I’m from Southern California, how in the world does Mexico feel so far away from home? The flight from LAX to Mexico City is shorter than in country flights I’ve taken. Yet, I still find myself missing and craving things from home. I just didn’t expect here to be so different from there.
Today I went to McDonald's and ordered a McNugget combo and a chocolate sundae. I’m not a McDonald’s person (or much of a chocolate person for that matter). Sure their fries are good and who’s really going to complain about the ice cream, but I don’t ever go there because I’m hungry. Unless I’m traveling. When I’m away from home McDonald’s becomes comfort food. So here I am in the country with my favorite food ever, in the middle of the busy downtown of Cuernavaca, Mexico with food vendors everywhere I turn, and where do I get dinner? McDonald’s. It’s a little shaming. I haven’t told my Mexican friend I’m living with that I went there and I probably never will. He knows how much I love Mexican food, he probably won’t get why I did it. I just needed something that felt like home. Boiled corn on the cob with mayonnaise, parmesan, and chili powder just doesn’t say home the way french fries do.
After the McDonald’s dinner and dessert shaming extravaganza of 2013 I walked by a fabric store and saw some yarn. So naturally I went inside and bought it. But they didn’t haven any knitting needles. So I walked around more until I found a fabric store selling knitting needles and crochet hooks. There was actually even a knitting circle going on at the time. When I know more Spanish, maybe I’ll go back. And then I caught a bus back to my neck of the woods. I had a plan. I was going to go to the store around the corner and buy all the supplies I would need to make caramel corn. Then I was going to eat caramel corn while knitting and watching Dr Who. How much more homey can you get than that? Well this is where things proceeded to disappoint me.
The market around the corner is small. They didn’t even sell any brown sugar! (I sort of live for brown sugar. Any recipe that calls for regular sugar and brown sugar, I usually half the regular and double the brown. And sometimes I’ll just eat brown sugar straight. Not a lot. Just a good really dark clump. It’s just so good.) And they didn’t have any Karo syrup, but they did have pancake syrup called Caro Syrup so I compromised. And I also bought some cajeta, I figured I’d add some of that and half the amount of white sugar and maybe it’s come out similar tasting. Oh and I forgot! The recipe I use calls for a handful of marshmallows. All they had were bags of pink and white marshmallows. Pink will be fine, it all gets melted together anyway.
So as I was melting the marshmallows into my experimental caramel concoction, I smelled the faint aroma of strawberry. Umm..., Strawberry? Yeah, so the marshmallows weren’t just pink, they were strawberry. Awesome. Strawberry flavored experimental caramel corn. Side note about me, I’m kind of a food purist. I don’t like when people muck up perfectly good treats by adding stupid stuff to it. For example: Rice Crispy Treats. THE ORIGINAL IS PERFECT! There’s no need to add peanut butter or chocolate or candy or heaven forbid, pumpkin. Seriously, Rice Crispy Treats are perfect in their natural state. So the idea of strawberry flavored caramel corn is sort of a really big no no in Maureen’s Book of Eating Through Your Emotions.
So there went one batch. Thankfully I had enough foresight to not poor it all over the popcorn before realizing I wouldn’t like it. And by the way, the plain popcorn turned out wonderful. So I threw away what I had so far, washed the pan and started all over again. (I have a very small kitchen to work in, I needed that pan.) Now the stupid burner isn’t working right. I went through about 4 matches before it occurred that I could just use a different burner that works properly. I imagine most of you would of figured that out before the fourth match.
I had to alter the recipe a bit and truth be told, I didn’t like it. It was OK I guess, but I’m sort of a perfectionist when it comes to cooking and baking. I know how it’s supposed to turn out and it didn’t work that way. Therefore, it’s not good. I guess the bright side is that by the time I was finally done I was no longer craving caramel popcorn. I was now just thinking about how I really needed to write this instance down and maybe keep a blog of all my Mexican cooking and baking mishaps and experiences.
And I thought: who would possibly want to read about that?
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