It's a Flanperfect day

buen dia!
Ah, it is so beautiful here this morning. Wish you could be here!
The temperature is already rising, but we still have very little humidity, so a ninety degree day like we had yesterday only seems like it is eighty. The sky is slightly overcast and it is just very pleasant.

I just came back from my trip to the track, where there were quite a few folks walking or jogging. I always enjoy my track conversations with the Mexican women and men and their dogs.

When I returned home, I found this little fellow, dead on the table top. Cookies spends most of the night out now, and I imagine he threw this up in the air, thought he could catch it, and it landed on the table top and Cookies lost interest.

So we asked Umberto about it. It is a little thing, only about eight inches long, and skinny. Umberto called it a name and pointed to his arm and pantomined that a bite from that means a trip to the hospital and a shot in the rear end. Umberto solves alot of problems, I think, with a trip to the hospital for a shot in the rear end.

Grippe? shot. Nail in foot? shot. Scorpion bite? shot. Fall off ladder? shot.

So I hope this guy's mother or father is not around nearby. I would imagine they would be a bit larger.

I rode to the Panteon the other day. Here is Jesus' grave and some plastic flowers I left for him. The marker says he died April 9, but the weekend I returned from Texas, the seventeenth, someone old with white hair was back in the casa watching a boxing match on tv. I even commented to Senor.........wow, Jesus really has the volume on his tv turned up.

Senor says he drove by the sister's house just yesterday and there was a new old man sitting out front in the chair that I had photographed. So we are confused, well I am confused. Senor says he is not the confusable type. But so far, the little casa remains empty and we do not even see any signs of Jesus' cat, the white one.

I went next door to learn to make flan. I have always had a recipe for it, but it's one of those things that is better done with a person who has done it before. So, I had the opportunity to do that.

I don't blog recipes or food too much, mainly because I have difficulty even following recipes.

But this one was worth it. i think you can make it easily.

You need:

8 eggs

2 cans sweetened condensed milk

2 cans water (use the milk cans for measurement)

1 1/2 cups sugar and 1/3 cup water

2 T kahlua

1 t vanilla

and you need a flan pan, a round baking dish with a hole in the middle

Over low heat, toss the sugar in a pan, add 1/3 cup water. Stir this Forever! It will get dry. It will get lumpy. It will get clumpy. You will think you need to add more water. Don't. You are just carmelizing the sugar and it will take forever. Eventually it will get dark dark brown and bubbly. When it does this, pour it into the flan pan and coat the pan and sides.Tony, our flan instructor, asks me if I washed my 8 eggs. Wash the eggs....... i said...........i never wash my eggs. He tells me I have to always wash my eggs, so I wash my 8 eggs. We crack them into a bowl and add the milk and the 2 cans of water. He says his favorite dessert is condensed milk on crackers. I tell him that when I worked at DIF some of the women there drank the condensed milk right from the can.........yum, he says.

We add kahlua and vanilla and beat all of this with the mixer. It gets too foamy so Tony holds the mixer just under the surface of the liquid and it gets creamy again. After a few minutes we pour the mixture into the coated flan pan.

The flan pan then is put into a larger pan, filled halfway with water and put into the oven for 1 1/2 hours at 350 degrees. More water is added during the cooking time to keep this water bath halfway up the flan pan.

The flan comes out of the oven and sits on the counter for several hours while Tony shops and my friends and I go off to buy art supplies at an art sale in someone's home.

At the art sale, I hear that La Victoria, which is Carroll O'Connor's Alamos home, has been sold, along with eight other proerties in town. Baby boomers are coming, says someone.

Indeed, on the way home, the front door of La Victoria is open and I snap a few photos. La Victoria needs a lot of love and care, so I am glad someone has bought it. I want to ask if I can go inside, but there are workers milling around and the flan is waiting on the countertop.

The flan is ready to come out of the pan. A knife is run around the edges and then, the pan sits in another water bath, this one warm with tap water. Tony jiggles the flan until it starts to move around in the pan.
Then in a very swift move, the pan is turned upside down.




And, we have flan. Isn't that pretty?

Gotta run, need to be over on Loma Gudalupe by ten o'clock. I am doing some custom glass tiles for someone there and we need to discuss the plan.

Que le vaya bien!......which when translated, means roughly, may you have an interesting life or may all things turn out well for you. Linda Lou