gone dancing

Cake Countdown 1: Deeply Spiced Carrot Cake

2011-09-08T11:37:00.000-07:00

There are elven weeks left of the term at the school where I work and these are my last eleven weeks as I have handed in my notice. By the time Christmas arrives, I will be in Europe. As my farewell countdown I am making a cake a week for work.

Cake 1 was a deeply spiced carrot cake. A large amount of ground ginger and cinnamon make this a warming, comforting cake perfect with a cup of tea. There is icing too; a cream cheese and yoghurt affair which stops everything being too sweet. The first time I made this I did it in two loaf pans and kept one simple, which means I didn´t add any spices or cranberries or nuts. Just carrot. The second one had a load of cranberries, nuts and spices. I changed this from the original recipe which says you need a mixer, but I made it with a wooden spoon. The second time, I baked one 22 cm round cake. In place of muscovado sugar I used light brown and, in the icing yoghurt, instead of sour cream. I used about one cup more carrot than they suggest because I had grated it and I am glad I did because otherwise I think it would have been too cakey and not carroty enough. The amount of spice they use is pretty small, so I upped and as usual didn´t really measure it; I just let my nose guide me.

Adapted from America´s Test Kitchen Cookery book

4 eggs
2 cups sugar
1 1/2 cups canola oil
2 cups flour
1 and a bit cups pecans/ walnuts
1 and a bit cups dried cranberries
1/2 teaspoon of baking powder (more if you don´t live at the top of a mountain)
pinch of salt

Beat the eggs vigorously until they go a bit frothy and add the sugar. Beat some more. Take out all your aggression on it. Drizzle in the oil. be quick about it, you´re not making mayonnaise, and keep beating. Then beat a bit more. In a big bowl with a big wooden spoon, this takes no time at all. add the carrot, nuts and cranberries. Mix again. Add the flour and baking powder and salt. Now stir, you don´t want to beat too violently once the flour goes in or else the cake will be tough.

Pour into prepared baking tin and bake for about an hour at gas 3.

Icing
To one packet of cream cheese (8oz) add about 50 mls of natural yoghurt, a splash of vanilla and enough icing sugar to make a thick icing. Taste it to see if you like it. Spread on and stick it in the fridge - the icing is good once it´s dried out a bit.

Slice thickly and eat with a cuppa.

Big Fat Cake

2011-09-01T09:27:00.000-07:00

That was what I wanted to make yesterday and this is what I did:

The recipe was based on using one pack of butter and six eggs. This seemed like a good starting point and I remember vaguely a recipe that uses those quantities. The flour, sugar and yoghurt were as I think I remembered the quantities to be. Actually I didn´t measure the yoghurt at all. Once the butter was soft, I added 300g of sugar and then the eggs. After that, a load of vanilla and about really approximately, 200ml of natural yoghurt. I just added enough until the mixture was as runny I as thought it should be. It looked like it had curdled, but no matter because once 350g of flour was in, it was all fine.

I baked it at gas 2 for about an hour. My oven has no thermostat or regulator, so I think it must start at gas 2 and slowly work it´s way up to about gas 4. Anyway, the knife came out clean. I baked it in a ring mold. I think it would work as two loaf cakes or a 25 cm round cake.

This morning it was just right with hot milky coffee. This afternoon it will be great with a cup of tea. Toasted it would work with jam and it could also be a drizzle cake. In the fridge I have some thick orangey syrup that I made a while ago and I am thinking of pouring that over.

Next time I am going to up the butter

Washing Machine

2011-06-13T10:59:00.000-07:00

I was asked by Jamie which cycle on the washing machine was the roughest out of easy care, wool and delicates. The explanation I gave was that easy care wold be the roughest with wool being a cool wash and delicates cool with less spin cycles involved. This at least is how I understand it.

The question made me think about my washing machine. As you do. Cleaning clothes has been quite a different experience since I have been living in Independence street. The house I rent was unfurnished, so I bought a cheap washing machine as I knew that faced with the prospect of washing by hand, I would probably just end up buying new clothes. It cost about 40 pounds, brand new.

Until it was delivered I hadn´t really considered how it would work or where to install it. The house itself is best described as cobbled together. Recently, when thinking about installing some kind of screen on the door to keep flies out, we discovered that the only way they could have put the door in was to hang the door before the roof was put on. It should come as no surprise then, that there are no fittings for a washing machine inside the house.

Once that discovery had been made, it dawned on me that the washing machine itself cannot be installed into any fittings. There are no electric bits or automatic functions. It is an upright cylinder with a beater which sticks up in the centre and twists from side-to-side to bash the clothes around. The amount of time for the bashing is controlled by a wind up timer, but there is no way of controlling the ferocity of the bashing.

Filling it up requires a hose pipe and so the water is always cold. To get the water out you unclip a flexible plastic tube and let it hang down so the water runs out and the plants get a drink. You have to remember to re-clip this tube when you are filling it up or else the water just trickles away. To connect it to the power an extension cable is dangled out of the window, precariously close to the water. There is no spin cycle, so all wringing out is done by hand.

Apart from that, it is bubblegum pink.

Bread

2011-06-10T12:34:00.000-07:00

There are few things more disappointing than a recipe which doesn´t work; the birthday cake that doesn´t rise; the expensive roast which is tough and tasteless. Once you have read a recipe, mulled it over and decided to make it you already have a preconceived notion of what you are expecting to taste. Sometimes the product disappoints not because it was bad, but because it just doesn´t live up to your imagination. The recipe, the words of another, described a final product which was different when conjured in your imagination.

While visiting some friends last week someone had found himself in the situation where it had been necessary to tell people-I-don´t-know about me. Apparently lots of questions had been asked and curiosity had been aroused. A snippet of information like that awoke my own curious nature. What had they wanted to know? And more urgently, what had been the answers given? The description I got of the conversations which had taken place was of course, woefully inadequate. Is there no man who can communicate with sufficient accuracy what was actually said? What of their gene for reiterating a conversation word for exaggerated word, eye movement for painstaking eye movement? I became slightly obsessed with which adjectives might have been used and what the overall impression might have been.

Sometime after the futile cross examination had finished and the matter had been dropped I was casually handed a mobile phone and asked to type in my bread recipe. Last week´s host had asked for it. Clearly this important detail had been overlooked in the description of what-had-been-said. Certainly my cooking and baking must have been mentioned. The request for a recipe leads one to the conclusion that it was revealed in a positive light. Can I deduce that I was depicted as a ´good cook´? No further information has been disclosed.

Being talked about is an odd circumstance where one has no control whatsoever over the impression strangers are forming of you. It sets precedents for a real meeting; you are not entering the scene as an unknown quantity but of a talked about entity which people have had time to chew over and form opinions about. Rather like the recipe which fails to impress the person-you´ve-heard-so-much-about could turn out to be a spectacular disappointment.

And so it is that I attempt to reproduce how I make my bread. Here I recreate the bread making process with decidedly more accuracy, clarity and specificity than the account of the conversation of which I was the topic. I do so in the hope that the final product makes a good impression.

The thing to do is not skimp on time. It doesn´t require a great deal of work, just a lot of waiting around which makes it ideal for fitting around a busy schedule; you do a bit then leave it for ages, do a bit more then leave again.

Get one cup of flour, a quarter teaspoon of instant yeast and a cup of water. Mix them together and leave overnight. This is your sponge.

The next day put 3 cups of flour in a big bowl. Add another teaspoon of yeast, just over one cup of tepid water (the exact amount depends on the flour, the humidity, all kinds of things which cannot be explained) and a couple of teaspoons of salt. Mix and knead. tNow leave it for about half an hour.

Get the sponge and add it to the dough. Knead them together. This takes quite a while, but keep going until it becomes a lovely shiny cohesive ball. Put it into an oiled bowl and cover.

Leave for an hour. Punch it down and turn it over, then leave it for another hour. Do this all over again. If you want, do it again but turning twice should be enough.

Shape the dough into two American football shaped loaves. The final wait. Put them on to the trays they will be baked on, sprinkle some flour over and cover them with a clean tea towel. One more hour to wait.

Once they have risen, score a line down the top. A Stanley knife is good for this. Whatever you do, don´t use a blunt knife because you´ll just knock all the air out. Bake them for about 45 minutes in a hot oven. I estimate this to be about 220° as I had my oven on gas mark 3 (EDIT: my oven is very hot at gas mark 3. After reading the comment and doing some research, I would say the temperature is around 200° celsius, 350° farenheit and gas mark 5 in a normal, properly calibrated oven. Your oven should be hot, not tepid).

Let it cool before you cut it. Eat with copious amounts of butter.

Rocky Road (for a hiker)

2011-03-01T06:02:00.000-08:00

Melt all of the following in a pan over a low heat (no need for bowls hovering over hot water as long as you stir it and don´t turn it up full blast): 2 bars of Lindt 70%, I bag of Hershey´s semi-sweet chocolate chips, 200g butter and a dribble of honey or Golden Syrup if you want. There is no danger that it won´t be sweet enough, but it will help to give it a chewy texture rather than just be hard. Add chopped marshmallows, cranberries, peanuts, and smashed up rich tea biscuits. You want to add the marshmallows in batches so that some of them melt completely and others stay in bits. The mixture should be almost dry, so keep adding stuff until it looks like you have put enough in, then add a bit more. Put it in a tray lined with foil or paper and squash it down. Stick it in the freezer. Melt some more chocolate, milk or white. Toast some coconut. Top the now cool-ish chocolate extravaganza with the melted chocolate and coconut. Put it in the fridge and forbid the sweet toothed hiker from stealing it.

This makes enough for about 50 normal people or one sweet toothed hiker.

Stop all the clocks

2010-08-08T15:56:00.000-07:00

Autumn term stars tomorrow. Summer has been and gone and somehow I filled those lazy days. I packed my basket over and over with homemade cinnamon roles, German Streusal Coffee cake, brownies, chocolate chip cookies, peanut butter cookies, coconut macaroons and gave them all away. I feasted with friends on lasagne, focaccia and a ham baked in coca-cola like Henry the VIII might have eaten. I knitted a cherry coloured scarf from thick, sumptuous yarn. I read, and read and read. I watched films until late at night. I picked plums from the tree in the garden. I had coffee fueled catch-up chats in Cuernavaca. I wrote, and wrote and wrote. I had all the windows and all the doors open at every minute. I taught an interested anglophile how to make trifle. I remembered French verbs and struggled with conjugations. I stood in the summer rain and smelt the sweetness of wet grass. I jumped at thunder and lightening. I sat by candle light through power cuts. I started again.

Heating

2010-01-11T05:12:00.000-08:00

No one has central heating in Mexico. Now, there may be a few super rich drug dealers or those who own companies, who are the exceptions to that sweeping statement, but the majority of us just freeze in the winter.

The first reason why not, I suppose is that typically Mexico is a hot country. Air-conditioning is much more desirable in most parts of the country than something to make your house hotter. The problem with living 2680 metres above sea level is that it never gets vey hot. Quite the opposite, the volcano in the distance often has snow on top of it. Today, I can´t see further than about 5 metres outside the window for the fog and it is 2 degrees. These are the kind of conditions where central heating wouldn´t go amiss.

Another key factor in the lack of any central heating is the gas. Gas is not on a pipe system in many parts of the country. In the centres of some big cities, gas is delivered by pipe, but most of us have a tank on the roof or in the back garden and every so often you have to phone the man who comes to fill it up. In the place I lived before, I had two 20 litre tanks, one for the cooker and one for the boiler, which ran out about every three months. You then have to hang around and wait for the gas man to pass down the street yelling ´gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaass, gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaas, gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaas´sometimes you can´t get a shower or have a cup of tea.

This situation clearly does not make heating a whole house very easy. Even with the huge tank I have now, I am sure to heat a house for a weekend would more or less run it dry.

The other thing is that radiators need water. Water we do have and it does arrive via underground pipes. However, it stops in the pipes at street level. To get it to the tank on the roof you have to switch on the pump. Without this, there is no pressure and the water doesn´t come out of the taps. To keep it going round and round the radiators, or whatever it does, would mean having the pump on for a considerable amount of time each day.

So, you see, cozy homes with central heating are still a bit of a distant dream.

It´s Still Raining

2010-01-10T07:35:00.000-08:00

So I made pancakes on Sunday morning.

Wish You Were Here

2010-01-09T17:00:00.000-08:00

Polpetini con pasta maltagliata per un giorno piovoso

2010-01-09T12:32:00.000-08:00

Don´t you want somebody to love, don´t you want, want...

I got up at 7 to a grey, cold, wet Saturday and huddled in the cold for nearly an hour, without so much as even a cup of tea because the gas had run out. Energetic cleaning took place and by 9 o´clock the house was spick and span. I had even sorted out the slag heap that was the kitchen. And the gas had been replenished. I thought that I had better stay stove side this day, to keep warm. Pasta and meatballs were my menu.

Your eyes, they tell me how you want me, I can feel it in your heart beat...

One Saturday, when I lived in Rome, I went for lunch at the house of two sisters, who were my students. Their lovely Mum cooked polpetini, little meatballs in a tomato sauce. The vague recollection of what she did served as my guide.

pasta (enough for one with second helpings)

100g flour
1 egg

I make my pasta by lobbing the egg on top of a mound of flour with wayward abandon, which may make you wonder if I was an Italian in a past life. So, mix up the flour and egg and form a ball. Stick in the fridge for a bit.

Something like a phenomenon, something like a phenomenon...

Roll the pasta out thin as can be and then slice it up. I don´t have a pasta machine. I am not sure that I ever saw one in any Italian home. The name, maltagliata means ´badly cut´so don´t get het up. Just hack away at it, it´ll taste the same whatever shape it turns out. I did ribbons. It takes about 3 minutes to cook.

I used equal weights of minced beef and minced pork, and some yoghurt for the juiciest softest meatiest of all balls. This is the most pleasurable kind of cooking because it requires minimum brain power and so allows for meandering thoughts and reminisance . My mind wondered amongst fond memories, while my hands went about the business of stirring and mixing.

I´m gonna live forever, baby remember my name...

This makes about 24 little meatballs using 300g of meat. The ingredients are

150g of minced beef
150g minced pork
a garlic
herbs of some description
an egg yolk
salt, pepper
one and half slices of stale-ish bread, crusts off
3 table spoons of natural yoghurt thinned with one tablespoon of milk.

Crumble the bread up as best you can and mix the yoghurt and milk into it. Leave it to soak up for about 10 mintues and smoosh it about with a spoon every now and then. You are aiming for a paste.

Mix the meat, garlic, herbs, egg yolk and salt and pepper together. Add the bread mixture and mix it all together. The herbs I used were dried Herbs de Provence.

I guess it would be nice, if I could touch your body, coz I know not everybody, got a body like you...

Shape the meat in to small balls - about a teaspoon in size and stick them in the fride for about half an hour. The mixture might seem a bit wet, but it is fine. Don´t over handle it because it can go a bit spongy and wierd if you do. When they have chilled a bit, fry them in oil until they´re crispy and brown.

that I´m wasting time with you, you´ll never be mine. That´s not the way I see it coz I feel you´re really mine, whenever I´m with you...

contigo, mi vida, quiero vivir la vida...

Sauce

Two onions
a couple of garlics
a tin of tomatoes
a squirt of tomato puree
a couple of teaspoons of sugar
salt, pepper

Chop the onion up as small as you can, which if you´re me is not very small. Push the garlics through a crusher. If there is a lot left, throw the oil out of the pan you fried the meatballs in but leave all the sticky bits of browned meat. Add some olive oil and soften the onions and garlic. Add some salt to help the water come out of the onion. Don´t let it get crispy, just soft.

Wanna get to know you in a special way, this doesn´t happen to me everyday...

I blended the tomatoes because they were in too large pieces and you are after smoothness. You could use passata. Throw the tomatoes into the pan. Add the sugar, how much depends on how bitter the tomatoes are. Add some water, about a cupful. Cover and lower the heat to the lowest possible flame. Leave it for about half an hour. Taste it. Add salt and pepper, more sugar if it needs it, a glug of olive oil and maybe a bit more water if it is too thick. At this point, I gave it another blast in the blender, to get rid of some too big bits of onion. Let it cook for a bit longer, then switch it off.

Re-heat the sauce, making any final adjustments to the seasoning. throw in the meatballs. Cook your pasta. Assemble.

I sang along to music from a cd that Jamie made me ages ago. Such memories. Thanks beautiful boy.

You´re my first, my last, my everything, and the answer to all my dreams...

Doing It For A Thrill

2010-01-08T15:34:00.001-08:00

It is certianly a consequence of the time of year that people come up with crazy ideas about what they have to do in the next phasae of their lives. Not only that, but they feel compelled to ask others what ambitions they may have, as though everyone had some secret master plan.

Having goals, or a big ambition is something I try not to bother with. I just do stuff. A great big ambition hanging over my head to become a ________ (insert noun) would probably paralyze me and then, when I realized I hadn´t achieved that grand ambition, because it was always unobtainable, I would consider myself a failure, which would then make me depressed and therefore even further from reaching aforementioned goal. That must be how self-help books work; they set you up for failure so that you have to buy the next one to get yourself out of the myre.

Instead, I think of something I want to do and try to do it. And I really try to do it, not just some half hearted attempt. And no excuses. Having said all that, I suppose I do have one underlying objective, which on occasion can perhaps make me seem a bit reckless.

For those years after university and a masters, the one thing I had realised is that I didn´t want any of it. I wanted to get out of London. I had had enough with the art word and it´s caprichos. I found that whenever I met new people, I was always drawn to those who had travelled, or lived in far away places, those who spoke different languages, those who were foreign, those who could tell me things I didn´t know, open up worlds that were beyond my reach. I had met people who earned a lot and had big houses, expensive clothes and cars, but I didn´t care about any of it. Being the manager, being in charge, who cares about that if when asked what you have been doing for the past week, the best reply you can muster is ´nothing´. What a shit answer.

My desire to live in another country had been awakened. I had never wanted to go travelling, and wouldn´t have had the money anyway. I didn´t want to just pass through countires, I wanted to live in them, to see if I could be absorbed in to another culture.

And, I had realised what my ambition in life was.

To be able to earn a living in another country I took a course on how to teach English to people who want to learn it. It seemed a simple enough idea, though I didn´t know quite how much it would turn my life upside down.

If you have ever taken a language class, you´ll know that at some point you usually get asked to talk about an important moment in your life, or a life changing event. As a language teacher, when I do this with students it is usually to get them to talk about the past. I have to hope that their lives have been sufficiently interesting to contain such a moment, or failing that, they are creative enough to be able to see the worth in their mundane lives, or are just good liars. I try never to ask students to do things which I couldn´t do, but fortunately, while I didn´t know it at the time, I have one of those life changing events.

That teaching English course led me to Mexico, then to Italy, then to Poland and then back to Mexico, where I remain, with a couple of short stints in the UK in between. Needless to say I have met a myriad of people who would never have been part of my life, had I not wondered in to that building in Green Park one day and convinced the guy to let me pay for the course using two credit cards, a bit of my overdraft and some cash because I was skint. I find it difficult to remember with much exactitude what my life was like 6 years ago, before I became someone who lives in a different country but that was the thing that changed my life.

All those years ago, when I realised what my ambition in life had to be, I had decided that it was to be interesting, to have interesting stories to tell.

Fortunately my objective is vague enough for it to seem like I have achieved it depending on how I tell a story. It is also one that needs constant work, and so keeps me striving.

I am perhaps lucky in that I tend to see what others might think of as mistakes, as material for a good story. It´s not that everything is fun all the time. Far from it; many head aches and much heart ache are born from the you-never-know-unless-you-try school of thought. And, I know that for everyone who thinks what you´re doing is super interesting , there will always be another who deplores your every move. Conveniently, I don´t care.

The only important thing is that I don´t bore myself.

Abundance

2010-01-06T09:55:00.000-08:00

January the sixth is the day when you cut open a large cake and see if the figure representing baby jesus is in your slice. At least that´s what happenes in Mexico. The cake is bejewelled with slices of glacé fruit, the electrified colours variety and is to all intents and purposes a bit of an eye sore. The french one is all together more refined and more tasty, but we don´t care about things like that here. (We? Since when did I start counting myself as a Mexican?) What you want is a bit of eye-socking garishness to start the year off.

Everyone takes it in turns to cut a slice. I was first and out popped a rabbit. If you get a baby jesus or in this case, a rabbit, it means you will have abundance for the year to come. On the second time round, I got a tree. So I will have double abundance this year, it seems

I have already begun by having two slices of cake.

being the lucky receiver of all this abundance means that you have to make Tamales on February 2nd. This is Día de la Candelaría, and frankly I have no idea what it is all about. it seems to be about eating tamales. I have made tamales once before and it involves enormous quantities of lard. There is another thing which can be made, called Canarios (Canaries) which are similar but made with butter. I assume they are called canaries because the butter makes them yellow. But that is just my assumption. Anyway, have enough time to find a recipe and get on with it.

I can´t fathom what a rabbit or a tree have got to do with the nativity, I suppose there were some around at the time. But, no matter, if they will bring me double stuff this year then that´s fine by me. Except of course, if it´s double trouble.

And relax...

2009-12-04T09:53:00.000-08:00

On Tuesday I had so much to do that didn´t know where to begin. Time seemed to warp with the workload and life became a blur. But, ladies and gentlemen, I have finished.

The term is coming to an end both where I work and where I study. I now have to fill all my afternoons with something other than study. It feels kind of sad.

But not too sad, you see I have many things which I want to do. I have made a list so that I don´t forget. I will still be busy, but this time with leisurely activites. I have a scarf to finish knitting, reading to do, at a more leisurely pace, clothes shopping to get on with, a house to clean (not so much fun), cakes to bake and trip to London to plan.

Life is good.

Forgetting

2009-11-26T10:05:00.000-08:00

I remebered about you this morning. This blog, I mean. And then I realized, that meant I had forgotten it. Completely. For a while it had been that thing you know you should do but don´t have the time/inclination/ideas to get on with it. But it wasn´t even that anymore.

I mean, I know I am busy and that is the main reason for the forgetting. The other reason is that I didn´t need a link with outer space any more. I suppose I started writing it because I wanted something to do, then all of a sudden I had too much to do. But, then the other reason I started writing it was to explain my existence here. To contextualize it in terms of home, because my intended reader is someone who speaks English and would ´get´the cultural references.

I was writing it to the English me.

You read it, and you understood it. Maybe you even liked it and I am sure that at times you found it dull and deadly boring. But none of that matters. It was a dialogue thrown in to the ether. Not a conversation with a friend. If I had wanted one, I could have picked up the telephone or written an email. it wasn´t supposed to be that intimate. It was, I now see the facade I wanted to project. The things I left out what I didn´t want to admit to myself. The lofe I wanted to be having.

So, maybe now I no longer need it. Maybe now I have accepted what I have and maybe now I know I don´t want it.

I owe you a post

2009-10-11T05:20:00.001-07:00

I sent this recipe to a friend, because I was also in debt to him; I have been promising to send him recipes for various things, but I have not had time. Finally I did get round to sending him what follows and I decided that I would post it here for you too, dear reader.

Calling it a recipe is rather an exaggeration. The most simple thing. It is my sandwich of the moment and reflects how much time I have to prepare food.

It needs a good wholemeal or grainy bread. I like grains and nuts, you take your pick. Grated carrot and grated cheese. For the cheese we are in the strongly flavoured chedder area. Something sharp to contrast with the sweetness of the carrot. I have an imported Gouda as good English chedder is not available here. If I were in London, it is the kind of thing I would make a trip to Neal´s Yard for. In fact that is one of the places I must go to when I am there.

Cold, or toasted to melt the cheese.

If you have it, and I am sure you do, a blob of Coleman´s mustard, made from the powder, on the side of the plate to dip the point (of course, you cut it in to triangles, didn´t you?) and each succesive bitten edge into.

Glass of cold wheat beer.

A marvel.

Busy

2009-09-02T12:51:00.000-07:00

busy

• adjective (busier, busiest) 1 having a great deal to do. 2 currently occupied with an activity. 3 excessively detailed or decorated.

Acording to the Oxford dictionary I am definition one or two. Had I a moment to breathe, I may stop to adorn myself with earrings so that my outward appearance reflected my inner rushed-off-my-feet self and I encompassed all three definitons.

I have realised in the past three weeks that things like getting your hair cut and washing up are activities for those who are very time rich. Blogging must be for those who seriously have nothing to do, or are procrastinating and putting off the critical summary they should be writing. I fit very neatly in to the latter.

But onward and upward I go. A full-time job and a masters is heavy going. Hard on the eyes (a lot to read) hard on the bum cheeks (a lot of sitting down) and hard on the social life (I no longer have one). I am rather proud to say I have managed to keep up my three to four hours of spinning per week. The hour of loud, monotonous rhythmic music, sweating and achey legs help to clear the mind. While I have moments of such sheer business, I feel dizzy, I am energized by the rigour and exertion of it all and I am going for the burn.

Back to School

2009-08-11T14:53:00.000-07:00

Monday was the first day of Autumn term, so we are in full swing again. Names to be learned, essays to be written, room numbers to remember, activities to plan. I always like to have some flexibility in my courses. A well designed activity should work with any group, but sometimes it just doesn´t. Particularly teaching young people. The task I gave to all of my groups today worked with 102 students but there was one who just didn´t want to make it work. It´s a difficult age, the teen-age.

Being a student, in some form or other, brings great benefits to your own teaching practice. It is easy to forget what a good lesson is like if all you do is teach and never experience the other facet; being taught. I think the most important thing is that you should have someting to do in every class. Sounds silly, doesn´t it? But I have been to numerous courses given by the institution I work for, where I have felt that I am wasting my time and that is the worst thing. Far worse than getting something wrong. I am not sure all teachers think that. Many seem to believe that standing at the front of the classroom reeling off hundreds of boring facts is the best approach. Not me.

And I begin my masters on Monday. Such a long wait, or so it feels, from when I was accepted. I can´t wait to finally get stuck in. I was worried that I was going to be super tired because of giving classes. The pace seemed frenetic in my first and second term but something seems to have clicked and I am no longer running to try and catch up with the pace at work. I suppose I have settled in.

108 J

2009-08-01T15:48:00.000-07:00

We bought the house. After all the frenzied activity before the signing, the moments afterwards were like a big sigh of relief. It was done.

On saturday we popped in to measure up for windows and doors. The house is a shell and we have about 7 months to get it looking how we want it. With all its straight edges and plaster walls it resembles and art gallery, but not for long.

Luckily someone had put up a cross in the kitchen, a blessing, a safeguard against bad spirits, a prayer that every thing would work out well. And I think it has.

Our street is a cul-de-sac with one yellow house that has been there a long time and the four newly built houses. Some of the new neigbours, who were moving in that day invited us in for a beer. Among other practicalities the subject of addresses came up. What number were we, I wondered. Following the logic of the street as it it now, wth five houses in it, I had thought we could be number one or number five or, if there were plans for more houses perhaps 10 or 15. Clearly what I had failed to take in to account was that the yellow house, the house that had been there alone in this street with no other houses is number 108. Who knows how a lone house ended up being number 108. Maybe that is the owners lucky number. I quickly worked out that we might be 118 or something like that. Alas no, because according to some logic that I am not privvy to, all the houses in that street are number 108. They will be distinguished through adding letters. And so we arrive at our number; 108 J.

I had decided even before we were made aware of this bonkers system that we should give our house a name. It only remains now to decide what that will be. Because I am that way inclined I had thought about a literary name, though something like Manderley would be far to presumptions for our casita. Maybe to use something traditionally British and as an ode to Mexican logic, we could call it The Shambles.

However curious the number may be, it is pleasing after 12 years of renting and sharing to have a little patch of earth to call my own.

All Around the Houses

2009-07-29T12:50:00.000-07:00

When I go out walking, I may meander and wonder and dawdle and stray off the beaten path but in my everyday existence, I like to get to the point. A reader described my writing style as ´economical´, which I took as a compliment and think is very telling.

I am often asked if I have adapted well to life in Mexico. I try to be polite. Really, I assume I am doing alright, even though there remain things that I may never get the gist of entirely. Many of those mysteries are borne of the workplace. Too much hierarchy. Too many lines that must be followed and never crossed.

Take for example, an absurd situation that occured today; The director asked if I would be able to invigilate an exam on Friday, to which I replied that I couldn´t. I later received a phone call from someone who had heard me say at the meeting that I couldn´t do it. She said that the Director had asked her to phone me to see if I could invigialte the exam. I confirmed that I still couldn´t, that what I had said only hours before was still true. She then asked who I thought might be able to do it. I gave the name of a colleague. She proceeded to ask me to ask him if he could do it and then for me to tell her his answer.

Is there ever any need for such behaviour? The director has a phone in his office and could have spoken directly to my colleague, therefore eliminating five steps in this ridiculous process.

Or take the joy that is renewing a Mexican visa. This time I went to the immigration office six times. As they only open from nine to one, I had to take time off work six times. I had to give them copies of documents that they already have several copies of and duplicates of duplicates. They asked for a copy of my rental contract, which doesn´t exist, so I bought a blank one from the paper shop and filled it in with some real sounding details. They didn´t at any moment check if it was genuine.

And house buying becomes a nightmare of never ending papers, stamps and signatures. It is so difficult to know if the sale is all above board because if somewhere along the line a signature is missing or a stamp isn´t right, it could invalidate the whole process. While I am very sure that the deal we are involved in is fine and dandy, I don´t know how I could ever be one hundred percent certain. It is such a maze, it is difficult to find anyone who really knows.

My theory is that this tendancy to create a trail so long that you don´t know where it starts or ends is precisely to create confusion. The more confusion there is, the more doubt is spread and so it is easier to dodge responsibility for anything. If two people are involved in something and it goes wrong, it is easy to proportion blame. When six people are involved, blame is much more easily avoided.

So it is that if the deal goes through with this house, we may live constantly wondering if one day the long lost half cousin of Uncle José will turn up to claim the land on which our house is built. A friend told me that on his wedding day this was exactly what happened to his in-laws. Someone came, with photos of the house interior, claiming that it was his.They told the distant relation to go away and haven´t heard from him since. That was five years ago.

One benefit of the labrynthine legal system is that any claim to land would take a life time to resolve, if it ever found a conclusion at all. We shall bite the bullet and hope that nothing crawls out of the paperwork.

Going Loco

2009-07-22T16:12:00.000-07:00

Three days was all that we had for a summer holiday and I needed water. Too much concrete, too much traffic, too much smog. The city we live in is hard on the eye, hard on the soul.

We were the first tourists to take the boat out to this bay. When we arrived a man opened a door hidden between some of the beach huts and out ran a horse and four dogs. Suffering from the heat they all ran straight in to the water to cool off.

We followed soon after. The sea was warm. I love what the salt and the sun do to your skin. I ate nothing but fish while we were there, especially carpaccio of tuna. We caught the early morning market on Sunday before we left and picked up some juicy Huachinango to take home

*All photos courtesy of the lovely César

Topsy-Turvy

2009-07-21T11:55:00.000-07:00

It is still July. While that may not be news to any of you, I keep having to remind myself which part of the year we are in. The seasons, I have mentioned before, are different here. There is wet or there is dry. During the summer months, June to September, it rains more or less every day. Not just a shower or two, but long torrential downpours which no umbrella could save you from. The mornings are cold enough that you need warm jumper; this morning waiting for the bus at half past seven, my breath made clouds of vapour in the cold air. At two o´clock it is hot enought to wear a T-shirt and around three or four the clouds will form and the rain will start. It gives you little warning, the streets flooding and your clothes soaked through only seconds after the first drops fall.

The winter is cold but sunny and dry. The sky is blue all day, the sun shines but its heat not strong enough to warm you. The temperature goes no higher than 10 degrees. Not all of Mexico is like this. These are the affects of living at the top of a mountian.

When the rainy season starts, it feels more like winter than summer to me. My instinct it to hibernate, curl up indoors, drink hot chocolate and await Christmas. Except that Christmas isn´t just round the corner, there will be no smoky smell in the air and crispy, frosty mornings. The leaves won´t turn every shade of red, orange and yellow and there will be no jacket potatoes or fireworks on Bonfire Night. Neither will there will there be a lack of daylight, winds so cold your lips and face get sore and crack, persistant rain or drizzle urging you to stay beneath the covers.

My love of the rain sets me apart from others here, perhaps from many in other parts of the world. I have always loved the rain, the way it blankets sound, beats on the windows, the smell of freshness afterwards but more so now that it is also the sound of home.

On Being Bilingual

2009-07-14T07:36:00.000-07:00

I left England 4 and a half years ago. At the time I didn´t know I had left for good. I didn´t really have any idea about whether I would go back, or how long I would be away. I am still not sure, though certainly it seems that for the medium term I am in Mexico.

Learning another language was something I had factored in. I had always been impressed by people who could switch effortlessly from one language to another, quite taken with the idea of being bilingual.

Something that I hadn´t banked on was how you lose language. Everyone knows that if you don´t practice the French you learned at school, you lose it. It is much more surprising however to be in a situation where you forget your native language. Sometimes I can only think of the word I need in Spanish. The English equivalent goes from my mind completely or hangs around on the tip of my tongue for a while, hours maybe, before it pops out. As I write I confuse words that are spelled similarly in English and Spanish and cannot distinguish which language is which. English is still my dominant language, but I use Spanish more.

Am I bilingual now? At what point did I pass from being a speaker of one language to being bilingual? That point is essentially arbitrary. It is impossible to distinguish the precise moment someone now speaks two lanuages. Moreover, what does it mean to be bilingual? Is it having native-like control of two or more languages? or is being able to produce meaningful utterances in both? or perhaps it is enough to be able to read and understand? Someone who uses English words while speaking Spanish, do they count as being bilingual? or is that cheating? And what are the rules of this code-switching, mixing and inserting words from different languages to vociferate. Is a child who says ´yo please have agua´speaking Spanish and inserting Englsih words or vice-versa?

I have been told that I have different voices in Spanish and English. I take this to be prof of something that I have always thought; that it is difficult to control our own subjectivity in a second (or third...) language. Subtile differences in tone, pace, rythm, affect how we are perceived. We do this without thinking, but change the language and the culture and it goes out of synch. One concern of the teacher of English is to teach the students how to control their tone of voice when speaking English to try to help them avoid coming over as rude or aggressive. English, particularly British English depends so much on the way you said it.

These are the ponderences I have as begin to write my thesis proposal.

Looking around me, I realise how urgently need to clean the kitchen, wash the floor, reorganise the cookery books. As any good student knows; before the work there is much procrastination to be getting on with.

Wheat from the Chaff

2009-07-10T12:50:00.000-07:00

I assume the introduction week to the Masters is designed to put off any one who wasn´t really interested. The main idea presented was that if you are not 100% willing to kill yourself trying to get a masters then get out while you still can. I love intense. It was right up my street.

We were told to come back on Monday to see the final, final list. On Wednesday I would have said that we were all in but after seeing the presentations today, it is clear that some just don´t get it. The main thing that marked out ´good´presentations from ´bad´was people´s ability to tell the time. If you have twenty mintues to present and there are two of you, that is 10 mintues each. If the first person speaks for 25 minutes, then you should realise that you are in trouble. If you are second person to speak you should not then think that you also have 25 minutes. Another give away of candidates to be outed is when they clearly haven´t read or understood the article they were supposed to talk about. Signs of this are reading directly from notes, or worse not having made any notes and looking for the exact sentence in the twenty page article, that you only glanced over, while your audience shuffle about in their seats trying to stay awake.

I was hoping not to have to wait any more to find out if I´m in or not but if that´s what it takes to separte the wheat from the chaff, then so be it. I am hoping I don´t find out that I am chaff, you understand. The ones that can´t take the pace or an on another plane, would be better doing something else, for their benefit and for the rest of the people on the course. Instead of creating lively debate, they slow things down and throw the discussion off course.

How mean of me. But I want the next two years of study to be worth it. I only hope I haven´t jumped the gun.

Bricks and Mortar

2009-07-03T05:24:00.000-07:00

Friday morning. Breakfast hot chocolate. Yum.

When we began looking for plots of land to build our own little house on, I had said that ideally we would find something with a half built house on it that we could finish. The reason a half built house is a good option is that planning permission has already been granted so you save a lot of time by not having to do the paperwork. You have to make sure that the proper paperwork has indeed been done, and been done properly. It would come as no surprise to me if someone who had not followed the necessary procedures would try and sell a half built house to get rid of the can of worms he or she had opened. Neither would I be shocked to find that building plans had not been followed properly and it was now going to cost more to correct the mistake than build it correctly in the first place. In short, many things could have happened since the beginning of such a venture to make someone decide to stop building and give up their dream.

Suspicion is the modus operandi I have adopted. Because if I had bought some land and begun to build a house, I doubt very much that I would then change my mind. It might go on hold for a while until I saved some more money to keep going, but I wouldn´t just give up. The fact that we like the area, that it was ideally located, that there is a garden, albeit small, that this seemed to be, dare I say it, the perfect opportunity only made me more certain that something will go wrong.

We began looking for hitches and so far we haven´t encountered any. Everything we thought might be the thing to stop us in our tracks has been sorted out, or would never have been a problem in the first place. It is well within our budget and perhaps the icing on the cake is that we cold buy it outright with no loans or mortgages and still have money to get going on finishing it the way we want it.

I emailed the owner to ask him for copies of all the documents and plans. We had thought that this may be the first obstacle, that he wouldn´t have the documents, the whole thing was illegal, but he wrote back saying that everything would be with us the following day. He hasn´t sent them though. Do you think it´s a bit early to decide it´s all gone up in smoke? I mean it is twenty past eight on Friday morning. He said Thursday evening. That´s what? 12 hours late. Is that too short a time to write someone off as a crook?

Waiting. It´s not my strong point.

Oh. Hey hum. I shall drink more hot chocolate and eat more blackberries and try to do something other than stare at my email all day long.

Houston, We Have a Problem.

2009-07-01T07:36:00.001-07:00

Pauline is the person in charge of the masters I am applying for. I received the following in chat:

Pauline: hola

me: hello!

Pauline: we have a problem

Now, imagine that you are on tenterhooks waiting to find out if you are in or not. What would that do to you? A tightening in the chest, a sinking feeling. It was the moment I had been dreading. I knew it might happen, I mean someone has got to be left out, but it doesn´t mean that the moment you find out is any less painful.

No. No. No.

She continued; I had done a Spanish exam a while ago as part of the entry requirements but it turns out that they gave me the wrong exam and what I presented has nothing to do with the masters.

Pauline: sorry to frighten you like that

it's not such a big deal

you should have presented the Proficiency exam

me: oh, right

Pauline: but you presented the reading comprehension
me: ahhh

so I have to do another.

Pauline: yus

me: or have I failed completely?

It was quite agonising. I didn´t know if she was saying I might get in if I do the exam, whether I was out because I failed to even know which exam I was supposed to present. Or worse, that the decision was going to be delayed. That would have been too much stress. What I wanted to know was if it was over. I knew it was, I was sure. I had stumbled at the first hurdle. What was I going to say to people? How could I tell everyone that somehow I didn´t get in? All that mental preparation gone to waste.

Pauline: actually I should let you know that you are on the course.

When one is stressed or tense in some way it often only becomes obvious when the metaphorical weight is lifted off ones shoulders. A cliché perhaps, but so true. For a moment I was floating and the ache I had had in my stomach and chest, across my back and shoulders went away.

I have more house hunting news but that can wait for tomorrow. Today is for revelling in the superness of me!

Waiting Impatiently

2009-06-30T10:10:00.000-07:00

I am sure there are many things I ought to be doing today, though I can´t think for the life of me what they are. I keep trying to start things but I can´t concentrate. The admission interview for University was yesterday, and the results are published tomorrow, you see. Last week was similar because I did the entrance exams, but now I am only twenty-four hours away from the final yes or no. Tomorrow evening I shall be calmer. That calmness may be accompanied by sadness or happiness, but I will be less fidgety. Especially as I have a more-expensive-than-your-average-midweek-wine at home waiting to be decorked. And, pass or fail it will come in handy.

I am hoping for a windy, rainy afternoon. Listening to rain dropping on to the windows is my favourite way to relax. I used to go to the seafront on stormy days with my Dad when I was little, where we would sit in the car and listen to the rain. Sometimes we had chip butties, and tea in polystyrene cups. There are a few clouds forming and I am hoping to be able to finish The Great Railway Bazaar curled up on the settee with a cuppa to soothe away my nerves.

House Hunting

2009-06-29T05:16:00.000-07:00

If only I had had the nerve to take pictures.

We trawled the classified pages on Sunday looking for houses or plots of land. We have decided to include already built houses in our search but we hadn´t wanted built and already falling down.

The first houses we saw on Sunday were part of a housing development. Vast areas filled with idenitcal looking houses, all cramed in and terribley overlooked on all sides. Despite the obvious faults with this kind of set up, they do at least look quite nice; their white plaster like icing on a cake. The decoration analogy doesn´t end there though because, that clean whiteness hides a multitude of sins. Structurally these houses are abismal. They are thrown up as quickly as possible, cobbled together at lightning speed. When we went to look at some which were being bulit, we saw that the upstairs floors seemed to made of polystyrene. César did some very pertinent questioning of this, and we left.

Later we saw another development, this time, much smaller with only 8 houses in a little closed off street. These were better, but still not good; cramped in gardens and picture windows which looked directly in to the house infront, no more than 10 metres away. The polystyrene houses we had seen were being sold for round about 650,000 pesos (a bit over 29,000 pounds) whereas these slightly better designed houses were going for 1 and a half million pesos. I am too confused with noughts to be able to sort out what that means in any other currency. What it meant to us is that we went looking elsewhere.

I am dubious about these housing estates because, apart from the obvious bad quality, in twenty years time they will look shabby and run down. Rather like the place we went to next. An area more ginormous than the first, with thousands of terrace houses, each one not more than 4 metres wide, the windows covered with iron bars, decorarive iron bars with flowers, but iron bars nonetheless, and rusting. When we arrived I phoned the lady to let her know we were there, but she didn´t answer. Three times she didn´t answer and so we were thankful for blessings in disguise and drove away.

The final abode in Sunday´s search was advertised as a small house in a ´privada´, which usually means a side street with a big gate at the end so only residents can get in. They are thought to be safer than other houses and more expensive for the privelige. As yet this ´privada´had no gate, just a wall. The space for the gate which hadn´t yet been installed must have been made when, late at night, a drunk smashed a car in to that wall and most of it fell down. The path in front of the house had at least six different levels, including cobbles, crumbling bricks, cracked concrete, gravel and mud. The owners great idea was to level this off so that each house could park their car outside, meaning that five cars would be parked in a row one behind the other so if any one ever wanted to get the car out, all cars in front would have to be moved. I didn´t think it was terribley practical. The house was one story and painted a cheery yellow, to go with the chickens directly outside the front door. Neither of the two bedrooms had a window to the outside world and the middle section of the roof was made from fibre glass. It´s the kind of ramshackle house that is very common in the poorer areas on the outskirts of Mexico City. By far the most extraordinary thing about this house was that the owner, in all seriousness, was asking 420,000 pesos. That´s 21, 000 pounds. I cannot for the life of me imagine how he thinks he will ever sell it.

We went home.

New Arrival

2009-06-24T06:18:00.000-07:00

There are no babies on the way, but it is just as exciting; a new kitten.

Rita was one of 6 kittens that we rescued. We saw her and her brother and sister running along by the side of a very busy road and I declared that we should go and get them. César was slightly more reluctant but he did stop the car and get out and help. It was him who picked Rita up. These 3 had clearly been abandoned because they didn´t run away and there was only minimal protest when we got near them. So they came and lived in the spare bedroom and it took them all of two days to settle in and feel at home.

The other 3 were the babies of the cat who lived on the street but used to come and visit. She would bring her babies along, usually in the evening and they would all eat outside the front door. One day they didn´t come. Nor the next day. We knew something must be wrong but we didn´t know where they could be. Until I saw her dead at the side of the road. I don´t know if she had been hit by a car or if she had eaten poison, or what had happened. What we did know is that the babies needed our help. It took me a couple of days but finally I got all three and they came to stay in the downstairs bathroom. These babies were scared! At first you couldn´t go near them without hissing, spitting and clawing. In the three or four weeks they were with us, they became much more confident and I could eventually pick them up and stroke them.

This is Milo, Rita´s brother who we hope has found a good home.

My attempts to find them good homes failed miserabley and we ended up having to take them to the vet, who is very nice and agreed to vaccinate them, spay the girls and castrate the boys and find them homes in exchange for enough cat biscuits to sink a small ship. I was sad to see them go.

Rita, it seems hasn´t looked back. She is growing at a rate of knots and gets along famously with Claude. It must be their street background which gives them a common understanding.

Rita in Action

The Kindness of Strangers

2009-06-24T05:22:00.000-07:00

Don´t you just love the way that life is full of surprises?

My current project is getting myself on to another Masters programme, this time in Applied Linguistics. This has involved much reading and not a lot of anything else for the past while. And then Monday saw the start of the exams. There were only two, so I´ve finished them all now and just have to wait-for-results. Then, should I pass, there will be an interview, and should I pass that, there will be a weeklong course. If I get through all that, I´m in.

Needless to say, I have been distracted and haven´t had much in the way of a life to write interesting blog posts about. Or at least, I haven´t been inspired enough to write, mostly because I suppose no one reads it any way. Well, I know that a couple of friends read this blog and César sometimes reads it (but he doesn´t even have RSS feed, which is just plain rude, don´t you think? to not want to have instant updates about his wife´s blog?) but I was fairly confident that this humble blog didn´t have any ´external´followers. I mean, why would it? It´s almost impossible to find by searching for it. And so I was sure as sure can be that it wouldn´t matter a jot to anyone if I was being lazy about posting.

Little did I know, there are people who read it. I was alerted to this by a delightful comment on my last post. I don´t know Georgina, but she will always be welcome at our house, when finally we get round to building it.

A little bit of encouragement does so much for the spirit.

Over the Rainbow

2009-05-25T06:05:00.000-07:00

After 5 months of asking, which I believe once married counts as nagging, I got César to go and look at possible sights for houses. It has long been our dream ,you see to build our own house. Many Mexicans buy a plot of land and build their own house, there not being very many ready built ones available. That is changing but we are not enamoured of the idea because often the houses are ugly, cheaply and badly made and going for extortionate prices. Our plan is to build an environmentally sustainable house from adobe, traditional mud bricks, with a living roof, vegetable garden and a wooden gate.

We went out on Sunday morning looking for something that we wouldn´t know until we found. We came across a tree lined lane. It looked semi-inhabited; a few tumbledown houses with flowers outside and dogs running around. We took the car as far along as seemed safe to do so and then got out and walked. The further we went the more idyllic it became. Dry stone walls, cobbely path ways and dirt tracks, trees towering from higgledy-piggledy plots of land. The air smelled sweet and clean and all that could be heard was the sound of tweeting birds and a woodpecker . Flowers grew in abundance along the pathway, clematis scrambeld over walls, tiny lilac butterflies fluttered at our feet. In the distance a fresh water stream babbled over jagged rocks.

Delighted, we went to buy water in the wooden hut that is the local shop. Following standard practice in Mexico, we asked the lady in the shop if she knew of any plots of land for sale here. Of course, most of it is for sale. She showed us around again, pointing out the plots which she knew were for sale. The next step in the process is to go the local market and locate the first stall on the left selling chickens; the lady attending this stall will be the wife of the owner of several of the plots we are interested in. The owner himself will be at another stall selling chicken a bit further in. So, next Saturday morning we wil go early to the market and probably buy some chicken with the pretext of asking about the plots. The lady in the shop, Concepcion is her name, will ask another lady who she will see in town if she wants to sell her plot of land and she will also speak to her son to see if he wants to sell his plot. César will speak to 3 friends of his who all know about plots of land available in this area and with any luck, we will be one step further down the path to our eco-cottage in the woods.

70%

2009-05-22T10:04:00.000-07:00

Today is graduation day for the students who have finished their 3rd year in Sixth form. It is bizarre to me that they have a graduation for this, but they do and I will be there clapping until my hands tingle as each one of them climbs the steps, without stumbling, for their 5 seconds of glory.

For those not yet at that pivotal point in their life, exams continue. I gave out the final marks for my classes yesterday. 70% is the minimum for a pass. Most were happy, some just relieved not to have failed and some filled with dispair. I have two students who failed English and one who didn´t score high enough to get the average she needs to maintian her grant. This is a private school and, unless they are lucky enough to be given funding, familes pay through the nose to send their kids here. For many, the grant is their only chance to be here so if they lose it, it´s goodbye private education.

Understandably, some get upset. One of the girls who failed English was in my office yesterday for an hour and a half, crying continuously. She has been having a hard time adjusting since she moved here a year ago from the north of Mexico. She has no friends, hates it and wants to move back. That´s what she told me. I saw her not two minutes after she left my office, laughing and frolicking with some other girls, who as far as I could tell seemed to be quite friendly. She wrote me an email begging me to change her mark. She came to see me again this morning with the same purpose. This is a girl who has failed 2 out of 3 of the exams that they have throughout the semseter. She arrives late to the lesson, sleeps on the desk, paints her nails during the class, listens to her iPod. Anything but try and learn something. She is the class clown. In her case, as she has failed so many of the 7 subjects they have to take, it looks like she won´t be accepted in to summer school and will be kicked out.

Another who didn´t get a high enough mark to keep her grant also emailed me, came to visit and begged. Nothing changed. She wasn´t a bad student, but shouldn´t she just have tried harder?

Refusing to increase a students marks when they are so desperate is not easy. I am appalled that they would even ask, however many teachers do it. A school for rich kids where qualifications are given according to what the student asks for. What a farce.

These kids are in the minortiy; many do work extremely hard. They get an average of 95 and they deserve it. Then there are those who celebrate when they scored the 70 necessary to pass, which is like dancing victoriously for just mananging to turn up to work.

I seem to think other school systems differ in that if you really are rubbish no one kicks you out, you just come out with embarrasingly low marks. I also like dealing with As, Bs and Cs more as there is less of a direct correlation between the number of correct answers and the final grade. External exams are much easier on teachers in this way. You don´t mark it and you can´t do anything about it later. Maybe people don´t learn many things that will have a direct impact on their adult lives. I can´t remember much about Pi or the chemical symbols for elements. I did learn that my success depends on me. I know that I can´t be lazy and then hope someone will bail me out later. If they do not learn a word of English, I hope at least I can teach them that.

In full denial

2009-04-28T09:23:00.000-07:00

It is rare that I switch on the television, but I now find myself asking César to switch it over or off as I cannot bear hearing over and over again how many people have got ´the flu´, how many have died, where, when and how many more are expected to get it, spread it around or die from it in the next few hours.

In comparison with other illneses, perhaps it doesn´t look so bad. Having a look around for useful statistics to support my theory (denial) that this flu is so bad, I found that last year 446 people were reported to have died from salmonella. Salmonella is a cureable illness, with many many medications available to get rid of it, but people still died from that. And it wasn´t all in developing countries; yes, mexico came out worst with 123 of the total deaths but second in lind was Germany. 69 people apparently died from salmonella in Germany! Then over 3,000 people were killed by falling objects. That´s a lot more victms than this flu has claimed, but we don´t stop putting things up high. Varicose veins killed 177 people in the United States of America. How, people, can someone die from varicose veins in this day and age?

The reporting, as expected is innaccurate. The people who have died directly from this disease are around 20. The others died from pnuemonia or related illnesses. They went untreated for approximately two weeks, before seeking medical help by whch time their illnesses had become muc more serious. It being a never seen before virus obviously can´t have helped their treatment. And perhaps some information about the victims health before they got ill. Many people in Mexico cannot afford health treatment. The national health system is badly run and seriously lacking in funds. Someone who is so poor they cannot buy the medicines prescribed may in the first place be badly nourished and not able to fight off a strong strain of a known flu virus, let alone a mutant bug.

Clearly I know nothing about medicine and pandemics. I do know that we humans love a good drama. How many people exaggerate when they tell a story? And don´t we prefer a terrible drama, with things to complain about to a story where everything went well? So that is what we have, a great story to keep the newspapers occupied. I have not heard or read one report that states the figures as ´the death toll remians below 200´. It is always increasing, more than, above. With technology making news travel so fast it seems to be a very big deal.

That´s not to say that I am not worried. I am. But I am not losing my head.

Cause for Alarm

2009-04-27T10:04:00.000-07:00

Alarms, I have always assumed, are loud, irritating noises which never fail to get your attention and provoke some sort of reaction in those having their ears blasted with sound. This is forgiveable as that is their sole purpose. When the earthquake alarm started to go off this morning I didn´t even hear it. I was alerted that something was wrong by the other teachers leaving the building and someone had to tell me that there had been an earthquake. When I finally could hear the drill it was no louder than a mobile phone ringing in someone´s bag. I heard nothing and felt nothing. My boss was walking hurridly out, panicked saying that she felt the tremour.

We assembled in the carpark, as one does in this type of situation and waited, all with our blue masks on. Apparently it had only been a drill. So much for people having felt it.

There is an odd security brought by the papery, thin blue masks that we are all wearing, those without them suddenly seem reckless and vulnerable. The withs and withouts see each other in the street and wonder what each other is thinking. When you are the only one in the street with one, because there are still people without, you feel maybe that you have exaggerated the whole affair. When you are the only one without you try to hold your breath and not get too close to those around you.

After the earthquake drill, which we assumed was just for fun, another meeting was held. We thought this might be to layout the plan for a plague of locusts. Instead we were told we could leave for the day.

Influenza Porcina: Living in Swine Flu Land

2009-04-26T08:39:00.000-07:00

At 6.30 am on Friday morning I got a phone call from my boss. I made César answer it because it was too early to deal with that sort of thing. A wave of dred rushed up my spine as I thought she was going to ask me to cover her classes. Instead she told me that clases were suspendid due to the ´brote de influenza´. ¿Brote de qué? (outbreak of what?) was my reply, having never heard the word ´brote´before. Flu, Yvonne, the president has suspendid all school activity today because of the flu outbreak which is killing people. You can go to your office to pick up anything you might need but you can´t stay in the school. I´ll see you on Monday. That was the first I had heard of it. César said he had heard something about a flu outbreak in the news yesterday.

How fast news travels.

Many people have taken to wearing a face mask. All people in restaurants or other place serving food are wearing them. But that´s definitley a good thing. The logic of wearing one while walking down an empty street or while driving, alone in the car with the windows closed and then removing it to kiss someone on the cheek to say hello, is lost on me. The general mood is to laugh it off, although seeing so many people with blue facemasks on makes my world feel apocalyptic.

Classes are canceled until May 6th, but I have to go to work tomorrow. I am sure I will have the door to my office closed.

When in Puebla do as the Poblanos do

2009-04-15T05:42:00.000-07:00

Puebla has many things going for it, one which I had believed was the Los Sapos flea market. We spent an hour or so browsing around hoping to pick up a flower vase or some nice hooks or other such treasure only to be faced with mountains of tat. And fake things. There are some very sought after objects called Retablos, which are what people make to say thank you for a miracle and they leave them in the church with the saint who grave them the miracle. The only way to get hold of these would be to remove them from the church, which is stealing and so now they are not available to buy. So the flea market sellers fake them. They are shuch shoddy copies. The only thing we did see which we wanted were some antique weighing scales but they were far, far too expensive.

After such a disappointment we went to a corner café for refreshment. We had ´Italian Soda´. Blackberry flavoured fizzy water. We had no idea what it had got to do with italy, but it was very nice.

Then, for sustenance we went to the Meson Sacristia restaurant. Mole Poblano comes from Puebla. Infact many of México´s typical foods come from Puebla. It is the desination for foodies, along with Oaxaca. You can´t go to Puebla with eating Mole Poblano. Even though I didn´t have any. It´s not on my list of allowed foods at the moment.

The menu is mostly Mole, as one might expect, or meat. The vivid decorations and the pianist make it worth a visit. It´s a hotel too but it was too expensive for us. The restaurant menu is very moderately priced though.

César says the Mole Poblano is the best and I recommend their Flan de Queso for desert.

Easter Holiday 2

2009-04-13T11:53:00.000-07:00

Not one chocolate Easter egg in site. The only chocolate I ate was a single finger of Twix.

Consumerism and wasting money on things that you don´t need or want are huge here, just not at holiday times. People spend money and time on buying clothing, cars, accesories with labels hanging off them at any other time of the year but don´t go crazy with present giving at Christmas or Easter. However, they dish out heart shaped sweets by the bucketful on Valetines Day. So, at Easter going to the beach and religious celebration prevail, though not necessarily together or by the same people. This was reflected by the Saturday newspapers many of which headlined with stories about the reenactments of the Cruxifiction which took place all over Mexico.

And most towns had some form of exploding Judas.

Unfortunately this year we missed the blowing up of the paper dummies and only got there to see the limp carcasses hanging in the breeze.

Easter Holiday

2009-04-12T12:19:00.000-07:00

A country retreat in a restored Hacienda dating back 400 years was our Easter break.

With friendly animals

and long country walks

Restored.

Back to Work

2009-03-31T08:05:00.000-07:00

I am back at work after 3 weeks and two days off for appendicitis. Everything is the same. It was not fun being in pain and having medicines pumped through my veins, getting infected or having trouble moving around but, once I started to feel better I did enjoy the reading and the sewing and the peace with the afternoon sun streaming in through the bedroom window. And I realised how completely engulfed by my job I had become. Teaching is work that absorbs you. After five years f English teaching I know that you become involved with your studens lives to some degree but working with adults or working in various school on a part time basis is not as consuming as working, five days a week in a Secondary school.

Teenagers are difficult customers.

I am not generally someone who likes the 9 to 5 environment, preferring to manage my own time and dictate my own schedule. It´s not necesarily easier like that, but it´s what I prefer. I am not sure I will ever understand the idea behind paying people to be in a certain place for a certain number of hours even if they have nothing to do. But mine is not to understand, mine is to let them pay me. I don´t thrive on being in the same place with the same people all the time. I am not sure that anyone does.

More fun is the order of the day.

And the fun is coming! We are going here for the Easter holiday, which begins for me at 15.30 on Friday afternoon. Life is peachy.

Worthy Cake

2009-03-19T09:56:00.000-07:00

I am incapacitated. That is to say that after having my appendix whipped out of me I am still recuperating. Part of that recuperation includes eating a high protein, high fibre diet. Cake is not usually part of that diet unless you make ´Worthy cake´, named for a comment Jamie made that his sister, Maddy, likes to give the tag ´worthy´ to sweet things, such as their Mum´s crumble, that have had raisins and the like added to make them seemingly less unhealthy.

Well, this is the worthiest of cakes in that sense. I have been being exceptionally healthy but a craving for a bit of cake crept up on me. And it wouldn´t go away. So, now that I am able to potter around and go up and downstairs albeit very slowly I thought I would make myself a healthy cake. The ingredients were what was lying around as I can´t get out to the shops: there was a black banana begging to be made in to a cake and all the ingredients for home made museli, half a bag of wholemeal flour, eggs, milk, sugar, oil. If you want a nice cake to have with a cup of tea, this would be a good choice. Sturdy would be a good word to describe this cake. Have you ever felt a bit peckish around 4 o´clock in the afternoon and wanted a bit of cake but known deep down that it won´t fill you up? well this will.

I am going to do my best with a recipe but as I kept adding bits here and there I can´t be entirely sure of the quantities. My cake turned out great for all the guesswork so I am sure exactitude is not necessary here. Afterall, if all good things go in, then something good must come out. Good and worthy.

Ingredients:
1 cup of wholemeal flour
2 eggs
1 heaping teaspoon baking powder
about 1/3 cup of oil (or less because when I got to a quater of a cup I got scared and thought it looked too much)
1 ripe banana, mashed
1 cup museli (this for me was a mixture of oats, whole linseed, ground linseed)
A generous handful of raisins
vanilla essence (or ground cinnamon)
1/2 cup of sugar.
A handful of dessicated coconut

I added more oats and linseed and raisins after I had mixed it all around because I was hoping for a very high fibre content. If you keep the flour-eggs-oil ratio the same, the flavourings can be played around with a bit.

Smoosh up the banana. Add the eggs and oil and mix around. Put in flour, sugar, baking powder museli, raisins and coconut. Mix some more. Put in a greased tin (I used and 8 inch round springform) or make muffins. Sprinkle a bit of coconut and some linseeds on top. Bake at 350° for about half an hour until a knife comes out clean.

Daring Bakers - February

2009-03-03T08:00:00.000-08:00

The February 2009 challenge is hosted by Wendy of WMPE's blog and Dharm of Dad ~ Baker & Chef.
We have chosen a Chocolate Valentino cake by Chef Wan; a Vanilla Ice Cream recipe from Dharm and a Vanilla Ice Cream recipe from Wendy as the challenge.

This month was so totally easy and I am still postng it late. Hey-ho, the life of a newly-wed Secondary school teacher is so busy. Really, it is. But I did manage to whizz up some whiskey ice cream and this little cake.

When I say cake, it´s not really one in the traditional sense. It has three ingredients; butter, eggs, chocolate. The process is as easy; melt chocolate with butter, separate eggs, whip eggwhites untill they have soft peaks, mix yolks into cooled chocolate mix then fold in egg whites. Bake. I used Lindt mint flavour chocoalte. It´s lovely, tastes exactly like the chocolate, so you could just omit the cake baking process and eat it directly from the packet, but where´s the fun in that?

For my add-lib ice-cream do the following; separate 4 eggs. Heat up half a litre of cream, add about 100g of sugar to the yolks (I did this by eye) and mix. Pour heated up cream over yolks and sugar, mixing as you go and the pour all that back into the pan. Heat up some more, stirring all the while. Add whiskey (again by eye). Mix around a bit with a spatula. Taste. Add some more whiskey. Too much whiskey will mean that it won´t really set. Pour in to a tupperware with lid and stick in the freezer. Forget to mix it every 45 minutes like most recipes say you should. Take it out of the freezer in the morning. Perfect ice-cream. My recipe was an amalgam of various bits of other recipes, all of which sounded too fiddley. The flavour was the easiest thing on hand. The whiskey bottle was in front of the tequila, otherwise it would have been that.

This is not my idea of a week night dessert. Well, we don´t really have desserts on a week night come to think of it, but for an impromtu dinner gathering it is perfect. Just make sure to have a load of good quality chocolate lying around and you can have the kind of rich squidgey dessert that you only get in restaurants knocked up in under an hour.

yum

Tea Cake tax

2009-02-17T07:20:00.000-08:00

I was reading that Marks and Spencer have just won a 13 year battle over the tax status of their chocolate covered tea cakes. For any overseas readers, a tea cake is pictured above.

Marks ans Spencer won 3.5 million pounds because for 21 years the tax man said their chocolate covered tea cakes were a biscuit and VAT had to be paid on them. However, the tax man has been back peddling like billy-o and decided that it is infact a cake and therefore no tax is due. They had to go to the high court for this lark because the first ruling was that M&S shouldn´t get anything as any tax had been paid by the buying public. Anyway, finally they got their money.

But the really interesting bit is how tax on biscuits and cakes is actually worked out. The whole cintilatng table is here, but you can just stick to my edited highlights

Biscuits coated, partly coated or decorated with chocolate or anything similar have a 15 % tax charge on them but if the chocolate has been pressed in to the dough before baking, they pay no tax.
Gingerbread men decorated with chocolate pay tax, unless of course the decoration is no more than two blobs of chocolate for eyes, in which case they have no tax on them.
Jaffa cakes, flapjack; no tax.

Day One

2009-02-08T08:48:00.000-08:00

Saturday 8th February 2009. I am Mrs. García and this is the first day of the rest of our lives.

Twoddle

2009-02-04T07:08:00.000-08:00

I wonder if I am displaying the first sign of ´getting old´. You see, I cannot understand Twitter. I mean to say, that I see how it works, indeed I have been able to post some ´updates´however, I fail to see the point of it completely and utterly.

I have a Facebook page and while I hardly ever update it and never send pokes or prods or do other invasive things in cyber-space, I have found long lost friends through it and it´s nice to look at their photos. Sometimes. A friend of minefound out that his ´ex-but-3´was in London, thanks to the genius that is Facebook.

I had heard of Twitter but I finally decided to see what it was really all about after reading that Stephen Fry had twittered about being stuck in a lift for several hours. What it appears to be about is writing ´staus updates´every hour or so of your life. I fail to see how that could possibly be interesting to anyone. I can understand that if you are an astronaught flying into outerspace, you need to do this. I can see that being stuck in a lift may be so utterly dull that you resort to this kind of thing, although he ought to have had a book with him anyway.

My total lack of comprehension on the matter has led me to believe that I must be getting old. I have crossed the line and cannot understand the latest fad.

Lectura

2009-01-23T07:57:00.000-08:00

Throughout most of my student life and the immediate period thereafter I financed my existence with various part-time jobs, the most frequently occuring being work in bookshops. Whether it was the most frequent because shops which sell books are constantly in need of staff or whether I inclined that way because of my love of reading, I am not sure. What I do know is that the romantic idea of sitting in a rocking chair by a small electric heater and being able to read til your heart´s content day-in day-out is a falasy. Bookshop work is tedious and tiresome and repetetive. Many an hour can be filled by putting money-off stickers on some books and then carefully peeling them off others which are no longer in the discounted range. Some days later you will undoubtedly find yourself peeling the recently applied stickers off again and repeating the whole process with more books. Then there are the endless hours passed by alphabetizing the books according to author and tidying up after customers who take books off shelves to browse, leaving them on a table or the floor for you to pick up and put back in the right place.

The benefits are that you know about all the new publications, that you get a discount on books, though this often leads to a stack of ´to reads´that never diminishes and only rises higher and the fun of ordering obscure titles to have a look at with no intention of buying.

For several years books were such a part of my life that when I moved to Mexico I was struck by the distinct lack of book shops. Britain has several bookshop chains, which have many branches in many towns and cities, and many more independant sellers. You are never far from book buying possibiliites. Here however it is a task to locate the bookshops which are not exclusively for academic textbooks. In these establishments it is impossible to browse at ones leisure; the proceedure for buying books in these places invovles going to the counter, behind which are all the books, and asking for the exact title or at the very least giving an indication of what it is you want. The book or books will then be brought to you and you are required to make a decision as to whether or not you will purchase anything while the attendant stands over you and watches your every move. It somewhat hampers impulse buying, but there it is.

After several months I located various branches of a chain called Ghandi, which is a more general bookshop, and has the books on shelves which are accessible to the buying public. The selection is on the whole quite good and they do have some books in English. The other option is Donceles street in Mexico City, which is lined with second hand bookshops. We had a very fruitful two hours there last Saturday and for the bargain price of 5 pounds I came away with a selection of novels and cookery books to last me few the next few weeks. The shop in question is an Aladdin´s cave of literature. Many of the books I purchased had to be dug out from beneath piles of other books. Walking around the shop is a feat of agility due to the masses of books that are heaped along the passageways. The book shelves are two deep meaning that for every line of books visible on the shelf, there is another row behind it. Old clothes should be worn when attempting this sort of shopping as most surfaces are covered in a thick layer of dust. It was great fun. the price stickers on the books I now own indicate that many had been on those shelves for 6 years. I cannot imagine how a profit could be made in such a shop as this, but I would not wish that they change one thing about it. It is the closest one might come to that romantic bookshop ideal.

Lack of reading material has of course led me to search the Internet for sources of downloadable literature. There are many and here are but a few to start you off. if you have more, please let me know.
After reading this I would recommend anyone to find the George Orwell essay ´Bookshop Memories´ and any of his other essays. A particular favourite is ´How the Poor Die´, which is not at all maudlin as it may at first sound but a highly amusing read. Other places are the Gutenberg project, Martin Amis´essays are always a good read.

No Place Like Home

2009-01-06T07:22:00.000-08:00

Today is Día de los Reyes Magos or Los Santos Reyes or The Three Kings Day. It is quite incredible that Santa Claus only made an impact in Mexico about 15 years ago, before that it was entirely the Three Kings. Now though, the kids get a double dose. My kids aren´t going to have a double dose, one or the other. I have heard many Mexicans say that coca-cola invented Father Christmas...could that possibly be true? I hope not. Anyway, kids write a letter to the Kings asking for the presents they want, tie it to a balloon and launch it in to the sky. Lots of faith in the Mexican postal system. But I like that idea. At about 7pm on the evening of the 5th you start to see some rather sad looking balloons snagged in trees, all those wishes.

So, where there is a religious festival there is cake. The Rosca de Reyes is a loop shaped cake with small, nude, monochrome, plastic babies hidden inside. When you cut your slice if a baby is in it you have to buy tamales for everyone on february 2nd, which represents the baptism of the plastic baby, who is standing in for the baby Jesus. We had one here at work with hot chocolate. The chocolate and the cake were both tasteless, unfortunately. I had had plans to make one and now wish I had. I didn´t get a plastic baby and one of the Rosacs, we had two, didn´t have any babies at all. Mine would have been awash with babies.

Still on a religious note but less celebratory, I was reading the Guardian online this morning.

I happened upon a couple of articles which just touched me for being so decidedly British. The first was that an aethiestts ahve launched a campaign of adverts on the side of buses gntly telling people that ´There is probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life." Free speech. Fair enough Very London. Very British.

I was also pleased to hear about the ´Cold snap´. I was reading that in America they were having an ´artic blast´. This dreadful sounding thing amounts to no more than the UK´s ´cold snap´however we are the champions of understatement, are we not?

Good too that a man jumped in the icy water to save his dog, too. Ah, the Britons.

I can´t wait to...

2009-01-05T06:30:00.000-08:00

...have everything complete for the big day and

... get married.

... get my hair done. I have got some clip on extensions for the ´do´that I will have on the wedding day and I can´t wait to get my hair cut, coloured and preened and elongated with these things.

...get a vegetable patch going on the roof of the (kind of) new House. We will be renting for a while and the ´new´place has a really sunny roof terrace which at the moment is completely unused, I can´t believe it. I am going to take full advantage and get a table and chairs up there with a potted vegetable garden. Bliss.

... read! With wedding organizing and being ill (horrendous stomach bug and very much vomit) I had neither the time nor the inclination to read. Well you don´t do you when you have your head stuck down the toilet, in a bucket or any other recptacle that happens to be close by? So I am hoping that once we are married we may have a few weekends where we can just relax and stick our heads in books instead.

... watch the DVDs we bought. Mexico has an anti-piracy campaign going at the minute where they set up small shops which sell original, new, packaged DVDs for mere pence in an effort to stop the pirators. We bought 17 films for 25 pounds (they were 30 pesos each) and I had already bought a few more when I started to think I was coming down with something, which equals a huge stack. We got some great ones like Casino and Rear Window and Peeping Tom, which was an incredible find in the underground station of the Zocalo in Mexico City, really, wasn´t it?

... start my (second) Masters degree. I am sure if/when this happens I will not be wanting for reading material.

... get a puppy. I am thinking that this is a longer term thing as where we will be living is not exactly pro-pets. But still, I can dream.

... my 30th birthday.

...begin my life with César.

Happy new Year, folks.

Am Daring, Will Bake

2008-12-28T08:26:00.000-08:00

Christmas Eve is the big event in Mexico not Christmas Day. I was elected to make the dessert. Perfect. Having recently become a Daring Baker I seized the opportunity to make this month's challenge, which apart from taking about 6 hours to make, used an entire litre of cream, 400g of chocolate, many eggs and several heaping spoonfuls of sugar. Perfect. I am not one to shy away from heart-attack inducing baking and do love emerging from the kitchen after several hours of toil to hear gasps of awe.

This month's challenge is brought to us by the adventurous Hilda from Saffron and Blueberry and Marion from Il en Faut Peu Pour Etre Heureux. They have chosen a French Yule Log by Flore from Florilege Gourmand.

Now, as luck would have it the Christmas Eve meal went as follows; prawn pasta to start and a small portion at that, it being the entree; baccalau volovents and the main course, salmon with salad. The lucky part, if it hasn't already dawned on you, is as Christmas meals go a marine-themed menu is rather light and so leaves you primed for a morsel of one of the richest, creamiest, most dense desserts you may ever encounter. Please, do not think that those superlatives convey any hint of dischord because this was a triumph and the kitchen bound hours I spent were well worth it.

It's not at all difficult this thing just a bit labour intensive as you have to make all the layers first then assemble, freeze and ice. I used the basic chocolate version adding grated orange peel anywhere I could to give it a citrus kick.

At one point I opened the fridge and all my eggs fell on the floor and broke. That was unexpected and a touch messy. Thankfully though Claude came along to slurp up some raw egg off the floor. Is that nice for cats, do you think?

Incidentally, this is a Christmas Yule Log. You'd never know it would you looking at the pictures? because quite clearly it is disc shaped and nothing at all to do with a log. Doesn't matter. If, like me, you have no half-pipe shaped mould get your round one out and get on with it because in the end it all tastes the same. (Click on Hilda for the recipe)
Thanks Hilda and Marion for hours of baking fun.

Blue

2008-12-15T08:12:00.000-08:00

If I pose the question, what colour should food not be? What colour springs forth in to your mind? yellow? red? or Blue? In a completely unscientific survey every person I asked said blue. Someone said green, but what? lettuce? broccolli? spinach? green food exists in nature, blue food exists as chemically dyed sweets, alco-pops tasting of bubble gum, ice-pops, energy drinks and cocktails with curacao in them. Blueberries are actually more of a purple, they have a lot of red in them and red is a food colour that we love. Blue cheese does indeed have blue in it and it is scrumptious but really it is mostly white and the blue is greenish.

It seems that there are many foods with the word blue in their name but they are not actually blue. Some people have tried dying their food blue so as to lose their appetite while trying to lose weight. I have to say, that is one of the most bonkers things I have ever heard.

And why are there so few blue foods? according to this, it is because edible blue things that exist in nature are few and far between and because blue is asociated with alkaline conditions while most organic life is slightly acidic so blue means that something is not for eating. Poisonous maybe.

Having grown up not really eating blue food I remember my disgust when I went with Cesar to get quesadillas and the tortillas were blue. Ugh! To my delicate foreign eyes, they looked revolting. And especially because he suggested having a quesadilla with huitlacoche, which is mould scraped off rotting corn cobs and it is black. Are you feeling hungry? Nor was I. But that was nearly two years ago and oh how we change! They are delicious, we seek them out whenever we can, but I know that to the uninitiated they may not be what you had in mind because I was agog. I may also have been slightly dubious about the practice, pictured below, of putting the plate inside a plastic bag and then replacing it with a clean plastic bag for every customer to save on washing up.

And so in the space of just two short years I have become acustomed to blue food. I now also, it occured to me the other day, regularly eat cake for breakfast, which has got to be a good thing. I don´t look the wrong way when crossing the road any more and say thank you less at the supermarket checkout. I am sure I walk more slowly. I still consume far more wine and vegetables than most people here and will always prefer getting up early to staying up late. I have been a spectator at many events which I once would have considered animal cruelty. I will never stop wanting to ´save´every stray animal I see. I never thought I would care but I now know I like it to be cold at Christmas and am discombobulated if there is no Christmas dinner.

Fa-la-la-laa

2008-12-08T09:51:00.000-08:00

I want Christmas reading suggestions, people. There are 10 small work days left and then I allegedly have two and an half weeks off where I will make the most of it and read untill my heart´s content. Allegedly because, the rules go that if you are new, your boss can be an old miser and tell you that you have to work extra at Christmas. Just call me Bob Cratchitt.

That´ll be the first one -
1. A Christmas Carol

2. Human Croquet (thanks Isabella)

Cards and Crackers

2008-12-03T08:58:00.000-08:00

Pressing on with Christmas what-not I went out to get some cards and I was deciding what to make for Christmas dinner. I hadn´t realised how difficult it would be to find cards. Are they not simply everywhere right now in Britian? I only wanted some to send home maybe four, say. Some big department stores have none what-so-ever and the one shop, Sanborns, which is the place to go for cards had a paltry selection. Then, thinking about Christmas dinner, I thought crackers. No one has ever even heard of these.

What makes these things so particularly British? The Victorians. I am usually explaining away the mysteries of Mexican life for the readers across the ocean but this time it´s al reves.

Christmas cards are sent in the extreme in Britian. I have found sites saying that the average person in the UK sends about 55 Christmas cards per year. That´s a lot of cards and little did I know that the UK greeting card industry is the most successful in the world. We love our formal greetings.

So, the Christmas card was dreamed up by Sir Henry Cole, founder of the V&A museum in 1843 because sending a written greeting was the done thing and as a high flying member of society he had far too many to hand write. He asked John Calcott Horsely to design a card that could be printed. The first card shows a wealthy family sipping wine and doing charitable things for the poor (above), which was the message Sir Henry wanted to send to his fellows, that and "Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year".

The invention of the card and the rise of the penny post, cheap post, lead to the phenomenon we have today.

Who would have thought it?

The Christmas Cracker was another invention of the Victorian period, this one more bizarre in it´s conception if you ask me.

'If there is one thing inseparable from Christmas in general and the little ones' seasonable gatherings in particular, it is - a cracker. With what a delightful look of expectation they have waited for it to go "bang", and how they have screamed as they scrambled after the surprise which came in response to the explosion ...'. these are the observations of an anonymous Victorian.

I don´t know about other families but we always had crackers at Christmas. They would be put on the tree untill Christmas day when they would be taken off and one placed on each table setting to be pulled before digging in to the turkey. All jokes were told, no matter how bad, and paper hats dutifully worn.

What do you call a short sighted dinosaur? Do -you-think-he -saw-us
Who hides in the bakery at Christmas? A mince spie.

Love them.

A cracker, for those who are not familiar with such a thing is a cardboard tube with a strip of chemically impreganted paper inside covered with brightly coloured paper. Two people take each end of the cracker and pull. When the tube snaps in half the paper strip makes a bang. Delightful!

These were invented as a sales gimmic to improve the profits of sugared almonds of all things. A man called Tom Smith had brought sugared almonds wrapped in twists of tissue paper back from France and wanted to sell them. They proved to be popular but not as much as he had hoped. He decided to put a motto in side the paper with the almonds and this helped but he still wanted greater success. One evening while sitting by the fireside watching the burning logs crackle and pop he decided that adding a ´pop´to the small packets would be a great way to improve the sales of his sugared almonds. He made the tubes and filled them with sugared almonds and jokes or sayings and they were a huge success. You can read more about Tom here, if you so wish.

Something so seemly simple once viewed in a different context becomes an event or a mark of that place or people. It´s odd to view your own country with ´colonial´eyes and to see it as something exotic and different but these are the things that, once known, travellers seek out. It´s like the list of 100 foods I did a few posts back; having lived here for nearly two years (!) many of those things were not the slightest bit strange to me - hueveos rancheros is as common to me now as bacon and eggs but some people would find the very name wierd and exciting and seek it all out so they can have an ´authentic´experience.

I am hoping a friend send me some so that I can show the oddeties of an English Christmas to a real live Mexican family.

Noche Buena - Poinsettia

2008-12-01T10:36:00.000-08:00

I´ve got my tree up already. It´s the tiniest thing and adorned with little round bulbs of white light. I also have a brilliant red Noche Buena, or pointsettia.

These flores are originally native to Mexico, you know. The Aztecs called them ´Cuetlaxochitl´ and a german botanist gave them their botanical name; Euphorbia pulcherrima, which means very beautiful. The more common name, poinsettia came about when in the 1820s the U.S. presudent John Quincy Adams appointed the first ambassador to Mexico, Joel Roberts Poinsett. Somewhat an ameteur botanist, he came across a Noche Buena growing wild and took cuttings back the States. The flower was then cultivated over the border and with it´s growing popularity it was renamed from the tongue twisting Euphorbia pulcherrima, to the easier Poinsettia, after the ambassador.

Apparently the U.S. has the patent for the original and Mexican horticulturalists have to grow a variant to be able to sell the plants without having to pay dues. That seems rather wrong to me.

The flowers are not flowers at all but leaves or bracts which are red or pink or white. The flowers are in the yellow bits.

This is the Mexican legend about how the name Noche Buena, or Christmas Eve was chosen, there are many variants on this, but here is the basic story:

It is Christmas Eve and in the dark night sky a star is shining more brightly than all the rest. It is the star of Bethlehem and it is shining above the baby Jesus. Many people are making the journey to visit the new baby including a young peasant boy. When he arrives at the stable he sees that everyone has precious gifts to give but he has nothing. His eyes fill with tears and he turns to run feeling that he is not worthy of the new born king. His tears fall upon the leaves of a plant and as they do so, the leaves which were once normal green, turn to a dazzling red. An angel appears before him and says, " Look at this plant. Once was the same as all the rest but your tears made it into the most beautiful plant of all. It is the love in your heart that is important, take this plant to the baby Jesus."

Aciento and Amarillo

2008-11-28T05:00:00.000-08:00

A snack which is eaten by day in Oaxaca, which I devoured on three occasions which gusto is an Empanada de Amarillo.

Big tortillas, a staple of the Oaxacan diet, are filled with chicken and Mole Amarillo. This is also very specific to Oaxaca. Mole is usually a sauce for chicken, green, red or black which is the one with chocolate. The yellow one isn´t sold in other places in Mexico. I asked various ladies about the recipe for this because you can´t find it in shops. It´s the dough used to make tortillas mixed with chiles, tomatoes and corriander. The best ones are fresh made over a comal, a large metal disc heated over a fire, the tortillas dough is laid on the hot mteal and the sauce put on top along with some bits of chicken, then the whole thing is folded over and cooked.

A squeeze of the all important lime and in to the mouth.

Travelling and finding local foods is good fun. I was hungry for more.

The late night street food of Oaxaca is Tlayudas; enormous tortillas again but this time stuffed with cheese, beans, lettuce, cream, avocado, chile and meat. The streets are full of stalls selling these things on any given night of the week, so I thought I had better try one for research purposes, only at 10.30 at night a slab of meat wasn´t really what I wanted. As I am shrewd about these things I had discovered that you can get them ´sencillas´, without meat. So that´s what I asked for, no meat at all I specified.

With 2 minutes flat you have this huge, hot hunk of food in front of you. A couple of bites in I was somewhat purturbed by a kind of animal taste. Not meat, something greasier and, well animal. And it was not a taste I warmed to, let me tell you. Further investigation revealed that they spread these things with ´aciento´. That word is a hononym for ´asiento´, which means ´seat´in English so more questions revealed that what they spread on to the tortilla is a lovely thick layer of LARD. I did not take anymore bites. I could feel the greasy film covering my lips and felt like gagging.

Clearly I had made the mistake of asking for no meat but not specifying that neither did I want animal fat. How stupid! Slightly dissapointed I did protest to the woman and referred to it as ´manteca´, which means lard. She was having none of it though because aciento, which as far as I can tell is particular to Oaxaca is not lard; lard is white and is the pure fat, whereas this stuff is off white, which does not add to it´s culinary appeal and flavoured with garlic. Flavoured with old socks, if you ask me.

I know that some of you will say I am simply squeamish but I don´t want lard. So there you are, a late night snack which is indeed heaven for some judging by the number of places selling these things, but not for me.

Electric Meltdown

2008-11-27T06:38:00.000-08:00

The electrician was coming. I had left my door key with the landlord in the morning so he could get in. When I got home there would be electricity circuiting safely through new cables in my flat.

I got home, knocked on his door to retrtieve my key and got the response that I had been expecting but not wanting. Still no lights. It was going to be very expensive and the landlord wanted the electrician to try and find cheaper cable so that it wouldn´t cost me so much money and that he was coming back at 6.30 pm to talk to me about it and get on with fixing it. It was not the moment to pursue the question of payment.

Later when I tried to speak to the landlord about this problem of him thinking that I would be the one who would pay for the electrics in my house he seemed to have gone out. The door was padlocked and the lights were off. I rang the doorbell, no answer. When the electrician came he didn´t so much as knock on the landlord´s door as cause a ruckuss by hamering on his door with quite a lot more force than I had. Said landlord finally descends the stairs. He had been hiding from me. Hiding from me. He is a grown man with two almost adult children and he-was-hiding-from-me because, I assume, he thought he could avoid paying for the electricity installation. What is this behaviour?

First impressions say that the electrician is a nice genuine bloke who is as shocked as I was that this could happen. Close inspection by César later revealed that my flat has been wired with a mixture of telephone cable (external) and audio cable which you use for speakers. I don´t profess to know anything at all about electrics but even to my non-scientific brain that sounds dodgy. Telephone cable? What where they thinkng? César also explained that this particular cable is only for external use not least because the black plastic covering is not heat resistant and when it melts it gives off toxic gas. At Daimler, where he works, this black plastic is not allowed to be used on internal stuff in the lorries because if there is a fire you could easily be poisoned to death if this stuff melts. I may be exagerating slightly here, but you see my point, don´t you? And I was right to have been worried about Claude. And what if this had happened when I wasn´t there or at night and I had been poisoned to death by toxic smoke.

Accident waiting to happen.

Anyway, looks like the landlord is coughing up and we are set for installation on Friday this time. I am currently searching the internet to find out how you hook up to the house next door and leach their electriciy. My candles are nearly down to the wick.

Chocolate Meltdown

2008-11-27T05:44:00.000-08:00

There are moments when I feel as though I have slipped down a rabbit hole and landed in a parallel universe, when the actions of those around me not only are probably not what I would have done, but seem to based of some alternative logic and way of reasoning that I am not aware is possible; My landlord, a fully grown man tries hiding from me in order to avoid paying for the electricity installation; women dislike me for no other reason, that I am aware, than I am foreign and vaguely blond with pale skin, pasty my Mum would say, not desirable at all when you say it like that; people say yes when they know they should be saying no, women take offense that I have more chocolate than them.

Maybe there are other forces at work.

That delicious rich, sweet dark chocolate aroma that led me towards the molino is very powerful. It made me go off course and go in to a strange unmarked building in the first place; so precious it was to the lady in the molino that she could not find it in herself to forgive the 100g of extra cocoa I seemed to have mistakenly been given.

It is powerful stuff.

Having brought back so much I decided to give some chunks as gifts. The first went to Norma, the department secretary and friendly soul. The second wedge which I had wrapped in plastic and ribbon was destined for a trustworthy colleague but I hadn´t seen her to hand it out. My boss had seen the block of chocolate that I had given to Norma and, as Norma sits outside my office I overheard my boss´s reaction, which as usual was annoyance. How could Norma have something that she didn´t? Not just the chocolate but someone who would want to give her something for no other reason that just that.

Later she came in to my office, stony faced, cold and abrupt. What she was blurting at me I can´t remember but it suddenly occurred to me to pull out the other chunk of chocolate. I had intended to give it to her, I said, but hadn´t had a chance because she is always so busy. I had expected no reaction or maybe just a brief thanks and for her to continue going on about whatever bee I had put in her bonnet that particular day.

Have you ever seen a child receive a present? Or someone receive some really good news? They passed their driving test when they thought they had failed, came in to some money at the eleventh hour, finally are reunited with their partner after months of being apart. Something like that. You know the smile that lights up their face, that is so big and they can´t stop it? Maybe they hug someone or let out a cry of delight.

That is what took place in my office when I gave her the chocolate. A kiss, thanks so much, smiled, laughed, told me about how much her husband loves hot chocolate, that she has the ceramic pot and the thing to blend the chocolate, what´s it called?, a molinillo, I replied, ah yes Yvonne, oh you know so much, your Spanish is so good, You made this at the Molino? oh how marvellous! Thank you. And you know, she continued, you are different from the other teachers, Yvonne, you are ´de planta´, you are more special than they are, we trust you more than them.

When she left my office she didn´t walk out, she skipped out. I kid you not.

I couldn´t understand the lady in the chocolate grinding place and I cannot understand this. If you profess to hate someone, to be irritated by their very existence, you don´t want to look at them or speak to them, how could you suddenly be bought off by a 20 peso lump of chocolate? It hadn´t been my intention to try and win her over. In fact had I been planning on that, I would have bought her something special.

This chocolate is more special than I thought.

Edit: She has just walked in and for the first time in several weeks shouted ´good morning, Yvonne´from outside my door.

Hot Chocolate in Oaxaca

2008-11-25T09:43:00.000-08:00

Oaxaca is chocolate capital of Mexico, hot chocolate we are talking here, not bars, and flavoured with spices and almonds.

Each of the very many small towns and villages have bustling markets and a ´Molino´, which is where you go to get your chiles ground for mole and your cocoa ground for chocolate. What a great place to have in a town; a chocolate making place! I only went in because I could smell such a strong chocolate smell and wanted to know what it was. The place is full of Señoras mixing up secret blends. People must drink hot chocolate in vast quantities down in Oaxaca because it really was full and not just this one but every molino we passed had ladies lining up in abundance. The place I went to didn´t have a sign outside, just a smell, which was enough.

You buy the cocoa beans and then add as much cinnamon, almonds and any other secret ingredients that you might have, and then you buy the sugar. I asked for a kilo and for the Señora to put the cinnamon and almonds as she saw fit, because what do I know about making chocolate?
After you´ve bought the stuff you line up and wait for the first grinding, where they put the cocoa and spices through and it comes out as liquid. You then have to mix it in to the sugar yourself with an enormous wooden spoon and then put that through the final grinding where it comes out as a dense powder and hot. It smells so, so scrumptiously rich. Clearly I had to try the end product there and then. I can tell you that eating it directly from the bag is highly recommended. I came out with an almighty bag full of chocolate because asking for a kilo gets you a kilo of cocoa plus the sugar, which was also about a kilo. Mexican hot chocolate comes in hard tablets and now that I have seen how it is made, I assume that commercial brands are dried out some how so that they stay powdery but this stuff binds itself into lumps of sticky darkness.

Lucky for me that there were lots of Señoras around to help out the novice inglesa, wasn´t it? Well, I say help. They sort of just look at you at first without offering to help you in any way until after much effort on your part they warm up a bit and decide that you´re alright really. Then you can´t stop them talking to you and asking about every last detail of your life.

You have to beware, though, of discussing what you have bought; one lady asked me how much cocoa I had, to which I replied that I had one kilo. She looked dubiously at my bag, picked it up, made a face and exclaimed that this was not one kilo but more. Angrily she held up her bag to compare the weight and was outraged that, even though she had also asked for one kilo, I had more than her. I was trying to say that maybe the lady had given, and charged me for more and that perhaps I had got it wrong, being foreign and stupid and the like it must surely be my fault. How much did I pay? she went on and obviously my 123 pesos was less than her 130 pesos. There seemed to be no logical explanation, a mistake, perhaps? I could understand her irritation and thought that when she mentioned this to the lady who was serving I would back her up, chocolate-buying-ladies united. Surprisingly, she didn´t complain to the lady behind the counter. What she did was, in a gesture of defiance, cross her arms and turn her back on me and refused to speak to me again.

I shall never understand that at all but then the ways of Mexican ladies are not to be fathomed, so I shall just sit back and sup up the chocolate

Lights Out

2008-11-24T11:52:00.000-08:00

Remember that I told you I was in the dark? Well, I am still in the dark. That is 11 days. ELEVEN days, people. I got some candles and that´s nice and all but I would like some electricy, please because it´s not just the lights you know, it´s all the plug sockets too.

When I got home last night, after a few days away, the landlord´s house, which is next to mine, was crammed full of fairy lights, stuck to the walls, hanging from the ceiling and a great big Christmas tree whose branches were bending under the weight of more lights.

Is this supposed to be funny?

He has all the electricity and I have none. And, may I remind him that it is still November. Sheesh.

Fajitas

2008-11-22T10:00:00.000-08:00

Sometimes, despite all good intentions to cook, we go out to eat just because it has become so late and we are so hungry that the trip to buy all the ingredients necessary and the time involved in cooking would mean growling stomachs and very bad tempers. When this happens what we need is something a) cheapish b) filling and c) not unhealthy.

Fortunatley for us there is a great fajita place up the road from me. It's bare bones, no fuss kind of stuff. We have been quite a lot. We don't even look at the menu, we know we want half a kilo of mixed fajitas (chicken and beef) coked in very little oil and two beers in glasses with no ice. Sometimes we get extra guacamole but that is just for celbrations. Now it may seem to you that being that formulaic about things could lead to boredom but you would be mistaken. Don't get me wrong, we don't eat here that frequently, maybe twice a month. Is that a lot? Don't know. Whatever, they've got their formula off to a tee and so everytime it's a dining extravaganza. I think one of the keys to the success here is that the food arrives on an almighty platter sizzling away with it's own gas alight below it to keep it warm. It's abundant but not over the top and it costs, for two including beer, about 100 pesos (a fiver).

I'll tell you the reason it is so good; it's the combination of chicken and avocado. Magic. Though we order the mixed fajitas, the beef is for César because I only ever want the strips of chicken. Vegetables are represented, not just in the form of an avocado but onions and peppers for crunch and colour and you get rice, beans, limes and tortillas. I had intended to take a picture when it arrived, but I hunger got in the way.

So, as you are all far, far away here is the recipe. I say recipe though really it's just guidelines to help you create this at home.

When I did it I marinaded some chicken for a while in garlic, lime, oil, salt, pepper and chile and cut all the vegetables in to strips and then threw them in a bowl with a touch of olive oil, salt and pepper. I cooked the vegetables first, letting them blister in places then cooked the chicken over a fairly high flame. We don't have one of those platter thingys with the fire underneath so I just served it from the pans. Classy,huh? The trick to eating is making tacos. Here's my method; get a tortilla (which you have heated up) spread guacamole and some refired beans down the middle. At this point César puts rice in but I don't, too many carbs. Put strips of chicken and/ or beef on top and add a squeeze of lime and a few drops of chile sauce. Make a sort of roll by bringing the sides up. You get it in to your mouth by holding the back up and pointing it downwards to go in to your mouth. It may all fall out if you are not practiced.

Accompany with beer.

Fit for a builder

2008-11-21T08:18:00.000-08:00

Coffee and danish, bread and jam, scrambled eggs in a spicy soup. What's that you say? The last one is not what you are going to be having for tomorrow´s breakfast. As bizarre as I have made it sound, it is a lovely comination. Huevos al albañil, or Builders eggs, is eggs cooked in a sort of scrambled-cum-omlette style and then bathed in tomato sauce laced with chile. Some places call this Huevo Ahogado, or Drowned eggs and to make it fit for a builder they add beans. I like it either way, beans or no. It's a good breakfast for a cold day, which is what we are having a lot of at the moment. I heard on the news the other day that we are having cold front number 9. I had no idea that anyone was counting.

On with the egg soup then. Now, if the idea of soup for breakfast puts you off, it does a bit, doesn't it when I say it like that? Well think of it as scrambled eggs in lots of sauce. I like it when it comes in a clay bowl, rustic, you know? But serve it on a plate if you must. I suppose the name 'Builders eggs' gives you an idea of what this is all about. What would those guys need when toiling outside all day heaving heavy loads about? And really, when you've got heavy work to be getting on with, you need something you can just slurp down, right? The name makes you think of something robust, filling and tasty, no? Well that's what it is.

You begin with the sauce, which once you've knocked up a pan full, will enable you to have this on the table this in about two minutes flat. It's a simple blend of tomato, onion, garlic if you want, chile and seasoning to your liking. In Mexico it is spicy enough that you need a bit of bread to dull down the burn but if you are not in to that, especially for breakfast then just add less. But do add some chile, I would say because you need something to give it a bit of a kick. The egg is scrambled but in big pieces so that you can get hold of it, so don't stir it about too much while it's cooking, just gently break it up a bit towards the end. You could, if you were so inclined make an omlette and then slice it up. The beans, which as I mentioned sometimes are there and sometimes are not are a good addition because if it's just egg and sauce then to get something filling you'l need about 3 eggs per person, which is quite alot. You can buy beans in a tin or do it properly and soak and boil the dried ones. I am not sure it is worth all that fussing if you are just making this for a quick breakfast, but you decide how much of your time to dedicate to this humble fare.

Huevos al albañil (Builders Eggs)

Enough for two
8 Tomatoes
Garlic
2 fresh red chiles
A large onion
4 eggs
beans (in a tin or dried ones soaked and cooked.)

Make the sauce by skinning the tomatoes and blending them with the onion, garlic and chile in a liquidizer until smooth. Add water if it is too thick. Put two spoons of oil in a sauce pan and heat it up then add the sauce. Cook until it changes from bright pink to deep red. Adjust the seasonings. If you want more chile, blend it first with a bit of water. The sauce should be soupy, not too thick so add more water (or stock) if necessary.

Once the sauce is to your liking, make scrambled eggs and heat up the beans.

To assemble, put the scrambled eggs in to two bowls, add a couple of spoons of beans, then pour on the sauce. Eat with totillas and maybe a bit of cheese sprinkled on.

Eat my Sausage

2008-11-20T08:01:00.000-08:00

You know how sometimes a new song is released and it just catches on by being played incesantly on the radio? You even get to like it sometimes, don't you? and then you find yourself singing it without really knowing what the words are? Well, that song at the moment in Mexico is ´El Mechon´. Catchy rythm, great hook, only it seems that the lyrics are complete nonsense. But that happens too sometimes, right? You sing along, sort of babbling sounds and noises which could be concieved as words, rewriting the lyrics to something that sounds right for you. Only it´s not just me with this one. Many Mexicans thought this song was nonsense too and many of thse Mexicans wanted to know what on earth the lyrics were talking about. Google to the rescue.

So, before I tell you about the lyrics themselves, I should introduce you to Banda, the kind of music this is. Banda is big loud music with trumpets and drums and trombones. It is the kind of music to dance energetically to. Often, not always, but often, the lyrics have a lot to do with sex and often they are indeed quite rude, mostly through innuendo, though sometimes more directly and often they contain a lot of swearing.

Taking all that in to account, it is still quite surprising to find that the point of this song is actually a very explicit request for oral sex. You may be able to imagine, when
I tell you that the principal verb used in the song, ´mamar´means suck. And, you see, the word ´Mechon´is infact a local word from the north of Mexico which not a lot of people, Mexicans included, know is a euphamism for part of the male anatomy. How odd it is then to see children, mothers, aunts and uncles singing along to this song with its catchy rythm when you know what it really means. I assume, hope, good lord, I hope and prey that they are singing in blissful ignorance.

The lyrics are complete rubbish and the song only lasts two minutes, because as César pointed out, how could anyone endure this for any longer. It is catchy and I do find myself singing it and then wondering if anyone knows what I am saying.

I am not one to blush easily at such things and I am certain that in Britiain censorship is over-the-top. I don´t think it is necessary that all swear words are always bleeped out; 'bad words' are cultualy defined afterall and using them doesn't make you bad, just impolite, perhaps, in some contexts. But I am not at all convinced that a man singing about such intimate details is something that should filter through so easily to mainstream culture. Maybe I am just prudish, but I think it is teling of how macho Mexican culture is and it is that which I don't like. How ever funny it may seem, would you really want your child dancing around singing 'eat my sausage' or other such euphamism?

100 foods

2008-11-18T12:05:00.000-08:00

I like lists and I found one that seems to be going around on some foodblogs. This one comes with rules, which I will try to remember for you now; If the word is in bold it means you've tried it; crossed out is you would never try it in a million years. Red means something, but I can't remember what so I have just added comments, which is not part of the rules, and I have put the ones I have made and eaten in bold.

1. Venison - I have never tried this. I would though. I have eaten veal Edit: I ate Venison tostadas in Oaxaca. Delicious.
2. Nettle tea - well, yeah. Is that special?
3. Huevos rancheros - obviously. This is César's signature dish.
4. Steak tartare - Still no, but there is a place in San Miguel de Allende which does it and it always looks very appetizing, so maybe next time we go.
5. Crocodile - no. I saw one up close in Chiapas, but I didn't eat it.
6. Black pudding - yes. This may feature on our weding menu and not even at César's request, but my own.
7. Cheese fondue - made it.
8. Carp - yep.
9. Borscht - made it.
10. Baba ghanoush - made it.
11. Calamari - yep.
12. Phở - nope.
13. PB&J sandwich - this being 'peanut butter and jelly', no I haven't eaten this but have eaten jam and cheese sandwiches.
14. Aloo gobi - made it.
15. Hot dog from a street cart -well, yes, many. Some may have been responsible for al the bugs I had in my stomach.
16. Epoisses - nope.
17. Black truffle - dahling. I don't have that sort of money.
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes - yes. My Uncle Bob's home brew.
19. Steamed pork buns - well now, I have no idea what that is.
20. Pistachio ice cream - Yep. In italy. A lot.
21. Heirloom tomatoes - This is the name of a tomato, not some really old one. And no I haven't eaten them.
22. Fresh wild berries - yeah, brambles, gooseberries, strawberries, rasberries.
23. Foie gras - no.
24. Rice and beans - all the time!
25. Brawn, or head cheese - I thought this was a no, then I realized that yes, yes, I have actually eaten that. Can you believe it? It's pigs head all chopped up and set in jelly made for mthe fat or something like that. It was nice.
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper - I have had it raw and blended into a sauce, just the peppers, nothing else. It is as hot as all hell.
27. Dulce de leche - No. I have had cajeta, which is the sweet unctuous psread of Mexico.
28. Oysters - No, clams. Raw and on the half shell all the same (also in Grand Central)
29. Baklava - made it.
30. Bagna cauda - made it.
31. Wasabi peas - what's that? peas with wasabi? No, I haven't.
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl. Erm, clam chowder in the oyster bar in grand Central Station served by a man who had no neck and looked like a clam, does that count?
33. Salted lassi - made it.
34. Sauerkraut - yes.
35. Root beer float - no.
36. Cognac with a fat cigar - seperately.
37. Clotted cream tea - yes. Yum! In cornwall and at Claridges. Seriously.
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O - no. Ad I don't want it.
39. Gumbo - no
40. Oxtail - no
41. Curried goat - I have had goat cooked in cactus leaves in the ground. That's more impressive, no?
42. Whole insects - yes. Chapulines which are crickets, fried and tossed in chile then put in a quesadila. The legs stick in your teeth.
43. Phaal - no.
44. Goat’s milk - yes.
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/€80/$120 or more - No. No.
46. Fugu - no.
47. Chicken tikka masala - yes. Is that not Britain's national dish?
48. Eel - no.
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut - No. Would hate to.
50. Sea urchin - no.
51. Prickly pear - no.
52. Umeboshi - no.
53. Abalone - no.
54. Paneer - yes.
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal - I cannot think of many things worse than that.
56. Spaetzle - no.
57. Dirty gin martini - Martinis yes, dirty martini as yet, no.
58. Beer above 8% ABV - yes.
59. Poutine - no.
60. Carob chips - I've had carob and it wasn't a particularly pleasant experience. I don't think it was chips though.
61. S’mores - no.
62. Sweetbreads - no.
63. Kaolin - Is that a medicine?
64. Currywurst - I think I had this in Gemany but I'm not sure.
65. Durian - no.
66. Frogs’ legs - no.
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake. - All but funnel cake.
68. Haggis - no.
69. Fried plantain - yes. Deep fried in fact and in some really old oil. Or maybe it was lard. It was disgusting.
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette - no.
71. Gazpacho - yes.
72. Caviar and blini - I've made blini but not with caviar, just smoked salmon. How common.
73. Louche absinthe - Well. I don't think it was Louche but the first absinthe I ever had while in Prague made me pass out within about 3 minutes of the galss touching my lips.
74. Gjetost, or brunost - no.
75. Roadkill - no.
76. Baijiu - no.
77. Hostess Fruit Pie - Is that a brand name? Well, no then.
78. Snail - no.
79. Lapsang souchong - yes.
80. Bellini - no
81. Tom yum - no idea..
82. Eggs Benedict - yes. Made it and the muffins.
83. Pocky - ...?
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant. - no
85. Kobe beef - no.
86. Hare - no.
87. Goulash - yes in Poland.
88. Flowers - yes. Courgette flowers, fried then put in in quesadillas, colorines, which are little red flowers, also in quesadillas, nastursiums in salad and crystalized violets.
89. Horse - no.
90. Criollo chocolate - no.
91. Spam - yes. oh dear.
92. Soft shell crab - in Brighton. Very expensive.
93. Rose harissa - no, but what a wonderful thing it must be.
94. Catfish - no.
95. Mole poblano - yep.
96. Bagel and lox - yes.
97. Lobster Thermidor - no.
98. Polenta - made it.
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee - no.
100. Snake - no.

Seems I am a bit lacking in the Asian department. I do get cool credit for having eaten insects though, surely. Somebody else do it in the comments or on your blog so we can swap notes.

Quantum Cool

2008-11-15T11:28:00.000-08:00

Have you seen it yet? Did you love it? We are a bit behind in Mexico because it only came out yesterday. And I was there. And I loved it. All that action and things exploding and shooting and suits and no hairs out of place.

Was it as good as Casno Royal? I say a confident yes, although Casino royale did win me over with all that suit changing and the set which was completely beautiful. Montenegro, was it?

I had read that Bond doesn´t drink Martinis in this one but a cocktail called sazerac, which involves a sugar cube and is what they give you in Paris bars if you have a broken heart. I didn´t see any of that though.

Today I am about to do something I have never done in my life. I am going to see the same film again today. César just got back from visiting his parents in Monterrey this morning so hasn´t had the chance to see 007 yet and so, who am I to get in the way of his viewing pleasure? And obviously, for research purposes I need to go back and check out if I missd the sazerac among all the action. Because, my, there is a lot of action in this film.

I had never realized that I wassuch a big fan of this kind of thing. I can distinctly remember not being when I was a little girl and protesting if my Dad wantd to watch JB on the telly at Christmas.

How I´ve changed.

Dark

2008-11-13T06:51:00.000-08:00

The night before last, when all through the house not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse, there was a great big bang and all the lights went out and the house filled with toxic blue smoke and Claude nearly died.

With the passing of two days and the absence of electricity in my house, still, I may have built the events up slightly but the smoke thing is true. You see, on Tuesday evening, after César had left for Monterrey, I set about tidying and pottering quietly when the light shade in my bedroom started to vibrate violently. Then I heard, not a bang as such, more of a popping sound. At the time I thought this was a bit strange and that maybe there had been a bit of a current surge or something because quite often the lights dip or we get a black out or a brown out. A fuse had gone somewhere I assumed, so went out the door in my bedroom and down the outside stairs to tell the landlord. I spoke to his son and then went back up the outside stairs to my bedroom. Downstaris I could hear Claude sneezing. I called him but he just meaowed feebly. He carried on meaowing fraily for a bit but didn´t come up. So, a few minutes later I went to see what could possibly be up with my little cat and found the house full of toxic blue smoke and Claude, poorthing, lying lifeless on the floor.

Imagine my horror.

I grabbed him and ran out side shouting something along the lines of ´theres a fire, the house, it´s full of smoke! Claude! Claude!´only, it was much more dramatic than that.

There was no fire actually but a lot of smoke came from somewhere. And Claude revived after about 7 minutes of sheer panic on my part. I still don´t know what happened but the fuses had all burt and melted and they were big fuses, so I am thinking something quite bad probably happened. I am left with no lights and no plug sockets which work and so no fridge, haird dryer, iron. And despite several attempts on my part, the landlord has as yet not got round to doing anything about it.

By about 7 o´clock each evening I have been reading by candlelight. My current book is the autobiography of Gabriel García Márquez and it feels quite appropritate given that I am at the start of the book where he revisists his childhood home in a small village, where clearly they used candles.

The photo above, in all it´s blurred glory, is the view I have at 8pm.

Red Hot

2008-11-11T10:38:00.001-08:00

While we were in Zacatecas we bought several piles of chiles, all red, to contrast with yesterday´s blue. Lots of chiles are grown in Zacatecas and so you can get dried chiles, which are fresh, if that isn´t too much of a contradiction in terms. They are recently dried is perhaps what I mean to say. I hadn´t realised until last night, when César made some chili sauce that the age of the chile must affect the intensity of the heat and I´m going to take a wild guess and say that must have something to do with the water content, musntn´t it? Or if anybody actually knows why this might be then maybe you could let me know? Save me throwing around rash ideas about things which I know very little.

Anyway, fresh dried chiles or not, this is a great saucy kind of a thing which you can just have hanging around in the fridge for ever and it will not go mouldy or let you down, it will happily perk up most dishes faster than you can say Scovile Heat Scale.

This is the second version we have come up with. The first I made with a packet of dried chiles which I got in the supermarket, whizzed up with some garlic and that baby is hot. This one is less hot and so we mixed in some garlic and oregano. If the chile is really hot there isn´t much point in adding other flavours as the heat just dominates everything.

So, how can it perk up your life? Well, I have eaten it daubed on pizza, sprinkled on vegetables, with meat, mixed with cream to make a sauce for a vegetable and pasta bake, with cheese, oh hell, whatever you like. You see how great this is?

Here´s what to do:

Get about 200 grams of dried chiles - a mixture or all the same, doesn´t matter.
blitz them in batches in the blender or all at once in the food processor.
Add garlic. We added a whole head to this quantity of chile but you just add how much you like.
Add oregano, again the quantities here are just to your taste.
Wf you want a liquid sauce add lots of oil and pack into a jar. We packed it into a jar then put a layer of oil on top as we wanted a drier thing that we can mix with more oil later if we like.

Use willy-nilly to brighten up your life.

Miracles

2008-11-11T06:56:00.000-08:00

The sky was gloriously blue in Zacatecas. Look at that blue. That really is the clour of the sky. In Spanish this colour is called azul celeste, or celestial blue, which is usually translated as just boring old sky blue, however that lacks a little something, if you ask me...doesn´t have enough impact or capture the biblical intensity . We went to see the Sanctuario del Santo Niño de Atocha, a church in a small town outside the city of Zacatecas and this blue was everywhere. Appropriately it wasn´t just in the sky but in the paintings done as thanks for a miricale.

This Saint is a child, which is quite unusual and he is one of the most popular Saints in Mexico. The legend is believed to have started in Atocha, Madrid and was brought over to Mexico when the Spaniards came here to mine silver. The story goes that in Atocha many of the men were in prison and back then prisons did not feed the prisoners so the families had to maintain them. One day a law was passed that only children of 12 years old or less could take food to the prisoners. This obviously caused problmes for families that did not have young children so they preyed to Nuestra Señora de Atocha, who is Mary, to find a way of helping them. After a while some of the children who had been visiting the prison came back telling stories of a young boy who was giving food to all those without young children. None of the children knew who he was but they all said that his water flask was never dry and his bread basket never without bread, no matter how many people he fed. He came at night, passing the sleeping guards or smiling sweetly at those who were awake. The women who had preyed to Mary for a miricle began to suspect that this was infact her child, the young Jesus.

So, the belief continues and, as Jesus is only child, if you wish to ask this little guy for a miracle you have to begin by praying to Mary, his Mum because you cannot ask a child to something without first having his Mother´s permission. Quite right.

If the miracle you prey for is granted, then you should say thanks and the traditional way to do this is to go to the church in Plateros, where the Saint is and leave a ´retablo´, a hand painted image of the story of the miracle.

I just love these. Many of the older ones are done on metal sheeting and as you can see, that celestial blue features a lot.

There are thousands of paintings and objects which have been left as thanks for a miracle. It is quite overwhelming.

I love this one below, which is a mixture of collage, painting and wood burning. I like how the Saint is just perched on the side of the bed.

And how marvellous, these jolly pigs.

Some of these are really old but I think they age very well. The oldest one I saw had a date of 1891.

I had seen some of this type of painting in the Frida Kahlo house museum and thought I might like some too but then César pointed out that they must be stolen and sold in flea markets because really they should just stay here for all time.

Thinking of it like that it feels a bit like it might if you were to take a gravestone or something so maybe I´ll just settle for the blue sky.

Restoration

2008-11-10T08:15:00.000-08:00

It´s Monday morning and I am so sleepy. That must have something to do with the bus rides which seemed to last for all eternity that we endured yesterday to get home from Zacatecas. Oh lordy, do they show some bad, bad films on those buses. I slept on the bus, but it´s not real sleep, you know? And, for all that lying around with your eyes closed, it doesn´t stop you being tired.

And now, at 10.35 in the morning I am dreaming only of a warm place and what I will have for dinner because my office is cold and I am hungry. I do have so much to tell you, about the sanctauary and the miracles, but it will have to wait for tomorrow when I have energy and cables for downloading photos. Or shouldn´t that be uploading? Oh, you see I told you I was tired.

While we were away we ate birria (goat stew) for breakfast, which is one good reason to go to Zacatecas, apart from the beautiful city and then later we ate steak. On the same day. That for me is a lot of red meat so now I am hankering after soothing warmth and vegetable sustenance and so for dinner I think I may make a vegetable stew and serve over plain rice. The stew is a mixture of diced vegetables; courgette, bell peppers, onion, carrots, whatever you can find, cooked slowly in broth so the flavours all mingle together. Cook the rice apart and serve the soupy vegetables over the top in a bowl, then eat it snuggled up on the sofa.

Quesadillotas

2008-11-05T10:57:00.000-08:00

While we all wait on tenter hooks for news about those wedding plans which seem to clash with a little thing called work(I mean, you are all as wrapped up in my life as I am, right?) let me tell you about a delectable snack that you should really make for breakfast tomorrow.

What this is really is a quesadilla, but amplified. Any of you not familiar with a quesadilla, we are talking the mexican cheese on toast, normally made of a tortilla folded in half with some cheese inside and heated in a dry frying pan until the cheese melts. While that is all well and good it´s not really that tasty, depending on the cheese you use of course, but still I always find them a bit lacking as a snack in themselves and if I have to eat it like that, would prefer to dip it in soup or use it as an accompaniment to something a bit more flavoursome.

But, buy huge flour tortillas instead of the corn ones (even if at the time you thought this would be a bad idea) and you´ve won half the battle. Smear some refried beans on the inside along with the cheese and I tell you, you will not be able to eat just one. Go on, try.

Now, I hear what you´re saying, this is not a huge move away from the straight cheese I just so blatently told you not to bother with but let me assure you that the addition of that beany paste (and they do need to be smooshed up beans, and preferably heated up before they get slathered in the tortilla) elevates this from an only-if-theres-nothing-else kind of thing to a stand-alone-snack. A few drop of chilli sauce and you´re really there.

I have also made this with the addition of a bit of omlette and that´s not half bad either.

What I also discovered, in a mad rush this morning was, that if you just get some cold tortillas, slap the cold cheese and beans in the middle and fold them in half you have your mid-morning snack which you then heat up in the microwave at work. And it is still as good as if you do it on the hob. my preference is to cook them for about 17 seconds on the ´frozen pizza´setting, although I am sure you can be much more scientific about it than me.

So, there we have it. No more excuses for an empty tum.

Official Calender

2008-11-03T11:10:00.000-08:00

Since my first week here at the school I have had a calender on my office wall showing me the dates of exams, qualification dates and holidays. As it is an official calender, which was given to me by one of the directors, I have been using it to book things like holidays and my wedding and have had no problems. However, not all the dates are correct. I booked tickets on Friday to go to Oaxaca on the 19th of November until the 23rd, because it says clearly that the 20th and 21st are days off. Those days are not holidays. I also planned the date of my wedding based on that calender and now it seems that no one knows if those days are holidays either.

The director who gave me the calender is going to talk to my boss to try and talk her in to giving me the days off. We shall see.

The one good thing about all this is that it reminds you that you are not as stupid or disorganized as those around you and complaints from the staff to the chime of ´I could run this place better myself´are in this case extremely well founded.

November

2008-10-31T09:56:00.000-07:00

I am very excited about November. It is time to start the Christmas baking.

And oh, do I have plans for Christmas baking. Last year I made mince pies, the year before that Christmas cakes and this year it is going to be Christmas pudding. I want to make it soon as the chilly, crispy weather makes me want to fill the house with spicy smells and steam up the windows. And a good pud needs time to steep in its own juices. I am going to do a Ginger bread house too. And biscuits to hang on the tree.

I have no suet, so to remedy this and to stay completely traditional I am going to use a Mrs. Beeton recipe for a suet free Plum Pudding. She used butter instead of suet, which must be nearly the same, mustn´t it?

Food for a 0 degree day

2008-10-28T06:18:00.001-07:00

Temperatures have plummeted over the last few days and we are now technically in the dry season. Yesterday didn't understand that here the deal is that we get cold weather but we don't get cold wet weather and it gave us a cold, windy wet evening. That combined with the fact that I hadn't eaten much yesterday gave me the urge to potter about in the kitchen and come up with a hearty baked supper.

Pastito was the result of that urge. I hadn't made it before and apparently it is of Greek origen. It is a sort of halfway point between a lasagne and mousakka; a layer of pasta tubes flavoured with browned butter, cheese and nutmeg; a layer of meaty sauce made with minced beef, tomato, wine, onions and garlic; then more pasta and a thick layer of bechamel, thickened with an egg.

Delicious. The cheese I used was smoked and I would whole heartedly recommend that. This is a mighty dish so we had two small portions each because it's the kind of thing where you want to have seconds and I served it with some steamed spinach and red wine. It would be nice with peas or some salad, too.

You need about an hour of preparation time to get this together, it's good for steaming up the windows on a cold day. Highly recommended. There are various recipes on the internet.
Here is what I did.

For the meaty sauce
500g minced beef
1 enormous onion
7 cloves of garlic
3 tablespoons or thereabouts of tomato puree
half a glass of red wine
a bit of stock powder
half a wine glass of water.

For the pasta
300 g pasta (that is a very rough estimate)
butter
cheese
nutmeg
1 egg

For the white sauce
50g butter
3 tablespoons flour (I measured it by eye and put about half the quantity of flour to butter)
nutmeg
salt and pepper
1 egg

Cook the pasta until tender and drain then melt the butter and cook until it browns. Throw over the pasta along with the grated nutmeg and grated cheese. You really need whole fresh nutmeg for this recipe. The stuff you buy ready ground is just tasteless dust. I bought one nutmeg about 2 months ago and still have half left because when it is fresh it has a strong flavour. Really, don't waste another minute with your dry powder. When the pasta has cooled beat the egg lightly and mix into the pasta.

Chop the onion very finely, I used my excellent hand blender which also chops. Cook in a bit of oil until it softens. Add the mince and cook until it browns then add the rest of the sauce ingredients. Simmer for about 20 minutes.

Make the white sauce by melting the butter then adding the flour and stirring so there are no lumps. Add the milk. I add it bit by bit and keep stirring so there are no lumps. You need about half a litre. Keep stirring until it reaches boiling point then drop the heat and simmer for a minute or so. It should thicken up. When it cools add an egg and beat well.

Now to the assembly. Put a layer of pasta at the bottom of an oven proof dish. Pour the meat sauce over it . Put on more pasta, mine had spaces between but I liked that because then it didn't get too heavy, but you could really pile it on if you wanted. Then spread the white sauce over the top, grate a bit of cheese on and some more nutmeg if you like, then bake it. I gave mine about an hour. If you cook the meat for longer before you assemble it you could reduce the baking time. Stick it under the grill for a bit to make it nice and brown on top.

Edit:
I just reheated some of this after leaving it in the fridge for a couple of days and i think it may have been even better.

Mr. and Mrs.

2008-10-24T09:40:00.000-07:00

There is something huge happening in my life at the moment. It's not the new job or the up coming Masters. It's a wedding. My wedding.

There, I've said it. I've gone and put it in print, which means there ain't no backing out now. I have said it a lot in Spanish, 'Nos vamos a casar.', 'Nuestra boda es en febrero.', but it's quite easy to distance yourself from your words in an other language, it doesn't seem quite as real.

So there it is. I am going to be Mrs. García.

There are 106 days until February 7th, the big day. Actually that makes it sound like it's quite far off. The more panic inducing way to put it is 3 months or, holy guacamole, 13 weeks. Especially when you consider that one of those months is December and nothing gets done in December because there is too much Christmas activity. I am sure the wedding will completely slip my mind.

So I get married, then 5 days later turn 30. That's got to be too many big changes all squooshed up together. There again, I have always been an all-or-nothing girl. I cannot abide faffing about.

So far we have picked the place where the wedding will be, but not signed a contract, started designing the invitations but not finished and nothing else really. We have set the date and my Mum and Dad have got their tickets. I have decided that I am going to make the cake. I have not decided what exactly it will be. The tests for that will have to be done soon. And I should sort out a dress. But really, there is not that much to be done. I am looking forward the most to the wedding list selection. We are going to do it at one of the big department stores because that way you can have it online and they deliver stuff to your house. to do the selection you just going around zapping stuff with a bar-code gun thing and typing in the quantities. Can't wait. Not a material girl at all. I am also thinking we should do an Amazon wedding list because I would love it if a whole load of books turned up.

On the other hand, I am glad it's not so long away because I can't wait to start my new life as Mrs. García.

The New Job

2008-10-23T07:26:00.000-07:00

I am in my office.

That, you may have deduced, means I started work. As so often happens, most of the fretting and frustration of that long, long wait I have now forgotten. Although reading my last post made me shudder a bit.

We're nearly at the end of the first term, or semester, as they say here. I have had a baptism of fire with regards to this school. My immediate boss is not the friendliest or most approachable of women. It is unfortunate that I have a female boss as if any of you remember how well that went in my last job, you will know that Mexican women sometimes have 'issues' with foreign women.

The fact that I have an office is also a tad problematic. There are 9 offices in the school for teachers and department directors, excluding the school director and administrative staff. There must be something like 50 teachers, a very rough guess, many of whom have worked here for around 10 years. None of those have an office, so imagine how popular I am. Offices mean status and in Mexico status is a big thing. I am a Maestra de Planta, which means I have a permanent contract and get a salary, not hourly wages. The other teachers are paid by the hour. If you are on an hourly rate you work one term, say August to December, then they fire you. They then give you a new contract for February to May, then they fire you again. When this happens you get a 'finiquito' which is two weeks worth of wages because they are firing you without good cause but you have no employment from May to August. There is also no guarantee that they will renew your contract, although once you have been here a while it's quite probable that they will.

This hiring-firing idea is completely legal in Mexico. I imagine they do it to keep costs down. If you are not a permanent member of staff they don't have to give you training, they don't have to give you a Christmas bonus, there are no ties. With the current state of the U.S. economy and the effect it is having on Mexico, The School-Where-I-Work, where I work has now officially stopped hiring. I got in at the last minute. They are not taking any more Maestros de Planta, like me, until further notice. Who knows how many teachers will be reemployed next term.

Jobs are generally not very secure in Mexico. The law is actually on the side of the employee, but not until you have a permanent contract, which makes people scared. The huge unemployment problem means that if you don't pull your weight there are anther 10 people waiting to fill your shoes. With that kind of atmosphere people work long hours, to prove that they deserve their job. Some people don't even take their holiday entitlement because it might look bad. It's the antithesis of Europe. I always believed that work was something you do to pay the rent, a career was something you invested more in but essentially it is always good to have a life outside of work. That's not the case here. Work is all consuming. Having said that, very little seems to get done. I have only been here 2 months and I have already begun a programme of film clubs. None of the other teachers have done anything like that. Surely that's how you demonstrate that you are dedicated, not just by running around saying your really busy and never leaving the campus.

I am teaching English, and I enjoy it. Teaching teenagers can be totally unrewarding at times and very draining. Sometimes though, something happens and you get a sense that what you said or did had an impact on someone. It didn't change their life but they listened and that is nice. Fortunately I enjoy the theory behind language teaching, so much so that I am going to do another Masters degree in precisely that. So I see my classes as little experiments, which helps to pass the time. I am also pleased with my office. Some of the students came and decorated it yesterday with handmade paper decorations. Lovely.

I am going to continue marking essays in my cubby-hole retreat.

Still Waiting

2008-08-07T08:41:00.000-07:00

Here I am still waiting to find when exactly I will start my new job. After many trials and tribulations I did get my visa in time for the first day of term. However there were still several things which in all the months that have passed since February when I had my first interview no one had thought to mention, so I got them, handed then all in on Monday. Then on Tuesday turns out there were more things and then finally I did that yesterday. On handing in that last thing I was told they would probably have the go ahead by that very afternoon. Still nothing.

The red-tape means that students are without teachers, teachers are overloaded with work and tired when I am here, ready to go.

I do not understand it at all. Being in limbo is unpleasant and I would rather jut know a date when I will finally be able to start work.

Meme

2008-07-10T09:30:00.000-07:00

I haven´t done an entry for a bit. I think I have been too interested in things like how to buy a house I can´t afford and planning how I can become the next Bond girl. This is what seven months of uncertainty does to you.

But I did see a Meme on some blog or other which I thought I would do for your entertainment pleasure. If you are like me you may not know that a meme is a questionairre aimed at finding out pointless information about you. I think it is called a meme because of ´me meme´ in French meaning ´myself´. Anyway, better not take my word for it as my middle name is neither Google nor Wiki.

Here we go.

What did you eat today?
So far, home made museli with milk and I realy want to go and eat hot buttered toast and a cup of tea.

What do you never eat?
Tripe, stomach, eyeballs, that sort of thing. While that may sound glib it is really not, living in Mexico as I do. A typical breakfast here is goat cooked in cactus leaves. This is in itself very delicious if rather heavy but the optional extras that you can have are the stomach which has been stuffed with all the intestines and ofal, like haggis I presume or the eyeballs neither of which make me salivate at the thought.

What is your favorite kitchen item?
My wooden fork which I use for scrambled eggs. It is hand carved from a nut coloured wood and nice and smooth.

Where do you eat out most frequently?
At the moment ´Las Palmas´which makes great fajitas. We usually get half a kilo of mixed, half chicken half beef. I think chicken, guacamole, cooked onions, peppers and salsa is the perfect combination of stuff to put in a tortilla and stuff in to your mouth.

What would you like for your last meal?
Well now. What a terrible question. At the moment it would be the hot buttered toast (home made bread with Lurpack or, if available home made butter) and a nice hot cup of tea. If it really were my last meal, and I knew about this in advance I would probably go for something a bit more extravagant. Oh I know, a juicy steak and some full bodied red wine.

Just Visiting

2008-06-26T12:03:00.000-07:00

But oh how I wish I could stay forever. This beautiful place is where I am right now doing a spot of house sitting. What luck! The antithesis of Toluca; instead of grey concrete there is green grass; instead of traffic fumes the air smells sweet; instead of noise I can hear myriad birds tweeting all day long and see wild horses walking down the lane

And cook in a lovely kitchen

which is what I am off to do now.

Oranges are not the only fruits of my labour

2008-06-13T08:01:00.000-07:00

It is such a sunny way to start the day, orange juice. I am hooked especially with all the grey skies we have at the moment and more especially because of my fantastic juicer. I had thought about electric ones and I have one of those things where you push the orange down on a spike and squoosh it around but this thing is a fantastic bit of kit. Well designed - not bits that don't serve a function, esay to clean and its weightyness tells that it will last forever.

I am still in the throws of waiting for employment. This is not unemployment you understand because technically I do have a job. Only it hasn't begun yet. Still. So I am making the most of the time at home and being domestic and doing things that you wish you could be doing when you are having a bad day at work. Last night I watched driving Miss Daisy, which I realize is not a new release but is such a lovely film with great acting. Sentimental but not too so and the house she lives in is a wealth of interior decorating ideas, if you like 30's style and I do. There is a wonderful room where she sits and sews which is furnished entirely with white basket weave furniture. Miss Daisy is a widow who fills her days writing, reading playing mah jong with the girls, drinking tea out of fine china and embroidering.

I too have taken a turn in that direction. I like to pretend that I am a character in a Jane Austen novel with every stitch. These are my embroidered tea towels,

I am going to do some baking now and a bit more reading and maybe some more stitching and enjoy it while it lasts.

Small Round Breads

2008-05-15T10:58:00.000-07:00

I live equidistant from two bakeries. One is very pretty on the outside but the bread never fails to disappoint and the other is actually quite good but as it is not on the way to or from anywhere I tend to neglect it. Neither of the two makes herby, toasty breads and so I was clearly pushed in to concocting this and now see no reason to go to buy bread at all. I got the idea for these flat breads here and as they contain no yeast, they are as quick as you like to make.

After making the basic dough, I split it in to two and flavoured one half with oregano, mixing it in by kneading and the other half by crumbling some dried chillies in my hands and sprinkling them, seeds and all over the dough. You don't even need to knead this if you don't want, just let it rest for about half an hour. I cooked them in a frying pan on the hob until they were brown on each side and ta-da, fresh crispy round breads, the kind of thing to dip in hummous. The chili ones do pack a punch.

This morning I made one by pulling off a bit of dough, manhandling it in to a circle and popping it in the non-stick frying pan (oil or no, the choice is yours) then making a fried egg to have on top. It puffed up like a pitta bread when it was cooking, which I assume was due to the resting time (?) I now see no reason why not to have fresh bread at my disposal within minutes. I think you could leave this dough knocking about in the fridge for a few days and it would come to no harm meaning you could pull of a piece of dough whenever the fancy took you to make bread within minutes.

Small Round Breads

2.5 cups Flour; I used a mixture of wholemeal and white because I didn't have enough white
2.5 teaspoons Baking Powder
oil; i drizzled about two tablespoons of olive oil
Salt; a pinch
water; enough to make a dough that is not sticky

Oregano
chili

Mix flour and baking powder then add oil and water. Mix around until it starts to come together and then squidge it about with your hands until you have a ball. if you are only adding one flavouring you could add it to the dry ingredients and have it all incorporated from the word go. If you want to split it then cut the ball of dough in two and flatten it out a bit. Sprinkle on the flavouring ingredients and knead to distribute evenly. if you added mushrooms or onions your douhg will be wet ans sticky so add more flour. Once everything is as you want it leave the dough to rest for half an hour or more.

When you are ready to cook the bread divide in to 8 pieces (or 4 of each flavour) and flatten in to rounds either by hand or with a rolling pin (I made rounds about 6 inches across). Heat up your pan over a medium high heat and add a bit of oil if you like (especially if your pan is not non-stick) then cook the breads for about two minutes on each side until speckled with brown. They look pretty cut in to triangles.

Mussels in a Tin

2008-05-09T10:40:00.000-07:00

There is no point to me checking in today except that I have to tell you about my new found super fast lunch or supper. It involves, of all things, tinned mussels. I know, I couldn't believe it either but they are actually nice. I am sure it would work too with frozen seafood. The dish is a slurpy soupy mixture of tomatoes and mussels on top of very garlicky spinach and cous-cous. It cooks up in about 10 mintues from walking through the door, faster if you have left over spinach in the fridge, which is how this sort of started.

In a moment of jittery hunger when all I had was a tin of mussels, some left over spinach and a tomato was chop the tomato and put it in a frying pan with nothing except a drizzle of water mashing it a bit in an attempt to make sauce added oil and balsamic vinegar then the mussels. I mixed spinach I had cooked with garlic the day before to some cous-cous and then when everything was hot I put the cous-cous in a bowl and poured the mussels in their meagre sauce over the top. And I have not lunched so well in a long time. I made it again last night when we got back from the supermarket at about 10pm starving. This time we ate it with crusty bread and red wine and it got a big thumbs up. You will note I am sure that there is no onion, garlic or other things normally associated with cooking a nice meal in this recipe. Well, you could add these, if you wish. You could tart it up in all manner of ways with herbs and different seafoods and such like and that would be all to the good however in it's most basic state it is also excellent and very fast.

Mussels from a tin with tomato and garlic Spinach Cous-Cous

enough for one

1 tin (about 100g) of mussles in water or other substance
1 tomato
a bloop of olive oil
a dribble of vinegar
Some cous-cous
As much spinach as you want

Chop the tomato into small squares and throw into a small frying pan. Add enough water to make a pool around all the tomatoes and mash the chunks a bit to make a sort of sauce. if the mussles are in water, drain the water away and put the mussels in to the pan. If you bought mussels in oil and vinegar or some other such sauce then throw in the lot. Now add oil and vinegar to taaste and maybe a bit of salt and pepper.

Put the cous-cous in another pan and add enough water to cover. Put it on the heat until the water is absorbed and the cous-cous cooked. if you are me you will undoubtedly have to add more water. Chop up two garlics or more and put them in a pan with a bloop of oil. Add the spinach (frozen is fast). When the spinach is cooked add it to the cous-cous.

Serve in wide bowls, the red over the green and white and eat with a spoon slurping up the juices.

Heavens Above!

2008-05-05T07:48:00.000-07:00

I have been dumb struck. Have you ever thought something was going to happen, really truly believed that you would be on a certain path only to have the rug ripped out from under you at the very last moment? Have you ever been so convinced that your life had taken a certain turn that when it turns out there is a delay in proceedings, a technical hitch, a blip on the horizon you are thrown so off-kilter and out of sink that for a moment you flounder, lose your grip. I had gone to the beach under the impression that this holiday marked the end of months of tedious job related disappointments and that on my return I would be thrown head first in to a new job, new environment, new people, getting up ridiculously early and earning money. Alas this was not to be. The day I thought I was going to be starting I was told that actually this will not happen until I have changed my visa to say that I now work in this school. Hmm, if you say it quickly it doesn't sound like a big deal but boys and girls it means at least another month, maybe two of no job. And had anyone mentioned this before? Is this all some big joke? Oh hey ho.

So, more days of baking and reading. Not that I'm complaining, only I may be developing an even greater aversion to full-time employment with every day that passes. And those of you who know me, know only to well that I already have problems with this sort of thing. It may mean I end up unable to have a job due to thinking that every employer is an idiot and unworthy of my services. Those of you who know me, know only to well that...

My saving grace in all this free-time is that I do not like telly and therefore do not have a television machine. T.V. in Mexico is only really worth it if you have cable as far as standard Mexican telly does not seem to distinguish between the idea of 'daytime' (mindless in the extreme) and other time (where you have the chance of seeing something half decent) and it is some of the most desperately terrible T.V I have ever clapped eyes on. Most things seem to operate at the level of Neighbours and below and I can only think that it is some kind of Big Brother type scheme by the government to try and kill off independent thought and perhaps even the will to live. My other saving grace is my monthly spinning pass. I am getting very used to peddling like mad and not getting anywhere.

Oh but I am not downhearted, really I am not. I could happily pass away years reading, cooking and studying languages as the fancy takes me. And how I love to play in the kitchen, for me relaxation is pouring a glass of red and taking up residence at the chopping board so really this is ideal.

So here's to bumbling idiots and making the most of the inefficiency of those in power.

off to the beach! back in a week

2008-04-10T11:02:00.000-07:00

In the meantime, make this

Tequila with honey

mix 1 measure of tequila with some honey and top up with chilled fizzy water and an ice cube.

Dustry Tracks

2008-03-27T19:13:00.000-07:00

I got a bit distracted there with bugs and what-not and forgot to go on telling you about our lovely trip. So here are some pictures to get you in the mood.

Lovely fresh cajeta we bought here.

At one point we drove in to a swarm of wasps. I have never known anything like it. I thought we had driven through a puddle and the water had splashed up on to the windscreen, because it sounded like a bucket of water being thrown at us which seemed odd as we were in desert country then a quick glance at the windscreen revealed lots of blobs of wasp body smushed to a pulp and as I had the window open to take photos for you dear reader, I got splattered wasp in my hair. Eeewww!!

Oh, still on bugs it seems.

A curly sand storm,

But oh, all that driving and heat coming atcha through the glass and the air-conditioning it doesn't half dry you out. Then theres the bit a of a schlep around to find a hotel and what a girl really needs after all that is a refreshing drink to quench a parched mouth. Thank god at every street corner in Mexico is a vendor selling Aguas Frescas, which are water blended with fruit and sugar.

This one is Agua Chia, a seed that when put into water swells up like frog spawn. Low and behold it´s rich in Omega 3 and you can buy it for a small fortune on the Internet (love point number 4) if you are not lucky enough to live in Mexico.

I love the drink-in-a-bag thing. So Chic. And it's much better for the environment than a polystyrene cup.

The chia flavour is not that common now in Mexico but apparently was in the 50s or something. No idea why that might be, maybe it was hotter then because this stuff is re-fresh-ing and really ought to have a revival. In fact if any one wants to help with that let me know and I´ll send you some. Get your orders in quick. We´ll beat Coca-cola yet!

Chia needs to be mixed with some other flavor like lime or pineapple. Add about half a cup full to a litre of water. the idea is make a flavoured water so it should not have so much fruit as to make it pulpy.

Agua de limòn

1 litre water
10-12 limes
1 cup of sugar (or to taste)

Mix everything together, blend it to dissolve the sugar more quickly. Put chia in and let it stand for a while if you want to make this into lemon chia water. About half a cup.

Agua de Piña

1 litre water
1/2 pineapple (skin removed)
sugar to taste

Blend pineapple with a bit of water. Strain in to a jug (or don't for fibrous water) and top up with more water. Add sugar to taste (again put the chia in and let it stand if you want.)

Tummy Ache

2008-03-27T09:16:00.000-07:00

I suppose I had been getting a bit complacent. After, what 3, 4 months of not being ill I had started to consider myself to be like other normal people able to eat food without instantly dropping with a terrible stomach bug. But it was about time I was taken down a peg or two and struck again with a prawn induced infection. I am now feeling more or less better want for the gurgling noises and the feeling that my stomach is on spin-cycle.

And so to the low point of our Easter holiday; Chilo's. A seafood place in Queretaro and I think another place somewhere near by, the food is decidely average if not actually terrible. I complained that the prawns we the worst I had ever had in my life and only ate two. It seems that this was enough to put me out of action for two days. I looked for their website but they don't seem to have one. All I can say is do not ever go there. It was the last place we went on the journey home and we were very surprised as every time we have passed it has been full to the brim, usually a sign of good-ness.

When one has an illness of the stomach all appetite seems to vanish but as I know from experience not eating can lead to gastritis and anaemia so it is best to have a little something to keep these things at bay. What then? A simple soup, so simple yet so good - made from a huge onion that you have chopped in to half moons and thrown in to the pan with a glug of oil, 3 potatoes peeled and and diced and a big fat clove of garlic which you throw in with the onions, enough water to cover and a spoonful or so of stock powder. Cook for as long as you doze on the settee or until the spuds are soft and broken up. Add salt and that is your genius sustenance. Good enough to eat on days when you are not ill.

For something sweet try Mexican Atole. Like runny porridge this rib-sticking drink is for when you are feeling a bit under the weather or for when the weather is cold and grey. This is as easy as my soup. I used piloncillo, which is a dark sugar sold in cone shapes. A perfect substitute would be muscovado, the darkest you can find.

Atole with sugar and cinnamon

(For about two mugs)

1 cup of oats
2 cups of milk
half a cup of water
about half a cup of sugar
a broken bit of cinnamon stick

Put everything in a pan and heat. Stir to dissolve the sugar and serve. The above quantities can be adjusted willy-nilly to suit your tastes. It can also be blended if you prefer a version without lumps (take out cinnamon stick first)

La Envenadora

2008-03-25T10:31:00.000-07:00

When I heard the knock at the door I had expected it to be the nice lady next door who had been looking after Claude while we were away. I looked for the chocolates I had bought her to have ready but when I opened the door it was the landlords wife and her daughter. They too are lovely people and the daughter dotes on Claude. They had brought him in from where he was running around outside and started to explain that perhaps its better if he doesn't go out the front in case something happens to him, something about her husbands sister was worried about the plants and maybe something will damage him if he goes out there. To give you some context here I live in a 'privada' which is a closed street where no traffic can pass through and with locked gates at either end so that only residents have access. So it's not exactly dangerous. And to be honest I wasn't really listening, I thought they just didn't want him out there for whatever reason and so said yes, they were right and that was that.

Cesar, who had been sitting on the settee, heard the conversation and said, well they mean that she is going to kill him. Slightly taken aback by this I needed further clarification. The key word here that had completely passed me by had been 'poison'. The landlord's wife had come to tell me that infact her sister-in-law had said if she sees Claude out there again she will poison him. Not an empty threat as she has done it before.

It is not often that something really shocks me, takes me by such surprise that I am at a loss for words, able only to repeat the same phrases over and over again until the news sinks in and the reality hits home. Who on earth would want to kill a cat? Much less one that is sweet and runs around and rolls on the floor and purrs at the feet of any passer-by.

After the shock and sadness come the anger and vengence. The world, it seems to me, would be a much better place without this kind of person in it. Cesar had informed me that you can kill a cat with a strong dose of rat poison. Well, of course. I have heard that drinking weedkiller can be fatal for humans and I am sure it does not taste very good, though I imagine that sugar and chocolate and honey could disguise even the most bitter tasting things.

I thought perhaps I should make her a cake, to say sorry for the bother that Claude has caused her. It seems only right.

Chocolate and Eggs

2008-03-24T10:00:00.000-07:00

Back just two days and already it seems like ages ago that we were driving through the altiplanos or eating delicious barbacoa. How is it that it always happens like that? Holidays just seem to vanish in to thin air like you were never there. Semana Santa or Easter Week here is much more of a religious celbration than a chocolate pig-out. That's how its supposed to be isn't it? Well, I would vote for chocolate any day of the week and it has only just occurred to me that we saw very little of it and even less of chocolate eggs.

We did find Constanzo's, a sweet shop out of the 1930s selling its wares in little paper bags. Somewhat an institution in San Luis Potosí, the only place where you can find the company, it was founded in 1931 by an Italian family and now has about 10 shops. The specialty is 'Purpuro' a honeycomb filled with liquid caramel and covered in chocolate. They are by far the best the other flavours being nice but fairly average, still they look very pretty. And not an egg in sight. At least not here.
But Easter is not Easter and breakfast is not breakfast in Mexico without eggs and eggs is what we had in Aguascalientes. We were very happy when we found this little cafe where two breakfasts with coffee, juice, eggs and danish pastries cost 4 quid for both having just walked out of La Saturnina recommended in Lonely Planet as being good value. Good value my arse.

Have I ever told you that you can't buy half a dozen eggs in the supermarket here? The minimum is 12 and more likely is 24 or 36 or a huge box of 360. Or you can buy them by the kilo in corner shops. There are a lot of eggs in Mexican cooking.

Well, so, to complete my chocolate and egg theme is Huevos Divoricados, or Divorced Eggs so called because the eggs, unable to exist harmoniously any longer, come with different salsas; one green one red.

There are 3 ways to go with the salsas; roast the tomatoes and chiles first, boil the tomatoes and chiles first, blend the tomatoes and chiles raw and then cook. I think roasting gives the best flavor.

Huevos Divorciados

For the salsas

4 tomatoes (for the red salsa use red tomatoes and for the green use green tomatoes)
half an onion
1 or more fresh jalapeño chilis (one red one green for each salsa. use more if you like it hot)
salt

Depending on your preferred method roast the tomatoes and chilis in the oven until slightly charred or put them, whole, in a pan with enough water to cover and boil until the tomato skin is lose and they have darkened in colour.

Blend with a little water, add salt to taste. Put salsas into sauce pans and heat gently. If you have not already cooked the tomatoes and chilis now is the time to do it so let the sauce simmer gently for about 15 minutes.

Fry the eggs and bathe in salsa, one red one green. Serve with refried beans and bread.

Hitting the Road

2008-03-18T08:58:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow we are off on a trip to the North where things get hotter and lush green fields turn in to dry red dessert. We have got a lot of driving to do on long, long roads which disappear in to the horizon and twist through rocky mountians. We have a trip to Aguascalientes planned along with San Luis Potosi and Zacatecas. Culinary delights are set to be barbacoa, a sheep cooked in cactus leaves in the ground overnight, Birria which is goat soup normally eaten for breakfast and what I am really looking forward to, barbecued prawns in the middle of the desert. This was my birthday barbeque in the thermal waters, which is only getting a mention now because someone took a while to send me the pictures. Ahem.

When we reach our final destination, Jerez, Zacatecas we are set for a party out of the form the times of Pedro Infante.

Hasta luego.

Baroque

2008-03-18T08:44:00.000-07:00

I had to show you this, my new table from the flea market. My flat lacks many things but glamour is not one of them.

Sopa Azteca

2008-03-03T10:15:00.001-08:00

For lunch yesterday we ate Aztec Soup also known as Tortilla soup and I was thinking how much I like the concept which is why I am going to share it with you here. The idea is to make a tomato broth and then pour that over uncooked ingredients. It is that simple. It feels very nutritious going down and if you prepare the uncooked bits in bowls on a table so people can help themselves, it makes a great lunch as you can keep going back for more adding as much or as little of each ingredient as you like.

I have given the basic recipe below and that is usually how it is eaten in Mexico but as far as I can see it would handle quite a lot of swapping and changing according to what you fancy or what is available.

There are two ingredients which may be difficult to get hold of but they can be swapped for something similar or just left out really. The first of these is a herb called 'epazote' which Google will tell you is also called mexican tea, wormseed and pigweed among other things. The flavour is quite bitter and not really similar to anything else so if you can't get hold of it I would say stick some fresh parsley or corriander in which is not at all traditional but will do the job. The other thing is dried chilli. Essentially you want dried chillies, the traditional being chile pasilla but you could use chipotle, poblano or ancho if they are available. They are normally bought whole here and are flavoursome rather than just hot. If all else fails a sprinkle of that dried crushed chili would be alright, just a bit, unless of course you like it really hot but you are after a comforting warmth rather than a head blasting heat.

Ingredients

6 tomatoes
1 onion
1 clove of garlic
A few leaves of Epazote (substitute with parsley or corriander or just leave out)
1 litre Chicken stock
about 1 table spoon dried chili, seeds removed and cut into strips (pasillo, ancho, chipotle or whatever you can get)
Tortilla chips (ideally in strips but triangles broken up a bit will do)
Chedder cheese cut into small cubes
Avocado cut into slices
sour cream and limes to serve

Start by whizzing the tomatoes, onion and garlic and a large glass of the stock to a pulp in a blender. Heat a bloop of olive oil in a pan and strain the liquified tomato mix into the pan through a sieve. You want to keep all the juice but the fibrous bits can be thrown away, it should be watery. Lack of a sieve meant that my soup had all the bits in it and it tasted just fine but if authentic is what you want then strain them out and throw them away. Add the rest of the stock and bring up to simmering. Remove the seeds and veins from the chilies and add to the soup along with the epazote leaves whole. Let the broth simmer for about 20 minutes until the tomatoes tchange colour from fresh pink to a deep red the broth to absorb all the flavours of the herbs and chili.

When you are ready to eat, cube some cheese small enough that it will melt with the heat of the soup, about half a centimetre cubes will do and scatter in the bottom of a bowl with some avocado slices and a small mountain of tortilla chips. Ladle the tomato broth over to cover, add sour cream or a squeeze of lime and slurp down.

Enough for two for lunch with left overs.

Swearing at the Salon Corona

2008-03-02T10:47:00.000-08:00

After being frustrated at the lack of good shopping in Toluca we decided to go to Mexico City on the spur of the moment. This involved several buses and being in traffic and going on the metro and coming out hungry, dusty and with the kind of thirst which can only be quenched by cold beer. We realised we could never concentrate on the important business of frivolous purchases without first addressing the problem of empty stomachs and dry mouths and so it was to Salon Corona.

This cantina or watering hole is just behind the Histoical centre of Mexico City and on Saturday at lunch time (for which read 4pm) it is busy with a capital B and underlined in red. We managed to bag a couple of stools at the counter, quite the best place to be. At the counter the women plonk your order in front of you therefore the risk of it being dropped by a waiter on route is avoided and as if this were not enough of an incentive the fantastic dialogue which gets bawled across the busy bar surely is enough for you to want a ring-side seat.

I want to mention for a moment the nature of swearing in Mexico. The word 'cabron' for instance could be translated as arsehole or wanker or nobhead. There are fewer expletives in Mexican Spanish but depending on the context they can be stronger or weaker. But generally swearing in Mexico is more acceptable; many men will use the word 'cabron' when talking to each other in general conversation so you may hear something like "Orale, Cabron. Que chingón" as a way of saying " Ah excellent. That's bloody great" but literally translated is more like "Ah fantastic, Fuckface. That's the fucking dogs bollocks." Now I am not suggesting that people don't swear a lot in Britain, I for one have at times a mouth like a sewer, I am simply pointing out that in Mexico, depending on the context and place, you can swear like a trooper and not cause the least bit of offence.

When the women preparing to grub have got it ready they yell for the waiter who usually doesn't come. This is followed by more cries to the tune of,

"For fucks sake you arsehole. Come and get these frigging quesadillas." "Are you going to leave these tacos here forever you stupid bastard?" "For the love of God where are my God damn prawn cocktails." "I asked for two beers, Dickhead."

And there is much mumbling to themselves things like, "What a fucking retard." "They don't know anything these morons."

Its noisy, greasy and hot, the Mexican version of a greasy spoon. But oh my god the food is good. The Tacos al Pastor are exquisite; seasoned and with just the right amount of grease and the Prawn cocktail is, amazingly fresh and sharp.

The rest of Mexico say that Mexico City is a law unto itself and that 'Chilangos', people from Mexico City are a rare breed, brash and rude. Whether that is true or not this place is pure Chilangolandia attracting Mexicans and foreigners from all walks of life. Go here for prawn cocktails, tacos al pastor and tips on how to speak like a fishwife.

Supper for 29th February

2008-03-02T09:32:00.000-08:00

Sometimes what you need is a supper which is a bit hushed. Snuggly like sheepskin rug by the fire.

For times like this there is little more appropriate than soup. This night I made my super stand-by Green Soup, so called because it was devised as a way to use up any old green vegetables that are lurking in the vegetable drawer. We all have one of these don't we? The trick, if trick it be is to put celery in it therefore guaranteeing a flavoursome dish whatever melange of other vegetables happen to fall in to the pot. The recipe goes something like chop an onion and fry in a bloop of olive oil. Chop any green vegetables you may have cutting out any really moldy bits and some celery. Put in pan with water and a stock cube. Leave it for a while until the vegetables are soft then blend. Lettuce actually works really well in this soup. As does a glug of olive oil to serve. If we are going to rescue something so basic from the realms of depressing student fare we need good bread. Bring on home made focaccia. I used this recipe but changed the tomatoes for onion and a toothsome loaf it did produce but next time I would add more salt and bake it in a bigger tin. 8 inches produces a really deep bread and I personally like my focaccie a bit flatter and with more surface area for toppings like, here onion sliced as thinly as possible with a knife that has a bent blade and coarse sea salt.

Add to that olive oil flavoured with chili and a glass of wine from a bottle that was opened the night before, I think opening a new bottle for this somehow misses the point, and that is your special, simple belly warming supper.

If you have also been waiting in for the post-man, gas-man, washing machine repair man etc. you will have had time to whip up a hearty cake no doubt. In this case the cake in question was an experiment based on two kilos of bananas being quite a lot for one girl to eat. You may remember the orange and almond cake which I implore you to make. Well, take exactly the same recipe and substitute the oranges for 5 bananas and swap the almonds for walnuts, because that is what you happen to have at hand and voila. One bite and you are transported to a country cottage in the middle of the village where they make Midsommer Murders, which to my mind is no bad thing.

Leap Day

2008-02-29T14:41:00.000-08:00

The post lady had told me yesterday that she had something for me and would I be in tomorrow so she could deliver it. Not being one who receives many parcels I thought well, yes I better had be in to wait around for her to turn up. I had expected a fruitless day-long wait so began soup, cake and focaccia. Imagine my euphoria then when the doorbell rang and outside stood the post lady, bicycle propped up against her hip holding not one but three parcels for Yours Truly.

My delivery was a care package from the wonderful Rachel Fletcher who I met when she was in Mexico City on holiday with her friend Mark. Cesar and me were going to the annual Oktober Fest at the German Embassy and I overheard a Geordie twang coming from two bods in our carriage. Friendly as always, I went and said hello and we got chatting as you do. When I said I was from Grimsby at first they thought I was having them on but then as Rachel so kindly pointed out why would you lie about being from Grimsby?

As you can see Rachel has included all the necessary items a Northener in Mexico could wish for. She is a girl who likes to do her research and has clearly read this post.

I let out an audible cry when I pulled these out,

If cake is going to be shop bought and wrapped in silver foil then this is how it should be done. These tooth-achingly sweet marshmallow biscuits should be washed down, this is the only verb that will do, with a cup of strong hot tea.

Where there is rustling paper there is Claude.

A packet of Hobnobs has never looked so good or space-age.

And as I am writing it has begun to rain making it all the more perfect. Thank you Rachel for shopping so well and for spending really, far too much money on postage.

Tomorrow I shall tell you about supper.

Day Off Lunch

2008-02-27T11:38:00.000-08:00

Cesar went to work on both Saturday and Sunday this weekend so he took Monday off. I think there is a lot to be said for having a day off in the week. You miss the crowds and all the traffic and normal things are open. We made the most of it. We went to the countryside, to the peace and the quiet and the fresh(er) air. Glorious. This delicious chap was cooked on our newest purchase, an ideal for two sized barbeque.

Our fishes were done in foil and with a whole head of garlic between the two, mushrooms sliced and packed inside with a bay leaf and a bit of thyme. Totally easy, totally healthy.

Orange and Almond Cake

2008-02-27T11:19:00.000-08:00

This weekend was a culinary extravaganza, what with the market and the burgers and this cake (scroll down). All I can say is; Make it!

You boil oranges for two hours, take out pips only, whizz all the rest of the oranges up in a blender with 6 eggs, two and a half cups of almonds and one cup of sugar, bake for about an hour.

And then you are very happy.

Hamburgesas

2008-02-27T11:00:00.000-08:00

Once the idea entered our heads there was really no stopping us. Homemade burgers were what was needed.

We did good especially for a first go, flavouring the meat with fresh parsley, dried time, onion, salt, pepper. I wanted a 100% meat burger; no eggs or potatoes or other non meat products invading the hunk of flesh. Pure beast is what I wanted and beast is what we had, even if Cesar wanted an egg-ed up version. That is for next time.

What I can tell you is that these would have been more meaty done over hot coals, as it was we used the frying pan. But the mushroom and pineapple garnish was one of the best ideas had in recent history. Pineapple fried in burger fat is simply heavenly.

We are going to do a take-two but this time with egg and homemade burger buns and, wait for it, home made plastic cheese. Thank god Jamie told me about that. For now we are on a fish run trying to give our arteries a spell to dry out and de-saturate.

Central de Abastos

2008-02-27T09:29:00.000-08:00

The place to be for the keen fruit and veg buyer is the Central de Abastos. Ideally you go in your car and load up to the brim or you go on the bus and well, it is heavy. It is bursting with colour and smells and noise and there are so many people and everyone shouting and in this whirl it is difficult not to buy a bit of everything. My best purchase were some grapefruits which are the sweetest, juiciest, slurpiest I have ever tasted. 3 kilos for 15 pesos. Surely that cannot be beaten. I sometimes think it isn't quite right that it should be so cheap, I mean do these people make any money at all?

In fact in all the excitement I forgot to get you a picture of the citrus aisle, which is actually outside the market so that they can just back up their lorries and then drop the trailer and scoop out fruit with a shovel. They chop you a bit off to try there and then so you can taste how sumptuous they are and have juice running down your chin and you want more, more so you buy those juicy fruits. There are many, many fruits. And chillies. And meat. The meat section is my least favourite with all those heads and intestines and animal parts which I cannot even name hanging about. Were you aware that a cow's stomach is black?

Oh and flowers, lots of flowers.

I could spend days in these big overgrown markets wondering round an edible Aladdins cave, selecting my jewels for their sweet scent and flavour.

And then I want to rush home and devour what ever I have bought. Things look so pretty when they are piled up high. Even these tiny dried fishes, 'Charrol' and the beans I bought which look like cows.

I don't know what to make with these. I think I might just plant them and wait for a beanstalk to grow.

Yeast Wednesday

2008-02-21T10:10:00.000-08:00

I have extended my Friday Night Baking to include absolutely any day of the week as with such a lot of time on my hands at the moment why not? On Monday I made pizzas and orange and Cinnamon muffins. First up today were cinnamon rolls. I got the recipe from Bon Appétit and they look like they should and taste actually very nice but hmmm, I’m not convinced. I think the texture is a bit heavy. The things just wouldn’t rise. Maybe I heated up the milk a bit too much and killed off some of those little yeasts. But at this point I can’t be sure if it was that or if the recipe is no good so I might have to make more to check. It makes 18 though so it will not be imminently necessary. The icing you see here is Philadelphia cheese mixed with icing sugar and both Claude and I learnt that it nigh on impossible to stop eating this stuff before you actually put it on the rolls, so do not make it an hour and a half before you need it like I did. I used about half the quantity of icing sugar called for because it seemed to me to be sweet enough as it was and while the recipe said to also add butter I refrained from that too, not wanting to consume my daily calorie intake in one cake. I have my limits.

Not content with 18 cinnamon rolls, the savoury side was represented by English Muffins and they turned out absolutely bang on the nose. I have to say when I had made the dough I thought that they were just going to come out like any old bread buns as after all, the recipe does not differ much from that of a common or garden loaf. Once cut out in to little discs though they puff up and start to taken on a muffin-like demeanour but the wonder is the cooking. You just cook them on the hob until a golden halo appears on each side and they expand to make their own tearing line round the middle.

Then, if you are me, you tear one open immediately and toast, slather with butter and apply to face with a long sigh of oh my god that’s fantastic. I can’t still really put my finger on why they taste different from bread because up until I cut out circles it looked to all intents and purposes like we were heading for Standard White Loaf. Well, who cares? These will definitely become part of my baking regulars as you can’t quite beat a hot toasted muffin with butter and Marmite. I did try toasting one over the gas to see if I would feel like I was a character in Wuthering Heights. Singed edges is all I have to say about that.

When the Comedy Descends in to a Diabolical Farce

2008-02-18T13:29:00.000-08:00

So I turn up at work at a quater to twelve, 15 minutes before the class starts, specially prepared materials in hand and am received with the warm welcome of ´why weren´t you here at 10 for your class?´the simple answer to this is that I didn´t know I had one and why didn´t they phone me because, as well they know I live about 7 minutes away from the school and could easily have got there in plenty of time to give a lesson. Apparently this stumps them and the subject is changed.

The student I am due to teach at 12 has cancelled. Not just for today but for good and this is my fault. This is news to me. I know she had several gripes with The Management, numerous grumbles that the course book they sold her wasn´t the right level, various problems with the payment plan but at least seemed perfectly happy with me. The old lady insists; it is my fault. My fault that they didn´t change the course book as I recommended, my fault that they gave me a terrible text from the internet about metaphysics which had grammatical errors in it and told me this was going to be the content for the last lesson, my fault that they cancel her classes and then tell her it can only be made up at a time inconvenient for her. All my fault and it is very bad to lose a student

Give me the money you owe me and I am going.

She changes her tune. It is not that easy to give me the money and say enough is enough. From where I am standing it is. I endure her drivel for another 30 minutes or so waiting only for the moment when I see some cash. In this half an hour she does a complete 180. We began this farce with me the accused and we end with the student the guilty party. She didn´t know what she wanted, nothing was good enough. We are now happy that she has left, in fact as we do not want difficult students. Oh, no, no, no. Yes, yes you have experience teaching, you are a good teacher, yes, yes and we have no one else.

Fine. Give me the money.

The money I am given is short two hours which I didn´t actually teach because the student cancelled but has 300 pesos extra to cover a lie. My lie as it happens; I told them on the day of the meeting (see post below) that I had to go as I was going to give a private class and would earn 300 pesos but if I didn´t get back in time I would lose the money. This was not true, just an excuse to try and get the hell out of there. They told me that they would pay me for the hours I was wasting standing at the side of the road. They later said they would reimburse me the 300 pesos I ´lost´and pay me the hours I wasted, a total of some 940 pesos. Great. They then said they will pay me the 300 pesos for the class this pay day and the rest...later.

I left with some money and the knowledge that last lesson the student asked me for my phone number and made a comment about cutting out the middleman would be better both for her and her very nice teacher with a British accent.

Yesterday

2008-02-12T09:41:00.000-08:00

As some of you may know I am still in the throws of finding a job which is 'stable' by which I mean, ideally is full time or at least if paid hourly gives me enough hours to live on reasonably or at least enough to pay the rent, or perhaps just buy some food, is legal and the company will help me get my FM3, preferably they would want me to work in the same city as that in which I live. I thought I had found it. The job I have now was presented to me as a salaried position where I would coordinate the English language courses and in addition, any teaching hours I did would be paid extra at either 80 or 160 pesos per hour depending on whether it was business or general English. The school apparently teaches almost exclusively business English to adults on a one-to-one basis so therefore most of the hours would be 160 pesos. And, yes they will sort out my work permit. No probs. Great then, when do I start.

Turns out that so far I have at most 5 hours a week at 80 pesos per hour. Suddenly everyone seems to want ' normal' English. There is still no salary and I have seen no evidence that they have begun the process of getting my visa, the bare bones of which mean I am an illegal alien.

Ok, they need a bit of time to sort themselves out. Fine. So when they asked me to go to a meeting with them yesterday in Mexico City, I was reluctant but thought I had better. the meeting itself was fairly uneventful. We were trying to convince the Human Resources manager to buy classes for the employees. She seemed fairly interested but no contract was signed.

We left the meeting expecting our lift to be waiting outside but instead found we had to take a bus to VIP's which is a bad chain restaurant where we would be met. On arrival it turns out that we have to wait half an hour so we go to get a coffee in the bad chain restaurant. An hour later we are still there. Another 30 minutes pass and a phone call comes telling us that we should go outside because the car is nearly there. 25 minutes later there is still no car. This continues for about another 40 minutes when finally the Mum, this is a family business, sees the car driving past and heading towards the motorway. More phone calls, not to the man driving the car but to the Dad who is in a meeting somewhere and who is relaying messages between us and the driver of the car. No one can contact the driver and now the Dad is irritated and does not want to be disturbed. I have no idea where I am. I only know that I somewhere between Toluca and Mexico City on what is a very dirty and congested traffic island surrounded by people who I would rather not be. It is decided that we should walk to a different main road where it is presumed the car will pass. An argument begins between mother and daughter as daughter thinks we should have stayed near VIP's as the driver doesn't know we have moved. This results in her storming off, the mum getting very upset about this and chasing after her and me waiting near the petrol station looking for a car I have seen once in my life and a man who I have only seen from the back.

This scenario continues, now in the rain, for about another hour until I finally figure out more or less where the buses go and find a bank to get some money. I arrive home 8 hours after I left the house, slightly defeated.

These are not ideal working conditions. After a fair amount of insistence on my part they agreed that I should be paid for these hours. Whether or not I will be remains to be seen as I have previously helped out for hours on end without seeing one centavo for my trouble. So I have decided that perhaps this is not the best job for me and continue to look. The training which I was supposed to start this morning at another school was cancelled at the last minute but I do have an interview on Thursday morning and it seems very promising.

What I believe will happen is that just when I think I cannot take it anymore I will walk into the most perfect job and wonder what all the fuss was about.

And of course I have many stories to tell.

Chilaquiles

2008-02-01T10:42:00.000-08:00

Chilaquiles (chee-la-kee-lez) are a bit of a Mexican staple in the breakfast area of cuisine. No, I would go further than that; they are an outright classic and deservedly so. A perfect hangover plate. Done well they are precisely the right mix of chilli, eggs and stodge, done badly they are an abomination. And it was an abomination that I ate yesterday. It was not an outright disaster so bad that I had to send it back it was slyly underwhelming and the dismality of the whole affair took some time to creep up on me but when it finally hit home I realized that it had been a jolly good job that I was not the one to shell out for the half hearted affair that was my 'almuerzo', my brunch of yesterday.

Let me explain what comprises a killer plate of chilaquiles. First there is the salsa which is nothing more than a blend of green tomatoes, water, green chilli, bit of garlic and some onion. But the key here is that ofter whizzing the hell out of that lot in a blender you should let it cook. The tomatoes will change from transclucent spring green to a much mossier shade. Then, if you are really going after Michelen stars you fry a bit more onion and add it to your sauce. Complicated bit over. Now you get 'Topopos' (is that right? or is it more like Topotos?) Well, these are just triangles of deep fried tortilla. Not Doritos. You can just chop up tortillas and deep fry them but here (I am afterall in Mexico) you can get them ready prepared. So just throw a whole load of these into your hot salsa and mix about a bit. You have now created the stodge part of this dish. Throw in some chopped up cheese and let is melt. M-mmm, we are nearly there. If you are me, or Cesar, you may now like to add a few more Topopo-doo-dahs so that you have a nice balance of slight sogginess and a bit of crunch. If you are me or Cesar you will have taken the liberty in the meantime of frying and egg 'over-easy' (How do we, Britons, actually say that?). Assemble chilaquiles on plate with said egg. Top with sour cream.

There are variations on this and they often come with chicken or beef in stead of egg and can be made with red tomatoes too.

Need I say more? Well, the thing masquerading as chilaquiles which I ate yesterday was not made with love and attention. The salsa was not cooked, it was only luke warm. There was no cheese! No cheese! Sweet Lord! Mal, muy mal. The egg came scrambled and not fried and flipped over as we all know it should and whats more is that they had some how made it very small. Now this is rather difficult to explain but it did not feel to me like and egg should, shruken, rather as they they had sucked out all that would fill you up. It was not sufficient.

I think you will agree that something so simple should be able to be turned out with a modicum of finesse in a cafe which serves a hell of a lot of breakfasts. Apparently not. It was with a touch of resentment that it dawned on me this morning that what I had eaten had not done the job. Why it took so long to sink in I really don't know. Perhaps it was to do with my new boss who was talking, constantly and loudly and AT me. At least breakfast was on her.

I think my only way of overcoming this will be to make chilaquiles at the weekend when I will send you a picture. And I would highly recommend that you all have a go too.

Please, Come in.

2008-01-27T10:55:00.001-08:00

I am not sure why it has taken me so long to get round to showing you my flat. It is partly lethargy and partly because it is not exactly as I want it yet. Anyway here is the before and after of the story so far.

The kitchen was just a sink,

But a quick bit of shopping, some paint and the generous gift of some spare bedroom furniture transformed it in to a cosy cocina.

You may notice that the curtain is a bit of fabric held up by paper clips. Well, as I said, not quite ready for Beautiful Homes Magazine but on the way. The kitchen is the cosiest place in the house and it warms up very quickly. This is important when it is 2 degrees outside and you have no central heating. The heat explains the haziness of the photo as camera lenses also steam up. That table is genius and cost 160 pesos which is about 8 quid.

As you can see I maintained orderliness at all times during the move. This is the living room ,which is now white not the horrible sludge-blue it once was.

Nice stairs, no?

What was the bedroom painted in industrial sludge-blue became

what I consider to be sheer brilliance,

Claude thinks so to.

Claude

2008-01-26T12:08:00.000-08:00

Meet Claude.

Claude became resident yesterday when I found him alone, cold and hungry on the street. I can't bear things like that and as he was so lovely and sweet and affectionate I decided that he ought to come and live with me. So I picked him up and carried him to my flat and that was that. Now, before anyone starts telling me that he may belong to someone, let me add that I spoke to a woman who said she had seen him there for a couple of days and that no body seemed to be looking after him, she in fact had just been to buy him some biscuits because he looked so frail. She couldn't take him because she has a dog who might well eat poor Claude as a mid-morning snack and when I mentioned that I had been looking for a cat, well, it was fate really, wouldn't you say?

I say he, but as yet I have not had that officially confirmed. We are going to the vets on Tuesday for a once over and confirmation of such things, but I am pretty sure so we will continue in that vein. He is so sweet. When he first arrived he was just a little ball of tired, weak, hungry fluff which could barely walk around. A bit of grub and a quick nap sorted that out and he was bouncing around and chasing wool, bits of paper, sprigs of corriander before you could say jump up and play, Claude!
He is very thin and light. He wraps his long tail around him to keep him warm and purrs more or less constantly. It was difficult to get any good pictures of him because oh, he is so affectionate! He just wants to be sitting on someones knee or in their arms all the time and so doesn't want to go over there and do a nice pose.

My little flat feels much more like a nice home with a little cat. There is a distinct lack of furniture still in the living room, but as I know you are all dying to see it check back tomorrow for the Grande Tour of mi casa.

Cooking with Gas

2008-01-03T09:06:00.000-08:00

Wow! So much to say - since my last post it seems like a million years has passed. I trust you all passed the festivities in style and happily whatever it was you did. I had a lovely time and I got quite a lot of painting done. I now have a table in the kitchen and I also have a new oven and a bed sponsored by Cesar, good that and thank you. Your name will appear on all publicity. Yesterday ' we ' connected the gas which means I now have hot water and am able to eat hot food without leaving the house.

I cannot tell you the value of having sources of heat. Toluca is the highest point in Mexico and the coldest. It is currently minus 3 degrees at midday. The houses don't have heating and are very badly insulated and in fact many of them do not let the sun in through the windows. Great for a hot climate, bad for today. During the Christmas period I had gas for the hot water but it had a leak so I had to turn it off. So near yet so far. At one point i just turned it back on and risked explosions or gas poisoning or whatever you can get from this sort of thing, just because I was so freezing and wanted to warm up with a hot shower. I am now in a state of euphoria that I can make hot drinks and that my kitchen warms up quickly once the cooker is going. My euphoric state is hidden beneath layers of woolen clothing and a hat and scarf, but I assure you it is there.

It is very easy to forget the value of things such as hot water and being able to cook in a country like Britain where it seems to appear as if by magic. So, let this be your queue to remember how lucky you are that someone came up with the genius idea of putting pipes in the ground and pumping gas through them.

I wish you all a jolly 2008 and hope you all have access to necessary heat sources.