After a couple of weeks in the interior of the Yucatan, where everyone comes up to my shoulder, Cancun was a bit of a shock. Enormous people everywhere, strolling hand in hand, necking on the beach, clambering on and off buses.
Tag: turkeys
Winding down
Tonight's my last night--back in the old favorite Playa del Carmen. Not the greatest beach town, but certainly not the worst, and the array of the Italian tourists' bathing suit styles and depths of tans is quite impressive.
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.
If It’s Worth Doing, It’s Worth Overdoing, or It Takes a Village to Roast a Pig (and a Lamb)
Who knew roasting a whole pig--plus a whole lamb, just for the heck of it--could be so easy? Well, aside from the creeping anxiety of spectacular failure beforehand, and the running around collecting weird bits of metal, and the blinding, acrid mesquite smoke the night of...it was pretty easy.