shoestring gringa

A couple kitchens I’ve had in Mexico have not had hot water; it seems to be regarded as something of a luxury here.  It’s a detail you might want to notice when looking for rentals, especially in areas with chilly winters.   We’ve had hot water for a year now, and I find myself using it much more sparingly — in the winter when the tap water is icy, for washing items used with raw meat, and for the occasional extra-greasy pan.

When I didn’t have hot water in the winter, I would heat a pan of water to use for the washing, and only have to suffer through the freezing rinse.  With hindsight, I suppose rubber gloves might have helped some, but it didn’t occur to me at the time.

Here’s a trick I learned from my Yucatecan mother-in-law:  Cold-water washing can leave a bad-tasting (and probably toxic) soap film on dishes; to prevent this, be sure when rinsing to pass your hand over the dish, which apppears to break the film.  I have no idea of the scientific basis of this, but it definitely seems to work.

Should you disinfect vegetables in Mexico as a matter of course?  I must admit I’m not nearly so big on it as I used to be.

When we first moved to tropical Yucatan, I faithfully disinfected anything that was not going to be cooked, i.e. salad stuff.  I used iodine (yodo) until I got a horrified look from the lady in the farmacia when I revealed what I wanted it for, and then moved on to the new silver-based, special purpose Microdyn, which is supposedly nontoxic.  It can also be used to purify drinking water.  I have no idea how effective it is, but it seems to have become very popular and appears to be marketed to restaurants in giant-sized jugs at Sam’s and Costco.

I do think in the tropics disinfecting is probably important.  Nasty bugs of all descriptions flourish in those climes, and they could well be lurking in your vegetables.  Better to be safe.

After moving to Sonora, however, I had an epiphany of sorts while getting ready to disinfect a tomato one night.  This tomato, it occurred to me, was identical in provenance to countless tomatoes we’d consumed in Tucson for years and years, with never a thought of disinfecting them.  Probably 90% of the tomatoes sold in Tucson supermarkets come from Mexico.   Do they somehow lose their Mexican cooties by virtue of crossing the border?  I think not.

I haven’t disinfected a tomato since.

Ironically, I have been disinfecting our homegrown lettuce because it’s grown in compost — just in case.  And I still disinfect supermarket lettuce.  I never disinfect cabbage, though, just remove the outer leaves.  I doubt  millions of taco-vendors do, so why should I?

Another factor to weigh is how trustworthy is the water in which you wash the vegetables.  (The Microdyn bottle makes a big point of the fact that you don’t have to rinse off the Microdyn with possibly bad water after disinfecting.)  As we’ve  had no problems in more than four years brushing our teeth with Mexican tap water, I don’t worry about it.

The truth is, many of the health hazards Mexico is so famous for are really not much of an issue anymore.  The Mexican government has done a bang-up job of getting potable water to the people, including in the most remote and tiny villages (even though many still decline to drink it), and much of the food (sadly) is grown by agribiz.   Common sense, as usual, seems the best approach.

Recently a circus came to our village, causing great excitement — at least at our house.  It was the third circus we’ve seen in Mexico and the best yet.

We saw our first Mexican circus a dozen years ago in a small Sonoran fishing village.  Everybody gathered round the trucks as they rolled slowly into town, gazing at the tigers through the bars of their cages.  The animals looked sad, except for one tiger who peed on a little boy who ventured too close, to the delight of the rest of us.  That circus was a tiny operation, with everything as if in miniature — the tent, the single ring, the bleachers, even the featured attraction, The World’s Tiniest Horse!   The show had an equal mix of animal acts, trapeze work, and clowns.  The animal acts were impressive,  from the tigers to the World’s Tiniest Horse to a very slick troupe of dancing dogs.  The clowns were a bit heavy on slapstick for my taste, even for clowns.  The trapeze artists, like all of their kind, were amazing, performing death-defying feats above our heads, close enough in that tent that you could see the holes in their stockings.  The poverty of that circus was so evident that pathos at times threatened to overwhelm the show.  The threadbare costumes were the least of it — one prayed not just for the skill of the performers, but also that the ropes and pulleys and things would hold.  At the end of the show, the emcee announced they were hiring.  We were almost tempted.  (BTW, if you ever have a chance to see the 1980s film Bye-Bye Brazil, I recommend it.  That circus and that movie are forever linked in my mind.)

The circus we saw a few years ago in Yucatan was much bigger, better financed, and altogether less memorable.  There were several shows a night in a huge tent and they were all packed.  It was all pretty professional-looking, and they kept a brisk pace backed by deafening, annoying techno music.  The most-hyped attraction was some people riding motorcycles around spherical wire cages — undoubtedly dangerous, but it somehow lacked that old romance, and the bikes filled the tent, already stuffy in the tropical night, with swoon-inducing noxious fumes.  Sitting on the beach later, we agreed that bigger is not always better, and traded fond memories of that other, smaller, poorer circus.

Our most recent circus was a small one featuring a giant anaconda whose fearsome visage adorned all the publicity posters.   In a fit of enthusiasm the Mexigringo decided to spring for palco, front row seats, which turned out to be rather unnerving on a couple of counts — everyone else in town was in the bleachers which made us feel horribly conspicuous (nobody chose luneta, the next section out), and when they brought out the tigers I’d have preferred to be a little farther away, despite my love of cats.

A Mexican circus is a family affair; everybody works.  The 90-year-old granny sells popcorn, the under-10’s are hustling those glow-worm things and taking pictures for keychains in the bleachers, and the girl with the huge false eyelashes and glittery makeup who takes your ticket at the door is one of the trapeze artists.  There was even a tiny tyke who had to be under age two performing a small bit with remarkable aplomb.

This circus featured a big focus on the kids in the audience.   Mickey Mouse and other Disney characters appeared at regular intervals with lots of kid-oriented patter and humor. What’s more, two of the animal acts were actually interactive.  There was a pony (apparently of the same race as The World’s Tiniest Horse) who didn’t do much in the ring, but following his performance was made available for pony rides at 10 pesos a shot.  And when for the final act they brought out the Giant Anaconda (which was a good half-meter shorter and rather less fearsome than the long-departed one on the poster) well, it didn’t do anything at all, but the kids were then invited to come up and touch it.  They all rushed up immediately, to the accompaniment of much squealing, laughter, face-making, and hand-wiping.

The other animals had an almost perfunctory role.  The best parts for us were the trapeze acts and the clowns.  The undisputed star of the show was a hunky 20-something with classical features of Mexico City, who wowed us with fully half of the trapeze performances and did the backstage work while his wife and sisters performed.   The clowns were outstanding, timeless, real theater, their humor hip, wicked, and clearly emanating from the capital.

But none of  this conveys the true essence of the Mexican circus, which is magic.   What makes it magic?  It’s magic because it is so real, so raw, qualities we never encounter  in our endless diet of canned, mechanical distractions.  Real human beings sweating real sweat and risking their very real lives, ten feet in front of your face.  It doesn’t get any realer than this.

The Mexican circus.  Now that’s entertainment.

If you’re building or renovating a house in Mexico and are at the stage of choosing the plumbing fixtures, here’s a word of advice:  always opt for the simplest item available.   Things like weird, exotic sinks will cause installation nightmares (unless you’re doing it yourself, and even then if you need any special parts).  And fancy mixing faucets may not work at all.  Keep in mind that deluxe fixtures are designed to work with deluxe infrastructure, i.e. levels of water pressure found in Canada and the U.S., not in Mexico.  Buy one of these babies and now you have to add a water pump.  Which won’t work when the electricity fails.  I’m all too familiar with the creative frenzy that can overcome a person when working on a house — but it really is best to keep a lid on it.   One’s true worth as a person does not hinge on cutting-edge bathroom faucets.

Mixer-type faucets may also be problematic when combined with on-demand water heaters which work off sensing water pressure.  This winter, our shower water kept getting colder and colder for no apparent reason, until finally the MexiGringo discovered that somehow the point that triggers the heater had moved in the faucet, so now we have to move the faucet toward the off position until it kicks in.  It was a miserable, shivery few weeks before he figured this out; at first we were thinking we had bought too small of a heater for the winter temperatures.  By the way, the on-demand water heater is a wondrous thing which has reduced our LP gas expenditures enormously, a truly worthwhile investment.

Please note I’m not advocating buying the cheapest thing (necessarily) — quality and durability are always worth paying for.  I’m saying get the simplest thing, the most functional item with the fewest moving/breakable parts, something which will be easy — or at least possible — to replace down the line.

And while we’re in the bathroom here,  if you’re shopping for sinks and toilets, consider the mineral content of the local water when contemplating the beautiful jewel-toned specimens available.  If there’s a lot of  lime in the water, you’ll become an eternal slave to that colorful toilet, on your knees scrubbing away with a pumice stone.  I actually learned this unhappy lesson back in Arizona, but it’s equally applicable here:  we never give those colored toilets a second glance.

There are plenty of trouble-free ways to beautify kitchens and bathrooms in Mexico — like tile for example.  But when it comes to the faucets and fixtures, keeping it simple is the way to go.

I lived in Mexico for over a year before I got up the nerve — finally driven by desperation for a perm — to visit a Mexican beauty shop.  After a year in Yucatan, where only frizz-control shampoo seemed to be available, I was nervous that the chemicals they used would fry my baby-fine hair to a crisp.

When said desperation finally prevailed, we were living in a small town in Zacatecas.  I made some inquiries about chemicals and fine hair at a shop we found, and was assured by the lady that they had chemicals suitable for my hair type.  So I returned, and submitted to my first Mexican Permanent.  And damned if it wasn’t the best permanent I’d had in years!  Many many years, in fact.  Ever since salon perms stopped working in the states, along about the nineties I think — you’d fork over a hundred bucks and the thing would last a week if you were lucky.  I remember thinking it must have been the ever-pervasive fear of lawsuits up there that led to the use of such ineffective products, and went back to doing Lilt home perms myself, until they too disappeared.

But Mexico is perm heaven, ladies and gentlemen!  I just had one done here in our tiny village and once again, it’s a winner.

The beauty shop experience south of the border is infinitely more colorful and amusing than the gringo version.  (This will probably not apply to big-city salons; I’m describing small town to village level operations.)

If  you worry about things like cooties, you might be put off.  Going to the beauty shop in Mexico is a beauty experience, not a medical experience.  Not an autoclave in sight for sterilizing the equipment between each customer.  Nor do you see combs reposing in glass jars of chemicals like body parts in a laboratory.  (I remember fondly the little courtesy hairbrush and mirror at the photo studio where I had my passport pictures done, so customers could spiff up before the photo.)

And in the waste-not, want-not spirit of Mexico, they re-use end papers here!  Sometimes, anyway.  Whether or not the end papers are previously used, you will likely be requested to hand them to the operator as she rolls your perm.   You’ll need to straighten out the used ones as well.

The chair you sit in might or might not be a special-purpose salon model.  I have sat in those, but also in straight-backed kitchen chairs and upholstered office chairs.

Towels are used sparingly.   Instead they use this ingenious U-shaped basin which fits around the neck to catch drips and which works amazingly well.

The first place I visited had a regular beauty-shop sink and a spray hose attached to the faucet.  (One sink only, mind you, not one at every station.)  The most recent place has a beauty-shop sink too, but it’s not connected to any plumbing.  This sort of obstacle would stop most gringos cold, but it means less than nothing to a Mexican intent on doing business.   When the time came to rinse, the stylist crossed the patio to her kitchen and brought hot water back in a bucket.  A 5-gallon bucket inside the sink cabinet served as drainage.  I stood over the sink and she poured the water on my head with an old yogurt container.  ¡No problema!

Other attractions may be present.  The first place I went to was graced by the presence of the sylist’s beautiful 18-month-old daughter Celeste, who would play quietly amidst the salon chairs, hairstyle magazines, and nail polish bottles.  If you speak Spanish, you’re in luck:  the art of conversation is alive and well in Mexico, and a three-hour perm can go by like nothing.   Or bring an entourage, they won’t care.

Oh, and the price is right.  My perm yesterday came in at 250 pesos for my medium-length hair,  about  ~$18 US at the current exchange rate.  Don’t forget the propina!

It looks like spring has sprung here in the Sonoran desert.  On the Alameda the poplar trees, so recently bare, have burst into leaf overnight, and the cottonwoods are raining fluffballs.  Birdies are tweeting and a million bees hum overhead.  Of course, this being March, there’s still a chance cold weather could return, but it grows more remote with each passing day.  The abruptness of the change never ceases to amaze me.  One day you’re walking around the house in sheepskin boots and three sweaters, and the next day you’re in sandals, it’s that sudden.  The sudden warmth has inspired us to expand our agricultural horizons beyond the lettuce patch on the patio and attempt to start a few herbs and vegetables from seed, given that there is no Home Depot handy for buying transplants.  Wish us luck!

Continuing on the food theme of the last post,  it occurred to me that some kinds of cookbooks are more  useful than others here in Old Mexico.  If you’re in the pre-relocation sorting stage, and you’ve got the wherewithal, as with all books, I say bring them all!  If you’re trying to weed out an overgrown collection, however, here are some points to keep in mind.

Any cookbook that relies heavily on exotic ingredients or equipment is likely to be of little use in Mexico (unless you live in a very metropolitan area).  I parted reluctantly with a Hunan cookbook before leaving and have had no reason to regret it — on the contrary, having it around now would only make me pine for its unobtainable pleasures.

Old-fashioned, basic cookbooks have proved the most useful in my experience.  The more general reference material they contain the better.  As I’ve mentioned before, cooking in most parts of Mexico involves starting with what you’ve got as opposed to dreaming up a menu and then assembling it.  I got rid of my 1968 edition of the Larousse Gastronomique because it was so large and heavy, and regretted it so much I actually found another copy (in worse condition) on Amazon and replaced it.  I also regret getting rid of my old Joy of Cooking, although I won’t be replacing that one.  I don’t remember ever actually making a recipe from the Joy of Cooking, but all those tables about cooking times and how long stuff will keep in the freezer can really come in handy at times.

I definitely recommend bringing anything you’ve loved and used for years (for me, all my Italian and Spanish cookbooks), and  also anything of  literary interest (e.g. Elizabeth David, M.F.K. Fisher, Anthony Bourdain, etc.).

I brought a couple of Mexican cookbooks, which turned out to be a good idea, despite my worry about carrying coals to Newcastle.  I’m sorry now I got rid of my Diana Kennedy collection; her formidable scholarship would be doubly interesting now we’re living  here, in spite of  her uber-control-freak recipe format which always annoyed me so.

The one cookbook we’ve acquired since living here (besides the Larousse replacement) is a Cuban one, bought with an eye to wresting more variety out of the limited ingredients available in rural Sonora, and it has worked out very well.

As with all these decisions, when in doubt, keep it and bring it along!  If it’s a book you’re fond of, it will still be good for entertainment or nostalgia, even if you never make another recipe from it again.

If you’re a fan of Chinese food, the good news is that there are Chinese restaurants everywhere,  even in Mexico.  Even rather small towns will often boast one or two.

If you want to make your own at home, you can usually find basic Asian items in large city supermarkets.   Warning — most of the available soy sauce is pretty awful — if you see a jug of Kikkoman in Costco, grab it!  Jars of  plum sauce, oyster sauce, hoisin sauce, and kung pao are easy to find.  Once we found tofu in a tetrapak which was quite acceptable.    We’ve regularly been able to buy fresh ginger (jenjibre) at Soriana for the past year.  Ingredients for other Asian cuisines are sometimes seen, but less common.

If you live off the beaten track, you can still satisfy those Asian cravings with a combination of planning, improvisation, and keeping it simple.  For example, we’re very fond of wonton soup.  The miracle of a steaming bowl on a chilly day was recently achieved by:

Planning:  (1) Having bought ginger when we last shopped in the city (growing it would be even better and is on my to-do list).  (2) Always having soy sauce, cornstarch and sherry, the basics for Chinese food, on hand, and of course garlic.

Improvisation:  (1) Making our own wonton wrappers.  This is easily done with a pasta machine (or rolling pin) and a recipe off the internet.  (I think we bought ready-made wonton wraps once in Merida, but I can’t swear to it.)  (2)  Using pork broth left over from  another dish combined with Knorr chicken powder and water for the broth.

Keeping it simple:  Forgetting about luxuries like dried mushrooms and Napa cabbage and just using locally available green onions.

For someone who learned (perforce) to cook out of books, this way of cooking and thinking is an ongoing learning experience for me — beginning with what’s on hand and fashioning something hopefully enjoyable out of it, as opposed to dreaming up a menu and going out and buying all the stuff for it.  As with so many areas of Mexican life, it involves a whole lot more creativity and way less expense.  Although it can be frustrating at times, it seems ultimately a more sustainable and satisfying approach to doing things.

For many years I made a ritual of buying an art reproduction calendar every year at a local museum.  I’d find an artist I didn’t know well and spend the year communing with their work.  It was an enjoyable tradition which I’ve regretfully abandoned in these times of lean earnings and ~$20 art calendars.

So how’s a girl to know what day it is?  There’s always the date on the computer screen, but sometimes you need a visual representation of the month, and sometimes you want to be able to write on it.

Our first year in Mexico we lucked onto a half-price sale.  The second year, I printed calendar blanks from the computer and stuck them onto some picture we had lying around.

And then I discovered hardware store calendars.  They may not be the most attractive items in the world, but their usefulness makes up for it.  And, they’re free!  We’ve used them for two years now and they’re great.  Not only do they indicate both legal and unofficial Mexican holidays, they also show official US holidays, which comes in quite handy at times if you’re still banking or doing any business in the states.  They also show the saint associated with every single day of the year and the moon’s phases.  The one we got this year even has the day of ingress of each astrological sign.

In cities, other types of business often give away calendars as well.  Once when visiting Merida we got a calendar with a beguiling photograph of a large pig from a carnitas takeout joint.  But if you live in a rural area, hardware stores are the most reliable source of free calendars.

My apologies for the recent lack of posts here, I’ve been in the states attending to some lamentable family and business matters.  I’m home now, and will be posting again soon.  All I have to say at the moment is, ¡Viva Mexico!