Mexico

This Sunday was a bit of a bust. 

My good friend Tracy was pregnant (I say was as I am writing this now the week following and she is now a mommy to 2 lovely little girls!) and I had offered to host a baby shower for her. I got all ingredients together and mostly prepped thinking I would cook the morning of the shower.

At about 3am I start hearing this beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. After poking Matt we realize it's the alarm beeping due to no power. Seems it was out to the whole house. Matt turned off the beep and back to bed we went. Except when we got up at 9am, there was still no power. Seems during the night there was a fire at a substation and a chunk of Auckland (90,000 houses!) were without power with no ETA for it to come back up. 

With no power and an impending baby shower Tracy and I headed to a near bye suburb that still had power to buy some supplies. Pre-made meringue with whipped cream and berries along with some cakes and out came the camping stove to make tea. Shower was lovely and at 5pm the power came back on (for us). 

Anyways to make a long story short I didn't have much energy to cook and with no power freezing the ice cream maker bowl the avocado ice cream that was due on the menu wasn't going to happen. 

So what was meant to be a trip to "Mexico" ended up being more if a stop over. I ended up cooking just one of the three potential dishes. To be fair, I was pretty tired though.

Entree (or Main): Mexican Salad in Tortilla baskets

The Mexican Salad in the cook book is a basic taco salad. For those not acquainted with this concept, this is effectively a taco in a tortilla shell.

This was super exciting because I got to try using a life hack. Life hacks are simple tricks and I read about this one ages ago but had yet to try it.

What was it? The life hack was this - to make a tortilla basket, invert a muffin tin and use that to keep the shape of the tortillas while baking in the oven. Yes, these ones are baked as opposed to what you might see in a restaurant where they are deep fried. This makes me like this recipe all the more.

Effectively it was all quite simple. Layer the ingredients and eat.

One ingredient listed was guacamole and I thought i'd share my guacamole recipe with you:

Lindsay's Guacamole

Ingredients

-1 Avocado (in NZ we usually have Hass Avos)

-1/2 of a red onion

-1 tomato or a handful of cherry tomatoes

-Coriander (or Cilantro as it's known back home)

-1 lime

-Salt and Pepper

1. Scoop the avocado out and mash it

2. Chop the red onion and cherry tomatoes.  If you like chunky guac, leave the tomatoes in reasonable sized chunks. If not cut smaller pieces

3. Mix the avocado, tomato and onion. Tear off bits of corriander and mix in.

4. Add the juice of 1 lime and then salt and pepper to taste

et, Voila!

This is probably the first dish I think I've done out of this cookbook where I feel like my version looks as soon or if not better than the version that was shown in the book.

Pretty good, huh?