All for the sake of a nice mexican dinner.

Occasionally I feel guilty over having house help and a gardener/guard. But not today. I would get NOTHING else done if they didn’t do their jobs. Here is a glimpse of the day:

I had invited teammates over for dinner, this meant meal prep for 10 people.

*Funny side note- Teammates gave us a rooster (named Jose) a few months ago and he has served his purpose and has three hens sitting on eggs (and we are sick of his crowing at 5:30am) so today’s dinner was chicken enchiladas which seemed most fitting as the main dishes’ name was Jose.

Anyway, starting at 8am I pointed out the hen and roster that were destined for dinner to our gardener. When I arrived back home around noon I boiled some water and we plucked them and gutted them. They then went into the stock pot from 1 to 2. Meanwhile our house help Helen made 40 tortillas and cleaned and sorted the rocks and sand from of a pot of beans. Then she started them soaking and eventually boiling (un-canned beans are lots of work to make them digestible). She also cleaned the stones from a kilo of rice. Those little stones are torment in your teeth.   Around 3 pm Helen went home but first she mopped the floor and did the dishes. Later in the afternoon I cut 2 kg of tomatoes, green peppers and onions to make salsa. I’d planted cilantro a while back so went out to the garden and cut and cleaned a few handfuls. The beans were finally soft enough to toss in the blender for bean dip. The chickens needed to have all of the meat picked off the bones and a white sauce made from scratch. I also wanted to do peanut butter cookies for dessert. (Our peanut butter was grown, harvested then ground by hand between two rocks by Helen.) The enchiladas needed to be assembled, the salsa cooked, the rice boiled and the cookies mixed up and baked. This part finally felt like dinner prep. But between the three of us we’d already spent nearly 10 hours getting this one meal ready!  Next time you grab a can of salsa or bean dip, a package of tortillas or peanut butter cookies, a bag of frozen chicken breasts or better yet a ready to cook pan of chicken enchiladas feel free to think of me.