In the kitchen

I don't know why I try to cook. Mostly I don't. But today the fonda in front of our house was closed for some reason, and I'm tired of leaching off my in-laws, so I decided to cook. I rummaged around in my plastic bin of herbs and chiles and garlic, and I came up with an old half-empty bag of morita chiles that had a recipe on the back for a beef dish. I vaguely remembered trying to cook it about 2 years ago, probably the last time I opened the bag, and I vaguely remembered it tasting pretty decent, so I thought, what the heck. It looked like it wouldn't be as time-consuming as so many Mexican dishes, definitely an added plus. So I headed out into the street with my little market bag, and went to the butcher shop, the vege shop, the mini-super, and the chicken shop (I got a chicken leg for the baby because I figured he's maybe sick of Gerber's, and I could whip up a little chicken soup for him instead). I handed the baby over to Nikis to take care of while I attempted to cook something from scratch for the first time in a long while. The baby fussed the whole time - he's in this new phase where I seem to be the center of his universe, and even the funniest of Nikis' many funny faces isn't funny enough to make him forget about me. He reaches out his hands to me, and only calms down when I hold him. So cooking was going to be a challenge, in addition to the usual challenges of the now famous outdoor sink and having to run in and out of the house every time I need to rinse something off or add water to a pot.

And first things first, I have to disinfect all my veges for 15 minutes before I can do anything with them. The disinfection stage is all important, as I learned in one of my earliest kitchen episodes here in Mexico. I'll never forget happily making a California style salad in my now-mother-in-law's kitchen under the wary eye of Doña Lucy, the snail-like housekeeper she had employed there at the time. Doña Lucy watched me the whole time as I chopped tomatoes and spinach and carrots and mushrooms, and tossed it with fresh cheese chunks and such precious goods as toasted almonds and the unheard-of black olives that I had hunted so long to find. It never once occurred to her to express out loud the thoughts passing behind her veiled droopy eyes, like "Why the hell aren't you disinfecting the vegetables, dumb-ass gringa?" Well, I had learned by the next day, after spending the night on the toilet. So now I always disinfect my veges, first step in Mexican cooking!

So anyway, I get cooking, and am wondering the whole time, how do women do this every day when they have babies, let alone several little kids running around? I mean seriously, how do they do it? I see why frozen meals are so popular in the States, because it's about all a woman could do if she was coming home from work, picking up kids from daycare and having to whip up a meal at the drop of a hat upon arrival at home. But here there are no frozen foods, and while women don't generally have to work outside the home, they also don't get to send the kids to daycare, so they're in the home with the kids while they're having to sweep, mop, scrub, wash, cook, etc.

I asked Juana one day how she did it with her kids, and she said she used to get up early and start washing laundry at 6 a.m., because mind you she had to do it all by hand (thank god I got a washing machine after the baby was born, because washing by hand was getting to be a drag). Then she'd finish the laundry around 8:30 and cook breakfast for the men. Then the kids would wake up around 9 and she'd feed them and then go out for her "mandado", her grocery shopping for the day, with the kids. Coming home, she'd put them in their walker and tie it to a table so they couldn't move too far away and get into trouble, while she would start cooking. Now Juana can cook - she cooks all the meals at the Dreaming House and she prepares the best meals in all of Teotihuacan, as far as I'm concerned. So whatever she was cooking with her kids tied to the tableleg was surely no quickie type of meal. I don't know how she got her kids to play along with the scheme, but apparently they did. Other ladies have told me that they had the baby in one arm while they stirred the pot with the other. My baby would probably go for that, since he doesn't ever want to be any place other than in my arms, but it would be hard for me - I think my arms would get so tired, I'd end up dropping the baby in the pot and I'd be serving up a fine dish called Niño de Olla or something for the comida later that afternoon.

Well, I managed today just because Nikis played baby wrangler for a couple of hours, while I chopped and fried, and the baby just cried hard when I turned on the blender to puree the tomatoes and chiles. But for all my efforts, my dish didn't turn out very well. It was edible, but I just never seem to get the right flavor blend in my Mexican dishes. I can follow a recipe to a tee, and I can watch the ladies to see their tricks, but my food never tastes quite right. I never put enough salt in - that's one problem I've identified. But something else is always lacking as well - some Mexican mojo that I will obviously never have. My husband told me, why don't you stick with pasta - that always turns out. If he complains too directly about my tasteless Mexican dishes, he knows I'll have a big "you should have married a Mexican girl" emotional outburst, so he's careful. But bless the baby's heart - he's direct. He took one taste of the chicken soup I made him, and he batted the spoon away and spit a fine greasy spray of broth, rice and carrots all over himself, his high chair and the general vicinity - the meaning was obvious: your cooking sucks! You can't even make chicken soup! I decided the baby should go take a nap after that.