Post date: Nov 4, 2013 12:29:52 AM
We have been settling in to our rented house. Last evening we made nachos. We discovered that the tortilla chips we bought were not salted. OK, Carol thought, we can make nachos. That is because we had also purchased shredded Asiago cheese, which we added to sautéed onions and chopped tomatoes to the chips and heated them in the microwave. Still not quite salty enough, but better than nothing.
We, of course, were surprise to find a fully equipped kitchen with no salt and no salt shaker. No vegetable peeler, either. The latter is too bad because we have three at home and finding one here has not proven easy. The kitchen also has a complete knife set, but only one of the blades has been kept sharp. Tomorrow I go to the market to look for the knife sharpener. (The public market in Cuernavaca, Mexico, has two men who sharpen knives, located just behind the butchers.)
What gives us another clue that this kitchen is not used for much more than opening wine bottles (there is a good corkscrew and six wine glasses - more than any other shape of drinking glass)? No wooden spoon to stir cooking food, a fine set of Kitchen Aid brand pots and pans, looking tired but not heavily used, and a maid who says that we must use matches to light the stove - which has a perfectly good electric ignition system.
Milk comes in either plastic bags or sealed, ultra-pasturized boxes. Once the bags are open, they don't stand upright in the fridge very well, So I transferred the contents to a nice glass pitcher. However, the shelves in the fridge were not arranged to fit the pitcher, or the quart carton of orange juice we bought.
The orange juice, by the way, makes a nice smoothie with blended papaya. The papaya that Joanna brought from the market is probably the largest I have ever seen - and I lived in West Africa for two years. Works well when blended with orange juice.
This morning we tried the toaster on the multigrain bread that we bought at the french bakery. Pretty good. The coffee was pretty good, too, except that the milk is 2% milk fat and Carol is accustomed to skim milk. Thus the purchase of a box of 0% milk today. (Skim does not come in bags - at least at the local La Colónia super market.) Got good local orange marmalade for the toast.
As I may have mentioned, we are eating two meals a day, breakfast (before six - it gets light early) and dinner (mid-afternoon), with likely a snack in the evening. As already mentioned, yesterday's snack was nachos. Today's remains to be tasted - it is only 7pm. But we did break out a can of soda water to share. Heavy drinkers, we!
Salted half of avocado started our supper. This avocado had a hard, green shell, a very large pit, and sweet taste.
Carol started soaking black beans this morning - using the boil-five-minutes, let cool, method. We also have rice, so gallo pinto is probably coming sooner or later. Only we both prefer black beans over the traditional pinto (red) beans.