Down Ol' Mexico Way

I recently traveled to Arizona,

ready to warm my bones in the American Southwest.

Cold, rainy, and...

snowy?!

I wasn't about to change out of my flip flops so I headed back to Florida and went on a mini-vacation down ol' Mexico way, or, to be more specific, highway 17 along the Peace River.

I met up with a couple of friends who were traveling in a

Burro

Their burro is a cool little 70's era travel trailer and their visit to Highland Hammocks State Park serendipitously coincided with a fiberglass travel trailer meetup event.

I'm not making this up.

Our original goal was to hunt for fossils in the Peace River

but rainy conditions meant the water was too high to engage in that pastime.

What to do...what to do...?

I decided to take the ladies to my favorite little Latin American store:

The Fiesta Market

in Bowling Green, Florida.

This store is better than a Bravo for making you feel like you're on vacation down south.  The ceiling is lined with piñatas and the shelves are stocked with all kinds of goods from Mexico and Central America including leather work boots from Guatemala and a selection of Mexican molcajetes.

The molcajete: an obsession from afar.

I have been gazing longingly at molcajetes for decades, never feeling confident enough to purchase this raw-boned, serious-as-a-heart-attack, Mexican mortar and pestle. Hell, after all these years, I still have trouble remembering the name for the pestle: tejolote.

(tejolote, tejolote!)

I've dicked around with old timey looking marble mortar and pestles and even bought a large clay Thai version but I'm convinced that you need to grow up in a country where these are kitchen staples to truly intuit the technique.

Then I asked the price (in Spanish, of course)...

$9.99? 

 ¡I'm going native!

Traditional molcajetes are carved from a single block of volcanic rock but for $9.99 you get a molcajete formed from volcanic scrap and cement.  Although this is an accepted substitute, my 60lb molcajete smells like a bag of wet Sakrete.  

I'm going to season it for awhile before I start eating what I grind.

Meanwhile, Anne is mesmerized by the tortilla machine...

or the tortilla technician. (smile)

I believe he said the machine cost $30,000 and that's a lot of 99¢ packages of tortillas but really, there's nothing like fresh, warm, soft corn tortillas, right off the incredibly expensive tortilla machine.

The day we visited, the deli counter featured fresh tilapia.

Now I've heard people trash talking' tilapia but I've had fresh-caught tilapia and it's very good.

I just prefer to remove the face before I cook it.

If you get down ol' Bowling Green way, check it out.

Back home, the yard transformation continues,

and let me tell you, there's nothing like moving twenty 60lb bags of Sakrete to make 40lb bags of manure feel like child's play.

The manure bags smelled so bad, the young man at WalMart almost refused to load them into my truck.  The Sarkrete bags smell like, well, a molcajete.

Coolest, easiest job yet?

The giant bag of gravel from Lowes:

cheap and satisfying; now the spaces between my stepping stones

 look as good as my stepping stones.

I thought I'd get to keep the bag for use on heavy laundry days but I wanted that $15 deposit back.

I found these "ladybug" seeds on a vine near the Peace River.

I thoroughly researched these on the internet for 5 minutes and have no idea what they are besides extremely toxic. 

No plans to eat them or plant them (they SCREAM "invasive") but they sure look purty in a jar.

I also found this sweet little deer mandible.

Love.  Don't know why Mike wants me to get it off his kitchen window sill.

Sakrete is hell on the skin

and it's taken constant applications of coconut oil to keep my hands from feeling like sandpaper.

I suppose it adds a little "texture" to the yarn when I'm knitting.

I've decided to knit snuggly socks for Christmas presents (with knitting, I have to plan waaaay ahead) and here's my first try:

I stopped halfway through (obviously) because I had to adjust the pattern, but now I'm thinking...

Is there a market for slingback socks?