Before Google Maps

We drove with our family to Tucson and then on to Sonora on the northwest coast of Mexico. We had booked a hotel in Guaymas. Both the small hotel and the town looked like they had been popular in the 50’s. The hotel was great looking, in an old world sort of way. But it wasn’t the 50’s anymore. As far as we could tell, there was only one other room booked besides ours.

We went out the first night looking for a highly touted restaurant. We tried to follow the directions in our guidebook.

We got lost. Very lost. We saw parts of Guaymas that were not exactly tourist attractions. We tried to be very upbeat with our children.

Finally, we spotted a small building with a sign that said “Policia”. We went inside, armed with our high school Spanish. A beautiful, young female police officer was there, armed with what I assume was her high school English. After playing charades and finding a few words in our dictionary, she got on the phone.

What followed was a rapid-fire string of Spanish, of which I caught nothing – except for two words – ‘gringos” and “perdidos”. Lost foreigners. That pretty much summed it up.

Then she said, “Wait here.”

We waited.

A pickup truck arrived with two men in the front and four more in the back. One of the men spoke English.  “We explained where we were staying and that we had gotten lost looking for a particular restaurant. We gave him the name of the restaurant.

“Follow me,” he said.

We followed the pickup as it wound its way back. We realized we were almost back at our hotel and not at the highly touted restaurant.

The pickup stopped just short of our hotel. There was a small establishment about a hundred yards from our hotel, more like a food stand than a restaurant. It had plastic tent-like coverings around the tables. But it was clean and neat.

“There is your hotel,” the police man pointed. “You can eat here.” He pointed to the little restaurant.

What was this? We thought that he obviously didn’t want to deal with the perdidos gringos any more. Or maybe he was part owner of this place. Had he misunderstood us?

But we weren’t really in a position to negotiate, so we thanked him very much and dutifully went into the little place to eat.

The food was fantastic! It was the best meal we had during our entire trip. In fact, later when we got our bearings and were able to navigate our way around town, we found the highly touted restaurant. It wasn’t nearly as good as the little place right next to our hotel.

Blogging

I’m writing this blog. You may wonder why. I do too.

Apparently not many people read the thousands of blogs out there. I certainly don’t. Occasionally, I will read one for a recipe or a household tip. But stories about people’s lives, spare me. I’m too busy reading my favorite authors.

I like to write… Yet I’m entirely too lazy to map out a novel and work on it for years. I’m also too lazy to send out endless query letters and write articles that may or may not be accepted. With the whole publishing thing, one has to write to a particular audience, and I don’t want to do that. So add a little anti-establishment tendency to the laziness factor and voila! – I am a blogger.

I figure that these days a writer like me who blogs is equivalent to a singer who sings in the shower. There are probably some very talented shower singers out there. I would probably enjoy listening to some of them. They sing for the pure joy of singing. Then they get out, get dressed and go to their day jobs. I am similar.  I can sit in my home with a cup of tea, write into the void of the blogosphere, then shut down my computer and go to my day job.

Sometimes these shower singers try out for American Idol or the Voice and end up having a career. Others are happy to sing for their family and friends. In the same way, sometimes bloggers end up writing books and having successful careers. Others are happy to be read by their family and friends.

I’d like to be able to write like Jane Austen, G K Chesterton, Alexander McCall Smith and David McCullough all rolled into one. Since that might be a tiny bit unattainable, I think my goal is to have fun and enjoy writing.

Meanwhile, I can practice on you. And then ten years from now when I get ready to start my great novel, you’ll have been along for the ride. You’ll have heard some of the songs from behind the shower curtain.

 

 

Culinary Offerings

For a number of years, I worked in rural England at a study center (or centre, I suppose I could say). Part of my job entailed preparing meals for international students.  Most of the students wanted to try new foods from other countries. I attempted dishes from many different global cuisines, many times with the help of the students from those countries, but sometimes on my own.

I had not done much cooking before I started that job. I did not know, for instance, that what seemed like a massive amount of kale would cook down to such a tiny, little dollop on the plate. Or that an English pint is a different amount than an American pint. The first meals I made had some deficiencies. I am grateful to those students who were experimented upon and who did not turn upon me.

At one point, I attempted Welsh Rarebit. This is a Brittish dish akin to a fondue, made with cheese and mustard in a bechamel sauce. It was a flop. Something happened to the sauce to make it a harder than it should be. I had people at my table waiting for dinner. What was I going to do? Well, it was an international group. And the sauce was edible, even tasty, but just not of the consistency it was supposed to have. I brought out the meal. “We are having Tennessee rarebit,” I said with a straight face. “It is a Southern American cheese dish.”

Another time something happened to the bread I was making. It rose initially, but I was called away with some sort of emergency. I tried to salvage it before dinnertime and cooked it anyway since the shops were far away and would be closed. It was flat. Not really so different from Indian naan, but not Indian naan. “North Carolina flatbread.” A little North Carolina flatbread actually goes along with a stew very nicely.

I found that by renaming a dish and resetting expectations, I was sometimes able to get by if the food itself was acceptable. But one time this was impossible. In multiplying a recipe, I accidentally used a number of tablespoons of chili powder instead of a lesser number of teaspoons of chili powder. At dinner I looked up to see the students in tears and going for their water glasses. Then I tasted the dish. It made me cry. It was the hottest thing I have ever eaten. I told the students my theory of renaming a dish. We laughed and had fun coming up with names for it: dragon’s breath pie and sinus clearing casserole. We ate a lot of bread that night and I got out some nut butter and cheese to make it a meal.

As time went on, I was able to improve my culinary skills and more consistently produce foods that tasted more or less as they should. I learned to make pastas and pizzas, crepes and curries, sushi and shortbread, dumplings and dolmathes. But sometimes I think about sitting down with a nice piece of North Carolina flatbread and some Tennessee rarebit.