“Greek” Salad, or in order to avoid the wrath of authenticalistas, “Greek-esque 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 up to preferred configuration
– 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. Perhaps 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

-Oregano if you have it (we often don’t)

Toss this all around and put a handful or two of toasted pinenuts over the top.

Papaya Salad a la Jasmine

My ‘food porn’ photography needs 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 mortar 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 particularly 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, bahn mi, 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 to nonexistent 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.

If your decks are dry in the morning, cock your head northward and start looking for some wind. Wet decks mean just another typical day in the sea. (This from David of Puerto Escondido.)

We got back to La Paz Saturday night, took some excellent showers, abused our flush toilet privileges, and went out for tacos and refrigerated beer. The next day was Sunday and we spent the morning listening to Bill’s Net and then headed out for more tacos and various boat supplies. Bill has a half-hour or so discussion net every day on channel 21 starting around 7:30am. He usually lists off some headlines culled from various internet searches and the BBC, comments on them, and then invites whoever is listening to come ahead with their own comments. Pepe is the first to comment every day. “Pepe go.”

Today was a slow news day, or else Bill missed this morning’s BBC: “So… anyone try out that stuff, ‘tor… er, tongue-fu?’ Supposed to be some sort of soy curd. You eat it. Anyone know anything about this stuff?”
… Silence …
Someone speaks up finally, “Do you mean … tofu?”

Mind you, the discussion was previously all about Cheney and how there were women with Cheney and the shot guy (makes you feel like you’ve been out of town when you come back to discover that the vice president shot some dude in the face and nobody seems too concerned) and how they were not the wives of the men and just who were these women anyway. Then Clinton. The tofu thread was a short-lived one but actually enticed some of the boat women to comment (a rarity). We’re back to typical topic matter with the Patriot Act now and the boat men have taken over once again.

Yesterday while loading some gasoline cans into the dinghy, this guy came over and started talking to us. We chatted about the Port-a-bote, then where he lived previously–he had lived in Maui for several years and then San Francisco–and if he knew this person or that person. Then we get to talking about where in San Francisco he lived, and he mentioned the Boat Club, which was just up the street from where we used to live, and we said something like, “Oh! We know a guy from the Boat Club!”
“Really? Hey who do you know?”
“This guy named Joe Cool.”
“Really. [pause] How do you know Joe Cool?” Each word carefully measured.
“We met him on this guy Mark’s boat and blah blah blah” Chat chat chatterson…
“Um. I’m Joe Cool!” And clearly do not remember you.
He looked *very different from the last time we saw him. But he remembered Mark and Mark’s boat and it all came back and he filmed us a bit with his camera to make sure he would remember us for next time. We decided to meet up with him in Tenerife when we get there, or at least look up his buddy at the kiteboard shop. This is the third person we’ve met along the way connected with the marina at Rio Vista where we bought Time Machine.

Anyway, we plan to hang around town for just a day or two, stock up on food and fuel, and then if the weather looks good, head across the Sea of Cortez to Mazatlan. It’ll be a while before we get back to La Paz and so the remainder of time not spent scouring town for supplies will surely be spent stuffing ourselves silly at all our favorite street food stalls.

La Paz’s tractor beam is sucking us back down the coast to its bouncy anchorage on the pretext of obtaining a part for our busted traveler. Will we ever escape and get someplace warm?

Now that we have a SSB receiver radio, we get to listen to Don From Summer Passage, also known as Don The Weather Guy. Every cruiser in this area knows about Don but we just “met” him, so to speak. He broadcasts from Oxnard at least twice daily on various SSB channels and gives a very perky rundown of the weather in all the key areas. “Gulf of Tuehuantepec? Will be screamin’. That’s right, 60 to 70-knot winds!! [Perk perk!] Pretty nasty stuff and you don’t want to be out in that. Not a bit! Seas 20-25 feet too; that’s as high as I’ve ever seen it! So any of you think you are going to make the crossing in that, well, you can just tell me how it was in the Afterlife! Ha!” Luckily the southern Sea only had a predicted 20+ norther and we took off south with ambitious destinations. We made it almost to Agua Verde and the wind died. Bleah. Motored in and anchored just as it began to pick up again. We hung out and attempted to take off the next day (the “peak” day, according to weather reports) but didn’t even get out of the bay, the winds were so light. I couldn’t see any whitecaps anywhere with the binocs and another boat that had left ahead of us was still visible on the horizon, sails luffing in the nonexistent wind and big leftover swell. We returned to anchor and did boat projects. The next day we tried again and had good wind nearly to our next destination, when it again died completely, leaving us to motor into the anchorage at Gatos.

Again we had a good time at Gatos. Maybe the most spectacular land scenery we’ve seen at any anchorage anywhere. We hiked for several hours in the other direction this time. The mountains are layered with many different colors of dirt/rock and so when you hike around, you go through all these different colored areas. It’s just a really cool place.

Manuel the fisherman intercepted us as we attempted to leave Gatos for points south but there was no wind and no sea and we were just sitting out in the glassy water. He motored up and sat on our ama chatting with us for a bit holding onto his panga by a light leash. We told him we’d likely be pulling up to the beach at Timbabichi (a mere two miles south of Gatos) unless the wind performed a miracle and began to blow and he said if we did, he’d stop by later with some fish for us. Sweet!

A few hours later, anchored in Timbabichi, Manuel arrived with the goods: “chocolates.” (What the?) They are large brown shiny clams and we traded some pesos for 20 of them. We asked Manuel how to cook them and he said you just boil them or whatever, like normal clams, which is what we did. They were great, not sandy at all; maybe a little on the large side if there were any complaints. Later, we ran into a couple in La Paz who were traveling around Baja with a camper and a folding kayak and the guy said that the best way to eat them was to take a large thin knife and split them right down the middle (uncooked, alive), then eat them like oysters on the half shell with lime juice and hot sauce. We told him that we boiled them with garlic butter and he went into fits. “AAHHHH!!! You ruined them! You ruined them!!” And his wife kept saying, “You didn’t ruin them, they are good no matter how you prepare them. Jeez!”

Chocolates! Boiled, not raw.

The next day we had light wind and crept south towards San Evaristo. Then the wind picked up insanely and we made wicked time. We pulled a bit of a Punta Baja when rounding the corner into the anchorage; winds that run over land intensify to insane proportions and generally anchorages are windier than the outside. Just another way life is not fair.

The next day we hopped over to Ensenada Grande on Isla Partida for the evening, chatted with a kayak guide from La Paz who was camped on the beach and returned to our boat to find that we had dragged anchor!! Ooop. It DID seem farther paddling back… We reset the anchor (it had reset itself but now was not in the position we wanted to be in) again and it held fine. We are not sure what caused it to drag; maybe it slid on some grasses? Hooked on the edge of a rock? Pretty embarrassing; I wonder if any of the other boats noticed. (“And they allll moved away from me on the bench…”)

We arrived in La Paz once again in the evening and stuck our anchor down right smack in the middle of the channel. “Hey, here’s a great wide open space where nobody’s anchored! Score!!” We discreetly moved the next morning when we realized where we were and again wondered if anyone noticed.

Don’s weather report was for northers and good sustained winds in the 20-25 knot range, “right down the middle!” so we did our restocking as fast as we could and headed out to cross the Sea of Cortez two days later.