When Life Gives You Lemons
Originally Published on June 27, 2010
When life gives you lemons — you obviously don’t live in Mexico.
In the mid-80s I went to Cancun on vacation because I wanted to see Chichen-Itza and I fell in love. Not with a person, but with the people, the culture, the ocean and the weather, and I found it impossible to go back home to Niagara Falls, Canada. A hedonist and foodie by nature, I eventually fell in love with the food in Mexico, but that took some time. Living in a recently created town with a population of 15,000 was a challenge on many levels. The nearest large city was Merida in the middle of the Yucatan, at the time about 6 hours away. Fresh produce came in once a week and there were weeks at a time when you couldn’t find many staples, including canned tuna or even toothpaste.
My first meal in a restaurant came on a plate with refried black beans on the side. I was aghast and sent it back to have them removed. Nothing on a plate should look like that! Things changed dramatically over the years, mostly because I realised that how food looked had nothing to do with how it tasted, and as my attitude matured, so did my plate.
Cancun now has about a million people living in it and shopping can be done at Walmart Supercenter, Sam’s Club, or Costco. The markets are disappearing or being converted into t-shirt stalls and the corner “mini-super” mom-and-pop stores have almost all been swallowed by Oxxo or Extra franchises. On the bright side, fresh mushrooms and broccoli have been available for over a decade and life is much easier for the cook. I even found lemons (real, yellow lemons — not limes, not key limes, not limones or limas) in Costco. Unless you have lived without them for 25 years, you have no idea what a big deal that is. So I bought a huge bag of them, because huge is the only option, and I decorated my house with beautiful yellow lemons. I filled my purse with them when I left the house so I could hand them out to American and Canadian friends, and I found myself scratching them just so I could inhale the wonderful perfume that I missed so much.
In a few days, I’ll fly out of Mexico and I’ll crave the abundant sweet mangoes that are sold at every speed bump this time of year. The world is shrinking and I will bring some of Mexico back with me to the Niagara region as I brought Canada to Playa del Carmen. For the last couple of years, I’ve been cooking and hosting events at OFF THE VINE, a wine store in Playa del Carmen, Mexico that I own with my partner, Ricardo. Aside from cooking four-course pairing dinners, I’ve also been hosting Ladies Night, an event that started as a forum to talk about subjects of interest to women while drinking wine and eating pasta. It became the highlight of my week as we attracted more and more women and many men and it turned into a funny, bilingual sex talk that opened up a world of conversations among the attendees. This is my life in a nutshell. Next Saturday, I move back to Canada to try my hand at some real hands-on experience in a cooking school so I can open my own school next year in Mexico.
There are about a million little stories that I would like to share but for the moment, I am going to sign off and try editing myself, something that I wish I could do in real life.
Besos,
Danielle