Lucito
Due to the great success of last Saturday’s “Introduction to Wine” course and the lack of space to accommodate everybody who wished to participate, we opened a new date for the course this coming Saturday May 22. We still have a few available places left for it. We have a special promotion if you register with a friend, you get 10% off. All the details are HERE, or call us at 1736 9016 or 044 55 3191 2732 in the Mexico City metropolitan area.
During the course you will learn all the basic things you need to demystify the wonderful world of wine. At the end of the theoretical part of the course we do a formal tasting of 7 different wines. All the course’s material is included on a CD, including a free copy of our professional wine tasting software.
The course’s price is MN$1350 (MN$1215 if you register with a friend) and we require a MN$350 deposit to reserve your spot. Reserve now as there are only a few spaces left.
Here is a little bit of what is in store for you:
Lucito
Today when I went to prepare the meal I found some unexpected ingredients for the marinade in the back of the refrigerator. A while back Normita had bought a bottle of Torito and we only had a few little sips and it has sat unused in there. Torito is an alcoholic drink typical of Veracruz, a state in the east of the country on the Golf of Mexico coast. It is a cream of peanuts, and I quickly thought of doing something like a cross between Thai and Mexican food. Torito is very sweet so I needed to cut that to make it palatable with the fish. I also found some tamarind pulp and some fresh limes so I made a mixture of Torito with tamarind pulp and lime juice. It lacked salt and chile to balance the flavor so I added some soy sauce and some chile paste until I got a satisfactory mixture. I then put my 2 pieces of fish filet in the marinade and refrigerated for 15-20 minutes while I finished preparing the rest of the meal.
Two nice pieces of dorado filet (mahi-mahi)
The main ingredients of the marinade
I had found some large potatoes while searching for ingredients for the marinade and decided to grill them with the fish. I sliced them, and then sprinkled some salt, pepper, oregano, and olive oil on them. I like to grill them on high heat until slightly burned. They get a great flavor like that.
The potaoes ready to be grilled
We had some frozen vegetables as a second side dish, simply heated in the microwave with a bit of butter, salt, pepper, and herbes de provence on top. I grilled the fish directly on the barbecue with the potatoes and the meal turned out surprisingly tasty. I served a little bit of the reserved marinade on the fish as a light tangy sauce.
The plated dorado
Lucito
TodavÃa tenemos algunos lugares disponibles para el curso de este sábado de “Una Introducción al Vinoâ€. Tenemos una promoción especial, si te registras con un amigo recibirás un 10% de descuento. Los detalles están aquÃ.
Durante el curso aprenderán las cosas básicas que necesitan para desmitificar el maravilloso mundo del vino. Al final de la parte teórica del curso, hacemos una degustación formal de 7 vinos diferentes. Todo el material del curso está incluido en un CD, incluyendo una copia gratis de nuestro software profesional de cata.
El costo del curso es de $1,350.00 ($1315 si te registras con un amigo) y requerimos un depósito de $350.00 para reservar su lugar. Reserve ahora porque hay solamente algunos lugares disponibles.
Aquà un pequeño extracto del curso:
Lucito
We still have a few available places left for this Saturday’s “Introduction to Wine” course. We have a special promotion if you register with a friend, you get 10% off. All the details are HERE, or call us at 1736 9016 in the Mexico City metropolitan area.
During the course you will learn all the basic things you need to demystify the wonderful world of wine. At the end of the theoretical part of the course we do a formal tasting of 7 different wines. All the course’s material is included on a CD, including a free copy of our professional wine tasting software.
The course’s price is MN$1350 (MN$1215 if you register with a friend) and we require a MN$350 deposit to reserve your spot. Reserve now as there are only a few spaces left.
Here is a little bit of what is in store for you:
Lucito
The heat has yet to letup here in Mexico City and the entire region is plagued by high heat and high levels of pollution. We had planned to go out today, but neither Normita nor I have the energy to face up with the heat down the hill. I guess that it will be for another day. I thawed a nice piece of dorado or mahi-mahi today. It is sitting in the refrigerator waiting for me to decide what to do with it. Since the is minimal wind today I might do something on the barbecue. I will definitely marinate it first, in what I still have no idea as I have looked into what we have left yet. I think we have some nice large potatoes, so I guess I will grill some nice slices of potato first, and since I do not think we have anything fresh in the refrigerator I will have to used some frozen vegetables as a side dish.
I will decide the details of the meal in a short while, but first I have to go take a shower. Bacchus just passed by my office’s window and from the long smell he took and the excited way he looked at me I guess that I smell like one of the pack and he wants me to go bark at the squirrels in the trees with him. I think I will pass on the occasion and go wash off the strange smell, so that I can be taken for a human again…
Later I’ll post the details on how I prepared the dorado.
Lucito
I have not been in the kitchen since last Friday… Actually I am lying there as we were invited by some neighbors to an outdoor Mother’s Day bash on Saturday. The men were preparing various fish dishes for the Mothers and after sitting around for a while sipping wine I decided to help with the prep-work as I did not want to interfere with the cooks. The did a huge salad with octopus, battered deep fried fish filets and shrimps, deep fried fish, grilled fish, grilled stuffed fish in aluminum, dried shrimp soup and all kind of other fishy things. It was an afternoon meal and we returned home past midnight well fed and well drunk. Luckily we live walking distance from there.
Sunday was spent visiting my mother in law for Mother’s Day, which is actually on the 10th here, thus yesterday, but the family got together on Sunday instead. We had a light meal of ham and cheese sandwiches and salmon sandwiches, followed by gelatin and cake. We returned home early and yesterday was spent trying to resolve some emergencies so we really did not have much time to cook. Normita prepared a nice chicken noodle soup with chipotle this time, and with the cooked chicken breast she made the soup we had some nice chicken tostadas. For those who do not know tostadas are corn tortillas that are fried or oven baked until crisp. For the sake of healthy living we have been buying the oven baked ones for years now.
They can be used as a side dish, or as we did as the main fare. They are normally topped with a variety of things and what we did is butter them with cream, followed by a sprinkling of salt, then a layer of shredded chicken, some avocado, a bit of grated Parmesan and some Valentina hot salsa. Very nice and tasty and we had the same again today as we both had soup and chicken left. We will see what we do tomorrow depending on if we have time to go food shopping or not. Since things have been hectic for the past few weeks and we have not had time to go shopping, we may need to improvise again…
Lucito
After I wrote the previous post about inspiration I hit the kitchen directly to prepare the tomato salad as I wanted it to cool down a bit once prepared and it could do so while I took my shower. I looked into the larder and found 4 small tomatoes that were good, a small bag of olives and I collected other assorted ingredients including some fresh basil from the plant growing wildly in Normita’s office. Starting with these ingredients I assembled the salad.
The tomato salad main ingredients. Tomatos, basil, apple, and olives.
I have been doing those kinds of salads for over 25 years and I love the basic combination of tomatoes, basil, and olives. I normally prefer something like a Kalamata olives, but the only thing I found was a small bag of Spanish olive filled with peppers. They are overly salty so I rinsed them a few times in water to tame the saltiness. Assembling a salad like that is very easy, as you just make layers of ingredients starting with the thinly sliced tomatoes. Thus went it the tomatoes followed by cubed apples, sun-dried tomatoes in olive oil, shredded Oaxaca cheese, grated Parmesan cheese, the fresh basil, ground coarse salt, a fresh grind of black pepper, some balsamic vinegar, and extra virgin olive oil.
The first layer of the salad
You the build the salad layer by layer until you have no more tomatoes. The process is simple. The salad that it yields is very tasty and I like to return it to the refrigerator for a while so the flavors gets well blended and that it gets very cold. I like fresh tomatoes to be very cold. I remember in another life when I was young and handsome, that often during the hottest part of summer when I was working on afternoon shifts from 2pm to 7pm. Before I left for work I would prepare a similar salad to that one with Kalamata olives and feta cheese to keep with the Greek olives, and I would put it in the refrigerator and eat it when I returned home after work. By that time it was ice cold like I like it and the flavors were blended to perfection.
The assembled tomato salad before I put it in the refrigerator
Once the salad was ready I put it in the refrigerator, did the dishes, and I then hit the showers. We sat down and relaxed a bit in front of an electric fan as it is still like a furnace in here. We had this cold refreshing and tasty salad and all of the problems of this stressful weeks we just went through just disappeared.
The plated tomato salad ready to eat
When we sat down to eat Normita reminded me that I had forgotten to put some walnuts in the salad, so I added a handful of them in each of our plates over the salad. It made a nice addition to the salad.
Lucito
The heat wave that has hit central Mexico in the past week has debilitated us completely. People think about Mexico as a very hot place with beaches and jungles, but actually here in the center of the country the average temperature is nice and pleasant all year long without any extremes of heat and cold. You have to remember that the center of Mexico is a very high altitude plateau and that Mexico City is at around 7500 feet and where we live is closer to 8200 feet. We even have an active volcano within 25 miles that is close to 18000 feet, the Popocatépetl. Thus we are accustomed to temperatures in the mid-70’s at midday almost all year long, and when it raises to over 90F our systems do not cope with it. I am from Quebec where I was used to extremes of temperature from -45F in the winter to over 95F and humid in the summer, but after living here for over 7 years you lose your adaptation to those extremes.
What does that has to do with inspiration? I have been cooking since I was a little kid when I started baking cookies with my grandmother when I was probably 4-5 years old. Being in a kitchen are amongst some of my earliest memory, and I have a sense of piece and accomplishment when I am working in the kitchen. I am used to the extreme heat of a working kitchen, but when I sit in my office trying to accomplish some work, concentrate on something, or plan what we will eat next and it is over 95F like it is now, my inspiration dies instantly with my transpiration. When you are in the eat of the kitchen you have a task and a goal, and you concentrate to reach it no matter how uncomfortable you get. Here in the office I am slowly dripping bit by bit to the floor, and creating a big puddle under my chair.
Yesterday we did not publish a Daily Express column as Normita was out at a school event with our nieces, and she had something to eat there. It was so hot that I did not even eat anything as I was not hungry. When Normita returned we decided to wait until it cooled down at night and see what we would eat. By 9pm we finally relented and went to eat something and she had the little bit of leftover chicken salad, and I had cold leftover rice from earlier in the week or last weekend. We had a few bites and that was it.
We both woke up starving and had some of the nice banana bread I baked earlier in the week and a nice grapefruit. Now it is getting late again and I have no real inspiration to prepare anything. The heat is not helping, but the fact that it is so hot up here that we do not have the energy to drive down the hill to the store where it must be over 110F in the sun is killing my creativity. Since we did not go shopping we have nothing fresh in the refrigerator. I looked around in there for inspiration earlier, and found a large moldy onion that was starting to sprout, a few old tomatoes, some limp radishes, and some potatoes. Not a great source of inspiration for a great meal.
As I am sitting here I am wondering what I will finally prepare and at least I do not have to prepare a “Menu du Jour” for a restaurant today, as I would simply tell people that the kitchen is closed for the day. I am sure I will figure out something in time. Normita is currently in the shower to refresh herself and I will go do the same soon. After that, refreshed, I am sure that the inspiration will come. Even just thinking of cooling down is helping a bit.
Let’s see… Since I have nothing fresh except those tomatoes, what could I do with them? If they are still firm and nice maybe just a simple tomato salad. Sliced ice-cold tomatoes with some fresh basil, bits and pieces of nuts, some olives, cheese, a sprinkling of olive oil and balsamic vinegar, and whatever else the inspiration brings when I get into the kitchen.
See? It was not that difficult. When I cook for ourselves or invent new recipes I let inspiration direct me. Cooking for others is a different thing as some experiments are better left behind the kitchen’s door. Do you hear that, young chefs of the world who are dying to cook something different? There are some reasons that after thousands and thousands of years that some things are not combined in strange ways that are not pleasant. Probably millions of chef trying to do something different tried those combination and found out it did not work, and left it at that…
Sorry about the digression, I did not want to turn this into a rant. Getting back to the title of this post, I found my inspiration just by focusing on this post and letting my mind drift away from the heat, and something interesting came out of it and hopefully the tomatoes in the fridge will be nice enough for what I have roughly planned for them. If not I will be mighty disappointed and there will probably be another post about it…
One last word, as strange as this may sound I actually just planned today’s meal as I was writing this using a technique I developed when I was still a kid. It is somewhat related to directed dreaming, where you focus your mind on something and let your subconscious work the details out. It is a great method to find inspiration and also to find solutions to complex problems. I normally do it very differently, but since I wanted to post about finding inspiration I decided to try the method in finding a solution to my dilemma while I posted about it. It did work remarkably well and if people are interested in hearing more about this technique please let me know and I will elaborate more.
Until then, the shower awaits me and after that it will be the kitchen…
Lucito
Estamos orgullosos de anunciar una nueva fecha para nuestro curso Una Introducción al vino en el área de la ciudad de México.
El curso se llevará a cabo el dÃa 15 de mayo, 2010, los detalles están disponibles AQUÃ. Durante el curso aprenderán las cosas básicas que necesitan para desmitificar el maravilloso mundo del vino. Al final de la parte teórica del curso, hacemos una degustación formal de 7 vinos diferentes. Todo el material del curso está incluido en un CD, incluyendo nuestro software profesional de cata.
El costo del curso es de $1,350.00 y requerimos un depósito de $350.00 para reservar su lugar. Reserve pronto ya que los lugares están limitados.
Aquà un pequeño extracto de lo está reservado para usted:
Por cierto, este curso será en español, pero si existe demanda también puedo impartir este curso y todos mis cursos y conferencias en inglés o francés. También puedo viajar alrededor del mundo o a su localidad para dar mis clases y conferencias en una variedad de temas. Por favor contácteme directamente para más información.
Lucito
We are proud to announce a new date for our Introduction to Wine course in the Mexico City area. The course will be held on May 15th and all the details are available HERE. During the course you will learn all the basic things you need to demystify the wonderful world of wine. At the end of the theoretical part of the course we do a formal tasting of 7 different wines. All the course’s material is included on a CD, including our professional wine tasting software.
The course’s price is MN$1350 and we require a MN$350 deposit to reserve your spot. Reserve early as spaces are limited.
Here is a short excerpt of what is in store for you:
BTW, this course will be in Spanish, but if there is a demand for it I can also give this course and all my courses and conferences in English or French. I can also travel worldwide to your locality to give classes and conferences on a variety of subjects. Please contact me directly for more information.
Lucito