everything is better deep-fried

 

 

I am now an insider in the world of making Honduran tacos. These are not to be confused with Mexican tacos, ate raw-ish, by just stuffing the corn tortilla with the chicken mixture, rolling it up and eating it.

Honduran tacos take more time. There’s the boiling of the chicken, the shredding of the chicken, the frying of the chicken with other stuff, the making of the sauce, the boiling of the sauce, the bringing it all together, the stuffing, the rolling and then the snap, crackle, pop of deep frying them. Then the wonderful crunch of eating them. They crack, they drip. They satisfy. Everyone is very keen that I replicate them in Canada, when I quite often have 7 hours to dedicate to making supper. I’ll have to find the time. Maybe at the cottage. It’s worth it.  

That was Monday during the day. Monday night was the final English class. No one is fluent yet. I repeated an exercise I did a couple of weeks ago when we passed out pages ripped from a magazine and asked the students to create sentences to describe something in the picture.

This week, we used the Sky Mall catalogue we lifted from the airplane. I regretted this choice almost immediately. Because the Sky Mall catalogue is full of ridiculous things. Useless things. Things not seen anywhere else on the planet. Things that no one could describe in any language. Things like mini-staircases for your pet so they can climb up on your bed. Things like an inflatable Nuclear Globe for a “brave new world of water fun!”; advertisements for the Hollywood Cookie Diet and a Batman Swirling Emblem Ring alongside the Evenstar Pendant of Arwen, a robot radio and Big Foot, the Garden Yeti Sculpture designed for “startling realism.” I spent a lot of time circulating amongst the groups reassuring them that I was really only looking for statements like “That thing is black.” Then, after a really complicated lesson about the use of “a” “an” and “the” we wrapped things up and ate chips together. I don’t think I’m a natural teacher. Holly is though. I found myself working the audience a lot trying to get them to laugh, my default position.

Today, we had lunch in the West End. There were three green parrots yelling at us, other diners and generally causing a scene. One of them made a noise that sounded exactly like Russell’s laugh in Bill Cosby’s skit called My Brother Russell. Russell has his face smacked off of him by his father, because he laughs, with what we now know to be a parrot laugh. Thankfully, their mother picks his eyes and lips up off the floor and puts them back on. Which is what mothers tend to do.