December 12, 2019 Breakfast – Steak, Mushroom, and onion omelet with Potato Latcke. Lunch – Ham and Cheese Wraps. Dinner – Poached Pink Grouper with Sautéed Julienned vegetables and black beans

December 12,  2019 Breakfast – Steak, Mushroom, and onion omelet with Potato Latcke. Lunch – Ham and Cheese Wraps. Dinner – Poached Pink Grouper with Sautéed Julienned vegetables and black beans

We are cooking with a handicap.  We have only a medium skillet and sauce pan and a two burner gas stove. Plus a slightly larger sauce pan that Linda and T.R. loaned s.
We must be creative with our menus.  Tonight Suzette pushed the limit brilliantly..

This was our best day of food on the trip so far, due to the variety and abundance of PPIs from our restaurant dining.

We slept in and started the day with cup of tea for me and coffee for Suzette and a toasted ½ bollia with cherry jam.  Later we made a steak, mushroom, and onion  omelet.  I diced the PPI rib eye steak from last night’s meal, two mushrooms, and two oz. of onion.

 I also ate the other half of the bollia with cherry jam.

After breakfast we rested and read.  Then at noon Suzette made ham and cheese wraps by spreading mayonnaise on a corn tortilla, then laying slices of lettuce, Swiss cheese, and ham, and rolling it. Suzette made four that fit perfectly into the lovely plastic box given to us with the leftovers at Si Senor that she packed into our ice chest with four Buena Noches and a bottle of water.  We stopped at our local grocery at the bottom of the hill to buy ice to fill our ice chest for 10 pesos and headed to town.

We went to the Hippie Market at 12:30 to look for a pair of flip flops for me.,because my sandals were rubbing blisters on my feet.  We did not see any flip flops, but among the usual touristy stuff being sold by Mexicans I noticed a booth displaying jewelry and fossils.  On further examination I saw a number of fossilized Gastropoda many that I had never seen before.  I asked the young man about one of the larger Gastropoda and he said he had collected it from a lake in Coahuila called Cuatro Cienegas.  This interested me and I spent over an hour inspecting and buying seven of his collection of fossilized Gastropoda for 2700 pesos ($150.00).  This violated my general rule to not buy something I did not know the price of, but it fulfilled my rule that if you see something you have never seen before on a trip that you want or need, you should buy it, because you may never see it
again.

After buying the shells we drove u the coast to try to get to a new beach but the gate was locked and we did not want to hike in, so we returned to Sayulita to the shoe store on the eastern side of the river and fitted me and bought a pair of black plastic flip flops with an in sole for 250 pesos ($14.50). This would liberate my toes from rubbing against my shoes, so a miracle for my toes.

 We then continued on the main road where the shoe store was located to the beach and parked in the same parking lot near the beach.  We carried and set up our chairs, umbrella, and ice chest in the same place we sat yesterday near the condos Colonial.

We were hungry so we ate our ham and cheese rolls with a Moche Buena and the the last of our first roll of cookies.

We rested and sat for several hours l then at 5:00 we walked the beach. A very personable Mexican came up to us just before we walked and talked to us about music and showed us lovely small hand harps made from sardine and tuna cans and chocolates made by his wife and daughter.  Suzette could not resist when he told her the keys were made from Bobby pins and she realized that making them could be a craft project for the clients at Seniorcare.  We bought a hand harp and a piece of chocolate and asked for a song, gave him 250 pesos, and then packed up and returned to the condo.

Suzette made us our daily banana, mango, and rum daiquiri and we sat on the veranda to contemplate our dinner menu.  Suzette swam and we showered and dressed and watched an episode of Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.

We then cooked dinner for tonight and tomorrow night. The key to the cleverness of cooking two dinners lay in the integration of the menu selections by Suzette.  Tonight’s menu featured poached grouper, which required sautéing onion, garlic, and bell pepper in butter, then making that into a poaching medium by the addition of 1 cup of white wine (in this case Argentinian Torrontes) and 1 cup of water and adding the fish fillets to poach.  The resulting liquid that was not served with the fish for dinner became the soup stock for tomorrow night’s meal of seafood stew with the addition of white wine and water and the diced extra grouper, PPI octopus, and red snapper.

We will simply heat the soup and serve it over rice or with saltine crackers.

The Torrontes was wonderful, full bodied with that rich fruity, citrusy Torrontes flavor.

After dinner watched another episode of Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and then went to bed.

Bon Appetit