¡viva mexico!

living in spain has given me a newfound appreciation for mexican food. that's because living in spain makes me miss food with flavor.

the grocery stores don't sell: a) sour cream; b) fresh spicy peppers of any sort; c) jarred spicy peppers (e.g., jalepeño slices) of any sort.

lisa also misses mexican food - in fact, we went to a mexican restaurant for her birthday. i wanted to ask them where they got their sour cream. i made chili a while back and i had to use greek yogurt. i've used cream cheese on my baked potatoes.

lisa says creme fraiche is basically sour cream too. even though it's got pictures of berries on the container.

anyway, i found a recipe several months ago for chile rellenos, and then another one a few weeks ago for chicken tortilla soup. i thought maybe we could have a mexican (or tex-mex, anyway) dinner party.

jenny made guacamole; lisa and jaime made quesadillas and chicken fajitas; cecile heated up a can of mexican-style bean mix and helped me greatly in preparing the chile rellenos.

our broiler doesn't work very well, so we couldn't get the skin off the peppers - but in trying, we tore a bunch of holes in them - and then didn't have toothpicks to close them while frying - and then we burned them a little. but they still tasted pretty good. they were really a group effort.

note the can of "nachos de jalapeños." i got that at hipercor and they were actually decently hot. i was excited.

we were prepping and cooking from about 9 to...uh...11:30, probably. all of these dishes were prepared in my kitchen, more or less simultaneously. but everything came out great. we were very proud.

lisa's boyfriend jaime. he's from the canary islands, like my roommates. lisa was saying earlier in the day that people from the canaries seem really proud of it - they talk about it all the time, they have posters and flags of the canaries in their house.

i mentioned that we had a banner for tenerife above our door, and a stuffed sun in the hallway whose rays list the names of all the islands. and that whenever cristian and alicia go out of town, they are always going back home.

so when cristian and jaime started talking, lisa rolled her eyes at me and said, "friends for life."

three liters of alhambra beer, courtesy of lisa and jaime.

god only knows what i was talking about here. we had some good dinner conversation, though. cecile mentioned that la perra gorda was putting on a production of "matilda" - a play adaption of the book, or something like that. so we talked about roald dahl and our favorite children's books. jaime had read Jaime y el Melocotón Gigante. lisa tried to say "the BFG" in spanish, which was something like: el Gigante Grande y Amable.

then we turned to the ninja turtles. we wondered how you would say the full name of the teenage mutant ninja turtles in spanish.  jaime said he had the muñecas as a kid, and that they were called "las tortujas ninja." lisa turned to him and said, very seriously, "¡pero eran mutantes!"

it was a good dinner party, and a good group of friends. i hope we can do it again soon. i think the next one will be a kingcake and jambalaya party. i've already got my mardi gras music downloaded...