Mi tienda esta en fuego. ¡Que lastima!

Argh, my excuse for not keeping up with my posting this time is sickness.  I randomly had a fever on Friday and was unable to make my planned dinner or finish a post.  I had applesauce and noodles for dinner instead.  It went away quickly, but then I was busy this weekend so here, finally, is the post I should've done on Thursday.

Back in the day, Will would attend a yearly conference that met at a different place in the Caribbean each year.  I was only too happy to accompany him.  After attending for 4 years running it was also like a big reunion every year, and boy was it fun to escape the cold and get to see everyone again every February!  The 4th year we went (in 2007) it was held in Mexico outside of Playa Del Carmen (which isn't exactly in the Caribbean, but I wasn't complaining).  As you can see in these pictures, I was pregnant with Emily, and as you can probably guess, this was the last year we attended :-( 

I was super-excited to go to Mexico, since Will had been before and loved it.  He first visited on an explorer group/work trip back in August of 1998, when we had been dating for about 7 months.  He was gone for 12 days, and I missed him with a passion that only a dramatic 17 year old can muster.  My family still teases me about how I sat on the couch clutching increasingly sodden throw pillows and sobbed, subsisting solely on boxed mashed potatoes.  Hey, it's still the longest we've ever been apart since our first date and if he ever left for that long again I might still be able to soak a throw pillow or two.

For the week of the conference, we stayed at the Fairmont Mayakoba, which was gorgeous.

Oh, how I wish I was there now!

 

 

There's Emily poking out (and me getting the worst sunburn of my life because I thought those cloth umbrellas would actualy block the sun.  Nope.

I had to miss out on all the tasty mixed drinks, but I did enjoy some virgin versions

Dinner on our porch

I repurposed the flowers the  next day :-)

Will's family, minus Margaret

Daytrip to Tulum

The Mayans knew how to choose a location

As lovely as our first week there was, my favorite part of the trip was when Will and I extended a couple days to set out on our own.  We rented a car and headed into the middle of the Yucatàn peninsula to check out Chichén Itzà.  We stayed at this idyllic little hacienda in the jungle just steps from Chichén Itzà itself (which allowed us to majorly beat the crowds and have the ruins to ourselves before the tour buses showed up in the mornings), and it was perfection.

Our little villa

Our little poisonous snake friend right outside our villa (red touches yellow!)

The back porch, where we ate our meals

Seeing the Mayan ruins was pretty amazing.  The Incan ruins in Peru were cool, but since most of their decorative work was done in gold (which the Spanish obsconded with pretty quickly) the ruins, while amazing because of their locations and ingenuity of engineering, were mostly just steps and giant rock walls.  The Mayans liked to carve designs into the actual rocks so I found them a lot more interesting to look at.

El Castillo

Chacmool, an ancient Mayan figure, a smaller version of which can be purchased onsite as a convenient chip bowl holder

Some columns

Cenote Sagrado

The observatory (possibly where they predicted the world would end this year?)

Will playing on the ball court (how on earth did anyone ever score with the hoop all the way up there?)

After a couple days there we headed back to spend our last night in Cancun, near the airport.  We took the less scenic (but more real) route back.

Cancun reminded me of a classier and prettier Ocean City (until the sun went down...then it was much less classy).

Will's too sexy for his shirt

I definitely "popped" while on this trip

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It was not tough to decide what meal to make to represent our trip to Mexico.  First off, it HAD to include gazpacho!  For one thing, gazpacho is just screams fun.

How could this sight NOT make you feel happy?

All my life I oscillated back and forth from the "gazpacho should be chunky" point of view to the "gazpacho should be blended until smooth" side.  While we stayed at Chichén Itzà we discovered there was a third option which was clearly the best solution, a sort of "all of the above".  Our hacienda served smooth gazpacho, but with little bowls of chopped tomatoes, green peppers, cucumbers and onions so that you could decide the exact degree of chunkiness you wanted.  We ordered gazpacho at every meal and enjoyed it so much that way so now it's the only way I make it

Part chunky, part smooth, all delicious

Everyone loves options

Especially sour-cream coated 5 year olds.  Tutu-wearing 2 year olds still won't touch it though.

For our main course, I recreated a meal we ran into (and enjoyed the heck out of) a lot in Mexico, a kind of "build your own toastada" bar.  I'm not sure tostada is really the right thing to call it, especially since ours were soft and not fried, but for lack of a better word that's how I refer to it.  In any case, you start with a soft corn torilla and go to town, scooping delicious toppings on left and right.  One thing I found interesting was that at these build-your-own bars, having a particular preparation of something didn't preclude its separate ingredients from being presented as toppings as well.  So for example there would be refried beans, but also pinto beans.  Guacamole, but also chopped avocado.  Various sauce-y salsas, but also pico de gallo AND plain chopped tomatoes.  And we almost always took a bit of everything until our poor tostada was smashed flat(er) under an El Castillo-like pile of fresh and tasty food.

Corn tostata, refried black beans, shredded chicken, grated cheddar (didn't get a chance to pick up queso fresco), avocado, sour cream, chopped tomatoes, cilantro, and a squeeze of lime

For dessert, I had to include papaya, because it was EVERYWHERE down there, but I was too afraid to eat it :-(  I had read that eating underripe papaya was dangerous to pregnant women because it can be toxic to fetuses and it also contains enzymes that mimic oxytocin in the body and can make the uterus contract. Rather than trust that every papaya presented to me was perfectly 100% ripe, I just avoided every delicious jewel-like morsel.  I later realized that it was probably GREEN papaya that was the biggest issue (and also that it didn't really work, when I purposely had green papaya salad to try to convince Charlotte to evacuate my premises) but by then I had already missed out :-(

I also found a chocolate bar with cacao nibs and chili peppers in it (and lots of X's C's and L's in the name so you know it's legit (-: ) to accompany my fruit salad of papaya  (very ripe!), mango and pineapple.  Not quite as good as having them fresh in Mexico of course, but a nice little end to my dinner nonetheless.

I shared the chocolate bar of course, although the girls were disgusted

And in case you were wondering, the title of my post is the first (and for a long time, ONLY) sentence I knew in Spanish.  I have had many occasions to use it over the years, let me tell you.

Peru, revisited

I want to write a post about my awesome weekend, but first I want to get started on a little project I've been wanting to do for awhile.

Maybe it's because I tend to get wanderlust every spring, or maybe it's because I haven't been out of North America in a long time (I know, wah wah) but I've been thinking back fondly on Will's and my travels when we were in our early-mid 20's and the foods we had in different countries.  Then I got to thinking if I can't easily travel internationally right now, I can still at least travel around the world for dinner and make some of the dishes we enjoyed while abroad.  And since I didn't blog super-often back then and DEFINITELY not the way I blog now, I thought it might be fun to write a bit about each of my trips and share the meal I make from a different country we've been to each night, thereby re-living my trips which is the next best thing to ACTUALLY traveling.

First up, Peru!

Back at the end of 2005, our friend Brad (who you have probably seen on here before) declared that he wanted to quit his job and go live in Peru for awhile.  Will and I, if I recall correctly, said something like "Huh?  Ok.  Well if you really do end up doing that, we'll come visit you", then we went back to working and hanging out with friends and showering often...whatever it is we used to fill all our time with before we had kids.

Then 2006 started, and damned if Brad didn't quit his job and go live in Peru for awhile.  So being the good friends we are we made good on our promise and headed down to meet up with him in April.

We ignored all the warnings that you should spend some time in Lima (close to sea level), then gradually move towards Cusco so that you could acclimate to the altitude.  We were young and short on time, so we flew straight into Cusco (about 11,000 ft) and took off walking all day, periodically stopping to gasp like fish out of water.

Gringo creepers be creepin'

We also ignored the warnings that alcohol makes "soroche" (altitude sickness) worse and consumed many of  what is still my favorite mixed drink.  The Pisco sour.

Stinkin' candle consuming all our oxygen

We balanced them out with lots of cups of coca tea, which is steeped coca leaves.  Later on we resorted to chewing the leaves straight out of the bag.  Too bad this stuff is illegal in America.

On our second day we drove over the mountains into the Sacred Valley, which is if not THE most beautiful place I've ever been, at least in the top 3.

That's Will and Brad over there

I didn't realize there were so many of these statues in South America

 We went through Ollantaytambo and caught the train to Aguas Caillentes, which is the town where you stay while visiting Macchu Picchu.  That's where I finally got to eat "cuy", which is a guinea pig.  Strangely enough, at 30 soles (about $10) it was the most expensive but least filling meal I had in Peru.

After crossing Macchu Picchu off the bucket list we headed back to Cusco, where we caught a 9-ish hour bus to Puno, which is on the shore of lake Titicaca (and sits at a lofty 12,500 ft).

By the morning, soroche (and we suspect a bad mango) was/were starting to get the best of Will, but he powered through and came along on our all-day tour of the lake.  We saw Las Islas Flotantes (the floating islands) where everything including the islands themselves are made out of the ubiquitous reeds that grow in the lake.

After that, we headed to the little island of Taquile, which is where Will pretty much died.  It was also where, unfortunately, we were expected to hike about 1.5 miles around the island to the lunch location and back to the port.  That's not a lot, but with the shape Will was in (i.e. literally staggering and leaning against me for support) and the steepness factor it was quite a ways.  

Yeah.

When we got to our lunch location, I deposited Will on a stone bench and enjoyed a lovely soup lunch in the town square.  

Then Brad and I practically carried Will back down to the boat, stopping occasionally to try and revive him when he slumped over.  Since we didn't have smelling salts I resorted to waving alcohol wipes from my first aid kit under his nose to try to perk him up.

We boated him back to Puno...

My "My husband is deathly ill in a 3rd world country where I don't speak the language" smile

And after about 15 hours sleep, he was much better :-)

His extended sleep meant that I had to go out alone to a travel agency and figure out how to get us from Puno back to Lima to catch our flight home.  Brad was continuing on to Bolivia and we had considered going with him, but with Will feeling so bad we wanted to head straight back so we could be close to the airport.  I would consider myself about 5% fluent in Spanish right now, and I was probably around 1% then, so it was highly stressful as I argued about "mañana" vs. "the day after mañana" (why didn't they understand that?) and cursed every moment I had wasted learning French.  I managed to book us onto a grueling 24 hour long bus ride mañana though.

They videotape you getting on so that if you're kidnapped en route they have a record of what you look like

24 hours on a bus is a LOOOONG time but we got to see a lot of Peru.  You know, the middle part where there really isn't anything to look at.

When we finally arrived in Lima in one piece, we did something painfully American.  We hopped in a cab and told the driver to take us to Hotel Bolivar, the most expensive hotel I could find in Lima.  After weeks in hostels and sleeping overnight on a bus I was ready for some luxury on our last night.  The taxi driver kept trying to take us to his brother's hostel, telling us how cheap it was and we kept telling him to buzz off and take us where we wanted to go.  He even followed us into the hotel and hovered over us as we checked in, hoping we'd get sticker shock and decide to go with him to the cheaper place.  The cost of $120 a night was nothing compared to comparable hotels in America, and we even considered upgrading to the presidential penthouse suite for $160 but held ourselves back and he finally slumped away and left us alone.

Hotel for spoiled Americans

Awww yeah

We didn't wander far, but Lima was impressive.  All the buildings reminded me of Wedgewood china with their bright colors and white trim.

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The meals that remind me most of Peru are cuy and alpaca, which we found out are delicious.  However since both guinea pigs and alpacas enjoy pet status in America they weren't really options for my Peru dinner tonight :-)  We also ordered "trucha" (trout) fairly often when we were near the lake, and it tasted like tilapia which is easy to find.  I had to remake the Taquile soup because Will was too sick to eat it at the time but would've loved it so I made a point to remember what was in it.  I also had a rather delicious salad several times in Peru that was basically chicken mixed with cole slaw (but somehow better than cole slaw) served in half an avocado.  So those are the dishes I chose to healthy up a bit and serve tonight to represent our trip to Peru.

Broiled tilapia with salt and pepper, 1/4 avocado topped with greek yogurt + seasonings and cole slaw mix

Onions, garlic, chicken broth, quinoa, zucchini, caraway seeds, chopped cilantro

Dessert was mango of course!

It was even bona fide.

Let's hope it doesn't make Will sick this time.  I'm not as strong as I used to be and I STILL don't have any smelling salts.