Finally, tonight we had some rain. We have been hoping for rain most of this month and so were really glad to get some, that is until the ceiling in our dining room started leaking like a sieve!! Always something!!
Last week, we had plumbers here revising our water supply. Here, we store water, although it does come in from the street/city. We have two LARGE tanks on the roof called tenacos which store many liters of water and we thought we had stored enough so we'd never go without. However, we had some trouble getting the water pumped from street level up there and so had to re-route and add yet another tenaco which will act as a cistern and sits in our garage. Now, we really should never ever again be out of water (and with the threats about this upcoming season of hurricanes, we want to have plenty of water in case our city turns it of as they do when a storm is supposed to be headed our way). And speaking of water, in a nod to the environment, we have a solar-powered hot water system that looks very much like a space ship which is also up on our roof. (Why would we need hot water down here near the equator, my mother asks -- well, we are not THAT near the equator and it does get coolish here in the winter not to mention the need for hot water when washing clothes and dishes!!)
Despite the water emergency earlier in the week, on Friday night, our friend from Winfield IL, Paul Lindemuth, 
cooked a magnificent dinner for us and 8 of our friends which we actually ate in our dining room, instead of our more normal outdoor terrace setting. This is by way of introducing Paul to folks in Merida who will want to use his talents and services once he is down here more. (Eva and I were guests and had almost nothing to do with the preparations except setting the table and julienning the beets.) We began with cold cream of cucumber soup (with what I'd thought was dill growing in our kitchen garden but was not). Then a salad of julienned beets and goat cheese followed by the main course of chicken in a lemon cream and basil (again from our garden) sauce and rice timbales. A cheese and fresh fig course followed, The meal ended with a dessert of individual cheese cakes smothered in local honey and caramel and some unbelievably fresh and ripe diced mangoes plus a chocolate shortbread cookie. So, we can eat well in Merida (and apparently Rick Bayless thinks so too since he's devoted an entire season of his shows on PBS to cooking in the Yucatan) and we plan to eat even better once Paul and Michael actually do move down here. While chef Paul was prepping our meal, Michael thought Eva and I could use some sprucing up and so took out his hairdresser shears and went to work on us as we sat under an umbrella by the pool. We look much improved now!!
cooked a magnificent dinner for us and 8 of our friends which we actually ate in our dining room, instead of our more normal outdoor terrace setting. This is by way of introducing Paul to folks in Merida who will want to use his talents and services once he is down here more. (Eva and I were guests and had almost nothing to do with the preparations except setting the table and julienning the beets.) We began with cold cream of cucumber soup (with what I'd thought was dill growing in our kitchen garden but was not). Then a salad of julienned beets and goat cheese followed by the main course of chicken in a lemon cream and basil (again from our garden) sauce and rice timbales. A cheese and fresh fig course followed, The meal ended with a dessert of individual cheese cakes smothered in local honey and caramel and some unbelievably fresh and ripe diced mangoes plus a chocolate shortbread cookie. So, we can eat well in Merida (and apparently Rick Bayless thinks so too since he's devoted an entire season of his shows on PBS to cooking in the Yucatan) and we plan to eat even better once Paul and Michael actually do move down here. While chef Paul was prepping our meal, Michael thought Eva and I could use some sprucing up and so took out his hairdresser shears and went to work on us as we sat under an umbrella by the pool. We look much improved now!!One other thing that happened recently and goes under the
six degrees of separation heading is we had invited over to the house a lovely woman we'd met whe we purchased two of her oil paintings. Her name is Ana Rosa Aguilar and she was born and raised here in Merida and can trace her family back here for several hundred years and before that to Spain. She told us wonderful stories about Merida when she was a girl (she is around my age). And finally I asked her where she had learned such good English. She said that she had studied one year in the US in a small town no one had ever heard of. The school was a Catholic school north of Chicago in a place called Lake Forest!! We just roared -- turns out it was Woodlands Academy about 2 minutes from the house I grew up in.
six degrees of separation heading is we had invited over to the house a lovely woman we'd met whe we purchased two of her oil paintings. Her name is Ana Rosa Aguilar and she was born and raised here in Merida and can trace her family back here for several hundred years and before that to Spain. She told us wonderful stories about Merida when she was a girl (she is around my age). And finally I asked her where she had learned such good English. She said that she had studied one year in the US in a small town no one had ever heard of. The school was a Catholic school north of Chicago in a place called Lake Forest!! We just roared -- turns out it was Woodlands Academy about 2 minutes from the house I grew up in. I have not shared previously our amazing tree that we have growing inside the house. This climate allows us to experiment with so many types of plants that we'd never before heard of and 
this tree is one of those. Called Amorphophallus, it is really a bulb. As such, it spends half the year resting in its pot and sitting in our garage not doing much. But the other half of the year, it emerges from the dirt, grows visibly each day for about two weeks, and finally is a delicate tree about 6 feet tall. Eventually, the tree kinda slumps and we know it is time to cut it off and put the pot back in the garage to wait until a shoot emerges. We had more fun watching it grow and would wake up thinking about what changes might have taken place over night! Here it is above after about 4 days of growing and then as its leaves appear within the tube. Below are some more pictures of its progress. Ultimately, the branches drop open to be parallel to the top of the trunk and the frothy leaves hang down. It is a wonder!!
this tree is one of those. Called Amorphophallus, it is really a bulb. As such, it spends half the year resting in its pot and sitting in our garage not doing much. But the other half of the year, it emerges from the dirt, grows visibly each day for about two weeks, and finally is a delicate tree about 6 feet tall. Eventually, the tree kinda slumps and we know it is time to cut it off and put the pot back in the garage to wait until a shoot emerges. We had more fun watching it grow and would wake up thinking about what changes might have taken place over night! Here it is above after about 4 days of growing and then as its leaves appear within the tube. Below are some more pictures of its progress. Ultimately, the branches drop open to be parallel to the top of the trunk and the frothy leaves hang down. It is a wonder!!
No comments:
Post a Comment