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.

The Kitchen

True story: when I was in the 8th grade, I had to ask my mom how to use a toaster so that I could complete a writing assignment. In my defense, I knew perfectly well how to use the toaster oven in our kitchen and had no idea that we even owned a regular toaster, tucked into some back corner of the pantry. Mitigating circumstances aside, I was not terribly familiar with the kitchen. In fact, I was pretty anti-cooking, which is hard to explain since my mom is a fabulous cook who never seemed to mind cooking family dinner each night. Anyway, I could barely boil water up until I moved out of the dorms and into a rented house after my sophomore year of college. I was suddenly faced with a dilemma: learn to cook or starve (and the follow up: learn to cook decently or suffer from indigestion or food poisoning). I learned to cook.

Since then, I have fallen in love with occasionally experimenting in the kitchen. (Regular meal cooking is ok, but not all that fascinating when I get home late and am too tired to think about it much.) Over the years, friends have been subjected to bananas foster (Sunday dinner crew at Tech), cornish hens stuffed with cherries and wild rice (Abby), stuffed porkchops or chicken breasts (too many of you to count, really), zucchini boats (Keating probably sees these in his sleep), and endless loaves of banana chocolate chip cherry bread (I'm looking at you Marty -- it's just not that same now that I never find old, black bananas in my office mailbox anymore. And no, Mom, I didn't forget the nuts. I intentionally leave them out.), etc. While I love cooking, I will never be at risk of receiving my own cooking show, and all of my meals come with the promise that if it came out plain bad I will be the first to call for pizza (Andy: do you still have nightmares about that lamb stew back in 2003? I do. Note to others: never cook up something that you find in your freezer when you move into a new place, even if it was left there by a kindly older couple.).

Moving to Mexico has provided me with exciting opportunities to try new ingredients and cooking styles. A couple of weeks ago, I made parmesan breaded chicken breasts stuffed with apple and goat cheese. Fabulous! A couple of nights ago I made pork chops with a lime sauce. Edible! For Christmas, I stuffed a turkey with tropical fruits (some of which don't even have names in English) because I couldn't find what I wanted for "real" stuffing. The turkey was awesome, the stuffing inedible. We have been through tacos, quesadillas, rice, and appalling quantities of refried beans.

While I'm enjoying the challenges here, every meal must still be approached as a contest of wills. Every day, I must challenge The Oven.

Mexicans apparently don't like cooking with ovens. Most food around here seems to be prepared in a skillet or something similar. It took me a couple of weeks to even find a mixing bowl for less than the cost of my firstborn child, and oven-safe bakeware appears to be a local joke. Nothing related to oven-use even came with our otherwise fully-furnished apartment.

I have learned why.

The Oven is...fussy. I don't believe the temperatures on the dial (why should I? The burners on the stove operate at "on" and "off" and don't even bother with gradational marks on the knobs). I knew I was in for a battle when Keating and I toured the apartment before we moved in and our landlady showed us the pile of matches she had provided. The Oven must be hand-lit. Instantly, my head was filled with visions of exploding my kitchen, or at least burning off my eyebrows. That Christmas turkey mentioned above? It was pretty much a miracle that it came out ok after I succeeded in launching a fireball 2 feet out of the front of The Oven while trying to preheat. Keating, who missed the fireworks display, had to calm me down and re-fire The Oven.

No meal in our apartment comes without the risk of becoming Dinner and a Show. I think I've mastered the art of lighting The Oven, but I still get a little nervous every time I have to do it. I would give up on The Oven, Mexican style, but for one thing: the grocery store sells brownie mix. Keating and I have committed to making brownies to celebrate my first paycheck down here (yes, that's right...6 weeks on the job and still no paycheck or ID card to allow me into the building). Wish me luck. Because when that paycheck comes in and I attempt those brownies, they'd better come out ok. That's one battle that if The Oven wins will really ruin my day. And I might just have to get even.