Work, Work, Work

I've been busy. Barbara and I gave a Brunch Baby Shower at my house on Saturday. There are several things I can blog about from the last few days but I don't have time to really develop the stories so I'm just going to dump it all in this one blog entry.

It took some doing to get the house ready for the shower. First of all we had gardening to do. My plants in the patio had been shredded in the hail storm a couple of weeks ago so I bought lots of pots of white poinsettias and spread them around in the flower bed to cover up the damage. I also bought some new plants to put in pots where the plant that was there was dead or doing poorly. Secondly, we had to move furniture around so that people would have a place to sit down to eat or at least a place so they could put their glass down while they held their plate on their lap. I arranged flowers and rented dishes.

Renting dishes took two walking trips to the rental place across town. It would have been much faster to use the phone but that wasn't an option for me. While I can understand a lot of Spanish when I'm looking at the person face-to-face, on the phone I'm usually lost and I didn't trust that I could get the order right via a telephone call.

Although Barbara was helping out with cooking the food, I had wanted to do the main dish. At first I thought I would do a strata but when I tried one recipe I didn't like it that well. So I decided to try chilaquiles with chicken. I wish I could just take a recipe and cook it but no I always think I can do something else with it, kick it up a notch, as Emeril would say.

I tried out my version of chilaquiles on Ned and he said it was a keeper. Then I nearly drove myself crazy trying to decide how many times I needed to make the recipe to serve 25 women at a brunch. I didn't want to end up with huge leftovers but I certainly didn't want to run out of food either. Somehow in the middle of the night I arrived at some conclusion about how much I'd cook taking into account that these were women, it would be a brunch, it was very rich with cream and cheese, and there was a lot of other things to eat as well. That very unscientific process worked well because even though lots of the women went back for seconds, they ate all of the big green Mexican platter/dish of the chilaquiles and I had a 9x9 Pyrex dish left over as a backup. Whew!

I'll post the recipe later because several people asked for it. I hope they can cook by look and taste because my measurements are "to taste" more so than actual teaspoons and cups. And actually I think once they see the recipe they might not want to fool with it because there are too, too many components to prepare before you put it all together. This is not a 30 minute recipe!

The shower was for Lisa and can you believe that here in San Miguel, we have a baby coming and both sets of grandparents live here too. I know that the general opinion is that San Miguel de Allende is full of retired gringos but that isn't quite true. We have a fairly significant group of gringos with children.

I am working on about eight images for a group show so I can take the finished images back to Texas when we go. I'm also full of angst about these images. They are difficult images from Holga negatives and they are radically different than anything else that will be in the show but the curator for the show thinks she has the right place to hang them and she would like some whimsy and color. I still have at least another week of work on them. If you could factor in equipment, overhead and time, a piece of fine art photography would cost so much no one would buy it. Except for those very few big players who are getting in the thousands for an image, I would guess that most of us make about ten to twenty-five cents an hour.

So the answer to "What did you do this week in San Miguel?" I cooked, gave a party, gardened, shopped, worked on images, rearranged the house and........
Live isn't dull in San Miguel de Allende!