I made a pie

Chocolate peanut butter cream cheese pie. For desert tomorrow.

Yum!

Mexican Thanksgiving

They don't have Thanksgiving here. Obviously. But we did Thanksgiving anyway. Or at least, we tried.

I never did find cranberries (fresh or frozen) for my cranberry sauce, so I bought to-go mashed potatoes from Chedraui, which were actually delicious.

Ashley couldn't find regular cornmeal, so she had to buy blue corn tortilla flour. It was too fine and the consistency of the cornbread for the stuff was off. By the time we ate, she was a bit tipsy and kept calling her stuffing "the blue shit" and apologising for ruining Thanksgiving with it. And there ain't nothing funnier than a pissed Southern girl doing the Stanky Leg and going on about her blue stuffing.

But the turkey she made was delish, and that's the most important part.

Deep-fried fun

Jill and I went to the fair outside the Panteón General last night. I just have to say that Mexican carnivals are 394395734857 times better than American ones, because they let you stay on the rides much longer and they jump on to the moving platform to shake the car and spin you round.

It would be an OSHA nightmare. But it's awesome.

Plus if you want a milkshake sugar milk-water to go, they put it in a plastic bag which I find hee-larious.

Fish of the day

Between writing papers about Mexican economics (in Spanish), going to the gym five days a week and ballet class two, finding time to go out and absorb as much 'culture' as possible, and flirting with cute (possibly underage) Mexican boys, I have sort of neglected blogging. I apologise. I know I have a hundreds, possibly thousands, of people reading this blog, constantly checking for updates only to be disappointed when they are short and sparse.* I'm sorry. I really am.

It's just that when life is really exciting, or at least closer to exciting than it usually is, I become impatient with writing about it and instead just want to live it. Which is, I know, a crazy notion, and you must be thinking, Damn, that girl is original. Carpe diem!

But even though I want to live in the moment, I would also like to remember the moment. So I am going to try and be better. Also, NaNoWriMo starts in two and half days, so hopefully I'll be writing for a good portion of every day and it'll just flow over into my blog. Or I'll be so sick of writing that I'll write even less. Either way.

And finally, the most amusing chocolate milk you will ever see:


Remember, it's only racism when white people do it!


*I don't not have hundreds, much less thousands, of followers. I have four. And they are not checking constantly for updates.

New vocabulary

We spent the weekend in pequeñito town of Benito Juarez in the Sierra Norte Mountains. And when they say 'mountains', they are not fucking kidding around. Look at that picture! Pine trees! Heavy cloud cover! Really cold weather! Very high altitude!

We went ziplining and hiking to waterfalls and making s'mores in our cabin fireplace (and roasting the marshmellows on actual sticks instead of metal pokers; my mum would have a heart attack). For lunch I had trucha (trout), but not a filet; no, the actual whole fish, skin and bones and head and eyes and all, and it was delicious as well as insanely amusing. I nearly died laughing as we explained Twilight and taught the word 'clusterfuck' to Justine, our Belgian director.

We should go camping more often.

Molé Chile Ancho

We actually took this cooking class ages ago (September 17, to be exact) and I'm just now getting around to making the recipe post. I KNOW, FOR SHAME. Oh well.

So, to begin: molé is the pre-hispanic word for sauce. There are about a million different types of molé because there are a million different types of chiles, not to mention every Dick and Jane (what would the Spanish equivalent of that be? Ricardo y... Jane? Hmmm, things to ponder) does their own thing with molé (of course). Each type of molé has a specific type of meat it's served with, usually with rice and tortillas on the side. And the spiciness, bitterness, sweetness, whateverness of the molé varies wildly by recipe. The molé we made was hardly spicy and very smoky with only a hint of bitterness (the good kind of bitterness; yes, such a thing exists).

We started by going to the market for, you know, a real authentic experience. Of course, our cooking instructor was the one buying all the ingredients while we were relegating to standing around and holding random things as he handed them to us, but we did get to watch our chicken filets get pounded!


I have to admit that all in all, I did very little of the actual cooking, as we had one pot of molé and eight people to cook it. But even though I have heard all about the painstaking process that is preparing molé, this seemed remarkably easy. So easy that I'm pretty sure any gringo can do it on their own, although you might need to go to a Hispanic or specialty food market to find the chiles, as I've never seen dried chiles at Ralph's.

Without further ado, the recipe!

Molé sauce:
125 grams chile ancho
6 tomatoes (chopped)
1/2 onion (chopped)
5 garlic cloves (chopped)
1 roll of bread (cut in halves)
1 large stick of cinnamon
oregano
pepper
sugar
vegetable oil

Rice:
1/2 kilogram rice (2 cups)
3 garlic cloves (chopped)
1/4 onion (chopped)
salt
vegetable oil

Chicken:
9 fillets
1 clove garlic (chopped)
salt

Directions:
Take seeds and veins out of chiles. Fry all molé ingredients separately in vegetable oil, then let sit in pot of water until soft. Add pepper and oregano.


Put rice and vegetable oil into pot and cook over stove. Blend garlic, onion, and salt in blender, then pour into the pot with rice.

Boil the chicken, garlic, and salt in a pot of water.

Take all molé ingredients from pot of water and blend with water from the chicken. Fill the blender up about halfway with the molé ingredients and use 1 cup of the chicken water. Repeat until all mole ingredients have been blended.

Use a strainer to filter the blended molé and remove all big chunks of ingredients. (This is very important, as some of the chile fibers can upset your stomach.) Filter sauce into a large pot cooking over stove on very low heat (it takes awhile to strain, and you don't want it to burn). Add sugar and salt to taste, but keep in mind it should be a bit bitter. To make the molé thicker, add pieces of bread blended with a little water. Once you've achieved the desired taste and viscosity, let the molé come to a very gentle boil if it hasn't already done so.

Serve mole sauce over the chicken with rice on the side.


¡Qué sabroso!

Mexican "lasaña"?

Mexican "lasaña"?, originally uploaded by sappycoldplaywhore.

Doesn't this look delicious? BECAUSE IT WAS.

This is what we had for lunch on Sunday at this super-expensive*, trendy, gastronomic-type restaurant. This was the Mexican "lasaña", and it was just layers of smoked salmon, tomato, and avocado.

Not lasagna, technically, but still quite tasty.



*Expensive is relative. It was the most expensive place we've eaten at by far, but I just looked at my bank statement and I only spent $18 there.

Taking the plunge

They eat grasshoppers here.

Now, that might sound like the start of a rant into all the gross, weird things here that I don’t like, but it’s not.

They’re called chapulínes.

My host mother offered me some on my second day here, and I even though I knew they would be tasty (I mean, they’re crunchy and covered in garlic and lemon; it’s like a potato chip without the trans fat), I couldn’t bring myself to eat it. I knew it would taste good (maybe even great), but I looked at them, and they looked like grasshoppers (SHOCKER, I KNOW) and I just couldn’t do it. They had legs. I mean, legs. That could start moving again at any moment. (They could not start moving again at any moment.)

I told my host mother to put them in my food without telling me, and I would eat them.

I’m not good at taking the plunge. Well, that might be a lie. I did come here, knowing no one, on a program I found at a study abroad fair that no one at my university had ever heard of or had anything to say about. And I actually did that before, when I signed up for debate/journalism camp in Italy two summers ago.

I think I’ve digressed.

I’m not usually good at taking the plunge. Especially physical plunges, like just running into the Pacific Ocean (it’s cold!) or jumping into the pool (it might be cold!) or, apparently, eating grasshoppers (I’M SORRY, BUT THE WAY THEY LOOK IS JUST FREAKING ME OUT).

Last weekend we were at this market, and Ashley bought a bag of chapulínes for everyone to share. And I took one out of the bag and stared at it for what must’ve been a second but felt like an eternity, thinking Just fucking do it already, just fucking do it, it won't be that bad, just fucking DO IT, and then just fucking did it.

My host mom said, “Oh, you wouldn’t eat them before, and now you say you ate them at the market!”

Molé, molé, molé

On Saturday we went to my host mom's sister's (my host aunt?) for my host mom's mom's birthday (my host abuelita?). Apparently, she has a lot of dietary restrictions in her old age, so all she wants to eat is molé. So I had molé for the first time.

Everyone kept saying it was really spicy, but I didn't think it was anything impressive in the picante arena. Everyone was also very concerned it was going to make me sick (because it was so spicy), but I am clearly a culinary Evil Kinevil and can take anything.*





*Yes, that is what she said.