's family. They seem to cost about the same if you buy them from someone no matter what country you live in. In Mexico, they are the food of choice for any fiesta, celebration or holiday, but are available everywhere in the Mexican-American world all year long if you ask around. In the US if you are buying tamales you generally buy a dozen at a time, but in Mexico they are not sold by the dozen; you can buy any number without regard to dozens. I don’t know why.

I grew up in Carlsbad, New Mexico, where my mother bought tamales from Manuela who took orders and made up batches for her devotees in her own home. Here in Colorado we can get delicious tamales, the hottest spiciest ones I’ve ever eaten that are sold by some Latin women from their coolers outside the Mexican super markets on Federal Blvd.; in Taos, New Mexico, Abe’s Cantina and Cocina in Arroyo Seco has the best tamales in the world because of their unparalleled masa. Eat a tamale in El Paso, Texas or Tucson, Arizona and it will be different yet again. In Santa Rosalia the tamales have two olives in them (watch out for the pits!) as they do often once you cross the border and keep on going south. US tamales tend to be spicier, those in Mexico more bland but tasty.

It usually takes about 2 whole days to make them with helpers. No one would make them by themselves--they would be crazy, it is so much work. At least two or three or more people are involved in an assembly production of these delectable morsels. Often the tamale filling is made the day ahead from the pig’s head, beef ribs or roasts, and of both dark and light meat of the chicken. The meats are not mixed together; you would buy pork (mine and Esperando's favorites), beef or chicken tamales. Regionally there are sweet tamales with no meat or tamales cooked in banana leaves, but they fall outside of scope of my treatise. The meat is boiled until it falls off the bones and then whatever seasoning, such as red or green chile sauce, or broth with spices is added to it so that you have a rather saucy wet filling. Masa (a dough) is made from nixtamal (very finely ground corn meal) mixed with lard and some of the broth from the meat. The masa is spread to about ½ inch upon corn husks that have first been soaked in hot water. Next a generous spoonful of filling is placed on the masa and it is rolled up cigarette style, so the filling is encased in the masa, and the husks keep it all wrapped together, the ends of the husks are folded over or tied with strips of husk. The tamales are carefully packed into a large pot to steam for 2 hours or more.

But how do you eat them you ask? That is the best and easiest part. The tamales have already been cooked when you purchase them, so you steam them covered in a basket for 7-10 minutes or so, it doesn’t take long, just a little longer if they have been frozen. Or, you can microwave a tamale on high for 1 minute. Take them out—be careful they are really hot! Unroll the husk carefully so the tamale stays whole. Throw the husk away, sliding the tamale onto your plate (or move the husk to the side of your plate if there is no where to toss it) and eat it with a fork. Some people like to pour red or green chile sauce or salsa on top, but if they are great tamales that is not necessary. There are plenty of bad or so-so tamales out there, but nothing can beat the taste of a great tamale. For those wanting to know even more Gourmet Sleuth has alot more details.

Soup of the evening, beautiful soup

One of my passions is cooking. I don’t get much of a chance to in Santa Rosalia since the guesthouse employs a cook. So today I am going to experiment with making Red Pepper and Orange Soup for lunch. The recipe comes from the Reader’s Digest Spanish language cookbook Cocina Fantástica which our cook borrowed from her friend to show me, and I was able to purchase on http://www.exlibris.com/ as it is out of print. This is such a great cookbook, full of delicious and unusual recipes that after I had sampled some of them, I bought a copy for myself as well. Theoretically the recipes can be prepared in 30 minutes.

Among my most favorite vegetables are red bell peppers. We don’t have access to them but once in a blue moon in Santa Rosalia. Last time I saw them I bought most of what they had even though they were slightly wilty and had Esperando roast them on the grill. Then I peeled them, put them in a jar, and covered them with olive oil and we ate them up over the course of the week. Now that I am in Denver for awhile this is an opportunity to see if I like this different sounding soup recipe.

Red Pepper and Orange Soup
Serves 4

2 T olive oil
2 lbs red peppers
2 cloves minced garlic
Salt
3 Seville or blood oranges
1 T orange flower water (available at health food, gourmet grocer or large liquor store)

In a large casserole, heat the oil over a medium fire. Devein the red peppers and cut into quarters lengthwise, then slice into large pieces. Sauté the pepper and garlic; add salt to taste. Cover the casserole and heat to high until vapor begins to escape from under the lid. Reduce flame to very low or they will burn, and cook for 25 minutes or until peppers are really soft, turning them from time to time so that they cook in their own juices. (Here in Denver we are at a high altitude so I had to cook them for 40 minutes.) Meanwhile in a mixing bowl, juice the oranges until you have ¾ of a cup of juice. (I cheated and purchased fresh squeezed orange juice from the grocery store, but I think blood oranges would be really good.) Add the orange flower water to the orange juice. When the peppers are well cooked, puree them in a blender or food processor. Add the orange juice mixture to the blender and liquefy again. Adjust seasonings, I added salt enough to balance out the sweetness of the oranges. Heat the soup again and serve with a little chopped parsley. What's not to like?

What is birria?

On Sundays, as you drive around town it’s pretty quiet. Many of the businesses are closed and there is a lazy feeling in the air. Around 9 am the church bell in Iglesia Santa Barbara’s bell tower starts clanging, calling people to mass. Various no-name eating establishments, little hole-in-the-wall places, put out handwritten cardboard signs offering up posole, menudo and birria. Esperando and I are familiar with posole and menudo, but we always wondered—what is birria? We first noticed birria signs elsewhere on the mainland side of the Sea of Cortez in Puerto Peñasco many years ago when that place was still a sleepy little fishing village. Back then Esperando thought birria (which can be made of just about any meat, but most commonly here is of goat) might be a kind of barbeque.

Well today we decided to draw on our local resource and asked the cook to make us a birria for lunch. She started early this morning with a big hunk of beef, a bag of mixed spices that looked like pickling spice, a whole garlic head still in its papery skin, some onions, and a small pile of dried pasilla chiles, dried Anaheim-type red and green chiles, and a few of the fiery little chile pequins that have been harvested from the darling pepper tree my friend gave to Esperando. The house is suffused with the spicy essence of this stew or caldo bubbling away on the stovetop. We didn't know how we would last until we were allowed to sample this obvious piéce de résistance. I thought we might salivate to death.

When we came to the table condiments were set out in bowls to put on the birria: chopped lettuce, sliced radishes, chopped onion mixed with cilantro, and a bowl of Mexican limes. The meat in the birria had been shredded in skinny threads, and the broth was flavorful but a clear broth colored red by the chiles. It was the perfect lunch, not heavy, not especially hot from the chile, but redolent with the spice of clove, cumin and allspice. Next time Esperando wants to try goat.

"How can a nation be great if its bread tastes like Kleenex?"

The above quote by Julia Child makes me wonder if she would have approved of automatic breadmakers. Did I tell you I decided to experiment with our bread machine this past weekend? I brought a Panasonic SD-YD250 to Santa Rosalia. I perceived eventually, or even sooner, we might get tired of eating the commercially baked Mexican version of Wonder Bread, known as Bimbo Bread. Their trademark hamburger buns complete with sesame seeds on the top go by the name Bimbollo, and the hot dog buns are called Media Noche (middle of the night—what gives?) They also make a wheat loaf and an oatmeal loaf. All are basic dry uninspired bread forms, but one sees their bread trucks even in the remotest smallest of towns in Baja delivering bread. The other bread available locally is the “French baguette” from Panaderia Boleo baked here every morning. They are a break from Bimbo, but a bit doughy and heavy. They are available at the bakery downtown which is housed in a cute French-style building with a lot of curb appeal. Unfortunately the staff, young women with an attitude, act as if they are doing you big a favor to even speak to you. The only time I bought stuff there it was actually moldy and that coupled with the snotty attitude sort of killed my interest in returning again.

But I digress—back to the breadmaking. When we first got ready to use the breadmaker after we arrived, I couldn’t find the directions anywhere. This wasn’t so strange because my unsupervised unpackers were ripping apart cardboard boxes of kitchen appliances, glassware, etc., which they would pitch onto a growing mountain of debris outside to be hauled off to the garbage dump. The bread machine instructions apparently fell victim to this annihilation, but I was able to resurrect them online or we would have been screwed. For the 100 millionth time, thank God for the internet!

The first bread we tried was a basic white French bread loaf, which everyone really liked. The trouble is we didn’t have a bread knife and the loaves were large and soft so they didn’t cut very evenly and wouldn’t fit into the toaster. We made quite a few of these over time, then we tried making the egg bread which was also good, but more work. While I was in the U.S. three months ago I bought a bread knife to make slicing easier. When I returned with the knife, the cook’s breadmaking zeal had expired, and I could see it was much easier when you are serving 7 or 8 people for breakfast just to buy Bimbo bread, white and whole wheat, and toast those nice, even slices up for breakfast (forget the bonus of the freezer space you are saving by not trying to store the baked bread as well).

However I kept wishing I could have a nice multigrain bread when the staff was gone on weekends. Somehow every time Sunday would come and when I would assemble the ingredients something was always missing. Initially it was molasses (which the Storyteller had to bring from Canada), then dried powdered milk, then the multigrain cereal I had purchased which was eaten before I could reorganize the breadmaking session. Finally this last weekend with malice aforethought, I garnered all the ingredients including flaxseed (which I brought back from Vancouver); and wheat germ found here in the grocery store (amazing!); and then when I went to trot out my cereal it was again missing. Arrgggh! In desperation I grabbed the box of Kellogg’s All Bran Original. I was following some recipe I found on the internet which looked really peculiar, but I thought what the hay, this is only an experiment. Just go for it! After 5 hours of baking when I removed the loaf from the pan it was kind of weird looking having risen sporatically and unevenly, and was almost too crusty. But it was heavenly to eat! It sliced easily and I froze the slices which I am hoarding for weekends. We have a 4-day vacation ahead. I can barely wait to get my hands on the breadmaker again. I made some adjustments to my original recipe which I think may improve the appearance of the loaf, there’s nothing wrong with the texture or flavor. Esperando even compared it favorably with my sister-in-law Suzy Gourmet’s cracked wheat bread.

Whole Grain Bread Machine Recipe

½ c Kelloggs All Bran Original or other 7-grain cereal, crushed
½ c rolled oats
½ c flax seeds
½ c wheat germ
¼ c brown sugar
2 tsp yeast
1 ½ c water
2 T olive oil
2 ½ c bread flour
1 tsp salt

Put oats in a mixing bowl; pour 1 cup boiling water over the oats. When oats have cooled but are still a bit warm, add remaining ingredients according to bread machine manufacturer's manual. Combine all ingredients in bread machine and cook as you would a whole grain loaf.

The story of food

Here we are back in Vancouver—the Frozen North—as my Mother refers to it. Today it does seem rather frozen. It is not raining, but extremely foggy with that bone chilling humidity and intense cold, only about 35F. We spent the morning at Granville Island and as we wandered through the food market I was struck anew by the beauty of the produce and sheer abundance of kinds of food items here in Vancouver— spices, breads, meats, fruits and vegetables, smoked fishes, candy, cakes, cheeses, Asian foods, herbal specialties, Italian delis, etc., each with a vendor specialized in a particular kind of item. What a contrast to Santa Rosalia.

I was just thinking before we left Baja that we had amazingly become accustomed to living a simpler lifestyle. I never would have thought I could get used to not having an Urban Fare or Whole Foods market nearby with all of its variety. However, lately I am convinced that when you can have really fresh squeezed orange juice every morning and fresh eggs—you can live without a lot of other seemingly important things. I still think that is true.

I have learned to be content with canned spinach and mushrooms since I am just using them as an ingredient in a meal and not the focus of the meal. What really broke my heart several weeks ago was to go to a market I wouldn’t normally shop at, find some fresh mushrooms that were about a week past their usefulness and to realize if I had known they were there earlier I could have bought them and been so happy. I bought them anyway and trimmed off the bad parts, but there wasn’t much left to use. They did add a lot flavor-wise to my pasta dish

I have just purchased the book The 150 Healthiest Foods on Earth http://www.amazon.com/150-Healthiest-Foods-Earth-Surprising/dp/1592332285 by Jonny Bowden and I see where all the meager produce we eat in Santa Rosalia is on the list of seriously good-for-you foods. We even get purslane, or verdolagas as it is known in Mexico. I had never heard of it before. It is a food superstar and a weed in my garden in Denver. It grows so fast among my roses I have to pull it out everyday to try and control the growth. Now I will eat it instead of stomping on it or trying to poison it. When we serve it in Casa Boleo, it is presented as a stew with pork. So far it has been a big hit, and this from men that are especially picky eaters. Who could believe it?

Maybe you have it growing in your backyard and just don’t know it yet!

How to eat tamales in February

The Christmas season in Mexico has been a wonderful long season of religious based customs enfolding the community which we have participated in second hand. The first part of this is Las Posadas which we are told is celebrated much more in mainland Mexico than here in Baja. It generally involves an extended family group, with part of the group representing the Virgin and St. Joseph outside at night with candles seeking room at the inn musically through the verses of a traditional Christmas carol. For their part the innkeeper group rejects their entreaties several times before letting them into the house, where the party continues with food, drink and piñata breaking. This kicks the season off on December 16.

Today we participated in the end of the Mexican Christmas celebration. Today is El Día de los Reyes or Epiphany (the last day of Christmas) and the day “we three kings of orient are” i.e., Melchor, Gaspar, and Balthazar, representing Europe, Arabia, and Africa, arrived on horse, camel and elephant, bringing respectively gold, frankincense and myrrh to the baby Jesus. Here, as in many parts of the world, this is celebrated by eating a Three King’s cake. While in France with the Oldest Daughter, Esperando ate the galette des Rois. This is a kind of cake with a trinket or a bean hidden inside. The person who gets the piece of cake with the trinket becomes "king" for a day.

Here in Mexico our Three King’s cake is called a rosca, which is defined in my Spanish dictionary as a pastry ring. Well it was a large pastry ring of a kind of mild fruit cake (not unlike a hot cross bun in flavor) with five baby Jesus’ baked into it. We had about 15 to 20 people at Esperando’s office who all came to have some cake. The trick is each person has to slice their own piece and if the knife cuts into a Baby Jesus or He is in the piece you get, then on February 2 you along with the other four chumps are responsible for bringing enough tamales to fed the same 15 to 20 people. Along with the cake we were served champurrado, a sort of a hot chocolate beverage which is made from maseca which is dough for flour tortillas which you then brown in a skillet (which thickens the beverage); milk; Mexican hot chocolate (a 3-inch round flat disk about ½-inch thick composed of chocolate, sugar, cinnamon and ground almonds); and cocoa. The result is kind of a thickened hot chocolate that is not so sweet, but interesting and tasty.

February 2 (tamale D-day) is the Feast of Candelaria or Candlemas which is the Feast of the Presentation of Jesus at the Temple. We were told by our assembled partygoers that the best place to buy tamales for this important day is in front of the church where a wholesale tamale undertaking is going on. I claimed one of the Baby Jesus’. I don’t know who organizes the tamale purchasing but I guess I will find out. Good grief!! A really excellent excuse to break the new diet and a validation for eating tamales to boot!!

If you want to know how to eat a tamale, click here.

Santa Rosalia shops for Christmas

Here it is the 23rd of December, almost Christmas. Santa Rosalia is decorated to the hilt with lots of Christmas lights everywhere downtown including the main plaza and side- streets. Mechanical moving reindeer beckon from second stories as do lots of big outdoor inflatable Santa-type balloons including one of Santa flying an airplane. The store merchandise spills over onto tables edging the streets, as well as a guy selling fresh fish and shellfish out of the back of his pickup, a small stand with fresh strawberries (from where?) for sale, and tons of pedestrians crossing the streets as their whims dictate. There is even a sign advertising cockfighting on Christmas day--somehow that seems un-Christian. Traffic creeps along downtown’s 4 major east-west streets, and cross-hatched 14 or so north-south streets (that are only 4 or 5 blocks long). The east-west streets are one-way streets of alternating opposite directions. And the north-south streets follow the same pattern, except that there are two Calle 8’s a block apart both going the same one-way direction.

Just about every other store is women’s clothing or accessories with a few baby’s and men’s shops thrown in, about four major grocery stores (not very big), snow cone and frappe sellers, taco stands and a few stationary/sports combined stores (a rather puzzling combination). I drove downtown with Esperando today as we needed to go to the bank and the liquor store and parking is all but non-existent anywhere this close to Christmas. I drove around the block which actually ends up being about 10 blocks because of intervening one-way streets, then found a lucky parking place to pull into thinking to give him a bit of time to get in and out of the instant teller. What I hadn’t counted on was the continuous stream of traffic that wouldn’t let me back out onto the street for about 10 minutes. By the time I maneuvered back to where I could turn back up the street he was on, the policewoman directing traffic held me up another 5 minutes. So the poor man had been standing waiting for me much longer than I had intended.

Next stop was the liquor store, normally in a not too busy location. I found a parking spot in front of a nursery school which had let out for the day, just around the block. I spent 10 minutes wrestling the truck into a parallel park, called Esperando and said call me when you are ready. I am ready now he said. So I unparked and drove around the block to pick him up. Theoretically we are all stocked up and set for the holidays.

As tradition for us dictates, tomorrow night we will have guacamole and chips, posole, New Mexico style enchiladas, and tamales. I made a lucky find of beautiful dried red Anaheim type chiles, so we will enrich the good canned enchilada sauce they have here with that too. Christmas morning will start with a spinach and cheese strata. We are having a turkey and the all trimmings on Christmas. We will be sharing Christmas with Flaming Mike and his wife we are enroute to San Diego the next day. I hope we don’t all freeze to death opening gifts in the house, since we do not have heating. Who would be believe that I could be wrapped up in my warmest clothes because it is 62F inside and a balmy 74F outside in the sun. Praise God for the electric blanket that keeps me warm at night!

Before Christmas, Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving approaches on Thursday. Yesterday I made a pot of Rich Turkey Broth (substituting chicken drumsticks) and tore up a bunch of our Panaderia El Boleo French bakery bread into cubes to dry out for making the stuffing. I am thinking this time I will add sausage and pistachios to the stuffing. I have found an interesting Argentine style sausage that worked well the other day in my lasagna.

My thankful meal will come when Esperando gets back home from La Paz. Now that the Aero Mexico flight to and from Mexico City to Loreto has been cancelled, he has a 6-hour drive ahead of him. Fortunately a driver will bring him home. The Storyteller, I hope, is looking forward to some Yankee food —he gets two Thanksgivings this year as he celebrated Canadian Thanksgiving in October when he was home on leave. I got curious about all of that and went and did a little research on Thanksgiving. It appears the U.S. colonists celebrated Thanksgiving fairly frequently and independently throughout the colonies, and when the Revolution broke out and the Royalists moved up to Canada they took that thanksgiving tradition with them, hence both Americans and Canadians celebrate the same holiday, but not in the same month.

Turns out we can have a fairly traditional Thanksgiving here in all ways but the turkey, so I will substitute chicken instead. I believe I could have ordered a turkey from a market in Mulege, an hour away. I didn’t know how to do that this time so I just went with the chicken. Our menu will be shrimp cocktail (Mexican style, made by the cook), the aforementioned bread stuffing, mashed potatoes and gravy, orange glazed yams, broccoli, cranberry sauce (I prefer fresh cranberries, but that I could even FIND canned berries down here is a miracle), and pumpkin pie for dessert. We will have to break out one of our hoarded bottles of California zinfandel to accompany all this.

Rich Turkey Stock

2 lbs turkey parts, neck, drumsticks, wings, bones
2 – 3 T olive oil
½ to 1 ½ c raw chopped carrots and onions
1 small chopped parsnip
1 to 2 stocks tender celery with leaves, chopped
2 cloves chopped garlic
1 walnut size piece chopped ginger
Handful of chopped parsley
1 bay leaf
1-2 c dry white wine

Chop turkey into pieces (i.e. bones, wings, drumsticks) of reasonable size and in a large frying pan brown them in oil, adding vegetables halfway through. Transfer to a heavy saucepan, leaving fat behind. Pour out fat and deglaze pan with wine. Pour wine into pot and add 11 cups of water. Bring to boil and simmer for two hours. Strain solid ingredients out. Degrease broth.

House party

Yesterday and today we are entertaining three Korean visitors, investors in the Boleo project. Last night we gave them gifts and they gave us gifts of some nice wood boxes with artwork on them. Our gifts were a hand-woven turquoise shawl from Oaxaca for the woman and domino sets made of Mexican onyx for the men. It turns out they didn’t know how to play dominos, but one of our other dinner guests, a Mexican man is quite the aficionado, and he taught them how to play the game. I think they enjoyed themselves a lot between that and some nice shots of Don Julio to liven up the game. It was a beautiful moonlit night, one day after the full moon, so after learning how to play dominos we took our tequila shot classes back out on the porch for moon bathing classes. Not so many boats out on the water as normal which surprised me as we didn’t have any wind at all last night. Today they will go on a mine tour to see what has been constructed with their money.

Tonight we will have a sort of Korean bbq party. The evening will start with taquizas (sort of like pigs in a blanket, but rolled in corn tortillas and fried), dipping sauce, and margaritas out on the patio, followed with skewers of beef filet that has been marinated in Korean bbq sauce and served as brochettes with bacon, green pepper and tomato. Of course we will have rice, kim chee from our dwindling supply in the refrigerator, and Korean hot pepper sauce.

Today our order of tamales showed up. It is getting to be quite the business now as the girls have a list of about 10 people wanting to get orders in on these tamales. I didn't realize this was going on, but I could hear them in the kitchen calling up people and taking orders, this one wants 2, she wants 5, etc. I thought it must be some kind of betting pool, then I realized it was the tamales. I personally didn’t find them much different from others I have had here locally, but I must be missing something because a list of 10 people attests to their greatness. They certainly are handsome in their rolls of corn husk with corn husk ties.

Marmalade Blues

We ran out of orange marmalade yesterday and the Storyteller was broken hearted. You can’t buy it here, but we have Seville oranges coming out of our ears. (Did I mention the fresh squeezed orange juice we have to choke down every morning?) So I decided to make a batch of marmalade after searching out different recipes on internet. After all, my father used to make marmalade every couple of days to feed his insatiable jelly habit, so surely I had to have some of those jelly making genes coursing through my blood.

It rather astounds me how many recipes are out there, quite different from one another. Some want you to juice the fruit, scoop out the pulp and seeds, then liquefy the whole in a blender adding shaved peels of orange rind slices to the pot when the sugar goes in—others want you boil the fruit whole for several hours then slice it in very thin slices, reserve the seeds to boil for another 10 minutes, strain them out, then add the sugar. I went for the latter recipe (less work) and ended up with two and a half pint Mason jars of chunky marmalade, not too much jelly more fruit. Next time I think I would cut the oranges up smaller, it is on the bitter side which I prefer however I think the shaved peel version would not be so bitter. I boiled it to the point they suggested on the candy thermometer, but I think I might not boil it quite so high next time as the jelly part is a bit more dense than I would like.

We don’t get grapefruit here or I might have been tempted to try my father’s version which he came by from my grandmother. I think this one from the Fannie Farmer Cookbook is similar:

Page's Favorite Marmalade

1 grapefruit
2 oranges
2 lemons
Sugar
Salt

Scrub fruit, slice very thin, saving the juice. Discard the seeds and the grapefruit core. Measure the fruit and juice. Put the fruit and juice in a large pot and add three times as much water. Simmer, covered for 2 hours, then let stand overnight. Measure the fruit and liquid, then add an equal amount of sugar and a sprinkle of salt. Cook rapidly, in two or three batches, until the jelly point is reached, stirring frequently. Pour into hot sterilized jars and seal.

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.