We finally arrived back home after a day’s delay. Our flight was overbooked and we had to take a later flight a day later. We spent most of the day on Thursday at the airport waiting for flight status, until our travel agent told us to go to a nearby hotel and wait there overnight. There were only two Internet terminals in the entire airport and both were out of order. I managed to get online a few times on them, and found out when we arrived at the hotel that my laptop had finally expired.

The evening was salvaged by a great meal at a very nice Thai/Chinese restaurant next door to the hotel. We had some light Cantonese style food with a few pots of tea, as we did not want to indulge in spicy Sechuan or Thai food just before spending a day in airports and airplanes. It had been a while that I had a decent Chinese meal in a restaurant instead of at home.

Yesterday morning we were at the airport at 3am and were finally on our way to arrive home around 2pm local time. It was a great trip that permitted us to visit family and friends and to eat way too much on the way. We’ll take the day to catch up with life and unpack, and will resume regular postings tomorrow. Have a wonderful weekend and lets start planning the next great meal together.

Lucito

As most of you must have noticed, the posting has been extremely light over the past few weeks. We had planned to post daily while we were away visiting the family in Canada, but circumstances beyond our control prevented us to do so. Everything from lack of time, minor family crisis, to technical problems with a broken laptop preventing us to connect to the Internet prevented us from updating the site. We are packing our bags today and we should be back home by tomorrow afternoon so regular posting should resume by Friday. We wish you all the best for the New Year and may the Gods of Food and Wine be on your side and make your bellies full.

Lucito

Normita and I wish you the best for Christmas and we are very sorry for not posting any updates in the past few days. We have been very busy with family matters and we will try to resume posting by next week. Have a great time and we will be back with lots of new recipes and interesting news soon.

Lucito y Normita

Posting will be light for the next day or two as I am not in the office these days with access to all my resources. Hopefully things should go back to normal by tomorrow once this hectic period will be over. Until then enjoy yourselves and don’t party too too much.

Lucito

Sorry for the light posting in the last few days. Our Padrino Kurtito was visiting from Vienna for a few days and we were very busy discussing serious business matters until late at night and forcing ourselves to taste a lot of tequila, but just for professional purposes, of course…

The Padrino is leaving at the end for the afternoon so I will get back to business shortly. Later in the day, if I can manage to finish catching up with work, I should be posting a new recipe. In the meantime here is a nice picture of the lentil soup from recipe that we posted last week.

Lucito

We are finally back online after over a month of fun getting things ready in the office. We decided to move the blog from our Blogger account to our in-house server on a new website we are in the process of designing. The transition did not go as smoothly as planned as we were busy at the beginning of the month with family visiting from Canada for a few days, and then we were plagued by a series of hardware problems one after another. First my main monitor blew up on me, then the server started freezing intermittently due to a failing power supply, it stabilized for a while then started freezing again so I changed the guts of the system and it seems to work more smoothly now. Let’s hope that things will now go well so that we do not have any further problems with the hardware.

As you should have noticed we extensively redesigned the blog and the host site. This is a first draft and we will make some further refinements over the next few weeks once we have time to settle comfortably into this new home.

While things were going crazy in the last month we also had put a halt in the development of the recipe viewer and other features we plan to add to the site. There was just not enough time in the day to work on the blog, redesign the site, do our regular work, and attend to all the problems with the hardware. Things should be a little less hectic in the coming weeks so that we will have to move forward instead of backward with all the new projects.

Keep an eye on the blog as we will try to start posting daily starting today. Normita had finally written a short introduction a few weeks back, and I am now trying to convince our Padrino in Vienna to introduce himself and start posting interesting stories from Europe.

A lot of new things will soon be ready, so stick with us and enjoy the fun.

Lucito

Hola, I am Normita, finally I had the time to write a little introduction about myself as Luc had mention to you a while ago. As Luc said I am his Mexican wife, we have been married almost 5 years on November 25th, during this time we have had very happy times and some very hard time too but I have learnt that all of this is part of the life experience.

Luc and I met through the Internet, one day I was with my friend Lety who wanted to find somebody on the Internet but on that time she did not know how to use Internet so she asked me to do it for her.

I decided to research on the internet and I found a page in which I had to subscribe to know the way it was working so I could teach my friend how to use it so I navigated through that page and I reach into a place where you could search the kind of person you would like to meet.

On that occasion I search for a man that would meet my requirements and I found Luc.

I decided to write him a message in which I was introducing myself, I thought that he would never answered me, as I was not trusty on these kind of things, but I had a big surprise the next day, I had a message from him on my yahoo account.

Inside of me I felt very happy because I had a very happy feeling with him since the first day he wrote me, I liked a lot the way he wrote, I think I fell in love with him since he asked me if I wanted to share his keyboard with him. Since then we have been together at first through the Internet and later married. This happened about 8 year ago and this has been the best adventure I have had in my entire life.

When I met Luc I used to work for an Investment Company (Pioneer International) as an administrator, on that time I was really happy with my job as I had the chance to reach many of goals in my career. I had the chance to travel through Europe on that time too and I will confess you something; when I arrived to Italy to a little town called Padua I met the tomb of Saint Antonio of Padua, everybody said that Saint Antonio was very miraculous to find a couple, so I decided to ask him to send me a good man to share the rest of my life. I can tell you that it really worked because three months later I found Luc my beautiful and lovely husband.

I could tell you lots of stories about our life together but I think I would never finish writing them, so the only thing I can tell you is that with Luc I found my happiness.

Actually I am working in a Canadian company, of course, Canadian Education Centre, in which I am a counselor and my main job is to organize the events for the Centre. This job has been another challenge for me in my career as my new activities are totally different from the activities I used to do in my other job but I love it and it has given me the chance to meet a lot of nice people.

In this space that Luc has created for us I plan to share with you some of my Mexican recipes and other surprises I will prepare to share with you with the help of Luc and my padrino Kurt. I will talk to you later. Normita Carreño de Paquin (on the Mexican way).

A lot of people tell me that they always are having problems coming up with new things to cook. This is a common problem for most of us, and when I was involved in the food business day to day I found that even professional feels the same a lot of the time. I cannot count the number of times when chefs confessed to me that they had problems completing a new menu due to lack of inspiration. The worst thing to do is to get into a routine, with pre-planned meals always on the same days. That totally kills inspiration. Since we have moved here to Mexico a few years back I have tended to suffer from the same problem for two reasons. First the kitchen in the small condo where we used to live was very small and it was a real pain to do any type of cooking, so I tended to enjoy it a lot less. Luckily the new place is still small but we organized it to make cooking fun. Second, and most important, due to our schedule in recent times we used to go food shopping only once a week, and this was normally on weekends when things were very crowded. It is difficult to enjoy food shopping when you cannot get to the food. That was compounded with not having any decent shopping in our area and no car to move around. Luckily the new place has lots of decent shopping nearby and a large street market (tianguis) once a week with a huge amount of fresh produce. Normita tends to be extremely organized and likes to plan things ahead. I am at the opposite and I have no idea what I will feel like eating tonight, let alone next Friday. I have found that the best way to get out of a food rut is to go food shopping either daily or every few days. In a way it might be a pain to do so, but it creates an environment that is conductive for variety. When I used to do this on a regular basis, we had something different on the table every day. Normita used to ask me what I planned to cook, and I could not tell her until we looked at available fresh ingredients. I like to look at fresh produce, meat, fish, poultry, etc. and what looks appetizing changes every day. I get inspiration from what is available when we shop, and at times you find new things that you have no idea how to prepare, and then I normally spend a short time on the Internet researching the background on a specific new product. I then try to improvise something in the style I am in the mood for that day. I rarely follow a recipe, but normally get inspired by a few of them, then add something based on my own experience. In this way ideas tend to be fresh and inspiration always challenged. Another important point is that it is always good to have reliable favorite dishes and the main ingredient to make them at hand, so when somebody drops by unexpectedly or you do not feel inspired due to time or mood, you have something reliable to cook. An example of this is that lazy mushroom pasta recipe I posted recently. We always have dried pasta, cans of mushrooms, and a jar of tomato sauce in the larder. In this way we are always ready to make that dish if we do not have anything else handy. One of the most rewarding pleasures of cooking is to look for new things and experiment with them. Also the sight of fresh products in a good market always inspire me to try something new, or something old in a different way. The next time you ask yourself ‘what are we going to eat today?’, either make one of your old standbys that you have all the ingredients at hand, or go food shopping with an open mind and see what inspires you. Try to experiment with something new, or a variation of an old favorite recipe with whatever ingredients that inspires you that day. Lucito

The last few days were busy with work here, so posting has been light. We managed to relax a bit on Sunday, a first after many months of craziness, and the last few days have been very busy with programming work in the office. Over the weekend we also managed to baptize the new kitchen and we prepared great dishes. Those recipes will be up shortly. For now we will not be posting pictures of the cooking process as we planned. The digital camera just died on us and I need to research what is available on the local market and do some shopping for a new one.

While preparing the recipes for posting I decided to try to standardize the format so postings will be consistent from the start. I still have a bit of refining to do before the format is final. I’m waiting for input on this from a few people. In the coming weeks I will also start posting links to downloadable recipe files that I will host on our internal server. These file will be in a format that will permit easy recipe exchange, and at the same time I will release a free recipe viewer that I am currently building. This will permit people to view and exchange recipes easily as well as search them and do various other things. We will keep updating it to add features and also permit submission of recipes to enhance interactivity on the site. More on that as the development progress…

I will call it quits early tonight so that we can catch up on some relaxation. We have been going non-stop for the last few years and we really need a break. We plan to take some extended weekends off over the next few months so that we can recharge the batteries, and also to give us time to work on some new features for the site and try and enjoy some great recipes.

Lucito

Some people are glad that Friday rolls along, but this week I am very happy that it is finally Saturday. It was a very busy one and I just noticed that I did not post for a few days as I ended up finishing work around 11pm the last 2-3 days. Of course I am still planning to work today as Normita is away again for the day at a trade show for her work. This leaves me with the fun tasks of either catching up on household chores, or doing some work in the office. Knowing myself I will probably end up doing a bit of both…

We were supposed to get the last of our furniture on Wednesday evening, but, of course, the carpenter building them called us to let us know that the last coat of varnish was not drying quickly enough. He would deliver on Thursday at 9am, which ended up being Thursday at 3pm. Don’t you like wasting your time waiting for trades people?

In any case we ended up getting our furniture and we set things up nicely on Thursday night, including the new aquarium, and last night we transferred the boys to their new home. They spent the evening swimming along madly as they now had 5 times the space to do so, compared to their old home. This morning they are at it again, so I assume that they will get in great shape from the extra exercise. I wish I was so lucky…

We will probably post some of the first recipes to the site this weekend as we will finally have time to really cook for the first time since we moved here. Our philosophy is that we do not want to post recipes that we have not recently done in our kitchen. Most of them are originals that are favorites of ourselves and our friends, and others are some that we have adapted over the years.

This is mainly for two reasons. First I do not believe that simply posting things that you find on the Internet as your own is fair, so how can people trust us if we do not actually cook and eat the stuff we present here. Like our dear friend Kurt always says, ‘I do not trust a chef who does not eat his own food, or that is too thin!’.

Second, I have a tendency to not measure much when I cook, and even for recipes of mine I need to double-check on the exact quantities as I rarely follow even my own written recipes. This is where doing all the recipes with Normita comes handy, as she will be able to keep an eye on me, take notes, and make sure that what we finally post will thoroughly reflects the way we cook. More on that and other things later today…

Lucito