January | 2016 | Searching4Zen

Grilled Prawns over a salad of arugula and fennel

January 24, 2016 No Comments

Outstanding grilled prawns served over a salad of arrugula and fennel.

Outstanding grilled prawns served over a salad of arugula and fennel.

Yesterday when we were up in Morelia doing to shopping I spied these awesome looking prawns. Sure they were frozen but they looked quite good so we brought them home for dinner last night.

Jo Ann then butterflied the prawns.

Outstanding grilled prawns served over a salad of arugula and fennel.

The prawns only required 3 1/2 minutes on the BBQ and then we served them over a salad of arugula and fennel, both fresh from our garden.

Outstanding grilled prawns served over a salad of arugula and fennel.

Winter Gardening

January 22, 2016 No Comments

Winter gardening is more challenging but the results are worth it!

This is the first year that Jo Ann has had her green house and the raised beds for her gardening. The results have been wonderful, especially considering that the over night lows have been in the 2 to 4° C temperatures. The cold weather crops are doing great, some under the cover cloth and some as shown below not covered.

Winter gardening is more challenging but the results are worth it!

In the green house we have probably 100 tomato starts of various types, none of which we can get locally. I am already dreaming of our mozzarella and tomato salad that we should be able to start enjoying by May!

Winter gardening is more challenging but the results are worth it!

Fresh Produce

January 22, 2016 No Comments

Garlic and Rosemary from our garden

Picked from our garden yesterday and used in our dinner last night.

If you are looking for a great soul warming chicken recipe, check out Italian Mt. Etna Chicken. It was amazing as I hope the following image shows.

Italian Mt. Etna Chicken

Mercado Cobb Salad

January 21, 2016 No Comments

Mercado Cobb Salad

One of the joys of living in Pátzcuaro is the availability of fresh and local produce. We went shopping on Monday and made this salad that evening made up of entirely local and fresh products. The bacon is from the Carnicería del Norte, the eggs from a lady who sells eggs and local honey and the other vegetables from a variety of the local farmers. The only product that was not local was the Gorgonzola cheese, which we did get at the Superama market up in Morelia. Such flavor and at a fraction of the cost that something like this would be up north of the border.

Come down and enjoy Pátzcuaro, you will enjoy it.

The Climate Is Going Crazy

January 17, 2016 No Comments

We started the week off down at the beach in Troncones. When we arrived on Sunday, the weather was what you would expect for a tropical resort area, warm and beautiful clear skies.

Troncones Sunset

Monday we got to spend the day walking on the beach and enjoying some pool time.

View from the pool

Playa Troncones

Pelicans

However come Tuesday we started to receive some very unexpected rain and the temperatures turned quite cold for the beach. Over the next two days we received over 250mm of rain and the temperatures did not exceed 21° C.

Rain in January?

Too Cold To Enjoy

We came back to Pátzcuaro on Friday and are receiving some of the coldest weather that I can recall since moving to Pátzcuaro. It was actually slightly below 0° this morning so around 5:30a I was moving all the tomato starts from the green house into the living room.

Jo Ann’s Tomato Starts

Now the weather is back up to around 14º and is suppose to top out at a normal 21 or 22º. Clearly there is climate change happening, I just hope we can revert back to our normal weather sooner rather than later.