So much whatnotting.

HACIENDA MIXIUHCA

The hacienda, due to circumstances described below, has been somewhat neglected of late. Regardless, I'm gratefully pulling tomatoes off the whitefly-infested vines on the daily. I gave one of my Cherokee Purples to my friend Mizraim for his birthday and he was pretty excited. I won't lie-- I talked it up quite a bit... Of course when Marcos found a little heap of them in the kitchen, he asked me if they were purple because they were full of smog. Very funny, Marcos.

The chickens are bigger on a daily basis. They seem to display normal behaviour despite extremely abnormal conditions. The duck is totally neurotic, but she's another story. Anyway, my students and friends are curiously asking me about my weird plans for chicken dinner. The okra is irreparably stunted and still upside down. The upside down cucumber trick was working remarkably well until it sort of dried up (see: period of neglect).

Natural disasters... many times, when it rains, the drainpipe clogs with feathers. This sucks, because my job then becomes chicken-feather scraper (by means of my broom, because I have to do this by half-sticking myself out of a hole in the side of the cage, which I normally cover with a lovely piece of corrugated fiberglass which I found one day on the roof). This means mucking around in chicken-poop mud. Fun and disgusting, all rolled into one. However, this does mean I've got to be pretty timely about sweeping that stuff up. BUT! But my compost bucket is, as of today, full to the brim. I guess I have to get another one? My worms died of chicken shit overload, I think, and so I think anaerobic fermentation is the only option for me. Anyone got any suggestions???

MY BORING LIFE

Since my last post I've gone through a series of iterations of a daily schedule. I'd taken a job with another company, teaching an advanced English class at the National Polytecnic Institute's Centre for Investigations and Advanced studies. I loved the class, a bunch of scientists: a physicist, two geneticists, a couple of biotechnologists and a few scattered others. It was a really fun class to teach and I learned a few useful things from that school's teaching method. However, I happen to think sleeping is really amazing, and it simply wasn't working for me that I was getting home at ten or eleven at night, and waking up at 5 to be out of here at 6 to get to Politécnico at 7:30. I just wasn't going to hack it anymore. So, three weeks of working that gig (see also making some good money—at triple the pay rate of my current job, I certainly couldn't complain about money!) just about did me in. But now I'm giving private clases to this Argentinian dude, who, (are you ready for an AMAZING COINCIDENCE?) in fact, is working on a documentary about the Ginger Ninjas. Yes, the very Ginger Ninjas that biked into our backyard in Davis, camping out in various of our beds, amusing us with their bicycle-powered music, amazing us with their crackpot journey to the southlands.... so, yeah, that's cool.

Okay, you ask, but what about my free time? And I respond, “WHAT free time??” That's right, folks. Working six days a week pretty much kills any “life” you may or may not have had previously. Regardless, I try to take advantage of the scraps they throw me as much as possible. Chiefly this takes the form of adventure-grocery-shopping (1), wanderings in the center of town (2), and eating, nerding out and sleeeeeeeeeping (3). Later I will recount the doings, seeings and beings of the only trip I've taken out-of-town in many moons, but for the time being let's stick with the quotidian.

The Merced (GPG: Mehr-SEHD) is a big damn market. The following is a collaborative piece by Ricardo and yours truly. We wrote it together on the way to Morelos last week. On your mark, get set, go!

The weather's clear and fresh. It's about ten in the morning. We're groggily going towards Mixiuhca station. Instead of sinking into the metro, however, we catch a shortbus heading to San Lázaro. From on the sunny, bumpy ride to San Lázaro we're laughing and talking in Spanglish, both of us pretty lazy about choosing just one language to speak. Then we jump over some puddles to get to the station, flying down th stairs just in time to watch one of the orange trains disappear. Merde. Well, now we have to wait. It feels muggy in the Metro. Some announcements on the bulletin board call my attention. I'd like to attend some of the events posted, and even firmly promise myself I will. However, I won't; that I can take for granted. God bless the 48-hour workweek. The next train has arrived and we get on it. People generally stare at each other like mortal foes on the Metro (says Ricardo), and I try not to be a part of it. Then a guy selling pop CDs breaks the silence. Cat of course starts to dance, which is more than a little embarrassing, especially when she tries to act like she's with me. We get off in the next station, and again we can see the sunlight.

It filters through the multitude of grimy skylights in Merced Station and we maneuver through the masses and rotating gates, ever closer to the throbbing center of barkers, vendors, pickpockets and shady types, old ladies, pirate goods, housewivery, and deliciousness that is La Merced. Tacos de Canasta, fly sneakers, peanut butter, raw meat, plastic everything-you-can-imagine mah-day en cheena. Anarchy: capitalist anarchy at its hairiest. It's this sort of twisted freaky commercial paradise vacation at a toxic waste pond. This photo is of the feet of a clown and his ever-so-many fans in the center of town.

We more or less know where we're going: first to the old lady in the middle of the shoe part, who sells from buckets of multicolor mole, pastes of every kind, a shrewd grandmother with braids who shovels spoonfuls of the stuff into polyethylene sheets by the quarter-kilogram. We get our PB from her, and snake around distracted

clients clogging the passages to buy some cemitas. The Cemita is the holy grail of Mexican bread products: a circular roll, perfect for these amazing deli sandwiches they make in Puebla. Oh god, they're way way way too delicious.

It's a lazy sunday, of course, so then it becomes extremely necessary to dilute the coffee sloshing in our stomachs with some greaseball tacos from the stand with indifferent and snotty taqueros (GPG: tah-KEYR-ohs) but amaaaaaaaaazing food. I order some carne enchilada tacos, and load them down with fried potatoes, salsa, onion and nopales. Then I merrily proceed to stuff my face.

Then we carry our now quite full bellies with us around from one side of the Merced to the other, not listening to the crooning of the sellers. There's one part with mostly fruit, mostly candy and nuts and seeds, another with mostly veggies, another with specialty veggies, and one side hallway which appears to consist exclusively of nopales, giant heaps of cut-off spines accumulating on the floor as the sellers deftly swipe their knives over the surface of the cactus pads.

We come here because it's cheaper, and not so far from my place. Ricardo and I are coöperating on the food front, so into the front lines we go every Sunday. It's kind of exhilerating, between the split-second bargaining, the risk of being run over by a dolly loaded down with ice, carrots or potatoes, the constant worry of pickpocketing or worse, and the general overwhelming goodness of being surrounded by FOOD, glorious food! Heaps of carrots, tumbling piles of tomatillo, buckets of powders, barrels of beans, glass cases of nuts and candy, racks of mangoes and starfruit, crates of tunas, stacks of jars of honey... anything you want, nearly, you can find it. Ruffly, fragrant mountains of leaf vegetables and herbs, delicate displays of oyster mushrooms, fluffballs of alfalfa sprouts.

GETTING OUTTA HERE: an adventure in Morelos with the Usual Suspects.

The last-minute planning, the running from here to there, the dropout. This, the

dramatic backdrop for our Very Rigid Journey. Then we went to my house (happy independence day?) and ate eggplant and drank guava-ginger agua-fresca. It was admittedly not very patriotic of us.

Oh well! Next day we boogied at some early, but less-early-than-we'd-hoped-for hour, dashed off, ate a way-too-spicy taco at Tasqueña station, and jumped on a bus. On the bus I called Lilia, and asked Chato, who picked up the phone, if I couldn't escape from my pals a bit to spend some time with them, at which point he very kindly invited Ricardo and Karen to come eat with us. We then proceeded to miss our stop. We asked the driver “Scuse us, do you know where the next stop is?” to which he responded simply, “Yes.” and left it at that. What a dick. Well, he let us off at the next town, some nowhere place where we threw ourselves in the grass and happily

wasted half an hour soaking in the sun... anyway, caught the next bus back to We ate at this amazing elegant restaurant with a KILLER view of the town, which is situated in this incredible verdant valley, just luscious with vegetation, life spewing with impunity from every foothold. THIS, this this, is indeed paradise! More next time on our adventures in paradise... it's sleepin' time now.

But as a final... thingy, a study in tropical fruit. I dissected a mamey and a black sapote from the Merced on our amazing new electric-blue tablecloth. This is the result of an intensive, even invasive, study of their physical forms. Both are very specifically mexican. The mamey is Enjoy

Ode to Foodstuffs!

I wrote this on: Saturday, 29 August. Why I never posted it I just don't know.

Today I went to the market in Cuauti, because this weekend I am not going to DF, I'm staying in the Estado. This is a photo of a chile relleno I helped Gloria make at home. It is swimming in sauce.

Have I written about the markets yet?

Every neighborhood or town has its own giant indoor market with a million stands inside selling fruit and veggies, or else giant sacks of sugar, flour, nuts, piloncillo, dried beans or what have you. Some stands sell candy (including candied fruit or candied squash or sweet potatoes), others sell spices and sauces, clothes, piñatas, or songbirds, and still others sell meat or seafood or weird witch-doctor remedies (I'll try to bring something good back for Bryan). And all the vendors are barking at you:
“Que vas a llevar, güera?”
“Hay chayote, hay uva, hay mango, hay chile... que le damos, señorita?”
“Pásale amiga! Quieres probar el quesillo? Manchego? Queso panela?”

I want to eat everything.

I find it way harder to decide what I want in this situation than at home. And most of the food's pretty cheap. The only really expensive things are mushrooms and eggplant. Nobody eats eggplant in this country. Anyway, the other thing there is in these spots is lots of places to eat, little tamale-and-atole stands or comida corrida stands.

Let's break this down:

In Mexico we eat a lot of corn. A ton of corn. Tamales, in case you are not familiar, are these delightful breakfast-foods that you should go to the Mission one morning and try. They consist of cornbread, effectively, but steamed, with a filling like rajas (chopped chile in tomato sauce), verde (tomatillo salsa), mole (which is the best sauce ever and has like a million varieties each with a million ingredients) or dulce, which is just where they sweeten the cornbread and dye it pink. They come wrapped in corn leaves, because that's how they hold their shape when they steam them, in these little corn-leaf envelopes. Atole they tend to serve either out of one of those old-school steel milk tanks or out of a giant cylindrical orange Gatorade cooler. Either way it's this delicious drink made from water, milk and corn starch (which dissolves better than you'd think), usually flavored with chocolate, fruit, or rice (with bits of rice in it, it tastes like rice-pudding). If you want to feel full in the morning you have a tamale and an atole and you're good to go. You don't even want to think about eating after that.

Alas, I think about eating pretty much constantly.

Comida corrida is my new way of life. You show up, and it's like a choose your own adventure, or a dichotomous key: Consommé or cream of squash soup? Rice or spaghetti? Chicken in mole or enchiladas in salsa verde? Pineapple or papaya? And your three course meal PLUS fruit PLUS agua fresca PLUS tortillas costs you 25-50 pesos (<5 bucks in any case) depending on where you are. It's genius. And they're usually clean, pleasant little places. I love it. It's a really good way to avoid eating tacos all the time. And as much as I love tacos, they're greasy little buggers. I will hereby give the rundown on a few foods you may not be familiar with Stateside:

HUITLACOCHE
This is actually a pathogen of corn: it's a fungus that infects the kernels but it's quite tasty and black... It's really good in quesadillas.

ESQUITES y ELOTES
There are little corn on the cob / corn off the cob stands everywhere. They put mayo (which normally I don't like but I can make a big exception for esquites and elotes) chile powder, lime and this odd powdery (a la parmesan) cheese on 'em and it's so damn tasty. You can ask for them roasted or boiled, too.

FLOR DE CALABAZA
Squash blossoms. My mom puts them in risotto sometimes. They're great in quesadillas. If you don't kknow what a squash blossom looks like you need to get your booty outside more often.

CHAYOTE

This is a kind of squash which in the US is sold in individual little plastic bags. It's tasty and the texture is way better than normal squash.

GUANÁBANA and CHIRIMOYA

Eating these is like eating custard. Try to find it somewhere. It's also a delicious flavor for popsicles. I bet they have guanábana popsicles in the Mission. There's a lovely Son Jarocho song about a guanábana.

MAMEY

This is the king of fruits as far as I'm concerned: it reminds me of an avocado in the sense that it has a tough skin and a sort of creamy texture. The skin is brown and leathery, and the meat it bright orange and super sweet and delicious. It makes an EXCELLENT ice cream or smoothie flavor. This I am certain does not exist in our country. I learned that this is without exception NOT a plantation crop; all mamey growers are small-scale, backyard type growers. I got to encounter a mamey tree when I was in Chiapas last year. It was pretty awesome: it's a huge tree and the fruit drops to the ground and if it splits when it lands they leave it there and these giant green butterflies, like the size of your hand, come and slurp up the orange innards... it was so pretty. I have never seen this fruit in the States. Everything else on this list I'm sure exists somewhere but I have seen no evidence that there is or has ever been a mamey in the US. I am going to start a mamey plantation in Florida or Socal or somewhere like that and get super rich. Just you wait and see.

LICUADOS

Smoothies. It's just that here they throw fruit, milk, vanilla, and cinnamon, along with oats or granola or nuts if you like in a blender and you get about a liter of it (a quart, if you're one of the older folks reading this...) for less than 2 bucks.

TEJOCOTE
It's like a little yellow apple, but with more flavor than a yellow apple, and an orangier color. It's starchy like an apple and sweet. It's the principal ingredient of the drink they call “ponche,” which is kind of an hot apple-cider kind of drink they make around Christmas.