Mazatlan

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Mexican Food, Canadian Style

While I did make a quick pasta the other night that could be considered my first meal in my new home, tonight’s dinner was a rather more messy and delicious true baptism of my kitchen, involving several pans, a ton of utensils, as many bowls as I could find, and both familiar and new ingredients (and utensils!). On the menu, stir fried veggies (chayote, carrot, potato, garlic) with bean burritos.

Yum, just yum. The meal came together perfectly. The chayote didn’t really remind me all that much of zucchini as it held its texture. It was just very crisp and light. I am going to be eating a lot of it because it is filling, cheap, nutritious, and low calorie!

One very important thing I learned today: when trying to light a burner, make sure that the burner you’re trying to light is the one for which you’re turning the knob. It took me about 15 matches and lighting my right thumbnail on fire to finally clue in. I will spare you photos of my thumbnail, but assure you that it doesn’t hurt in the least. Nail polish is flammable, folks, and Mexican matches ARE dangerous! 🙂

The potato, garlic, and chayote I bought from the veggie man were absolutely lovely, same aesthetic quality as you would find in a Canadian or US supermarket.

The carrot, much less so. But I grew up eating from our garden and have been given worse looking, yet perfectly good and delicious, produce by C&C. So I know that supermarket produce is an illusion and I wasn’t worried about the sad looking carrot because it was still firm. I shopped off the bad bits, peeled it, and sampled it raw. YUM.

I actually had dessert, too! It was some of my carefully rationed strawberry yoghurt. I’m still avoiding sugar outside of fruit, but wanted a treat the other day and yoghurt seemed the least evil option. I’m only allowed four tablespoons at a time. It is Lala brand, a little runny, and very tasty with big pieces of strawberry. More yum! 🙂

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Living Equinoxally

The nights here are almost exactly as long as the days and about to get quite a bit longer. It’s fully dark by about 6PM and it’s fully light by about 6AM. I’m naturally adjusting to being in bed super early so that I can be up with the sun (and the roosters) and get as much natural light as I can.

I am finding it difficult to think of 3PM as essentially being early evening. It’s now 4:30 and it is going to get dark fast. Even though I’ve been up since before 6:00, the days feel very short.

I know that if I ever do end up getting work, I am going to have to really adjust my schedule and try to have most of my day done by noon, rather than just half of it because the afternoons go so fast.

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Rainy Isla Day

This morning, I awoke to a very heavy sky. It’s now almost 1PM and, sure enough, it’s pouring rain!

The surprise of the day was garbage pickup, which I was told was Tuesdays and Thursdays. I had a hard time understanding the garbage man, who seemed bewildered by me, so I’m not sure if today’s pickup was exceptional or not. I had a bag ready and the other tenant’s bags were by the gate, so I was at least able to get some of the trash out.

I finished off a work assignment, then went for a long walk around Isla. I stopped in at the Super Deli for an onion and some limes for tonight’s dinner and decided to get another container of panela cheese. The total for everything was 28 pesos. I can afford to eat cheese here!!!

The walk along the malecon this morning was lovely, but the beach part not so much. I hope the vendors start to recognize locals…

This was my first time walking at higher tide and I couldn’t believe how different the beach looked!

I came home and minutes later, Dale stopped in and asked me if I wanted to join her on a walk to the Super Deli! I had nothing better to do, so why not?

There, she asked me to find her some whole milk, so I spent some time squinting at labels (the print on food labels is TINY in MX!). I discovered that for a lot of the milk here, they remove the animal fat and add back some sort of vegetable fat. HUH? I found a bottle that said ‘entera’, which I took to mean as whole, and, sure enough, in super tiny print I found some English that said that I was holding a bottle of whole homogenized milk. Dale was grateful for my translation help. 🙂

On the way back, I showed her where the chicken lady sets up her stand and then headed across the street to the peanut guy, my target yesterday until I got sidetracked the smell of chicken. 10 pesos got me a whole big bag of small roasted peanuts in their shell.

We kept walking and eventually passed one of the vegetable men! I stopped and had a look at the wares, picking up a few potatoes, a carrot, a garlic, and a chayote for about 18 pesos. I had never heard of chayote before, but he said ‘es como un zucchini’, so I decided to give it a shot since I started eating zucchini this past summer. I described to him where I live (doing a very good job of it!) and asked when he passes in my area. He said that he is at the corner of my street between 9:30 and 10:00 every day and to listen for his chime.

The problem is that all the services have a chime and I’m starting to tune them out… 🙂

I’m starting to run out of bandwidth, so I have to be a bit more careful with my time online for the next little bit. I don’t want to go pay for a drink to pay for public wifi unless it’s for work purposes and work is not incoming for this week. 🙁 I am feeling very panicky about that and finding it hard to occupy myself because I’m so worried. So if I disappear a bit, I’m just walking around Isla trying to stay busy by soaking up the local culture.

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Sand – A Lament

I wrote this poem during the summer of 2002, while I was supervisor of boat rental operations for Gatineau Park. I spent an amazing summer on a lakefront beach, barefoot in the sand, getting fit hauling canoes and rescuing paddlers from the lake.

Sand
The curse of the winter lover
Sand everywhere
In your hair and in your crotch
Between your toes till it lays bare the skin
Sand
Dusty, gritty
Tired brown
For the same faceted crystals
Seek out a snowflake melted then refrozen
That snow that crunches beneath your snowshoes
Instead of those bits of rock
That grate beneath your desiccated feet.

While I am no longer a winter lover, now seeking out warmer climes, the bit about the feet holds! My feet are already rubbed raw from bad footwear, salt air, and sand. I’m making sure they’re just sore, not hurting, knowing that they will callus if I just endure this for a week or two, and that the pain will be worthwhile. 🙂

Tonight’s sunset on the beach, not retouched:

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The Chicken Lady!

I actually first heard about The Chicken Lady from my neighbours Charles and Caroline! Contessa and Croft confirmed that she exists. It was then up to me to find her.

I’m still behind on work, but needed a walk. Instead of going straight to the beach, I decided to go up my street and turn to emerge on the paved road right by the basketball court. I could then circle back around and come home by the beach. Well, I didn’t get that far. Soon as I reached the basketball court, I could smell chicken roasting!

So here’s the scoop on Isla’s chicken lady. She is set up on the paved street in a stand across from and right between the basketball court and the police station. She only sells chickens Saturdays and Sundays. BOO. I was hoping the days would be spaced out a bit more. Half a chicken is 50 pesos, a whole one is 100 pesos, not much better than I pay for a pre- roasted bird in Assiniboia, but still not expensive!

HOWEVER her birds are MUCH tastier and they are a full meal, coming with tomato rice (wonderful!), tortillas, and salsa. This is what 50 pesos (4.18CAD/3.69USD) gets you from Isla’s chicken lady:

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She had me confirm how much I wanted and that the quantity was worth 50 pesos. She then hacked my half of the bird into smaller pieces to see if they were cooked and put the pieces back on the grill since they weren’t.

I had time to watch the process since it took about 10 minutes for my half chicken to be deemed sufficiently cooked. She takes raw chickens (that looked perfectly fine with good colour) and soaks them in a brine, which gives them an amazing flavour throughout (not spicy, just a little salty and yummy). They then go on a HOT charcoal grill, eliminating most of the worries about her not washing her hands between touching raw and cooked chicken.

Once the chicken is cooked, she plates it with tongs and passes the plate to a non-chicken handling helper who adds a generous scoop of rice, several tortillas, and a bag of salsa (which I haven’t tried and am going to save for the bean burritos I’ll have tomorrow instead of tonight). The meal is then double bagged and passed to the customer who pays.

I came straight home with my treasure, or at least tried to, somehow making a wrong turn. I followed the sound of my neighbours’ dang roosters and eventually emerged near the RV park, about two Isla blocks from my place.

So my first Mexican street food!

And I must reiterate how yummy that dang chicken was. It was all I could do to only eat half while it was hot and put the rest in the fridge for later!