“Greek” Salad, or in order to avoid the wrath of authenticalistas, “Greek-like Salad”

(Ingredient amounts, by the way, are based upon approximately a two-person serving size; two persons without refrigeration—meaning, however much I make is always the right amount and there are never left-overs.)

– 1 healthy-sized cucumber, cut into cubes (I’m on a dice/cube jag lately; cut the cucumbers how you like)
– 1 roma tomato, chopped fine
– Some onion, minced (if you have red onion, you can cut them into more aesthetic sliceys)
– Bell pepper if you have it, or some poplano, or not… Um, cut this one into nice little half-circle things (to compliment the cubish look we have going with the cucumbers)

Dressing:
-Lime juice (one small lime’s worth)
-Red wine vinegar
-Olive oil
-Garlic clove, smished
-Bit of salt and ground black pepper
Toss this all around and put a handful or two of toasted pinenuts over the top.

Papaya Salad a la Jasmine

My ‘food porn’ photos need some work. Objects in the photos are tastier than they may appear.

We were over chatting with Jasmine and Shannon once and ended up staying for an impromptu early dinner/snack/late lunch that was so elaborate that it included two different salads!! This recipe is a variation on one of these; I’ve adjusted it a little to accommodate ingredients that I seem to have (or not have) around.

– 1/2 papaya cut into cubes (set aside a spoonful or so of papaya seeds)
– 1/2 jicama cut into smaller cubes than the papaya cubes
– 1-2 chives, sliced finely
– Generous handful of cilantro, chopped
– If you have red or yellow bell pepper, add some of this, sliced finely; I sometimes use poblano or just leave it out
– 1 avocado, cut into chunks and added last

Dressing:
– Smish the papaya seeds with a mortor and pestle. They’ll look fairly nasty.
– Smish one clove of garlic
– Balsamic vinegar
– Olive oil
– A bit of sugar or honey (depending upon how sweet your balsamic already is), a little salt, and black pepper to taste

Mix everything together, except the avocado. Add the avocado at the very end and mix gently once more. It’s good if you have some roasted pepitas (pumpkin seeds) to put over the top.

Here we are in Mexico and eating Mexican food when out and about. Then we bring back veggies and market goods to the boat and make… Mexican food. Or a variation thereof. I’m not sure why but I don’t seem to be terribly homesick for American food, unless you count sushi or pho, which is what we typically ate back in the states.

Breakfasts on the boat consist usually of egg tacos. We actually regularly made these in the states so this is not a “We’re in Mexico and going to make tacos” phenomenon. I don’t seem to get tired of them and we stray from this paradigm only maybe twice per month.

Egg tacos: (Very very simple)

* Tortillas (warmed, of course)
* Scrambled eggs (we do these plain because Joshua is a maniac for unadulterated eggs; scrambled is pushing it by his standards.)
* Salsa.

We’re salsa fiends here and so on very plain days, the salsa variety will consist of some bottled variety (‘hot sauce’ like Tabasco, except we don’t have Tabasco; we have Tapatio’s—my current favorite, a habanero, and a chipotle open), as well as a canned variety. In Mexico you can buy 6oz cans of various salsas (usually mild in spiciness) like salsa casera (cooked mild tomatoey salsa), verde (tomatillo), 5-chili (made with dried chilis and vinegary), chipotle, etc. We stock these things regularly and go through them. If we’re (I’m) feeling fancy, I’ll make some sort of fresh salsa. And I’ll also put together some sort of guacamole, if there are avocados about. And possibly a couple of cabbage leaves chopped finely to sprinkle on top; that’s pretty good. Maybe a lime wedge or two squeezed over the tacos might be nice (keep that scurvy away!!).

** That’s it! Now put them together. The only trick maybe is timing; making sure everything (except the salsa) is warm is a good start. I’m not sick of these yet and we’ve been eating them for years.

When we do not have egg tacos for breakfast, it is usually because we ate an entire package of cookies while drinking our coffee and feel sort of sick. Or else I made oatmeal instead. Oatmeal consumption, however, will surely go down now that we discovered that maple syrup, when not refrigerated, will grow a funky powdery mold over the top and begin to taste funny. Maple syrup had been our preferred oatmeal topping. So sad!

Some salsa recipes

Here are a couple of salsa recipes made from ingredients that are commonly found in the typical Baja market.

Salsa Number One:
1 roma tomato, diced
2 cute little yellow peppers, diced
1 jalapeno, diced (those yellow peppers have zero hotness)
1 green onion, sliced finely
Cilantro, one handful, chopped finely
–Put all this into the salsa bowl, then add:
Juice of one Mexican lime (that means the little kind)
Healthy toss of chili powder
Dash or two of cumin
Salt to taste.
–Nice and mix, nice and mix.

Salsa Number Two, which is VERY different from Number One:

1 or 2 small roma tomatoes, diced
1 poblano pepper, diced
1 or 2 jalapenos (depending upon how hot your Poblano was), diced
Some minced onion, whatever you have around
(You can add cilantro if you have it, but I’ll leave it out just to stress how VERY different from that other salsa this one is)
–Put all this into the salsa bowl and add:
Juice of one Mexican lime, chili powder and cumin (equal parts), one smished garlic clove, and salt.
–Then add one half to one avocado, chopped into cubes. Adding it at the end keeps it from disintegrating into the salsa. However, I do like it to disintegrate so I add it usually after the jalapenos; it gives the salsa a creamy consistency.

These are the peppers I normally buy. The bell peppers don’t keep very long so I generally go with the poblano (that’s the dark green warped one). The light colored yellow pepper is very mild but tasty and the long medium green one is also mild.

The much-touted Norther (“Norther” = a ‘storm’ of unidirectional wind from, for example, the north) hit finally Monday morning/early afternoon. In anticipation, we moved the boat closer to the beach (because there always seems to be less wind, calmer water, better visibility, free beer, etc. in some other part of the anchorage). Closer to the beach however, severely compromised our internet situation. We were unable to connect to our previous standbys and instead found only the Applebees (of all god-forsaken things) within mooching distance. It worked until around Monday afternoon, when things got shockingly bouncy in the anchorage.

We came straight back from class, fighting the nasty dust storms tormenting the streets (La Paz streets have nothing short of a scandalous amount of dust that can be blown into one’s chapstick during a Norther). Then it took us 45 minutes to row the 120 yards back to the boat—and that is not an exaggeration; Joshua rowing and me paddling with our spare paddle in the front of the dinghy (my feet wedged up against the forepeak in a pathetic attempt to keep water from pouring in so damned voluminously with each breaking wave). By the end of the docking procedure, I was soaked thoroughly from the waist down and the majority of our groceries were bobbing around in Lake La Paz, a turbulent affair that resided in the bilges of the Port-a-bote (heretofore referred to as “Alyosha”—because I’ve had two glasses of wine and I WIN). It was a minor miracle that the bags that Tucker gave us for Christmas last year happened to both be water resistant AND have a zipper (Spanish class accoutrements thus spared a gross fate) and that the bread, purchased in anticipation of a nice quiet dinner party with candlelight and wine in glasses sitting peacefully on a table that does not boast a ‘safety’ ledge, weirdly got chucked in the back of the boat and not the forward, which was the deep and treacherous end of the lake, and stayed 85% edible. Environmentalists were not informed when Joshua bailed the entire contents of Lake La Paz overboard with a cut-off bleach jug. We hauled Alyosha onto the ama (that’s one of the auxiliary hulls, or “pontoons”) and tied it down securely. Then went below and sorted the groceries while listening to the chatter on channel 22.

It was 4pm. We had invited Jasmine and Shannon from ‘Tranquila’ over for paella the previous calm and quiet afternoon (“That yella-bellied norther is never going to hit!”). Now our side of the anchorage was a slobbering froth of unpleasantness. Not necessarily dangerous, but sort of pukingly uncomfortable, if you get my drift.

We were dubious that a dinner could be prepared in such a motion, the inside of Time Machine was a high-decibel cacophony of creaks, splashes, groans, thwackings (that’s what the sail cover does; Can you say “thwack?”), clangings (that’s the rudder), gratings (from the steering cables), and very foul language (that’s me banging my knees and elbows because everything was suddenly in my goddamned way). Can you say “puta mierda?”

We finally got a hold of them on the radio at 5:15 after an hour of fruitless attempts.
Joshua: “Hey! So… are you anchored? How is it for you over on the Magote?”
Shannon: “Not so bad! Kinda windy… when do you want us to head over?”
Joshua: “Uhhhh, it’s not super bouncy over where you are?”
Shannon: “Not at all! There’s free beer too!”
Me: (not into the radio “PUTA MADRE!!!”)
Joshua: “ Wellll… It’s pretty, um, exciting over here. You guys, um, might get (cough cough) wet on your way over.”
Shannon: “Ah heck! Are you kidding? We were just getting ready to do some neurosurgery over here! I think we can handle a little dinghy ride a quarter of a mile to where you are!”
Joshua: “Um.”
Shannon: “Neurosurgery can wait! Dude’s in traction and sitting tight. We’ll be over in a jif for some BITCHIN’ PAELLA!!!!”
Me: “Oh HOLY FUCK!”

Shannon and Jasmine arrived via dinghy, prudently garbed in their foulies. Shannon managed to deposit Jasmine and a FREAKING CAKE with a container of orange-freaking-custard onto our aft ama with no major disasters and zinged off towards Marina La Paz to conduct some high-power stock trading while Jasmine socialized and casually chopped some garlic. Meanwhile, it was a minor miracle that I managed to get my shirt on front-side forwards after the post-docking-wet-clothes-stripdown-freakout, and paella and salad were, frankly, on their own as far as getting prepared that evening.

In the end, vegetables somehow got chopped without any life-threatening lacerations and dinner honestly ended up a whole lot of fun. The only actual disaster was the state of my cucumbers, which had turned into snot after a mere three days, leaving my vegetable bin in conspicuous need of sterilization. Enter the cabbage; a vegetable so hardy it could survive nuclear fallout if only cockroaches did not eat cabbage.

By the time Shannon and Jasmine left, the wind was actually worse. We got the bed put together without accidentally lurching out the window and settled down to a night of next-to-no sleep. Willie, from Fleur de Mer, gave us a call to let us know that he was spending the night aboard with his super-dinghy at the ready, which has the Big Motor, and just give him a call if we needed a tow off of the beach at any point during the long, dark and bouncy night. Honestly, we weren’t so worried about dragging anchor ourselves, but that there was a semi-derelict (??), unoccupied powerboat directly upwind of us and we were skeptical of the state of its ground tackle after the “Hay Chihuahua” incident. That this large ponderous vessel might snap its anchor line and come charging at us, bobbing madly in the froth (remember the frothy madness that was the anchorage?) and crash into us, splintering our poor little boat into a zillion wee bits, was actually a real concern. I spent the night about to drift off and in that sort of semi-dreamy state where you are awake but that kid from third grade is in the room with you, along with your former boss and your brother, and they are all discussing the wonder that is www.chucknorrisfacts.com and you are just getting interested when the kid from third grade detonates a hydrogen bomb and you leap out of bed, sticking your head up out of the companionway to be sure that all the other boats in the anchorage are still where you left them when you went to bed. WTF!!! It was a sort of long night.

We recorded 25 sustained knots with gusts over 30 at around midnight and at 3pm-ish, 30 knots sustained with gusts above that. Wind mellowed early morning, we thought, but picked back up to 25-30 by 6am so we played hooky from Spanish class because, while I may not have been under pressure to produce a paella out of the inside of a bouncy, pokey TimeMachine-shaped blender for a language class of nine, it just would not have been pretty and the world was better off for it.

So far we’ve caught a lot of bonito; yesterday however (uh, that was around Dec. 14th), during a gnarly full-day sail in 30+ winds and steep chop, we somehow managed to get a 30-inch amberjack on board. We got into Los Frailes around 8pm but were starving so we cooked up about half the fish for dinner (typical bedtime occurs around 7pm ’cause we’re dorks). The other half we saved for breakfast Fish Tacos.

Preparation of the fish (Joshua the master fish flayer expertly sliced the thing into about eight fat filets)
* Mix together some oregano, cumin, and chili powder and sprinkle over the filets
* Dredge the filets in some flour
* Put a couple of tablespoons of olive oil in a frying pan and once hot, add some smished garlic. Let this sizzle for 30 seconds and toss in the fish.

Cook covered until perfectly done, maybe 3 or 4 minutes on each side. While this was going, we started cooking the tortillas.

Tortillas. I don’t know how to actually make tortillas but a random package left over from San Diego revealed a shockingly simple ingredient list: flour, water, some sort of fat (lard, vegetable shortening, whatever), and salt.
To make six 8-inch tortillas, use 1 cup flour, two blobs of fat (I used this weird margarine stuff we ended up with from Bahia de los Tortugas), a healthy pinch of salt, and some water. First I mix the flour and salt, then cut in the fat until it is evenly distributed, then add water until the dough is The Right Consistency. The Right Consistency is soft like cookie dough but more bread dough-like; it should go together in a ball very easily and be soft but not too terribly sticky. I kneaded it a bit (I have no idea if this is what you are supposed to do)—maybe 10-15 kneads to a minute or so. Then divide the dough into 6 balls.

** Internet research right before posting yields this possibly crucial step: knead 1-3 minutes, then divide into balls, THEN let the balls rest for 10-45 minutes before rolling out into flats (there are many methods evidently…I haven’t tried them yet).**

Now on a floured board, roll out the dough balls into tortillas. I have been using my muddler and trying to ignore the fact that I haven’t had a chance to use the muddler yet for mojitos. It works okay for the tortillas though and I keep in mind my mojito moment will come.

When tortillas are ready to go, just pop them on a hot griddle (I use the fantastic flat iron skillet previously mentioned in the Naan “Let’s Cooking”). The griddle should be hot enough so that they immediately start to bubble; don’t burn them though because, well, duh.

That’s it! Put together your tacos with whatever is lying around: pico de gallo, hot sauce, chopped cabbage, avocado.

First off, this being my first Let’s Cooking!! entry, I must lay out a few things.

I don’t follow recipes very well. Even if I’m the one writing the recipe, there’s no guarantee that it’s actually what I cooked myself to produce the fabulousness that inspired me to share. I don’t measure very well because I have no patience and am suspicious at such exacting ingredient amounts such as “one cup and two tablespoons.” You might be required to just figure out for yourself what “one glass of” or “the red bowlful” means. Sorry about that.

(If this irritates the bejeebers out of you, don’t feel alone; Joshua goes nearly insane every time “we” try to cook together from a recipe. If the man was in charge of the culinary arts around here we’d surely clutter up the boat with kitchen scales and the like.)

Oh, and ‘t’ means teaspoon and ‘T’ means tablespoon; ‘c’ means cup.

Stovetop “Naan”
(Don’t even waste time wondering why I put the “Naan” in quotes.)

Ingredient list (with modifications):
* 1t yeast (The first time I made this I used a full packet, which turns out has 2.5 teaspoons of yeast. Who knew. Nothing happened out of the ordinary as far as I could tell except it rose faster. The flavor was a bit on the yeasty side perhaps.)
* 2/3c warm water (110 degrees I believe is the proper temp to get the yeasties going.)
* 2c flour (2 cups of flour is a measurement I can totally handle)
* 1t salt (The first time I made it I didn’t actually own measuring spoons and so measured out what was probably 1/4t into my palm and tossed it in the bowl. It wasn’t salty enough; a teaspoon is a lot more than you would think. Second time I made it I had since purchased some cute-as-hell stainless nesting spoons from Cost Plus and so totally measured out one teaspoon and it was very salty. I’ll try it next with 1/2t salt domed; if not enough, a tad more.
* 2T yogurt (I guessed at the 2T the first time since I didn’t have the spoons; no discernable difference between this and the second time, when I carefully measured out two tablespoons of half and half, since I didn’t have any yogurt in the house.)
* 1/4c I think of ghee; 1/2 for the dough and 1/2 for the cooking (Not having ghee in the house, I used butter. Melted it on the stove. Since I didn’t know how many T were in a 1/4 cup, I guessed and used 1.5T butter. Far more than 1.5T of butter was used for the stovetop cooking–Joshua is willing to relinquish exact measurements where butter is concerned and was in charge of “charging” the pan with butter for each side.)

The Method:
Make the water warm but not too hot (I stick my finger in it and arbitrarily declare it 110 degrees); carefully add the yeast and whisk to dissolve and keep from clumping together, which is icky. Cover (why? who the hell knows–the directions said to do this and I had a cover handy so I covered it and probably will cover fizzing yeast until the day I die). Mix the flour and salt in a bowl. The yeast is supposed to sit for 10 minutes before being added; the first time I made this I probably waited 12 minutes and the second time, 8 minutes. Add the yeast/water mix and the butter/ghee/olive oil/whatever and ‘nice and mix, nice and mix.’ Turn out onto lightly floured board and knead for two songs (if you are listening to punk, make that three songs and if classical, make that 5 minutes). Put dough in greased bowl and let sit for a couple of hours (or until dough doubles in size) in a nice warm place. Ahhhh.

When ready to go, knead for another two songs and separate into 6 cute little doughballs. Pull/smack/roll/squish these into naan shapes and you are ready to grill. Now the recipe says “grill” or broil or something. We have no oven onboard so this is a stovetop recipe for me. Heat CAST IRON pan to hot but not smoking hot (med or so); grease liberally with butter and toss on the naan. Sizzle/steam/yammy smells.. (black burny dots are okay–a little char taste is a good thing I think, just not too much). Flip when it seems right (you have to use your sensory perception here). Take off when done. Experiment with dough thickness and doneness the first time you make it since you have six tries. Remember which is the best for next time.

Here’s the official stovetop bread pan: a cast iron “fajita” pan I got from goodwill that had never been used. I spent a shocking amount of time sanding down all the bumpiness because I wanted a smooth surface and then seasoned it with bacon grease. It’s just the right size and doesn’t weigh a freakinjillionbillion pounds like the larger skillet cousin.