Now I'm _really_ back. Echoing my May itinerary, I did a full North American tour in a week, swapping my bag of sweaty tank tops and sandals for leather pants and a wool sweater and heading up north to Montreal.
Category: Food
Two great tastes…
Malt and coffee. About a year ago I had an espresso malted milkshake in San Fran, at a hipster ice cream shop, and it was about the most genius thing I'd ever drunk.
Pitayas
A pile of pitayas (aka dragonfruit). Split them open and they're pure white flecked with tiny black seeds. If you blend the pulp into a drink, the seeds are magically suspended, which looks very sci-fi.
Panuchos
The best road food ever: a panucho from the bus station in Felipe Carrillo Puerto.
At the live poultry store 1
At the live poultry store 2
At the live poultry store 3
What I Ate
Oh yeah, today at a cheery little cafeteria in Cancun: big oval quesadillas of thick, chewy corn tortillas filled with 1) sauteed squash blossoms and 2) huitlacoche, aka white-trash truffles, that corn fungus that's all black and tastes like bacon.
Julia!
First the Froog, and now Julia Child dies! I didn’t learn as much from her as others have, because I didn’t ever really see her TV show, but I did appreciate that she always had a nice soft stick of butter sitting around, and drank wine while she cooked. And I can’t really imagine the benighted pre-Julia era of American food, though my father has occasionally spoken of those dark days when there weren’t even fresh mushrooms in the grocery stores.
I feel a little like when the old country music greats started kicking off–first Tennessee Ernie Ford, then Waylon Jennings, then Johnny Cash. It’s all downhill from here. Shit.
I imagine that all over the country tonight, people will be cooking tribute meals to Julia and toasting her, maybe even ritually dropping turkeys on the floor. Oh, I feel so sad.
Mexico, ho!
Part of the reason I'm not writing much as that I'm prepping for another short-notice trip to Mexico. Frantically trying to finish current book so I can get started on another book. Happily, I feel like I'm over the hump in terms of terrible hotels to visit, so maybe this trip will be more leisurely...Didn't I say that last time?