Saturday
bee-dee-dee-beep; bee-dee-dee-beep
That's my alarm. That's right. I set it for 8:00 am on Saturday to make sure I was up and at 'em (and speaking) by 8:30 when Maricela would allegedly be picking us up.
I was not happy to hear my alarm, but I must admit that it's nice to finally need an alarm for the weekends.
After I graduated from Lipscomb, I was a grown up and teaching, so I was getting up earlier than any human should. In October, I enrolled in Masters classes, incuding Saturday 8ams, 20 minutes from my house. For two years, I was getting up most Saturday mornings at 7 or before (depending on how non-scary I needed to look), which set my fate for what I assumed would be forever. I figured I was destined to be a grown-up who can't sleep in on Saturdays.
Wrong!
Move to Mexico and all your worries go away! But really, I am thankful to be abel to enjoy sleeping in again.
So, I get up, get dressed and put on a happy face. Around 8:40, Maricela waltzes in. On my way to the pantry to get a pineapple breakfast bar, Mabel asks if we want to eat breakfast. I put my breakfast bar back and get my hunger in gear for a traditional (heavy) Mexican breakfast.
Off we jaunt to Panamá, a popular bakery/restaurant chain here in Culiacán (and I would assume all of Mexico, but who knows?).
I ordered divorciados, which consists of two tostados, each with an over-easy egg on top. One has a green sauce (delish) and the other has a red sauce (a bit too sweet for my taste), and there is a wall of beans between the two.
Mabel took a fruit plate that they wheel around to entice you to get one for the table and Maricela finished her yogurt and ordered a coffee only. I felt like a pig, but dealt with it.
My eggs came over easy on the plate with nothing else. There was a side of multi-grain toast (which is yummy here), but nothing on the main plate besides eggs. That was not what I had ordered, so we called the waitress back over and explained the problem. She wasn't happy about it, but she fixed it.
$11 dollars (my food, two coffees and a fruit plate) and at least one full belly later, we were ready to head out to the grocery stores to get our ingredients for buñuelos. Cosette was with her grandparents still from the night before (since we had had our posada and Wings) and she was going to stay there since the buñuelo process is not a short one. She would've gotten bored quickly and been all in our hair!
Of course the first grocery store we went to didn't have the exact brand of the ingredients we needed, so we got what we could (I bought it-$10) and headed to the second grocery store (Maricela bought it-$10).
We got to Tía Laura's around ten, which was almost an hour later than we had scheduled. Such is Mexico, right? She showed us some new house shoes she was crocheting for relatives for Christmas and I was taken back to the Gabhart Christmases where we never failed to get the socks with little rubber dots on the bottom for traction from... was it Aunt Nantie and Uncle Merle? I also felt a lot like I was at Honey's with an almost finished crossword puzzle from the newspaper sitting in the chair with the pen on top as if we had interrupted, and the crocheted things all around.
It's funny to me how much "older" Mexicans seem. And that may just be because I've redefined old (or maybe because the "old" people I know don't match the definition for old), but Mabel's dad and aunts seem along the same lines as my grandmothers instead of my parents or aunts and uncles.
We went through our ingredients and realized we had about 100 times too much lard and were short one bag of flour. Off Maricela went to remedy that situation. Mabel and I set to work cleaning the table (outside in the garage- the garage here is not the same as it is at home because it's more of a multi-purpose room without walls) and setting out the ingredients. I took plenty of pictures and made a recipe (that Aunt Laura had never written down-or even paid attention to- until now).
I felt like I was in a movie all day long. We started by mixing and kneading the ingredients. Then we made dough balls. Then we had to roll them out into the tiniest, thinnest little tortillas you ever did see. Next the tortillas had to dry out on the table and finally be "browned" on the stove. After they're browned, they get fried in vegetable oil and then you eat them with a sauce that I liked but if I make them in the future, I'll use ice cream and chocolate sauce.
We made two batches. After the first batch was drying on the table, we broke for lunch (it was already 2!). Then we got going with round two. It was such a neat tradition because they do it every year. Laura said she doesn't do it because she loves buñuelos; she does it because she wants to see Mabel and Maricela. You spend hours at the table together, getting a rhythm with the rolling pins and conversation flows and then stops naturally. Then it picks up again and pauses again. It was the definition to me of what I've always studied about regarding Mexicans and their relationships. How I said in the beginning that time together was more important than what "needs" to be done (remember how Hernán would chat and chat and all I wanted to do was get organized and get going to my next class?). I absolutely loved this tradition and hope to implement it some time when there's time (oh, the American in me).
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