Chick Pea Pancakes, You Guys!

Chick pea pancakes, you guys, chick pea pancakes! Thank you to my dear friend and neighbor, Skyler, for offering them to me on so many occasions that I finally took it upon myself to make them on my own. They are so good and easy, I have had them as a meal almost every night for the past week. The hardest step is remembering to get the flour when you are in the store. The Chick Pea flour, aka Garbanzo bean flour, can be found in most grocery stores and I hear in abundance at Indian grocers...)

I mix water and the chick peak flour 

together, I pour little silver dollars of the batter into a pan full of olive oil for a few minutes and then flip. I cover them in chopped parsley and salt. There is no such thing as too much parsley. 

There are many incredible things coming to me these days besides amazing high-protein pancakes... one of those things has been the bluegrass singer, Claire Lynch, I heard live yesterday. Music restores.

A Chair in the Sky

There is a great clip (or maybe this one) of the comedian Louis CK in an interview with Conan O'Brien where he is describing how ungrateful we are as humans despite everything amazing going on around us. It is true. When times get tough, I still have to thank my lucky stars for all the beautiful, incredible things going on in life. So with that, I'd like to celebrate good things happening all around me despite the rain cloud hovering over me this season.

1. I have the most amazing students who keep me going everyday and bring me joy and purpose. There is so much love in my classroom.

2. I have my health. I walk and talk and breathe miraculously everyday. I like walking so much that I will do it--to a beat--in go-go boots for miles at a time.

3. When I have forgotten to eat, my adopted Greek grandmother/landlady next door who doesn't speak English will offer me sustenance. She speaks the universal language of "tupperware-full of-stew" with a chunk of Feta, and Greek coffee. We sit on the back stairwell and watch the leaves change color. It's a lesson in accepting change and the passing of time. Her legs are not doing so well these days, you guys...pray for Anthoula's knees.

4. When I have forgotten momentarily that I am an artist that makes things, I discover a new cartoonist and laugh heartily for the first time in weeks over the idea of pouring lemonade over children to keep them quiet. This comic is from the Moomins series by the great Tove Jansson who I had to look up. She is such a rebel! Look at her picture! Remember: smoking is bad, comics are good!
5. I also had an open house in my studio recently and shared my own cartoons with the public. And gosh darn it, people like them.

6. When I have no more words though, I can still sing... with Polly, with waves crashing on the cold Chicago beach, with my new ukulele chords I just learned.

 Fall seven times, get up eight. -Japanese Proverb

I touched lions and dinosaur eggs. Now what?

I’m not a PETA member or an animal rights activist per se. Maybe it’s time I step up to the plate. I do love animals and cuddling fluffy puppies...or baby tigers as the opportunity arises. I’m a vegetarian primarily for health reasons but of course, support and appreciate fair treatment for all animals.  While there are so many issues worth fighting for in regards to the rights and dignities of humans, the way we treat our animals is also a sign of how we treat each other. Thank you, Upton Sinclair, Howard Lyman, Julia Butterfly Hill and countless others for pointing out the sick relationship we have had and continue to have both biologically and mentally with our eco-systems. I try to avoid soapboxes on my blog but I thought about all of these issues rather intensely this past weekend.

I wrote to my sister when I safely got back into Oaxaca last weekend... “I went with my Swiss classmate to visit this really wealthy man's house and spent the night in his mansion. He owns a private zoo. It was the strangest past 24 hours of my life. One for the book.” My sister has suggested I write a book.

So here's the story before I adapt it to the book:
My friend from language school was invited by this wealthy Mexican man to visit his home. They met on a weekend excursion to see ruins outside of town the weekend before. Red flag! Where have I seen this before? Right, the other stranger's house in Mexico. Read here: http://heartjean.blogspot.com/2011_09_01_archive.html
  My Swiss friend was willing to go if I would join her. It wouldn't be so strange if there were two of us going, would it? I've done far riskier things. We decided to accept his invitation to stay at his home for one night. I think we had an exit strategy...like, if it was really awful we could always stay at a hotel or something.
We took a 3 hour bus to the town Tehuacan in the state of Puebla. Our new "friend" picked us up at the bus station in a fancy car with his niece and nephew riding along. Nope, nothing strange here. A few minutes later we arrive at a large gated home.
As the gates opened to his driveway, a bullet-proof-vest-wearing-guard shooed the scores of chihuahuas out of the way of our car pulling in. The wealthy man sells chihuahuas on the side. Good business, he says.

We entered the house filled wall-to-wall with taxidermy-- (I was assured all animals died of natural causes on his property). While the wealthy man and his nephew attended to some business at the dining room table, the niece brought out a baby leopard for us ladies to cuddle. At this point, I have no idea where this animal came from. The nephew and wealthy man were still talking about something at the table so the niece started opening cabinets and showing us fossils, dinosaur eggs, pre-hispanic-mesoamerican artifacts. We passed them around like we were shopping for a good centerpiece at The Pottery Barn.
The wealthy man found us in his office a while later fondling artifacts thousands of years old and posing with stone tablets with mysterious inscriptions. The occasional flamingo could be seen sauntering past the office window in the backyard. The wealthy man openly admitted he bought his pieces on the black market. He wanted to start a museum one day. Fascinating, right?
Well, as you can imagine, we had many questions! Number 1: Why did he invite us strangers to his home? His round-about answer suggested that he enjoyed sharing what he had and that he trusted foreigners in his home far more than his fellow Mexicans. Hmmm. After leaving our things in guest bedrooms, we went for a ride to the local shopping mall for sandwiches with the wealthy man and his niece. You're right, this isn't in the guidebooks.

Nighttime had fallen on the house of enchanted black market treasures...so what to do?---- That's right!...say goodnight to all the exotic animals in the backyard! So off we went out the back door of the house: myself, my Swiss friend, the niece with a baby tiger on a leash, the nephew and two guards following behind walking with flashlights.  We followed closely behind as the wealthy man clanged on the cages with his flashlight and cooed at his cats.  By cats I mean, lions and tigers...and bears and zebras and monkeys suddenly emerging out of the darkness!  The feeling of walking down a pitch black pathway and then realizing you are within inches of a white tiger's face is a sensation to remember.

My Swiss friend and I later retired to guest bedrooms to quietly whisper our private reactions to these strange environs. "Um, why are we here again?" "Was that really a dinosaur egg?" "Does it matter?" "How many foreigners are buried in the backyard?" "Just kidding, haha!" "I think I walked through monkey sh!t...or was that from the chihuahuas?" "How does the wealthy man have money again?" "Look at the pretty marble floors in the bathroom." "He was married to how many European women?" "Which Mexican political party's campaign did he support again?" "Is that his nephew or a cousin? Are you sure that's his niece? No, I heard niece." "What kind of laws are there for having tigers in your backyard in Mexico?" "Is this what you imagined when you met him last week?"

The next morning I couldn't eat the cow intestine soup served for breakfast but my Swiss friend said it had interesting texture. I had quesadillas and we sat surrounded by jade skulls and arrowheads discussing what mountains the wealthy man had climbed and how much he likes Russia. It was a largely male dominated conversation with the nephew and wealthy man at the heads of the tables with us four girls quietly chewing our breakfast, speaking in rapid Spanish and using sprinklings of choppy English. Soon thereafter we went to see all the animals in the private zoo in their full daytime glory. The wealthy man often opened the metal doors so we could take unobstructed photos of the amazing creatures.

The wealthy man says that his cats have a huge rate of reproduction. More "mainstream" zoos don't understand how he does it with such a small space. He says it's because he loves them and the animals have fun looking at each other. At one point, I tried to tactfully ask about how he learned to take care of so many animals and if he has a lot of legal obstacles. His short answer was that he just started reading about animals over time and that he has to keep microchips in all of his animals so that they are accounted for by the government. 
So what to do with that information? Well, in that moment, you can only feed marshmallows to 7 foot grizzly bears and pet the fine silky black coats of jaguars. We had our choice of the stuffed ones inside or the live ones in the cages.
After  hours of being up close and personal with dozens of species in the wealthy man's zoo, we went for lunch in town and were dropped off at the bus station...without a scratch.

He was a nice enough man but I was ready to scratch under the surface a bit more. Luckily, others have scratched here before questioning whether these animals should be confined as they are. There have been petitions to move the animals to a better habitat. There is also a short film investigating its ethics as well. I'm not sure what to do next. But writing about it is a start.

Recipe for Disaster, I mean, Chiles Rellenos

Step 1: Stand in Mexico City's central plaza next to Mexico's biggest cathedral on Mexican Independence Day until a chef walks up to you and asks you to take his picture.
Step 2: Wander the streets together talking in broken Spanish and broken English for several hours while drinking cans of blue colored vodka poured into empty 7-11 cups. Confirm that chef is actually a chef and works at the Hilton by looking at his resume he happened to be carrying with him.
Step 3: Try to understand when chef communicates that he wants you to meet his mother, his 3 dogs, and his brother only a few train stops away.  He might also make you dinner but you will not be certain.
Step 4: Follow him. Get onto subway, then get onto bus (colectivo) and then walk for 10 more minutes to his house and meet his mother, 3 dogs, and his brother.
Step 5: Sit on couch and talk about Mexican school systems with chef's mother and how you don't like eating meat using a combination of  the following 5 Spanish words you know: "No" "Carne" "Chemicos" "Me" "Gusta". Gesture how you like to see where your meat comes from. Listen as chef explains that they have eaten one of the pet fish from the tank and that they can do that tonight. Decline offer.
Step 6: Upon chef's insistence, put on proper chef attire. Black shirt for the lady. White shirt for the gentleman.

Step 7: Keep drinking the kool-aid in every sense of the phrase, preferably of the blue variety.
Step 8: Pour cream and cheese of the Philadelphia variety into blender. Add pecans and sugar.

Step 9: Cut open peppers and scoop the "meat-no really, it's okay-meat" from mysterious pot at back of stove inside of peppers.
Step 10: Walk to corner store and 'borrow' toothpicks and walk back. Don't forget to carry blue kool-aid with you for the evening stroll.
Step 11: Sew the peppers together with the toothpicks. Then flip over and pour cream and sprinkle dried cranberries on top.
Step 12: Eat the chef's stuffed pepper.
Step 13: Let chef drive you home and spend 10 minutes trying to communicate the concept of 'trust' without actually knowing the word in each other's language.
Step 14: Take a 14 hour bus ride to Chiapas the next day.

Optional step: Consider how you could have been eaten alive as shown at the Museo Nacional de Antropologia.

A few notes on language for the chef.

No-Fail Kale

I know, I know, I'm more likely to make pigment for a painting with kale than actually eat it. But I keep hearing the nutritional wonders of this bitter leafy plant. Notice how I placed a complimentary color (my half-eaten carrot) in the picture above. Carrots are certainly not required to cook kale here but aesthetics count in my world. I would consider kale to probably be my most likely scapegoat vegetable. It needs all the compliments it can get. I actually think my worst nightmare might be being strapped to a chair for days being fed kale.
My friend, Natasha, has done amazing things with kale in the oven so I thought I'd try it out myself. While I think anything smothered in olive oil will usually improve, I was doubtful with even this vegetable. Thanks for some "no-fail kale", Natasha! Here it is:

Crisped Kale:

1. Wash kale and pat COMPLETELY dry.It's important to dry it or else it ends up steaming in the oven.
2. Toss with a little bit of olive oil, salt, and pepper. Over-salting will cause shrinking. Hold back!
   
3. Broil until crisp. About 5 minutes. Watch it as it turns black quickly.
4. Eat your vegetables!
   

I'm also happy to report that I actually used the broil option on the oven dial. As for how much nutrition I just cooked out of it, that's another story.