I´m on Isla Mujeres and overall the food sucks. This is OK because 1) I spent the previous few days eating the most exquisite tacos imaginable, and 2) I´m having plenty of non-food fun: the beach is gorgeous, the cerveza is cold and the farmacias are lax with prescription requirements. (And it turns out the cook crush is a good traveling date.) 

There is, however, one promising food stand near our cabaña. A little woman who makes moist, delicious, sweet tamales. She´s right on the street leading to North Beach, from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., should you find yourself here.

I´ve had a prejudice against tamales since eating one for the first time in the Sarah Lawrence dining hall. Clearly Flik Catering is a gross way to be introduced to any foodstuff, but their rep continued to suffer through attempts at liking them at the mexicanish place in Park Slope (too dry) and at Puebla on 1st and 4th (not enough filling).

My coworker (who has clocked many hours cooking in Latin America) has promised to teach me to make good tamales for family meal. And before him the lovely Derek Coffer had assured me he could whip together a delicious tamale for a festive treat. But even they acknowledgethat there is something special about having a tamale made by some old lady´s hands.

This tamale-making mujere lives up to that notion. At about $1.50 each, they are pricier than an entire mealat a taqueria in Mexico City, but after my last dinner at Señor Frog´s Bar and Grill, the decision is made. Tamales for lunch and dinner until we catch the ferry back home.

As the cook crush points out we haven´t been in Mexico for even 24 hours so I shouldn’t feel lame for consuming only 10 or so corn-based snacks, but when I reflect upon how delish each one has been, I feel that I should be eating more.

So far the big winner was the lengue taco eaten on a plastic stool in the back section of La Merced market. Sweet onions and and soft meat, greasy in the best way, followed by a gelatinous pig snout taco.  And all this while wearing shorts!

I’m going to Mexico TOMORROW and plan on eating as many street meat antojitos as I can cram in my face.

When the maintenance dude at the restaurant heard I was visiting his homeland, he informed me that in the carts around the Zocalo “you have the best al pastor tacos in the world”.  When I responded that this was why I chose to stay near the Zocalo, he smiled and called me a “good little gordita”.

Before a previous trip to Mexico I read up on the CDC’s advice on preventing GI distress while traveling. While part of their advice is to avoid street food, I followed the “2 Pepto Bismol tabs, twice a day starting a few days before your trip” advice, ate plenty, and it worked out just fine.

I will also be eating a great many goat milk caramels. And posting about my culinary exploits in between shots of tequilla.

I’m generally a healthy person and can’t remember the last time I had to take a day off of work for legitimate illness - allergies, maybe, or the always delightful “mental health day”, even the occasional Irish flu, but never too coldy or fluey to go in. Until now. I was sick last week, feverish and dizzy. Just a cold, and a brief one at that, although for about 36 hours, I felt terrible. But I’m paid by the shift and so couldn’t afford to take the day off. 

This means that I spent my sick time in full body extremes of hot (over the stove) and cold (in the walk-in), resulting in swoons and shivers. I also had to taste things I really couldn’t taste to see if they were good, and taste things I really didn’t want to taste because they seemed gross at the time.

An example of this taste reluctance is our anchovy butter. I make this right before service and hold it warm to use to order on charred, grilled prawns and milk-simmered brussels sprouts. It is creamy and rich, not at all fishy but instead sweet and salty and for me, embodying umami. It is a really elegant sauce.

Not only did making this while with cold make me feel completely nauseated, smelling each time I ladled it out made me feel pretty bad, and even now that I’m all better, the process of making, tasting and serving this sauce makes me wince, pull back my head, and crave a bitters and soda.

The cook crush thinks that these aversions are not cold related but are the natural course of losing interest in foods you make every day. All I know is that the marrow bones, formerly so luscious to me, now smell like hot dog food.

We curently offer a 24 oz boneless ribeye for two on our menu. For my money, ribeye is the best steak: densely marbled, flavorful and tender, when it is grilled with a salty, peppery crust each bite is the marriage of the simple and the refined in the mouth.

We get in a primal cut of beef and butcher it ourselves. I was excited to have an opportunity to improve my butchering and terrified of creating unnecessary waste off of this expensive slab of meat - I hadn’t done any real butchering since the first module of school, almost a year ago. So I angle to take on butchering whenever it is on our prep list. 

From the outset, I was clean at cutting, working close to the bone and without a lot of excess trim, but at first was slow. After working through 5 or six over the past couple of weeks, however, I’ve become quite adept at breaking down the large slab of animal. (Although I still sweat an awful lot for undertaking a basically stationary activity.) Yesterday I cleaned and portioned two primals in 30 minutes. Aside from my sous chef, I’m the fastest and cleanest butcher in the house.

Like all things, you get better at butchering with practice. On some lizard level I must know this or I wouldn’t ever take anything challenging on, but despite experiencing this revelation with business math, distance running, bikram yoga, being patient and knitting, it is a surprise with each success.

If I could remember day-to-day that getting better with practice is inevitable, I would be less likely to procrastinate, more confident in my undertakings and less frustrated by the process of learning, but would experience less delight when improvement sneaks up on me.

Better to have it be a surprise.

Until just 10 minutes ago, my stove was on the fritz, and so I could not make coffee at home for over a week.

As a result I have been staying in bed until the very last minute possible and then rushing out the door to work where I can get very good coffee for free, or grumpily getting dressed and getting decent coffee at the North African diner around the corner on my way to the gym or whatnot.

So it isn’t as though I was caffeine-free, but I wasn’t able to comfortably stay in my jim-jams and shuffle around my apartment, as I could not make coffee at home. This seriously impacted my productivity in terms of bill paying, email correspondence, posting here. It left me feeling out of sorts. Staying in bed until going to work when you don’t have to be at work until after 1 p.m. is shameful, even when you work until 1 a.m. the night before, so there were even some moments of weepiness and self-loathing.

My dependence on coffee did not come as a surprise; I am a carefully calibrated machine that operates best on two shots of espresso made on the stovetop moka with soy milk in the morning, two shots of espresso over ice with a splash of simple syrup in the evening at work.

My mediocre super just fixed my stove up, and I brewed a moka-full of strong, dark Gorilla coffee, and feel like myself for the first time in over a week. It is going to be a great day.

My new favorite snack at work is a banana sliced on a homemade cracker, topped with a sprinkle of Maldon sea salt. We’ve been playing around with cracker making at work and the basic recipe we use results in a crisp, flaky-layered square much like a flattened biscuit when it is baked perfectly, and like tasty, chewy lavash bread when baked imperfectly or rolled out too thick.

Salting a banana makes perfect sense in terms of both flavor combination (think caramel and cashews) and mouthfeel (salt helps you produce more saliva, eliminating some of the chalky or mealy texture you can get from a too-ripe banana). 

The only way this snack could be improved is if it were made on a Vermont Common Cracker, like those sold at the Vermont Country Store in Weston, Vt. While I am a huge fan of making things yourself and am tickled by the idea of baking and keeping some of our crackers at home - maybe with whole wheat flour instead? - there is nothing like a common cracker for plain, baking soda satisfaction.

I worked at the restaurant last night, which was moderately festive (we served an Italian-inspired menu, including lentils, a symbol of prosperity, with cottechino, a seasonally traditional fresh pork sausage).

The cook crush came and picked me up when he was done at his restaurant and I was done at mine, and we walked to the subway together.

Being sober at 1:30 on New Year’s Eve, walking through the Lower East Side, is hilarious. So good was the drunken assholery all around that we decided to prolong the exposure and visited Wo Hop on Mott Street for some late-night Chinese-for-gringos food. I never knew how funny people who are at the tail end of a late night of partying could be.

Decent noodles, romantic company, quality people watching. Excellent and unexpected way to ring in 2008.