Holy Frijoles!!! Welcome Guest | Login or Register

Last week I hosted the Rotary Women’s Committee meeting and as the hostess, I was responsible for making snacks to serve during the meeting.  Of course I didn’t want to venture into the realm of serving up traditional Mexican snacks because it’s just too dangerous for the foreign person to do this so I decided to do a mix of things that I’m good at making but would be “friendly” to my guests.  The menu included smoked salmon (home smoked, using an amazing recipe from my father-in-law), hummus & pita chips, veggies, roasted red pepper spread (made a recipe from my friend over at Foodhead) and a chipotle spinach dip.  Everyone liked the food, but it was surprising at what I thought was pretty normal stuff was unknown to my guests.  I had a great time explaining what everything was and how to make it and I’m starting to think about opening up a smoked salmon shop out of my house because that was a favourite. 

Anyway, the biggest hit of the evening was the Chipotle Spinach Dip.  It’s really simple to make and it was a take on the standard Knorr Spinach Dip.  The chipotles add a nice burn and smokiness to the dip and it’s definitely worth making again.  You can find canned chipotles in the ethnic food/Mexican food aisle in some grocery stores, but you might have to venture a little further to your local Latin American food mart to find them.  The come in fairly small cans—two popular brands are La Costena and Herdez.

Chipotle Spinach Dip

1 cup mayonnaise

1 cup sour cream

1 pkg frozen, chopped spinach, defrosted and well drained

1 pkg Knorr Vegetable Soup Mix

3-4 chipotles, minced (I leave the seeds in, but you can take them out if you want to reduce the heat but keep the flavour)

Using some paper towel, squeeze the heck out of the defrosted spinach until there is no water left in it—otherwise your dip will be super runny.  Combine all the ingredients together in a bowl and let sit at least 4 hours, or overnight for all the flavours to combine.  The sour cream will decrease the heat of the chipotles so you may need to add some more to get the appropriate amount of burn for you and your guests.  I used about 5 for my guests and it was pretty spicy but not overpowering.  Serve it with chunks of dark pumpernickel bread, veggies or crackers and enjoy!

The way our house is constructed, we have an overhang in front of our patio door which blocks any sunlight from hitting the ground and makes it impossible to grow grass.   We ended up with just a big patch of dirt which would get tracked into the house every time we were in the back yard.  We finally got around to putting in a patio this week and it’s awesome!  This is what our patio looked like before:

And this is what it looks like after:

It was really interesting to watch the guys mix the cement.  They mixed it in the street and hauled it in buckets through the house to the back where they were working.  It was pretty impressive seeing as they didn’t get any cement in the house at all and they swept up all the dust and dirt that was tracked through the house from the project.  We’re very happy with the final product and we can’t wait to break it in!

We have good friends that live in San Antonio who are kind enough to let us use their home as mailing address for things that we order online from the US.  There are just some things in Mexico that are more expensive or poorer quality and therefore are better to buy. 

We celebrate Labour Day in Mexico on May 1st so it was a good excuse for us to take the bus up to San Antonio to visit Mark & Lily.  The bus ride is 12 hours overnight and it’s really not that bad of a trip.  We arrived in the morning and checked into our hotel, had a quick shower and headed off to check out some of the local sites.  We visited the Alamo, which had really beautiful gardens behind this building.

.

I didn’t know the history of the Alamo but to summarize it briefly, this is where a bunch of Texans got their butts kicked by the Mexicans.  I found it strange that they call the Alamo a shrine of liberty and everyone seemed pretty proud of this place.  The famous quote “Remember the Alamo” really translates to “Remember how we got our butts kicked??  Let’s not have this happen again!!” 

We spent the evening at a place called Blue Star Brewing Company where Don and Mark had some beer while I snacked and drank some soda.  On the whole the food was pretty good but I can’t comment on the beer—I’ll leave that for the Guero. 

The next day we took a drive to the San Jose Mission which was much more beautiful and interesting than the Alamo.  It’s the biggest mission in San Antonio and by far the most beautiful.

Lots of brides come here to get their wedding photos taken and you can see why.  After touring around the mission, we headed over to our favourite Texas BBQ place, Rudy’s Country Store & BBQ.  The food is really good tasty and they have the best T-Shirts that say “ I didn’t claw my way to the top of the food chain….to eat vegetables!”  Sadly, every time I have tried to get one of these shirts, they either don’t have my size or they are sold out.  It’s not so bad, it just means that I have to keep going back! 

That night, Don hopped on the bus back to SLP while I spent the night at Mark & Lily’s so I could hop on a Southwest Flight back to Canada for a few weeks.  The flight was cheap and it was nice to break up the travel with a visit with our friends, but I wouldn’t recommend trekking back to Canada without the break.  On the whole, we had a lovely visit with Mark & Lily, did lots of shopping and ate very well.  Hopefully we’ll get to visit them again soon.