Pie Party

For my latest birthday, I invited my local-in-Mexico friends to my house and asked them to bring pie.

The awesome people I invited brought so much pie, that I had to take seven pies with bi-sected radius (radei? radiuses? circumferences? WHY AM I SO BAD AT MATH?) to school just to clear-out enough space in my fridge for my Slow-cooker Sunday leftovers (white bean & chicken chili, fyi, and it was delicious for lunch all week!).

How much is 'so much' pie? It's 19 pies...well, I made 3 pies, so it's 16 pies, plus the pie my friend brought me a week late (because an infant and a pre-schooler can hinder pie making efforts with all their adorableness); anyway, the sum of this equation is ... a lot of pie (see there, I beat you MATH!). Not TOO much pie, mind, there is no such thing - just SO much.

The winner of the trophy (of course there was a trophy!) was L with her Cornbread-BBQ pie, a pie that had BBQ chicken and melted cheddar on a cornbread crust that she had found the recipe for on Pinterest. She also took second place with Chocolate-Peanut Butter pie (and got bonus points for discovering - while researching pie recipes - that Rodney the Pie Guy - the man whose pies first sparked my pie-obsession - now has a Pie Truck in DC).

This is the trophy:

It says "Pie Champion"

These are the pies:

These are not ALL the pies, there was a second
wave of pies that arrived about 10 minutes after this was taken.

My life is so full of tasty-deliciousness and good bakers that some days I have to just kneel down and thank my lucky pie-plates for my ability to enjoy it all!

September Status

I just got back from another spectacular weekend in Merida, Yucatan for Mexican Independence Day! I even managed to stay-up past 10 pm this time and my friends and I went to the Greeto (Viva Mexico!) and the fireworks!

Street Food and Party Lights

 It was a bit drizzly in the Yucatan, but David (the proprietor of my B&B of choice in Merida) has recently built a covered porch on the back of the hotel, so our group bought a pizza at Vito Coreleone (in the Centro - so Yummy!) and brought it back to the porch and read-away an afternoon. Evenings were spent gouging ourselves on cochinita pibil, panuchas, local soups, and crepes with cajeta!

Other than the drizzles, it was the perfect temperature out and the cloudy days were really pleasant for walking around the streets of Merida, empty of people, yet crowded with a mixture of deco and colonial style homes - some restored, some evolving, some crumbling like cookies left out in the rain.

My favorite store (Minaturas) and my favorite restaurant (Amaro)
as seen from the doorway of Vito Corleone Pizzaria.

Unfortunately I've come back to rain in Monterrey. Lots and lots of rain - today, courtesy of Hurricane Ingrid. So much rain, for weeks now, that school was cancelled today by order of the local government and there is an impromptu waterfall behind my house:

This is the sky's perpetual mood these days.
That is also the hummingbird feeder I recently
had to replace due to clumsiness.

Because of all the rain, I had some time to update my travel map, so I thought I'd post it here, as long as I was posting.

Otherwise, life is school: it's teaching, it's learning, it's growing little minds into critical thinking machines. The world is just turning on and on and on and in a few days I turn older than now, which, despite all the planning, is going to catch me unawares this year, I just know it.