I have now lived in Mexico for a little over 9 years and, honestly, I am running out of new things to post. There are only so many times I can post about Christmas, Easter, Mexican culture, daily village life, etc., etc., so I will be starting to write about other aspects of life in general. And given that I can be long-winded, I will probably break this up into two or three posts
I’ll begin with expanding your horizons through chance meetings with strangers. Many years ago, on one of my flights, I met a Danish-American woman and we had a very nice conversation. She told me about the Danish American Society and how the town of Rebild, Denmark holds the only authentic American Independence Day celebration outside of the United States. I was intrigued by this and vowed one day to attend.
Fast forward to 2018, and I would be going on a trip with my granddaughter Brenna. I asked her parents’ permission to include the 4th of July on our trip. Permission granted. And so we spent that 4th of July in Denmark, with celebrations over several days, ending with a fancy dinner and fireworks over the water in Aalborg (I believe). We met many wonderful people and tried the Danish cuisine – except for hot dogs and hamburgers on the 4th.
We also learned a lot about the history of Denmark in general and Rebild in particular.
stairway in the very health-conscious hoteldrinking song. Every so often, we would start singing and then take a swallow of Akvavit – heavily flavored with anise
The people we met were surprised that we have not a drop of Danish blood, and they wondered how we had come to be there. I explained to them how I had met a Danish woman on one of my trips and that is how we learned about the festival and decided to come,
For my second meeting-with-strangers story, last month I went to visit my son in the U.S. While waiting at the gate to board, I sat next to a woman who needed to charge her phone. I offered the use of my portable charger, and we began talking. As it turned out, she was the author Norma Alicia Gallegos.
Throughout her life, she had become progressively deaf and wrote a book about it – “Voces en el Silencio, Pensamientos de Amor” (Voices in the Silence, Thoughts about Love). It is also available in English – I’m not sure if it is available in other countries in other languages.
She has also co-written with two other women a book titled “Resilientes” (Resilient). The three women tell their histories each one dealing with her individual challenges. I would recommend this book to anyone facing serious challenges.
I would recommend Voices in the Silence to anyone who is experiencing, or knows someone who is experiencing, various degrees of hearing loss. And while I am promoting books, I would also recommend a book I am currently reading – “A Heart that Works” by Rob Delaney. He tells in great and honest detail the story of their lives after his one-year-old son Henry was diagnosed with a brain tumor. I would recommend this book for anyone working in hospice or any person who is dealing with a serious illness of a child. I learned about this book when I was listening to interview he gave online.
So I think I will end this post here, as I don’t want it to be overly long and become boring. More in the next post about expanding your horizons. Take care.
Five years ago, I decided to try my hand at making chocolate. I had read that it takes a cacao tree five years to produce cacao, so five years ago I planted two trees. One tree is still not able to produce and I believe it is because it has been fighting against my banana trees to access sunlight, but the other tree is strong and now producing many pods of cacao, so I am now documenting my first efforts to make chocolate from tree to table.
Unripe cacao pods
To prepare myself, I studied many articles and watched many videos about the process. There are so many methods depending on the quantity of cacao seeds, the equipment you use, what type of chocolate you plan to produce. As a result, I put together a pick-and-choose plan, combining what I thought could produce a good chocolate using the whole pod, from seeds to pulp to husk because I wanted it to be as pure as possible while eliminating wasting the pulp and husk.
When the cacao first forms, it is a small, green pod which eventually grows to its full size and then changes to an orange color. Literature says when you shake the pod it isn’t ripe until you can hear the seeds rattle when you shake it. This was difficult, since the stem connecting it to the tree branch was short and the pod was growing in between two branches and basically stuck there. I did my best at deciding when to harvest it and am still not sure it was ripe enough. But there was no bad smell, so I don’t think it was overripe.
The next step was to open it without cutting the seeds, which I did.
One article said that the seeds taste a bit like pineapple. I ate one of the seeds and the article was correct – it did taste a bit like pineapple. The article also said that the juice is 14% sugar, and by distilling it down to form a highly concentrated syrup, “combined with the pulp and then taking sustainability to new levels, mixed with the dried husk, or endocarp” forms a very sweet cocoa gel which, when combined with the cacao beans, eliminates the need for refined sugar.
This is what I was hoping to accomplish.
What I did was put the seeds in a small dish of water to wash off the thick white coating from the seeds. Then I cut the pulp from the husk and used a garlic press to try to extract the liquid from it. That didn’t work very well. In the end, I put the water with seed coating into a saucepan along with the pressed pulp and heated it on my stove. I didn’t end up with a gel, but I figured that the sugar content was still there, and I would add it to the finished product.
In the meantime, the literature said to dry the husk in an oven at 80ºC (176ºF) for 18 hours. I was not going to run my oven for 18 hours, and since it’s still very hot here, I put the pieces of husk on my outdoor drying table in the sun, covering them with plastic during the night to avoid the humidity. The literature also says to mill it to a fine powder once it is dry. Not having the equipment to do that, the husk ended up in my compost pile.
The seeds needed to be fermented as the next step. I read that some producers wrap them in banana leaves and leave them to ferment for 7 days, turning them daily. Since I grow banana trees I decided to use this method, and the seeds did turn brown, but I had no idea if and how much they had fermented. Because the seeds needed so much time to ferment, I froze the heated pulp mixture so it would not spoil.
Husk drying and seeds fermenting in banana leaves
Then it was time to roast the seeds. I put them on a cookie sheet and roasted them in the oven at 205ºC. (401ºF) for 6 minutes, then for 20 minutes at 132ºC (270ºF). They were then removed from the oven and left to cool for 15 minutes.
Cacao seeds ready to roast
Roasted cacao seeds with and without the shells
NOW they were starting to smell like chocolate.
I had already defrosted the frozen pulp mixture and was now ready to peel the roasted beans. Once peeled, I put them in my NutriBullet and they did end up as a thick paste. I added the pulp mixture and blenderized it some more.
The taste of the resulting mixture was very bitter, so I ended up adding a few drops of almond extract and some refined sugar. It became slightly more tolerable. After that, I heated it in a double boiler to smooth out the mixture and spread it into the chocolate molds.
Heating the paste in the double boilernext to some defrosting pie dough
In the molds, ready to freeze
After freezing the chocolate came the moment of truth – how good or bad was my chocolate. Here is the video with the honest results:
I have to say it was a good learning experience. This was only from one cacao pod, and my tree is producing many more, so there will be many more trials until I get it right, if ever. It certainly won’t replace Hershey bars, Ghirardelli or my now favorite Carlos V Mexican chocolate, but it is a fun hobby. After years of living in a basement apartment, working nights and not seeing much sunlight, my garden is my little bit of Paradise and I enjoy every minute of being able to plant new species and work with many products which was impossible to do in New York.
And – most of the time I am not discouraged by failure. I remember decades ago when my son was in Cub Scouts. I volunteered to make brownies for an event. Knowing that many people were diabetic among the adults, I used saccharin instead of sugar. They were AWFUL – I’m guessing the correct word might be astringent. I apologized to everyone and admitted that they were, in fact, awful.
And finally, a thought that has crossed my mind many times as I learn to prepare meals from scratch. How long did it take various species of humans to convert certain natural plants, etc. into various forms of food – such as wheat into bread. Or poisonous plant life into edible forms. How many people died from eating raw casava, which contains cyanide, before someone decided – “Well, this root has killed so many of my kin, I wonder what would happen if I soaked it in water and then heated it and THEN WE ATE IT ANYWAY?” I believe that would take more daring thinking than to find meat that was cooked in a naturally occurring fire and discovering that it tasted pretty good and was easier to digest.
In case anyone else is interested in this sort of thing, I recommend the book “Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human” by Richard Wrangham. Be careful when ordering it. Make sure that you are ordering it by the entire title, or you might accidentally end up with the book “Catching Fire” from The HungerGames Trilogy, which happened to me (but I still enjoyed both of them).
Reference:
Source: Mishra, K., Green, A., Burkard, J. et al. Valorization of cocoa pod side streams improves nutritional and sustainability aspects of chocolate. Nat Food 5, 423-432 (2024).
As I said in my previous post, whenever someone wants to visit me, I ask several questions, such as what type of climate do you prefer, what activities do you enjoy, what type of wild creatures are you willing to tolerate or look forward to seeing. For my son, he preferred cooler weather and wanted to come down for my birthday. Since not much is happening here around my birthday, I suggested his present to me would be to celebrate Day of the Dead with me. He asked me several times to be sure, but I assured him that nothing would make me happier than to celebrate this holiday with him.
As I did when my sister visited me for Mexican Independence Day, we did not spend the time in my village, and in the case of my son we spent the weekend in Tlaquepaque – a town in the state of Jalisco that celebrates Big Time. Day of the Dead is a MAJOR holiday, and as I feared, by the time the dates of the visit were confirmed, most of the hotels in Tlaquepaque were booked solid. However, I was able to find rooms at hotels which were close to the plaza where all the action would take place. Once the reservations were confirmed and bus tickets bought for the trip between Cofradía and Jalisco, I notified my friend Claudia and her daughter Sofia so that we could get together during my visit.
Of course, the first thing we wanted to do was to have our faces painted. I was afraid my son’s beard would interfere with that, but the artist managed. As for me, it was a different story. The artist was using a different type of paint than I had experienced in previous years – not as heavy, so it did not give the appearance of an actual mask, but it was still beautiful. My eyes are sensitive to eye makeup, so I expected my eyes to tear and eventually smear the makeup. Good thing we took pictures right away, since the tearing was heavier than usual, and by the next morning I had an infection/inflammation. We went to a hospital clinic that was in the plaza where I received prescriptions and after a while needed to go rest in our hotel room while my son Michael, Claudia and Sofia continued with their day.
That first day, more and more people arrived to celebrate. By lunch time, it was so crowded that we could barely move. It reminded me of New York City at Christmastime with people shoulder-to-shoulder. The second day, it was much less crowded during the early part of the day, so we could see many of the displays that were just unapproachable the night before.
When it was time for lunch, there was a waiting list for every restaurant, so we picked the one with the shortest wait time, and we were not disappointed after we were seated. Two dancers performed for the customers, and it was very impressive.
That first night, there was a procession which we followed. People in costume would stop at various places in the street and tell stories. At the end, we were in the cemetery, and they introduced the speakers, who were actually members of the Toastmasters Club, and for one of the ladies, it was her first time telling a story in public.
While there is something magical about Día de los Muertos at night, it was also very nice to see all the altars and other decorations and displays during the day. All in all, I am glad that my son got to have the experience of Mexico during this special holiday.
Please enjoy the videos and photos, and if you are planning one day to see Mexico, consider spending a day or two in Tlaquepaque. It has so many things to do and experience – great restaurants, shops, museums, outdoor sculptures by our famous artists. You will definitely not be disappointed.
When friends and family say they want to visit, there are several questions that I ask. If they are working, when would they have vacation time, and how much time. Whether or not they are working, I ask – What type of weather do you prefer, hot or cold? Dry season or rainy season? What type of insects and other creatures will you be comfortable with? Would you like to be here to experience any of our holidays? What type of activities would you like – hiking, the beach, educational tours, cultural events, etc., or just plain hanging out and relaxing. The answers help me plan an enjoyable visit.
When hosting visitors during Mexican holidays, especially national holidays, there are added things to consider. You will probably need a great deal of advance notice if you need tickets or a hotel room, since these events attract hordes of international visitors, and this turned out to be the case for my son’s upcoming visit for Day of the Dead. But for now, I will write about my sister’s visit for this year’s Mexican Independence Day.
As I’ve mentioned before, Colima is an agricultural state, and I live in a small village of less than 2000 people. Normally, I am content to attend whatever ceremonies we hold in the village for Independence Day and then watch the president give “The Grito” from Mexico City via the internet. However, for my sister’s visit, my neighbor suggested I reserve a hotel room in our state capital, also called Colima.
Fortunately, I WAS able to reserve a room at the hotel that used to be called Hotel Ceballos, and is now the Concierge Plaza Colima. It sits along the border of the plaza, along with the Old Cathedral and government buildings, so we had a good view of the events from a hallway balcony.
I was worried about the weather since this is still the rainy season, but fortunately it did not rain for the two days we were there. The night of the 15th was great, with bands, dancing in the plaza, The Grito shouted from the balcony of the government building, and then fireworks into the sky, followed by the grand finale – the lighting of the Castillo, a tower of fireworks set off one level at a time until the top was lit and flew into the sky.
The next morning, after breakfast, was a parade featuring bands, school children, the military, firefighters (bomberos in Spanish), and many more people representing various sectors of the community.
In conclusion, spending the holiday in a hotel abutting the plaza where all the activities would be taking place resulted in a wonderful experience. Besides being right where the activities would be held, it was nice to be able to just walk downstairs, spend as much or as little time as one would want in the midst of all the activities, and then go back upstairs to rest, or simply go to the balcony to observe. For us, it was much better than returning to the village during the night and returning in the morning.
So there you have it, some suggestions for hosting visitors which I have found useful. For the timetable, for major holidays, the sooner you begin making and implementing plans the better. And even if you think you know the preferences of whoever will be visiting you, it is better to discuss various options such as those I listed above.
So enjoy the photos and videos.
The hotel
View from the Balcony
Government building and balcony where El Grito will be shouted
Ready for the festivities to begin
One of the bands on stage
Fireworks in El Castillo (The Castle). The video is 9 minutes long for the entire fireworks display.
mex-pat.org 