los dos cooking

We found an apartment! Yay, its not the most wonderful thing in the world, it has a live electric cable to heat the shower … so we will only be having cold showers for the next 3 weeks or so! But we have a kitchen, double bed, dining table, sofa and air con in a gated and safe building. Next door is an American girl who has been living and teaching here for the last year and seems quite nice and makes us feel better about the place. It is also really central to town so will be handy for various trips to the archaeological sites, cenotes, caves, flamingo beaches etc etc. We don’t have the internet here but we can get it free in one of the many near-by plazas so we are still very contactable!

We did our first real ‘activity’ in Merida yesterday! It was great fun. It was a cooking course at the Los Dos school of Yucatan cooking. It was run by an American chef who basically took an early retirement here having renovated his beautiful central hacienda. The course was really personal, there were only 6 of us, and was within his house. He gave us a big talk about the history of food in the Yucatan, The Mayan influences, the Europeans ones and stuff, then took us out to the market to buy all our ingredients. So now, we have some sort of an idea about what to buy there, and from which stalls! Then we went back and got cooking! Some Mayan ladies taught us how to make proper, fresh salbutes and panuchos which are kind of a cross between pitta bread pockets and tacos/nachos (made of corn meal!). For this we made various dips, notably one made from the hottest chilli in the world (habanero chilli) which is 350000 scoville heat units! We were both very brave and gave it a try. He asked us to try and describe the flavour like we would for a fine wine … the other couples said really evocative words like ‘woody’ ‘grassy’ ‘tender’ … Adam boldly and very Britishly said ‘bloody hot!’. Then we made a three course Yucatan meal with all the ingredients we’d bought from the market (which he had paid for of course). I tell you, the food was incredible! The chicken we spiced, and wrapped in a banana leaf before cooking them in a make-shift pib. A pib is a pit in the ground that it is traditional to use as an oven. We didn’t desecrate his beautiful solar though, we mimicked the pib by smoking wood in a big sealed casserole pot lined with foil! But it made it so deliciously tender! Oo, for pudding we had corn sorbet which sounds gross but was actually really good, it tasted almost like a really rich vanilla one. The other couples were really nice, both American (we are yet to meet any other British travellers yet) and we might meet up with them again on Saturday at a big street parade on the main route into the centre. What is really great about this city is that they don’t seem to have any qualms about shutting off major roads to traffic. It makes it such a cultural and bustling place. There is also a really high police presence so it feels really safe.
cya later (we may put some archaeology in soon?!)