A mother-daughter conversation on food and cooking (mostly)

Monday, January 7, 2008

Pico de Gallo on the Road




We drove from Tucson to South Padre Island, Texas, in our trailer and just got back yesterday. Just before leaving Dad picked all the jalapenos and cherry tomatoes in his garden to take with. The tomatoes ripened daily, and we also bought more jalapenos on the way, so I ended up making pico de gallo every day, varying it to fit in with the ethnicity of the evening meal. If Indian, I threw in more cilantro and ground cumin.

The usual recipe consisted of:
a handful of cherry tomatoes, halved
1 jalapeno, seeded and minced
2 cloves garlic
Juice of 1 Mexican lime (the little ones)
Salt

Optional additions included fresh herbs, onions, cumin, red chile powder.

Here's a trailer dinner. I had bought foil packets of Saag Paneer and a garbanzo dish. I made salmon patties, pico de gallo, and toasted some tortillas in a skillet to mimic Indian bread.

On New Year's Eve we had a really great meal of fresh Gulf shrimp, black eyed peas, and champagne.

There were lots of wonderful roadside fruit markets on the Gulf coast near Corpus Christi where we bought grapefruit and Texas sweet onions. Some advertised "We have Valley Lemons"--I bought some and discovered that they're Meyer lemons. Wish I had bought a whole bushel, since our crop failed this year.


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