One day, as a friend and I were walking to Viva Mexico, she said she didn’t exactly care what else she had to eat — everything on the menu is good — but she did have a craving for guacamole. So when we got there, she made sure she had some, and she was a happy camper. I had some as part of my fajitas plate, and it was great.

I often make guacamole at home. I am a casual cook, and here is how I do it. As you will see, measuring does not come naturally to me.

1. Grab all the avacados in the fridge or on the shelf that are getting soft. (We planted an avacado tree two years ago, so pretty soon I can amend that to include checking the tree… and under it!)

2. Pull out some garlic, at least one tomato, a lemon or lime, and some salt. If you have cilantro, that’s really good too. If you don’t have a lemon or lime, some nice vinegar could be used. Salsa, cayenne powder, or a hot pepper could be used too.

3. Peel  and pit the avacados and put them in a bowl. I like to use a relatively shallow one, as it’s easier to mash the avacado. Mash it. Lumps are fine; this is not a cake.

4. Cut up the fresh garlic into tiny pieces. Decide how much tomato you want to add, and cut that up fine as well. Add these things to the bowl. Add a LITTLE lemon or lime juice (or vinegar), and a pinch of salt. If you have cilantro, pull leaves off the stems directly into the bowl. Add some heat (if you like it) one way or another — Kelly makes homemade salsa in our bread machine, so I usually use a tad of that.

5. Mix it all up and taste. More lime juice etc. can be added, or more salt.

6. When it’s perfect, you can chill it in the refrigerator for a little while, but usually I make it just before dinner or just before guests arrive.

7. Americans seem to be used to eating it with chips, but it is also good as a small dollop on a plate. It’s commonly served that way in restaurants here, often with a small chip sticking out of it. At home, I like to use carrot sticks, bell peppers, or other veggies to scoop with.

Readers, how do you make guacamole?

Making Guacamole is a post from: Mexico with Heart - Living, Traveling, and Retiring in Mexico

Some forty of us took the tour, guided by Wendee Hill of ACA, who has lived near Lake Chapala for many years and knows the market well. She took us around to a variety of places over several blocks, then turned us all loose to eat and shop for a few hours. Above is one of the fruits she pointed out; the sign says "My name is yaca. I have 7 flavors."

Virtually all the produce that we buy at our local street market here in San Juan Cosala comes from the Mercado de Abastos. Carlos goes in to the big city long before dawn, loads up his truck, and stops by his home in Chapala to pick up his wife Blanca if she hasn’t gone in with him.They sell till mid-afternoon every Tuesday here and every Wednesday in Ajijic. Countless other vendors do the same thing all over Jalisco.

After the tour, Kelly and I headed down to the area that was mainly wholesale. That’s where we wandered among onions. While I waited for Kelly to come out of a men’s room, I chatted with a gray-haired Mexican woman who seemed to be a store owner. After we exchanged pleasantries, I asked her if the market was at all affected by the economic problems in the US. She rattled off a couple of sentences I couldn’t follow and then added that before there would have been ever more activity. Things have slowed down some. Still, everyone has to eat.

This stall is typical of many:

Hot peppers up close:

Just outside that stall, a man was playing his sax for coins:

On his left, a couple of guys were sitting on the end of a cabbage truck. Kelly got several lovely photos of cabbages but here is one from my favorite of the wholesale areas, the fruit part. Mangos:

Wendee had told us that Mexicans like their mangos less ripe than we foreigners like them.

Okay, the truck trailers aren’t as pretty as the mangos, but they are an essential part of the scene. We really got the feeling of the Mercado de Abastos as being the heartbeat of the food of the region. In from all over, out to all over the city and the outlying communities for a good long ways.

I also enjoyed the characteristic Mexican jolliness of the workers. Some were working hard, carrying heavy things or navigating their hand trucks deftly past us and around obstacles. Others were lounging for the moment. As ever in Mexico, it was all done with a good humor that I don’t see nearly as much north of the border.

Eventually we wandered back to the restaurant area. A Mexican friend had recommended two places: either a particular menuderia (place to eat tripe)  for its large quesadillas, or a Korean place.

Tripe? Well, one of our favorite television programs features chef Anthony Bourdain eating all kinds of things in restaurants and street markets all over the world. There was no doubt in our minds what Anthony would do with that choice. But us? We went Korean and it was delicious, plenty of stir-fried veggies with meat and rice. We chatted a little with the Korean woman – she’s been here 20 years, and came with her husband and a number of his relatives. I asked if she ever gets back to Korea. Very little, she said. It’s hard to leave the stall.. Her Korean accent in Spanish was less than my American one.

Now it was time to do some serious shopping. We actually didn’t buy any produce, as we had our eyes on some grains and other odds and ends in stores and mercado stalls Wendee had shown us.

I asked Kelly to take a photo of this fruit – didn’t catch its name but think it’s from a cactus – which Wendee had said is good for diabetes.

We crossed the street from the Mercado and shopped in several stores. La Gallina Feliz and Mama Coneja were my favorites. I was in health-food-store heaven, with all sorts of herbs, spices, grains, beans, and other things in bins. Unlike the US, I had no idea what might be organically grown and what not. Both stores were on Avenida del Mercado, not far from each other.

When we got home, we took this picture of the results of our shopping:

The two hammocks were from a street vender, and were 350 pesos for both. I asked where the hammocks were made, and he said Acapulco. I asked if he was from there and he said yes. "Still dangerous?" I asked in Spanish, and referred to a grisly event that had happened there a couple of years ago. "No, no," he insisted with a smile.

The brown stuff in the large bag on the upper right is 5 kilos of wheat. Kelly grinds it into flour in the VitaMix blender we brought down with us from the US, to make our bread. That 5 kilos cost a total of 25 pesos, The peso is now at about 15 to the dollar, which means our cost of living is a just over 2/3 of what it was about half a year ago. We certainly notice this! So all that wheat cost us about $1.65 US and will be the main ingredient in something like 15 loaves of bread. (A kilo is 2.2 pounds.)

Next to it is 2 kilos of brown rice, which also totaled 25 pesos. Other items in the picture are two round sweetened nut-and-seed cakes, oatmeal, granola, lentils, 2 kinds of chia seeds, raw cashews (a rare find here), other seeds, citric acid, red jamaica  to make a health-enhancing herbal tea (it’s the red in Red Zinger), and two big chunks of cheese from a place Wendee had recommended. One is a sharp Cheddar and the other is a mild one. After tasting samples, we got half a kilo of each for a total of 90 pesos or 6 bucks. Our total grocery bill for all this came to about $30 US, and over a third of that cost was the cashews. We were well loaded up on the way back to the bus.

To find out more about ACA, see their website. There is a "contact us" page you can use if you want to find out about future events and tours—they do a regular email newsletter. This same tour will take place again in mid-April, and more times after that. It was way more fun than just heading in on our own would have been, though now that we know our way around, we could go bac on our own. But actually I do like riding buses into Guadalajara – I find it quite a relaxing way to go. So wait long enough and maybe we’ll meet on another Abastos tour!

A reader emailed me that the so-called raw cashews you get in health food stores in the US are actually processed. After reading his comments and the article he referred me to, I think mine were too. He says, "cashew shells contain a similar poison to that of the poison ivy/poison oak family of plants. That is why in the U.S., you almost never find cashews that aren’t de-shelled and toasted. Take care in eating them!

Here is a link describing the cashew and its poison: http://www.wisegeek.com/are-raw-cashews-really-poisonous.htm

At Guadalajara’s Mercado de Abastos is a post from: Mexico with Heart - Living, Traveling, and Retiring in Mexico

But back on topic. For the next two or three months, we’ll have an abundance of lemons. Not those seedy sort of sweet things that a lot of our friends have but real tart lemons. Actually we haven’t bought lemons in years, as the tree keeps producing at varying levels all the time. The wind knocked a bunch of lemons off the tree this week so even after we gave a lot away, we still had a bunch in the house.This picture shows mostly green ones, but some ripen to yellow before falling.

"Lemon curd!" I thought. Don’t know why – I had never made it before and am not sure I have ever even tasted it before. But I googled lemon curd and found a bunch of recipes along with warnings that it could curdle and and need to be strained to remove unappealing bits of cooked egg white that hadn’t blended.

This was beginning to sound like too much work for my style of cooking when I can across an article about a foolproof way to make light, luscious lemon curd. That sounded good, so I printed out the article and the accompanying lemon curd recipe. It’s just lemon juice and a bit of grated peel, butter, sugar, and eggs.

I didn’t have a small pan with a thick bottom so I decided to double the recipe and use my big stew pot. It was a fair amount of mixing, and that was by hand, but the results were worth it. And it was foolproof.

Some lemon curd is in the freezer, and a jar is in the fridge. The article says it will keep a week in the refrigerator but I doubt ours will last that long. Too addictive!

It’s quite tart – yeah, I did use a little more lemon juice that the recipe called for, didn’t want to waste those lemons – sort of like the yellow part of lemon meringue pie on steroids.

I think it will become a regular part of our Mexican cuisine.

3 Comments from the old blog:

• At November 23, 2008 10:59 PM,  Steve Cotton said…

  I am impressed that you have a lemon tree. A true rarity in Mexico.

• At November 24, 2008 3:23 PM,  Amanda said…

  Sounds like fun. There are lots of lemon trees around here just out on the sidewalks. When we take walks my husband will snag some leaves for yummy tea.

• At December 01, 2008 8:01 PM,  Paul and Robyn said…

  I too make lemon curd and I use it in pancakes. Pour your batter on the griddle, add a teaspoon of lemon curd then top with a bit more batter. Cook s you normlly would a pancake. They are GREAT. I have the cook at our home make them for our guests and everyone is just blown away by them. In the states I ue lemon curd too.

If You Have a Lemon Tree, Make Lemon Curd is a post from: Mexico with Heart - Living, Traveling, and Retiring in Mexico

Just before going to a Chivas soccer game, Peter and a couple of his friends went to a taqueria. Here’s the menu:

I don’t know what all of those things are but lengua is tongue. They ordered a variety of things:

Peter’s friend Jason is having an eye taco here. Peter said they were chopped up enough that the eyes weren’t staring at you.

How did the eyes taste? Kinda bland. You had to really scoop guacamole and hot sauce on them.

And Chivas won their soccer game, against the Jaguars. Peter was impressed with how intensely involved the audience was.

Peter and Friends Eat Eyes… in Tacos is a post from: Mexico with Heart - Living, Traveling, and Retiring in Mexico

http://www.joyofbaking.com/LemonFrostedLemonCake.html

But my directions read quite differently from theirs. Here’s how you do it a la Rosana:

• Realize you can’t print the recipe from your computer because printer is newly attached to husband’s computer and doesn’t recognize yours yet.  Kick husband off his email with bribe of cake to come and print recipe.
• Light the pilot light with flimsy Mexican matches and discover that the temperatures on the oven dial are celcius not Fahrenheit. Not to worry, this recipe tells you that 350 F is 180 celcius. Resolve to make a little chart to put on the newly-installed kitchen bulletin board.
• Instead of room-temperature butter, use refrigerator-temperature canola oil. Instead of carefully mixing as the directions say, throw the oil, sugar, and eggs in together and beat with a fork till bored.
• No vanilla in the house, forget it. Lots of lemon zest but don’t notice this and leave it out of the recipe.
• In the absense of a sifter, dump the flour, baking powder, and salt into a sieve and stir with a spoon. When you see how long it will take for it all to go through the rather fine sieve, just dump it all in the bowl. Add the lemon juice and beat.
• Thoroughly grease the only pot you have that will go in the oven, your cast-iron frying pan. Put baking dishes on master shopping list on newly installed bulletin board, with a question mark in case the oven is no good.
• Fill the frying pan with the batter. Decide it’s a little too much and might overflow so spoon some back into the mixing bowl. Taste the batter and decide it’s not good enough that way to finish eating it raw.
• While the cake is baking, notice that the wall behind is getting hot. Call Kelly, who points out that there is nothing flammable there, just tiles and masonry. Also make the topping, but instead of one cup of confectioners’ sugar and 2 T of fresh lemon juice, double the lemon juice and halve the sugar, using regular sugar. A little tart contrast will be nice.
• After 40 minutes, remove cake from oven and put it on a plate with the topping, which soaks in nicely.

Don’t wait one minute for your first helping. Sit by the window with your sweetheart, enjoying the gentle breeze and the birdsongs, even if it’s too dark to see the view.

The taste? Sublime! The texture? Heavenly. The color? Far more yellow than the picture at the original site.

3 Comments from the original post:

• At March 04, 2006 6:58 AM, BillieS said…

  Rosana, a cook after my own heart. I love your recipe!

  On my list of things to bring back to San Miguel is a new oven thermometer. The old one died. A conversion chart doesn’t work for my inconsistent oven so I have to keep an eye on the thermometer. Actually one of the things on my list is to replace the oven when we re-do the kitchen.

• At March 14, 2006 8:46 AM, roni said…

  funny funny funny! I could almost see you doing this! Glad it turned out good – I would like the actual propoertions, because I get a lot of lemons in CR. Sweet limes, too, which I absolutely love. I already have an oven thermometer packed in my bag to go back, because my oven has three settings – hi, medium and low, and I have already almost burned a chocolate torte.

• At March 18, 2006 11:56 AM, Brenda said…

  Hi, sounds like my experiences here with throw away tin foil bakeware and a toaster oven. Every baking is an adventure as I never know how anything will turn out,between the internet recipes and the toaster oven. Things are usually edible though and it is fun. I have been using the jam jar as a rolling pin when I bake cinnamon buns, as I don’t want to buy many things until we return for good.

When You Have a Lemon Tree, Make Lemon Cake! is a post from: Mexico with Heart - Living, Traveling, and Retiring in Mexico

That was certainly recommendation enough, so last night Kelly, our friend Rob, and I went out to eat at Piave, an Italian restaurant near the center of Bernal. Our time in Bernal is drawing to a close for now, and we want to do some of the things we’ve been meaning to.

First there were drinks: Rob had a mineral water, I had a freshly made limonada (lemonade), and Kelly had his favorite dark beer, Negra Modelo, served with a frosted glass mug. Soon the breads arrived:

We looked out the window as we ate. It was an enjoyable view of the Baratillo, a place where meals are served, especially on the weekends, and small vendors set up at any time:

“I’d never noticed that artwork before,” I commented.

“I’ll never forget when that was done,” Rob said. “Aurelio painted it, and I had to talk to him. He said come on up. It’s higher than it looks up there, and the scaffolding was pretty rickety. So we talked. He was happily painting away!” Aurelio is a local architect who is very artistic.

When our dishes arrived, they were also very artistic. I commented to Claudio Brusadin, the owner of the restaurant, who was serving us. He said something like, first the view, then the smell, then the tasting, in a crescendo!

I’ve never written about food much before this trip, but with lines like that, it’s easy!

Rob had ravioli:

Kelly had vegetarian lasagna:

And I had chicken with pesto:

We were enjoying the delicious aromas while we waited, none too patiently, for Kelly to finish the photos I’d requested. We got right to the next step, and it’s too bad I can’t include you in the tasting. (Crude thing, this internet!) Most years, I grow several kinds of basil in my garden and make my own pesto, and this sauce was at least as good as I’ve ever produced. It wasn’t just pesto. I was almost sorry when Kelly and I traded plates about halfway through the meal… at least until I tried the lasagna. Rob had a good report on the ravioli too. It was made with ricotta and spinach, in a four-cheese sauce.

Some time later, Rob suggested we go all out and have dessert as well. It didn’t take much persuading. We ordered zabaglione, which took an order of over two people for the kitchen to produce this delicately flavored dessert. We were glad there was a short pause in the eating while this was prepared:

After such a memorable meal, we chatted with the restaurant’s Italian owner Claudio. He had an Italian restaurant in Mexico City for two years and has lived in Mexico for many more years. He loves what he does, and it shows. He graciously allowed me to take a picture of him in front of the restaurant:

If you are ever in Bernal, Piave is just a block from the central plaza, or jardin. It’s open Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays, from 1:00PM on into the evening. On special occasions, it’s also open during the week.

Oh, and the cost for all this? It worked out to under $12US a person, including tips and everything.

After dinner, we strolled along the street where Rob lives. This week is Bernal’s annual feria, or fair, and Rob had already moved his car over to the place we park our motorhome Cando, because his street will be impassable for about a week. Vendors were busy setting up stalls along the several blocks of the street. I’ll blog more about that soon.

On our way home, Kelly and I stopped in to visit a Mexican friend. She offered us some water, but it wasn’t just water. On many Mexican restaurant menus, aguas or waters are listed, and they turn out to be delicious concoctions of fresh fruit blended with water. The water that she served us consisted of entire limes and mint mixed in a blender with water, and then strained. She offered us sugar to add, but with the after-taste of that zabaglione, the drink was perfect as it was.

A lovely evening. We expect to leave Bernal in less than two weeks, to return to Colorado for a while, and I thought of a line from Shakespeare: “Love that well which thou must leave e’er long.”

World-class Italian Food in a Mexican Village is a post from: Mexico with Heart - Living, Traveling, and Retiring in Mexico

This last Sunday, I was alone and the produce was exceptionally good, so I loaded my bag to the very top and had to carry my half kilo of eggs in their plastic bag in my other hand. So I skipped my usual stop at the tortilla place, where half a kilo of fresh-ground corn tortillas would have set me back 3 pesos, about 27 cents. I also skipped the plastics lady with her son who appears to have Downs syndrome and is always very friendly (I meant the son but the mother is too), the used-clothing vendor, the CD vendor whose wares are likely not made by the original music companies as they cost about $2US each, and a couple of other vendors. Like I said, it’s a small market.

The cost for all this food was 71 pesos, which is about $6.45 US. And here’s the receipt:

It seems to be a large family who runs the produce stall, sprawled out over several tables. I didn’t think to bring my camera, not knowing I was going to be blogging! Any one member will weigh each item and put it carefully in a plastic bag if I have left it loose, while telling someone else what the item is how much it cost. This Sunday, the teenager was weighing and a plump boy (amazing how many kids are plump here nowadays) of about nine was writing things down.

This teenager likes to try out a little English on me. Once when our bill came to 60 pesos, he said “sixteen” — this is a common pronunciation problem I’ve encountered before. At the end of our transaction, as usual I said “Thank you,” and as usual he said “Very much.”

It’s about a ten-minute walk from our house down to the downtown area and then back uphill several blocks in another direction. It takes me longer to get back home with my load. As I walked along this time, I thought how nice the fresh papayas and mangos would be with pancakes, one of Kelly’s specialties on Sunday mornings.

Then it occurred to me that my loot would make a nice picture, so here it is:

That’s a papaya next to the bananas, and the funny looking thing next to the broccoli is a root vegetable you may be familiar with, jicama. Tasty in salads and often served here as a snack with lime juice and hot sauce sprinkled on it. The dark green thing in the top center is a slightly spicy green pepper, the kind used in making chile rellanos, which we also use in cooking or even salads. You don’t see any tomatoes, cucumbers, grapefruit, or carrots because we had some at home.

After the photo op, I did my usual produce washing. Bananas I just rinse off, and I don’t do anything to onions except peel their outer layers off before cooking, but just about everything else I rinse and then dump in a bath of tap water and MicroDyn, a form of colloidal silver widely available in grocery stores and pharmacies. (There are other brands but this is the one I always seem to see.)Everything sits there for about 20 minutes, and the things that float I turn over about midway.

I am more careful than some people, since I had pretty intense training in self-protection from 3rd world bugs both from my father, who grew up all over the globe many years ago, and from a summer I spent on a work camp in Africa when I was in college.

I keep two basins, bought from the friendly plastics lady and probably made in China, just for my Microdyning projects. Here they are. What looks like it could be soap on the first basin is just the flash glittering off the wet broccoli.

Once the time is up, I drain the produce and it’s ready for use. In the sink to the right of the bins you can see our homemade way of keeping the smell of the drains from coming into the kitchen, a little plastic bottle we happened to have with us that we jam into the drain. But we still get smells pretty often, because we have to take the bottle out to let water go down the drain. It’s a funky kitchen and we may redo the whole thing eventually.

It so happened that Kelly had had the same Sunday morning thought that I had, and here is the result, complete with a little lime on the side, a very Mexican touch:

From Mexican Village Market to Sunday Brunch is a post from: Mexico with Heart - Living, Traveling, and Retiring in Mexico