Cooking

 When we chose a place to stay in Oaxaca, we had several criteria:

• Close to the centre. Last time we were in Oaxaca we stayed in a suburb, and getting to and from the centre was a bit of a pain.
• A bedroom separate from the living area. Sometimes one of us has insomnia, or wants to take a nap mid-day. It's much easier to have one person awake and one asleep if you have a bedroom door.
• A decent kitchen, with a fridge bigger than a bar fridge. We're here for a month, and we wanted to be able to cook meals.

Those criteria eliminated a bunch of places, but we found a few. We picked the one that looked nicest and here we've been, living in Oaxaca, eating out for almost every meal.

What went wrong?  Technically nothing.  We eat almost every breakfast at home, and have cooked a few simple meals here, including this one.  

But this is the most elaborate meal that we've made, and we've only done it once.  

Why?

Cooking here is So Much Work.

It starts with grocery shopping.  We happen to have selected a place that doesn't have any kind of food store close by.  The closest market (La Noria) is about a 10-15 minute walk away, and is deeply uninspiring in terms of the selection of food that's available.  Mercado La Merced (15 minutes) is somewhat better, and we've bought bananas, oats, milk, and a few vegetables there.  Mercado Sanchez Pascuas is much better, and makes me hungry every time I visit.  But it's all the way across the centro, a 25 minute walk away.  It's an expedition.  Worse, it's not really possible to stock up, because veggies seem to have a really short shelf life here.  One carrot went from beautiful to shrivelled in only 3 days, when at home carrots last for weeks in the crisper.

Next, there's prep.  You have to worry about food safety, even and especially with vegetables, so the first step in cooking is to disinfect your vegetables.  The normal way that Mexicans do this is with a product called Microdyn.  

Microdyn is an iodine solution that you can use to purify water or to disinfect vegetables.  

Eight drops in a litre of water, and then soak for 15 minutes.  

After that's done, prep the ingredients.  Unfortunately, in common with most furnished rental places, the knives are crappy.  We also have a tiny cutting board, and only 3 plates, 3 small bowls, two non-stick pots, and a very small non-stick frying pan.  Simply juggling ingredients while you're doing prep is a bit of a challenge, particularly because you want to make an effort to keep the prepped food 'clean', and you can't clean a dish with tap water and then reuse it during the prep process because the tap water isn't clean.

Cooking. Our two burner stove is the slowest stove I've every used. It takes forever to heat up, has only 3 heat settings, and reacts very slowly to changes.  

It took me almost 2 hours to cook the small pot of beans we used to make the supper pictured above.  What's worse, that was two hours that I spent moving the pot off and on the burner every 5 minutes because I couldn't figure out how to make the burner 'simmer'.

Finally, food!  Yum!  You eat.  

Then you need to do dishes, preferably immediately.  There are regularly small ants in the kitchen.  We haven't seen any cockroaches, but this is the tropics and it wouldn't be at all surprising if they were around. In fact, if you aren't careful with dirty dishes and food scraps, I'm positive that they'll make an appearance. 

Step 1: boil water.  Yup, there's hot water for the shower, but not for the kitchen sink.  You need to heat water on the stove to do dishes, and don't forget you have only 2 pots so you might have to clean one of them before you can use it to heat water for the rest of the dishes.

Step 2: do dishes.  

Step 3: do a forensic-level cleaning of all surfaces, the sink, and the strainer to eliminate any tiny food scraps that might feed bugs.

Step 4: take any food-related garbage out to the bins or put it in the fridge, which we use as a secure "food storage box" against bugs.

Step 5: rest while looking at Google reviews of nearby restaurants.

Yeah, it's not impossible to cook.  But it feels like a significant effort, especially on days when you're mostly focused on Doing Stuff, because after all, the reason you're here in the first place is to Do Stuff.