October 22, 2017

October 22, 2017

 Hola from Cuernavaca, the City of Eternal Spring…that’s really what they like to call it, and I’m a believer.  The rain has subsided, we now have sunny days, the mosquitos are diminishing, the cockroaches are everywhere despite the Raid every night and day, no recent earthquakes, and we are happy serving the Lord.  Last week was really awesome…we came home from our three-day trip totally worn out (for a couple of oldsters) but really excited about our interactions with our brothers and sisters here.  We traveled to our favorite places, Iguala, Chilpancingo, and a little branch for the first time called Ocotito…way out in the boonies.

 Both of these groups had asked us to teach them things to do with wheat which we were a little hesitant to do because corn is their grain of choice (as in tortillas every morning, noon, and night) and we didn’t think they would ever do anything with wheat, but after asking us a couple more times, we decided that we would plan a wheat class for them.  They assured us that wheat was readily available to buy and that we could grind it in our blender.  News to us, but as it turns out, yes you can grind wheat in your blender.  Our classes turned out to be awesome…even though I doubt they will do anything with it but we showed them how really yummy wheat things can taste.

 In planning for the class we first made wheat bread with wheat flour from our local store…it was so gross I had to throw it away.  The wheat flour had turned rancid sitting at the store!  So we next searched for wheat grains, found it both in our local market and the mercado.  The blender didn’t grind it as fine as it needed to be, so back to searching for a hand wheat grinder…bingo at the Mercado again!  I tell you, you can buy just about anything in a Mercado here.  So we ground the wheat twice in the grinder and then put it in the blender to refine it into flour…it worked!  The bread we made was delicious using the same recipe as for white bread with a few changes (like honey).  Even made a loaf of wheat cinnamon bread…so yummy!  But what else could we teach them???  Dad went to work researching how to sprout, grow wheat grass, and how to make wheat nuts.  I happened onto a recipe for wheat pancakes and dad reminded me that my favorite cereal is cracked wheat….so there we had enough to teach them in a two hour class.  It felt like we were running a tag-team marathon!!!  It was awesome.  They were really taken back by how yummy it all was.  Dad always likes to ask them at the end of the class what their favorite recipe was and several of them liked the pancakes the best!  I lucked out with a really good recipe.   Wheat bread, cinnamon/raisin wheat bread, pancakes, hot cracked wheat cereal, wheat grass, wheat sprouts, and wheat nuts.

 So we taught the same class, mas o menos, in all three places and got pretty good at our tag-teaming by the end of the week!  If you can believe it we carried dad’s wheat grass around with us all week on buses and in hotels and somehow it survived.

 Oh, something kind of funny, but shocking at the time happened during one of our classes.  On the third night of teaching this class I had all my ingredients and bowls and utensils, hot water for the bread, eggs for the pancakes, everything spread out on the demonstration table.  I had just measured all the dry ingredients for the bread into a large bowl when the table just suddenly collapsed, of course taking everything and dumping it onto the floor!!!  The wonder of it all, nothing broke, the dry ingredients in my bowl didn’t dump out (I didn’t have a speck of yeast left to start over if it had), the eggs cracked (the only two I had) but Pop managed to salvage them, and besides being wet from the water spilling out, we picked it all up, dried it off and carried on!!!  If you’ve ever had that happen to you it’s really shocking to have the table collapse, the noise of it all.  Obviously the guys who set up the table forgot to lock the legs, but all was ok.

 In between my cooking Pop taught them about wheat, its nutritional value, storage, the fact that nutrients start deteriorating the moment the berry is cracked open, etc.  One of the ladies at the end of our class told him that he was like a book!  But you know what…they’re like sponges.  They wanted to know what we were going to teach next…I asked them what they wanted to learn.  Their answer…everything!! 

 Another part to this story is on the way to the bus terminal Hermana Estella told us that two of the men in attendance were friends of hers, not members, in fact one is a pastor in another church.  But they wanted to learn more about self-reliance so she invited them to come to our classes.  After the first class the pastor decided to make the cookies and instead of putting in 1 teaspoon of baking soda for some reason measured out 3 teaspoons instead.  Yuk!  He threw it away and started over and didn’t let it discourage him from coming back to the next class.  You just never know what might turn them to the Gospel.

So my last story has nothing to do with cooking or teaching.  One day last week Pop and I were kind of making fun of the paranoia of the Mexicans with their high gates surrounding their homes, padlocks everywhere, glass and barbed wire on top of the walls, etc.  Our conclusion was that they must know their countrymen.  Anyway this was garbage pick-up day and I had put out our trash earlier that morning, a couple of plastic bags full of kitchen trash.  But one of them I had put inside one of those big old green Walmart shopping bags that you buy, which had a large slit in the bottom of it so I was throwing it away also.  When we left our house for the day I realized that even though the trash had not yet been picked up someone had stolen our green bag full of garbage!!!  I was stunned!  Why would someone want to steal our garbage with kitchen scraps, etc.  Pop likes to say about the Mexican culture is they have an attitude that “what’s yours is mine if I can get it”.…I guess the person who stole our garbage that morning must have decided that he could get my green Walmart bag cause I had left it out?????  Go figure.  Maybe their paranoia is justified after all.

 Give kisses to our grandkids…okay, maybe hugs.  We love you all, miss you all, and pray for you all each day.  And I miss English! Thank you for your prayers on our behalf…I have felt occasionally the missionary angels have been working overtime.  We are enjoying our missionary experiences and are anxious for the next mission!

 We’re making cinnamon rolls in the morning for the newbies coming tomorrow…22 of them.

 Love you all,

Mom and Dad, Non and Pop, Ken and Chrys

Photos: #1 and 2 cool looking trees in a park we were enjoying, #3 new group in the Ocotito Branch