Traditional pico de gallo

This is what Cristina on the Chowhound message board insists is real Pico de Gallo. I call melon with lime juice, chile powder and salt Pico de Gallo because I have heard other people call it that. She insists that is called "fruit."

In any case, this is a refreshing summer salad.

Pico de Gallo

2 cups jicama, peeled and cut into 1/2 inch dice
3 oranges, peeled and trimmed of white pith, chopped in dice
1/2 large red, orange or yellow bell pepper, diced
1 cup or more mild flavored cucumber, diced
Some people like paper thin slices of red onion, too
Some people like chopped cilantro
Juice of one lime
Your favorite chile powder to taste
Couple good pinches of flake salt if you have it, regular salt if you don't.
A nice drizzle of olive oil

Combine and eat. It gets better if it sits for a couple hours.

My newest blog

Ever since I spent 3 weeks in Oaxaca last summer, I have been wanting to print my journal and photos, and I just couldn't figure a good, economical way to do it.

Duh! Yesterday it finally occurred to me: Who needs paper? Publish a blog!

So I chopped my word document up into chronological chunks, uploaded a zillion photos to flickr.com (which, due to my techno-incompetence took longer than it should have) and about 10 hours of screen time later, here it is:

My Oaxaca Journal.

It is quite long and quite detailed. If you have a lot of patience and a masochistic streak, you can read all of it. Otherwise, read part of it or just look at the pretty pictures. There are more photos later in the blog than earlier.

Good bye low-carb diet

Of course I am lying about being on a low-carb diet. I would NEVER, both because I think it is a bunch of idiocy and because I am a carb-addicted vegetarian. A typical meal can be a bean burrito with a side of sweet corn and some carrots with a piece of fruit for dessert...bring on the carbs!

After about a year of holding myself back, I finally went into Sarai Panaderia at the corner of TO Blvd and Conejo School Road yesterday for some Mexican, Central or maybe South American pastries (I will ask next time I go in, maybe later today).

It was even better than I expected. They have lovely crumbly sweet empanadas in flavors from guayaba (guava) to cajeta to fresa (strawberry), the usual assortment of pan dulces and other pastries.

The two I bought, a cajeta empanada and a long, thin sugar covered cream filled pastry were both very sweet, especially the runny brown cajeta, and I ate them both before I remembered I had been meaning to take one back and share it with someone in my office...

The price? 50 cents apiece. That, my friends, is a deal.

Eat and Run

I haven't been posting much lately and I haven't been cooking much lately. I have been busy.

I have to tell you about one of my new staple lifesaving got-no-time-to-cook foods, Ajvar. Or, to be more specific, mild Ajvar, since the spicy version is a little much for me.



This middle eastern or Turkish dip has a smooth consistency and a flavor I don't get tired of. It is primarily red ripe sweet peppers, eggplant and tomatoes blended with some spices, including a few hot red peppers.

Thus, it is an almost miraculous 15 calories a tablespoon.

I eat it on crackers, on torn-up pitas, on bread, on quesadillas. The brand shown isn't the brand I buy, Zer Gut, but I couldn't find a photo and I was too lazy to get out the camera.

Cheese of the every-other-week

I just can't eat that much cheese! I wanted to do cheese of the week but I can't keep up.



This is Queso Quesadilla, a Cacique product . They make a line of Mexican cheeses, cremas and chorizo sausage. Their website has recipes and descriptions of what the differents cheeses are like, which is handy because they look pretty much the same when they are in their little round packages.

This cheese doesn't have a lot of distinctive flavor. But it is very, very smooth and melts like a dream - the perfect quesadilla cheese. It is much much better for quesadillas than monterey, which tends to separate, or stringy old mozzarella.