Mexican food revisited

Nearly 2 weeks ago, I attended a Mexican-themed potluck holiday dinner. It was fantastic. There were many wonderful dishes, and lots of effort was put into authenticity. As I was cooking my contributions (chicken mole and esquite), I couldn't shake the feeling that something was missing. It wasn't an ingredient I was searching for (though I made some minor substitutions to reflect what I could get), nor was it the wonderful weather of Mexico City (though I would have preferred it to the icy conditions outside); I was mostly just lost to be cooking Mexican food without one of my beloved balls of fire in the kitchen. My current rental kitchen might not be fabulous, but in over 3 months of using it I have not yet had a single fireball shoot out of my oven. Strange.

Sadly for my chicken mole, it was served in the kitchen with the other crock pot foods. This was a bummer, since everything else was served in the dining room and attendees mostly forgot about the second room of food. As a result, Keating has been eating chicken mole steadily for nearly 2 weeks (I spent last week presenting my Mexican research findings at a conference in California). I think he's ready to put aside the Mexican food again, fireballs or no.

The buildup to the conference kept me fairly busy, so I have taken longer than intended to post more stories from Mexico. Over the holidays I will try to post about our Buffalo-Mexico-Saint's Day-4th of July in between hours spent with family and spent polishing up a research proposal I'm working on. Happy holidays!

F-ing fire (part 4???)

Someone needs to get down here and take away our matches. Seriously. Keating and I, normally fairly responsible adults, apparently cannot handle fire.

We set the garden ablaze again.

Yup.

This time, Keating had set our little hibachi grill on the glass table in the garden so that he wouldn't have to sit on the grass to cook. He had done this before, and all had been fine. Anyway, all was going well until I arrived home with our dinner guest, a friend from my PhD program who know also works at the university down here. We had just finished with introductions when an amazing crashing sound came from the garden. Yup: the glass table had imploded and dumped the flaming grill onto the glass shards and yard. Keating and I managed to keep cool, and I poured wine for our guest and kept chatting with him while Keating successfully extinguished the yard but kept the grill going.

I think we deserve 10 points for style, but negative 15 points for setting our garden on fire for the second time in a month. Fortunately for us, plants grow like wild down here. In another two weeks, the burned-out patches of grass will be completely erased by new growth. Now we just need to figure out where to get a new glass tabletop.

Grillin' in the garden OR More trouble with fire

Last night, I asked Keating to grill up some spicy sausages for dinner while I made up some spaghetti. Thanks to genetics, Keating is blessed with awesome grilling skills -- I'm pretty sure that a little bit of charcoal and lighter fluid runs through the veins in his family.

Our new apartment came with a small grill, so Keating happily set up shop in the garden while I went to work cutting tomatoes for the sauce. A few minutes later, I hear muffled obscenities floating in from the garden. Keating dashed into the kitchen, looked around quickly with a flustered look on his face, and ran back out. I don't enjoy cutting vegetables nearly enough to not wander over to see what all the fuss was about. As I nonchalantly rounded the corner, prepared to ask if I could help him with anything, I glanced out the garden door. And froze. The garden was quite clearly on fire, with bright little flames jumping up from the grass. I quickly grabbed a pot of water, but Keating had used his previously unknown (by me) locker-room-style towel whipping to put out the blaze before I could get back. (I lamely pored the water where the fire had been.)

It turns out that Keating had been having trouble getting the charcoal to light. This may seem odd, even disgraceful, for a member of his family, but he had a pretty decent excuse: the charcoal was Mexican-style, or untreated. When he tried to put some more lighter gel on the charcoal (couldn't find lighter fluid at the store and didn't want to siphon gas out of a neighbor's car), the gel lit. The problem was that it wasn't just the gel on the charcoal that went up in flames, but also the gel on/in the container. Keating's attempt to put out the gel fire only ended up spraying flaming gel across the garden and igniting a seat cushion and a large patch of grass.

Needless to say, the sausages were cooked on the stove and we are working on figuring out where to get the vinyl seat cushion reupholstered. On the plus side, dinner came out well and we were able to have a long laugh over it all... after a bottle of wine, anyway!

Ovens are still evil.

I whined several weeks ago about doing battle with my oven in an attempt to bake celebratory brownies. Little did I know the true terror of a Mexican oven! I made brownies again, this time to celebrate our move to the new apartment. Thanks to the resulting fireball, I singed off some arm hair and some hair from the left side of my head (you know those frizzies that never go away? Gone.), and my eyelashes on the left side are now half the length of those on the right. Part of what really sucks about singeing your eyelashes is that the burnt ends curl up and work like little velcro bits until they give up and break off, so I had about 24 hours of my upper and lower eyelashes sticking closed when I tried to open my eye.

Keating kindly pointed out that the brownies still came out great and I didn't burn any skin, so all is apparently still well with the world. I think it will be his turn to light the f-ing oven next time.

Brownies and Banks

In keeping with the plan, Keating and I made brownies last night to celebrate being given 3 months of pay. (Apparently, I'm so cool that they decided I started work in December even though my visa wasn't even approved until Dec 3 and I didn't arrive in Mexico until Dec 14, only to find out that everyone was already on Christmas Vacation.) We were a little nervous about how the brownies were going to come out since the box specifically told us to not use the only size of oven-safe dish we own for the high altitude version. Fortunately, the good people at Hershey's Brownie Mix are sissies and our brownies came out great!

That left me with one challenge left in the paycheck saga: how to actually get my bank to accept my cheque. From a cynical American perspective, this seems easy enough -- I mean, don't banks want our money??? It turns out, I was wrong. It took me three banks before they would accept my paychecks, and by bank 2 I was getting nervous that maybe my brownies were a little preemptive.

The first bank, which I visited yesterday, wouldn't accept my money because they won't deposit cheques from other banks after 3 pm. It was 3:05 pm. Argh! My boss was along for this since he said that particular bank, located inside of the university megastore (the school owns its own Walmart-equivalent), wasn't terribly safe. Disconcertingly, one of me boss' friends (an adult man) was apparently mugged in the parking lot in broad daylight. Despite the current travel warnings to Mexico, this sort of thing is still considered absurd. My boss did his best to convince the guy behind the counter to take my money, but was told that the computer is actually set to prevent him from doing this after 3.

The second bank branch, visited this morning, asked me to hang out while they figured out why their computers weren't working. Admittedly, that should have been my sign to flee. One woman there was kind enough to tell me that there was another branch only 3 stoplights up the road, but I have been in Mexico long enough to know that walking that apparently short distance would be a bad idea. First, Mexicans all seem to lie about distances when giving directions. "One block" in Mexican is the equivalent to "maybe a mile?" in English. In addition, she specifically said "stoplights" and not "blocks," and I can only imagine what that distance conversion is. Finally, she grimaced when she said how far it was, further convincing me that the bank branch in question might very well be located in Texas. I sat there for about an hour being told that it would only be a couple of seconds longer. When the computers were finally deemed to be functional again, the woman behind the counter told me that she couldn't deposit my cheques because I had only brought my bank card with me and she needed to know my account number which only exists on the paperwork that the bank gave me when I first opened the account and is now locked safely away with my other documents I'm hoping not to lose. Oddly, I have not memorized this number. Adding to the frustration, Bank Branch 1 had explicitly told me at 3:05 yesterday that all I needed was my bank card.

In the end, I wound up back at Branch 1. My boss figured that I'd be safe if I went before noon, since the local criminal element apparently likes to sleep in. I waited in line for close to forever (20-30 minutes, which they made more pleasant by making sure it was at least 90 degrees there), but they finally took my money. I get to keep my brownies after all.

My next step? Figure out what I have to do to set up direct deposit. There's no way I'm doing this every month.

Breaking news!!!!!

I have finally been paid!!!! And they even gave me my own ID card that lets me into the building! Living the high life now!

I'm off to pick up brownie mix and wine. Keating and I might even have real food for dinner, too. I'll think about it. Tomorrow, we're off to a nice restaurant to celebrate my paycheck and his final exams.

Cheers!