How I spent my summer vacation

So despite not having posted much in the last three or four months, my pageviews have rocketed up from 6,000 to over 8,000!

¡Muchas gracias!

But though I haven't been writing, I have actually been cooking. In fact, I cooked so much I'm worried I'm going to forget some of it before I have a chance to post.

Over the next several weeks I plan to post as much of this "backlog" as possible. Most of it involves cooking with my mom, who visited in July to see the new baby.

You may remember she was meant to bring my (Mexican) great grandmother's recipe for mole rojo for us to cook. I even bought some real Mexican chocolate from Lupe Pintos for the occasion.

Well, she didn't bring it.

Her excuse was that the recipe was hand-written and Grandma Eva is no longer with us, so she didn't want to risk bringing it in a plane.

Fair enough.

So we cooked my recipes instead.

The other thing going on is that we've entered mes de la patria, "patriotic month", which is September, the month of Mexico's Independence Day.

(September is also my birthday month.)

On 15 September the streets of Mexico will ring out with people shouting el grito ("the cry") of "Viva Mexico!"

This commemorates the priest Hidalgo's grito, which kicked off the war of independence.

Twelve months ago I had some serious cooking plans for this month, but parenthood comes before cooking, so I'm officially running late on the chiles en nogada, but that, and possibly pozole verde, will happen at some point, along with cochinita pibil.

And I'm considering pato en pipián (duck in pumpkinseed sauce) before the year is out, because I've always wanted to cook this elegant dish.

And finally I have a restaurant review to publish.

So between catching up and doing new things, the next few months will be quite busy. Honestly, I'll be lucky if I can finish all this before el día de los muertos.

Clearly, I am still insane. I won't even talk about my plans to make Oaxacan black mole at Christmas.

Now, because this is an info/update post it has no food. But I have been receiving a lot of food from my various Mexican Food Heroes out there, including some incredible salsas from Kan-Kun.

These came with some clothing, so I thought I'd put them on and take my first ever selfie.

If this doesn't "unleash your inner luchador", nothing will!