(Post 55 of 233. Thanks again to those who participated in the Fundrazr!)

I walked over to my friend’s house this afternoon to drop off his Amazon package. We stayed well apart, but did take a few minutes to chat. We marvelled that it was exactly two months to the day that I got back from vacation!

There’s a taco place that I love that is just around the corner from him. I almost never order from there from home because I have to phone in the orders and, frankly, it’s just less trouble to be able to use an app or to send a text message to another restaurant than to call them. But when I’m around there and it’s meal time, I love to pop in and either eat there or order for takeout. Like most restaurants, they are currently open for take out or delivery.

They admitted to struggling and to having  to really reduce the menu to avoid waste, but they said they were still doing brisk business on what I wanted anyway, which was just an order of four tacos al pastor.

I should’ve known something was off by how heavy my bag was when they gave me the order, but I figured that maybe they were extra generous with the salsas.

They were. And they gave me two free tacos. And they gave me double tortillas and extra meat on the others. So I basically got 12 tacos for the price of 4. 😳 Yay for leftovers! I can’t get over how many restaurants are sending me a little extras every time I order. Usually, it’s just a little scoop of guacamole with a few chips or some grilled onions — something I sometimes order as a side but didn’t that time. And sometimes, like tonight and in the case of my last order from my favourite sushi restaurant, it’s a a really generous gift that turns a meal into two, like extra tacos or a double portion of chicken fried rice! My favourite lunch place is also being sneakily generous, like sending me white meat instead of brown. It’s really good business because it makes me feel appreciated as a customer, which extra makes me want to order again.

The taco al pastor is by far my favourite fast food here. It is surprisingly nutritious, and while every place is sort of technically the same, a slight variance in the spices in the meat and in the sauces, plus the type of tortilla they use, can make a different experience from restaurant to restaurant. These folks have a spicy chipotle sauce that others don’t. Another one that I really like has a tree chile sauce that I have never seen anywhere else. My neighbourhood taquería up the street has the best garlic sauce of anybody in the city, I think. So I’m not really loyal to anyone particular taco place, but I have a reason for ordering from one restaurant over another on a given night. It really depends on what sauce I’m in the mood for!

I was really amused recently when the taquería up the street sent me a note with my order saying that the chef was bored and experimenting with salsas and what did I think of their new tamarind and habanero sauce? The lady who has the Chinese restaurant around the corner uses me for similar experiments – she figures that if the foreigner can handle the heat, the locals will also. I remain really surprised by how many locals do not eat spicy food. I still generally do not enjoy the feeling of the spicy foods, but I really appreciate that I can taste the flavour behind the heat now. So I said to keep the tamarind sauce on the menu! 🥵😋

So two months of lockdown locked down… Time marches on. I am so busy I don’t even see the days go by. I feel really bad for my extroverted friends who are struggling and finding the days are very long…

(Post 54 of 233. Thanks again to those who participated in the Fundrazr!)

I got mail today!

The first item was purchased on Amazon on February 29th. I didn’t realise it was coming through Correos de Mexico and would never have ordered it had I known. DHL got it to the border fairly quickly — Aduana scanned it in on March 11th, and that was the last update. Getting packages to clear customs here is like placing a bet, so lots of fun for folks who like gambling. I would say 75% of things I order from outside Mexico that don’t come from a large company with good brokers, like Amazon, get to customs and never leave.

The second item was a letter from my best friend, who now lives in New York state. She mailed it on April 22nd, so it took less than a month to get here. Transit time for mail has gone from so long that we lose hope and forget about it (up to six months) to about six weeks to now just under four weeks!

I remember when I first came to Mexico how things would just never arrive — the postal system here had a horrible reputation that was well-deserved. It was actually astounding that a country as developed as Mexico lacked a viable postal system. Correos de Mexico has been promising improvements and reforms for about a year now and I’m actually since them happening. I am going to have to give sending something to the U.S. another chance. Nothing has made it there so far and it’s so inconvenient to go to the post office (the one in my neighbourhood is just for distribution and I have to go to a larger one north of me to actually send anything!) that I have been loathe to try. But getting a letter in less than four weeks in the current global climate is making me optimistic.

(Post 53 of 233. Thanks again to those who participated in the Fundrazr!)

One of the most luxurious things I ever bought for Haven, my property in Saskatchewan, was a huge deep freezer. It was the first time in my adult life that had a place for such a thing and it was life-changing. I am surprised by how many people I know who don’t think to use their freezer for anything more than ice cream or the extra pound of meat that they bought on sale. The freezer is my favourite tool for preservation of all types of food and it is ideal for this hot humid climate I live in where canning doesn’t have the lifespan it has up north. I knew that I wanted a freezer here, but the unreliable power grid made me leery. I had a nosy neighbour unplug my freezer at Haven and while I caught it pretty quickly, I realised just how devastating the loss would have been if I hadn’t. The power in this house from the time of move-in was much too flakey for me to invest in a freezer full of food — with huge voltage fluctuations and frequent outages.

But after the landlady had the main breaker panel to the house changed for a newer one and CFE, Mexico’s power company, changed the metre and beefed up the connection between the street connection, the metre, and the new breaker panel, I saw huge improvements and only one major power outage of a few hours that an unopened chest freezer could handle with aplomb. So I started shopping for a freezer, discovering that they actually aren’t that expensive here, but that there isn’t much choice. The two main brands I found were Midea, a Chinese brand that is just coming on the market, and Mabe, an established Mexican brand. Some of you may remember my opinion of Mabe stoves being very negative, but I have no problem with their refrigerators or washing machines (my Mabe washer is serving me very well!). There wasn’t a lot of information about Midea out there yet, but after scouring reviews from different countries (it’s so helpful to speak three languages!) I knew I was going with Mabe.

Now, what size of freezer did I need? I thought five cubic feet would be enough, but when I was chatting with my mother on Mother’s Day, the subject came up and she told me five would probably be perfect for now but not leave me any space to grow, so she said that unless the difference in price was hugely different, she strongly suggested a seven-cubic-foot model. We always had at least one deep freezer in our house growing up, so having one is part of our family culture and how I learned to manage my food stores, so I trusted my mother’s opinion. So now, I knew I needed a Mabe seven-cubic-foot freezer and that those come in just under 6,000 pesos while a Midea was closer to 5,000 pesos.

Since it was a “holiday weekend” I decided to see if there were any online sales. And boy did I find one — Bomssa had a seven-cubic-foot Mabe chest freezer on sale for $5,249, one day only. The next best sale price I found was $5,600 pesos. I’d been shopping for a while and knew I’d found a really good deal. So I added the freezer to my cart and discovered that I could only pay by debit card. And HSBC declined the transaction. I was livid!

I contacted Bomssa on Facebook to see if they could do anything for me, not expecting much. It’s not a store I’m super familiar with. There is one just a few blocks from me on Calle 60 that I shopped at for my appliances, but they never had the best price, so I’ve never bought from them. Imagine my surprise when a sales rep reached out to me via Messenger at 9PM on a Sunday night! He said that he could put in an order on my behalf and authorize it to be cash on delivery. I told him to go ahead, thanked him profusely, and he told me to look for an email Monday morning with my order details and the date of delivery.

The email came around 10:00 on Monday morning and, of course, delivery was on the one day that week I had to leave the house! So I called the number on the invoice and dialling the extension number got me to the rep who had just sent the email. We rescheduled delivery for Wednesday, but he put a note of just when I would be away the next day in case the delivery driver could get to me sooner. Bomssa outsources their delivery, so they couldn’t schedule me within a precise window of time.

Not even two hours later, the phone rang. “Hi, I’m picking up Bomssa deliveries and saw your order in the list for Wednesday. I have just enough space left on the truck and you’re so close by. Can I come now with your freezer?” And just like that, I had my freezer and Bomssa gained a loyal customer!

I could already tell that my mother was right about seven cubic feet being the perfect size.

Soon as life returns to normal and I can go shopping again, I want to pick up bins for sorting my food, but for now, I can still find everything. One thing that was great was gaining space to store things like rice and flour that I normally keep in the fridge (since they don’t last in the pantry). The freezer is actually a better storage location as it is lower humidity.

Once the freezer was plugged in and running, I messaged some friends who raise lamb and pork on their ranch outside of Mérida and butcher the animals themselves. ordered myself a ton of pork (I don’t like lamb)! The pork arrived this morning. I got bone-in chops, bacon, ground, shoulder, and loin. It feels great to support a local business that ethically produces meat that I can trust to be all-natural and of high quality.

All of this was 950 pesos. As a point of comparison, ground pork is usually around just under 75-90 pesos per kilo in supermarkets while they charge $150, but the supermarket price is for run-of-the-mill pork produced by huge companies. These pigs are a Pelón mix, a local breed that I know from my few times eating at higher-end restaurants serving local dishes is much more flavourful, and the meat is from a small local business. So I think the prices are very fair and I’ve heard nothing but rave reviews about the quality. I have some leftovers to eat this weekend, but Monday, I look forward to a pork chop dinner!

(Post 52 of 233. Thanks again to those who participated in the Fundrazr!)

One of the best kept secrets in Mérida is the little store up the street from me that specializes in cashews. Sadly, when I contacted them a few days ago to see if they were still operating, I didn’t get a reply back. I decided to see if there might be another source of cashews in the city and also almonds. The only place that I have found almonds in a large quantity at a reasonable price has been at Costco, but I try as much as I can to encourage small local businesses for things like that. It’s not altruistic, though, because they tend to have better quality product at a better price because that’s all they specialize in, so they get wholesale prices. I did a search for “nueces a granel merida” (bulk nuts in Mérida) and found a store named, appropriately enough, A Granel that sells bulk nuts seeds, dried fruit, and more.

My search let me to their Facebook page, which had a post that confirmed that they were still operating and taking orders for delivery from either their webpage or from messaging them on WhatsApp. Kind of unusual to see a Mexican business running a website nowadays because everything seems to be done on Facebook, Messenger, and WhatsApp, but, sure enough, they had a fully operational webpage with a checkout cart! So I requested 1 kg of raw cashews and 1 kg of raw almonds. I was able to check out using PayPal, and there was a very small and insignificant delivery charge tacked on. I was promised my order in 1 to 3 days.

A few hours later, my doorbell rang. I was expecting a couple packages from Amazon, so I was a little taken aback when it wasn’t Amazon on the other side of the door. Then, I realized it was my nuts!

As it turns out, 1 kg of nuts fits perfectly into a 2-quart sealer.

I cannot wait to use my Vitamix to turn some of these nuts into butters and others into milk!

Tomorrow’s project is going to be trolling Facebook marketplace for a peanut seller. I have a few leads. But I think that an order of just plain old roasted peanuts is going to be a special request. I rather miss my peanut vendor neighbour on Isla! I also have one of the vendors from our small neighbourhood market who tagged me on Instagram recently. He resells all manner of Badia brand spices in any quantity you want. I am due for a top up of a few of my spices and there’s a few that I wanted to add, so I will go through his list against mine and see if I can put an order in there too.

I’m also waiting for a delivery in the next few days from my societally acceptable and legal drug dealer, a.k.a. my coffee bean roaster. 😉 I’m so glad to see some of the city’s small businesses still getting through this difficult time. A nearly 600-peso order of nuts might not sound like that much, but I know it made a difference to this small business today. I can’t wait to try some of those cashews in my green smoothie tomorrow morning! I have an ounce soaking right now waiting for morning. 😋

(Post 51 of 233. Thanks again to those who participated in the Fundrazr!)

One of the most frequent post requests I get, usually from someone on a Mexico expat forum who stumbled on the post, is an update on the range I bought at the end of December of 2017. Do I still stand by that post? Is that information still relevant?

In the months after I bought my range, I was so disappointed with it because it never generated enough heat to cook properly. I really regretted not buying a really good stovetop and complementing that with a high-end toaster oven. But it turned out that the regulator on the propane tank on the roof needed to be replaced! What convinced my landlady to have the regulator looked at is that I bought an oven thermometer to prove that the oven really wasn’t getting very hot no matter how long I ran it.

Once the regulator was changed and I started to use the stove again, my satisfaction increased and I grew more bold in the recipes I attempted because the range was finally hitting the right temperatures.

That said, it’s not a great range, there are tons of issues with it, but it does what I need it to do, so I can ignore those faults. The thermometer plays a huge role in that — you can’t really get an exact temperature with a gas range that leaks heat, but for the recipes I make (I’m not much of a baker, for one thing), just knowing for sure that the oven is at a minimum temperature before adding the food makes such a difference. The egg rolls I treated myself to tonight needed to be cooked 20 minutes at 425 or to come up to an internal temperature of about 170F. I popped the tray in the oven when the oven was at about 400F and 20 minutes later, the oven read about 450F and my egg rolls were perfectly done. I’ve also successfully made cakes and bread in it, and I can actually roast a joint of meat or make sweet potato fries without it taking all day!

The biggest issues are cosmetic. It doesn’t have a high quality finish. As you can see in the pictures, it’s staining and rusting. I’m someone who really uses her stove multiple times daily and I can’t be bothered to dismantle it every single night to clean it. Even if I was, I don’t think that would have helped with this range. Regular cleaning is just scratching it and wearing off the finish. Some people would go so far as to cover the stovetop with aluminium foil to protect it, but I find that so wasteful. A stove is meant to be used, not kept pristine!

My other issue is, of course, with the oven, which leaks heat like a sieve. I can’t even open the door without wearing my Ove Gloves!

This is me NOT touching the oven after it had been preheating for ten minutes!

The important thing is that the cast iron grills are holding up well to my using heavy cast iron pans on it. I know that the thinner wire grills of a less expensive stove would have had to be replaced by now. I have rubbed the finish off parts of the grills and they do have some rust, but they still do their job perfectly.

I love having the six burners and, yes, I do sometimes use all six at once, but mostly, I like to be able to have two large pots going at once at opposite corners. I mostly use the middle two burners for the comal that came with the range.

It’s funny how I never used it when I first got the range, but I use it almost daily now that the range gets to temperature. I get a much better Maillard reaction on meat with it than I do in my cast iron pan, it’s ideal for roasting chiles and onions, and I can make double the amount of my favourite banana pancakes at one time with it than I can in my largest frying pan.

One of the reasons I picked this range is that it has a broiler compartment. That has worked great! I will sometimes cook small batches of things in the broiler compartment instead of the oven because the temperature is more even in there and things cook faster. Plus, I get a lovely brown crust on the top!

I’m surprised that the range’s only two little fancy extras, an oven light and an automatic lighter for the burners (oven needs to be lit manually), still work well. I was so used to lighting my burners with a BBQ lighter in my RV that I never dreamed of how lovely it would be to turn on the gas, push a button, and just like that, have a flame!

So would I buy this range again if I could go back to December of ’17 and have all the knowledge that I have now about how it performs? If I was on the same budget, the answer is an unequivocal yes because of how informed I was at the time of purchase. I’m really glad I did not go with a stovetop and toaster oven! So, yes, that post is still relevant and, yes, I still stand by it. 🙂