The salsa that we use the most here is Chile de Amor (Chile of Love) and it’s imported from the states! Free trade indeed.
Lately I’ve noticed a lot of products in our house come from Cincinnati, from manufacturers like Proctor and Gamble, or Kroger. We have playing cards that are printed/distributed in Cincy, and who knows what else, but it makes me smile inside that the east coast has made it over here to the west coast, and eventually Mexico. Another thing that reminded me of home unexpectedly was a running mag with an advert for the marathon at Wright-Patt. (aside: I knew they had races at Wright-Patt, I knew there were sweet airplane flyovers sometime in fall. I did not connect the dots.)
TWO EGG STORIES!
One is comedic, and one is tragic…
Tragic first: M-, 19, needs to learn some life skills, so I took her to the store with 6 dollars (60 pesos) so that she could pick out items to cook for a meal. She had decided to cook her six “sisters” and I scrambled eggs with hot dogs and potatoes cut up inside them, to be served with tortillas. Yummy! Even though she didn’t have enough money to buy the potatoes, I thought she bought enough for us to eat well. 10 eggs, 35 tortillas, 5 hot dogs, and one bottle of oil with which to cook it. When we got home, she cooked, and I didn’t oversee. I had already done what I had thought was the hard part- making her shop for herself. Our trip to the store included her asking me “do I have enough money for this? Do I pay?”, not asking the meat man anything, instead just asking me “do they have hot dogs?” while my reply was “I don’t know, look in the glass case! Or ask that guy, he works here!” and other really thought provoking things. I made her do math in her head (addition/subtraction) 6 separate times, oh my! So…We sat down to eat, and there was a pitiful amount of food on the table, well, 3x more fruit salad than the main course. There was no way it would feed 7 people! She saw the look on my face and quickly explained, “one of the eggs was bad.” The countertop still had 5 eggs, and 3 hot dogs. Uncooked. Unchopped up. Unserved. She had planned to save it to cook for a different meal?!? After her “do I HAVE to cook all of it?” and the look on my face
she did cook the rest of the food we had purchased, and our bellies were happy.
Saturday she is making chicken flautas, we already bought the chicken. She wanted to make something else so she took charge at the store today, (and while it’s admirable that she talked to the meat man herself this time!), she ended up with a bag of choice cut meat at $11.40, when she only had $10 and hadn’t bought any other ingredients, nor was it enough meat for all of us. She hadn’t asked how much it was per Kilo, nor looked at the price after he stuck the sticker on the bag. So that was embarrassing for her.
The odd part for me about all of this, is that I don’t remember my mother making me chose food on a budget, plan a meal, or try to teach me the value of money. I wish this was one of those things that children learned instinctively.
Comic: YOU HAVE TO READ THIS ONE. We had boiled eggs at breakfast on Tuesday. One of the girls, 8, decided to save a boiled egg as a snack for school. She told me, and I said it was ok. 10 minutes later she comes running to me, freaking out about how someone smashed her egg. Turns out, she had put it in the pocket of her corduroy skirt. Not a regular sized pocket, a coin sized pocket that shouldn’t hold things larger than quarters, but somehow, fit this hard-boiled egg. We had to turn her pocket inside out to get the egg out. I had thought it was going to be easy to pull it out, 2 or 3 pieces. Boy was I wrong. It crumbled out of that pocket like a fine feta cheese. Then she was upset that she had to change her skirt, but we weren’t going to let her start smelling like rotten egg half way through the day. I laughed so much, I hurt her already fragile ego.
Won scrabble once, and lost scrabble once this week. Not bad odds. Please play scrabble with me when I come visit home!!!
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