January is always a lean month, a month in which we choose to spend eating whatever stuff is in the kitchen. We waste far too much food, so it is a great way to clear the covers and used up all those things we bought during the year and never ate. Take the freezer, for example, I don't know about yours, but my freezer is always full of food, things I bought I put there and then never quite found time or occasion to eat them or cook them. Every time I open the freezer, I feel super guilty that there is so much food there!
I totally blame this post on two fabulous friends who are big into their craft beers: the ingenious Kate Packwood, from The Wild Flour Bakery, and the super mad Steve Mooney (AKA @pasty_face), who is well known on twitter as the outrageously funny guy behind the entrepreneurial Anto (his alter ego).
Salsas are at the centre stage of Mexican Food. A taco is not a taco without a good salsa, so there are so many recipes for them it will make your head explode! One funny thing I discovered last year is that a lot of people seem to think that chopping fresh tomatoes and adding onion, chilli and other raw stuff makes a salsa... In Mexico, mostly all our salsas are cooked. What Irish people refer to as 'salsa' is really a salad for us, a sort of pico de gallo that we use to garnish or accompany a dish with.
This is a very lazy post, so beware! I was cooking during the week for a party of friends who will come over for Sunday and sneaked a bit of the Cochinita Pibil I cooked for our lunch. I normally cook 2 kilos of cochinita, then portion it and freeze it. This time I took a bowl of it and made this delicious Pork Pibil Tostadas which served two purposes: it fed us and provided the recipe for this post.
One of the first things I learnt to make from scratch when I was little was mayonnaise. I loved making it, mam showed me how to do it and although it was nothing like what we would buy in the jars, the sheer fact that I could play with the flavour, made it special.
As you know, I'm trying to blog more regularly these days, at least once a week. Friday is usually the day I can get to do that, but when I have a busy week and there's little or no time to go food shopping, I try and come up with something I can blog about and which I have ingredients to make and photograph before all light is gone. Like many bloggers, this is a hobby for me, a passion and a pastime, this means that the day job, and in our case, the night job, have priority over everything else.
