New Product Thursday

Sept 20, 2012

Corn and Chile Tomato-Less Salsa. Bottles of this product, containing 13.75 oz. (390g) of salsa without a speck of tomato, are available at Trader Joe's. In case you don't get the point, the verbage on the bottle exclaims (in all caps) NOT ALL SALSAS ARE MADE WITH TOMATOES! "Popular recipes found throughout Mexico & the Tex-Mex border region contain everything but the tomato. [Everything?] We searched for a tomato-less salsa & found a unique recipe with corn, red bell peppers, onion & jalapeño peppers..."

Like I've said before, I like good product-label advertising blarney, and Trader Joe's produces some of the best. The text on the bottle implies that intrepid culinary explorers fanned out throughout Mexico, enduring heat and illness and long bus rides on bad roads to seek out cafés and taquerías and hovels whose tomato-less recipes might be right for Trader Joe's selection of novelties.

Whatever it says on the jar, I have to report that it's a good salsa. But the real reason for that isn't mentioned anywhere in the advertising on the jar, with its listing of corn, red bell peppers, onion & jalapeño peppers, which are nos. 1, 4, 3 and 5, respectively, on the ingredient list. Rather, it's the no. 2 ingredient that makes the salsa sing: sugar.

Downmarket from Trader Joe's, but controlled by the same obscure German billionaires, is Aldi. There you can buy Simply Nature brand Sweet Potato Corn Tortilla Chips. Or maybe it's Simply Nature All Natural Food brand. "Simply Nature" is in much larger text (36 pts, maybe), while "All Natural Food" is maybe 12 pts. So maybe Simply Nature is the headline and All Natural Food is the subhead, to put like a journalist would.

Anyway, it drives home the point that "Nature" and "Natural" on food labels are completely meaningless. This particular product contains corn -- let's assume they mean maize -- and sweet potatoes as ingredients nos. 1 and 2. In as much as I understand the history of maize, it was created by Indians through selective breeding of much less useful ancestor plants, and exists only because of human intervention. So from the get-go, corn is as natural as Hoover Dam.

Never mind, the chips are outrageously tasty. Good, as it happens, with Corn and Chile Tomato-Less Salsa, but also other species of salsa that sport crushed bits of red orbs.

One more thing, not a food item. Yuriko came home not long ago with Valerie Bertinelli brand measuring spoons. I didn't know the actress had any lines of cooking equipment, but I don't know a lot of things. Included are four spoons, 1/4 Tsp, 1/2 Tsp, 1 Tsp, and 1 Tbsp, or 1.25 ml, 2.5 ml, 5 ml, and 15 ml. Google, at least, tells us that 1 Tbsp = 14.7867648 ml, though I'm not sure where the search engine got that number. Seems close enough.

The spoons are stainless steel with blue silicone handles, and are strung together on a small steel triangle like keys on a triangular keychain. They seem like perfectly adequate measuring spoons. The tag has English and French on it -- my guess would be for export to Canada -- and a small picture of Ms. Bertinelli apparently at a picnic table, spooning colorful food (fruit?) from a larger bowl to a serving-sized bowl. She's wearing a bright yellow apron and, either because it's an old picture, or through the magic of modern photography, about 20 years seem to have been shaved off her appearance.

Yuriko didn't have the slightest idea who Valerie Bertinelli was. She was just looking for measuring spoons. But I noticed instantly. I think to fully appreciate Valerie Bertinelli's charms, it helps a lot to have been a 15-year-old boy in 1976 with access to American television.

Gansito Snack Cakes

Woke to a dusting of snow this morning, but I can't call it the first snowfall of the season, especially since most of it melted by noon. By evening the sky was clear, with a bright Venus following the Sun down, and waxing gibbous Moon not far from Jupiter on the other side of the sky. A pretty nice celestial show for the suburbs.

Recently I bought a package of Gansito brand snack cakes (pastelito relleno) on impulse at a grocery store that features a good many Mexican items (and Polish items, for that matter; this is metro Chicago). I turned my research assistant Señor Google to the task of finding out more about it. He came back with a number of interesting things, such as the contrast between this (I assume) older Gansito commercial and a newer one.

Of course, once you start watching vintage Spanish-language commercials, there's no limit to the amount to time you can waste with it. Still, it might be worth 30 seconds to become acquainted with La Negrita brand pancake mix.

Gansito ("little goose," or "gosling") is a product Marinela, a division of Grupo Bimbo SA de CV, a vast Mexican food conglomerate (revenue $8.8 billion in 2010). So vast, in fact, that it bought Sara Lee's North American Fresh Bakery unit in 2010 for nearly $1 billion. Now Rainbo bread, among others, is technically a Mexican brand.

The Gansito package is as colorful as you'd expect, pink and blue and orange, and features an anthropomorphic gosling in t-shirt, baggy pants and athletic shoes. The package I bought has two cakes in it, for a total of 3.5 oz. (100g). It's clearly made for export to English-speaking lands, though with Spanish flourishes, such as "Búscame en Facebook: Gansito Marinela," in case you want to be the cake's amigo on Facebook.

Another assistant of mine, Señor Wiki, claims that they are "similar to Twinkies," but I disagree. They're both cylinder-ish in shape, and creme filling is a component. But Gansito also includes strawberry filling, and is coated with dark chocolate covered in chocolate sprinkles. They're not bad at all. Not something I'd buy any more than Twinkies, which isn't that often, but a good alternative when the snack-cake urge strikes.

My Idea of a Souvenir

Key chains, t-shirts, snow globes, fridge magnets: I've bought all of these things and other destination bric-a-brac in tourist settings, but I also think the standard notion of souvenirs is unnecessarily restrictive. Or maybe I just have an eccentric take on the idea. That's probably it.

I didn't have much time to acquire conventional souvenirs in Mexico, though I did get a few items at the Puerto Vallarta airport to distribute to family members. I didn't want anything like that for myself, besides postcards, because I already had a couple of uniquely Mexican items to remind me of my short stay in 2009.

Namely, breakfast cereal boxes. This one amused me no end:

Note that it's an Edición Retro, which tells me that Mexicans have been enjoying their Fruti Lupis quite a long time, long enough for Kellogg's to mount a marketing effort that appeals to nostalgia. Note also that Toucan Sam is just Sam in Mexico.

Tony the Tiger, on the other hand, is Tigre Toño. He's retro too.

The cereals inside have already been eaten. They're exactly the same as their U.S. counterparts in taste, color, texture and everything else, but they aren't an export to Mexico. One of the side panels on each box notes, "Henco in Mexico." That makes them genuine souvenirs, to my way of thinking, though I expect I'll only save the front panels.

Happy Easter to all. Christus resurrexit, vere resurrexit!

A Three-Hour Tour

The thing to do when your boat is tethered to a small buoy in sight of guano-spattered offshore islands in the Bay of Banderas is to jump off the side. At least that's what I did, because I was dressed for it. I got a first-hand, full-body experience of the chilly California Current. It was a cold dip, but after moving around for a few minutes, it was still pretty cold. So those of us who went in the water only took short swims.

I've never had any hankering to own a boat. Maybe that's because, long ago, I heard boat ownership described as the equivalent of throwing money into the water. But I'm glad to catch occasional rides on them. As a break from property visits and real estate discussions, we spent part of an afternoon on a Sea Ray boat. Not sure which model, but I think it was one of the sport yachts: big enough to carry six passengers and three crew without any of us falling over each other while hanging out toward the stern drinking beer or lying around in the sun near the bow.

The small, chalky islands were busy seabird cities. I can't remember the last time I'd seen so many birds in one place, though there was a noticeable lack of the kind of gulls I'm used to seeing. No doubt other varieties were represented. I looked around for blue-footed boobies, whose feet are indeed blue, but I didn't see anything quite like the pictures I've seen. National Geographic claims that the "bluer the feet, the more attractive the mate," and I believe it. If that were true for human beings, there would be an entire complicated and expensive and socially significant industry devoted to foot-bluing.

But ornithology isn't something I ever took up. Blue-footed boobies could have had their own villas on those islands and I might have missed them. I did notice, however, that some seabirds fly in V formation, something I associate with geese. Off in the water, we spotted dolphins jumping from time to time, but saw no whales. We were told that it's a little late in the season for them.

One thing about a seabird city -- birds have no use for sanitation, and probably no conception of it. At one point the guano smell was so intense, especially when mixed with the strong smell of brine, that one of our party had to cover her nose and mouth for a little while.

Hole 3b, "The Tail of the Whale"

In the summer of 1979, my friend Mike and I goofed around on a golf course on the island of Moloka'i. By goofed around, I mean driving our golf cart most anywhere we wanted, though I don't think we vandalized any greens by doing doughnuts (which would make a better story, so maybe I should remember it that way). We also hit golf balls without regards to the rules of the game, the holes or anything else.

We could do that because we had the place completely to ourselves. Thirty years ago, Moloka'i wasn't often visited by tourists, which may still be true, for all I know. So we played a kind of bizarro golf in which hitting balls into sand- and water traps was a good thing. Neither of us were interested in playing real golf in that warm, tropical spot.

I still don't have any interest in playing golf, tropical or otherwise, but I didn't want to pass up the opportunity to try to hit a ball into the sea at hole 3b at one of the Jack Nicklaus Signature Golf Courses on Punta Mita. After visiting some properties one morning, we went to see the golf course, which is exceedingly lush in the controlled way tropical golf courses can be, without being overgrown. To get to 3b, we drove five or six golf carts along a golf-cart road through the course. I was the driver in my cart, with a woman from Toronto as my passenger. It may have been the first time I'd driven a golf cart since 1979, though I wouldn't swear to it.

This is a map of 3b, next to the tee. The plaque along with the map says (in Spanish and English): "Hole 3B. 'Tail of the Whale.' You are about to play the world's only natural island green. Course designer Jack Nicklaus describes 3B as, 'probably the best par 3 I've ever designed.' We trust 3B will be a hole you'll never forget."

This is what 3b looks like from the tee. It was low tide when we were there, so it was possible to walk to the green. During high tide, we were told, it really is an offshore island.

Golfers have the option of playing 3a for scoring, and then playing 3b for grins. There were no golfers in our group except one of our guides, who managed to hit the ball almost to the island. But it went into the sea. My ambition was to get it at least into the water, and for my swing I had a driver nearly as big as my foot. But I'm no golfer, not even a bad one, and my ball didn't even get wet.

The Villa

As words, luxury and luxurious have been beaten to death by copywriters, at least as they apply to destination properties, though in hotel industry parlance "luxury" does still describe the topmost class of expensive hotel and resort properties. Too bad luxury has been drained of meaning, since the word has such an ancient pedigree--all the way back many thousands of years to the Indo-European leug-, to bend, turn, wind: referring to the bending, turning and winding of luxurious plant growth, which turned up as luxus in Latin, with the completely recognizable meaning of "excess, extravagance."

In any case, I luxuriated at one of the villas managed by Four Seasons Punta Mita for three nights and parts of three days. The villas are arrayed on a landscaped hillside lush with flowers and palms, and are connected by narrow, twisty roads and even narrower paths used by hotel golf carts. I stayed with three other writers in a five-bedroom villa with a view of the ocean split by a couple of small promontories sticking up from a rocky shore below.

Published sources put the villa's size at 8,000 square feet, at most. I didn't have any measuring equipment, so I can't vouch for that, but I will say that each day I discovered another room or two I hadn't noticed before. About an hour before I left for the airport, for example, I found the laundry room and the connection to the garage, just off the kitchen. Maybe I'd missed that because I dallied too much in the kitchen, which included all the usual upscale suspects, such as Subzero, Viking and Krups.

The sturdy wooden front door opened up into an open-air courtyard. It also took me a day or two to realize that there were three separate water features in this courtyard, the combined effect of which was to make me believe for a moment, in the middle of the first night, that it was raining. Most of my photos of the courtyard suffer from awkward lighting, even though it seemed pleasant enough to the human eye, with sunlight reaching its pastel yellow walls, offset by dark wooden pillars and iron accents.

This one turned out all right, though. Stone fish in rock pond.

The fish was only one of many mostly Mexican objets d'art throughout the villa, including ceramics, driftwood art and wall hangings. Potted palms and ferns also figured in the interior design scheme. Under everything was a limestone floor, hard but pleasant under foot, and pock-marked by small shell impressions.

Short corridors branching from the courtyard led to the various bedrooms, which by themselves (mine anyway) were much like well-appointed hotel rooms, with certain added touches. Such as a doubled-door shower. One sliding glass door led into the shower from the main part of the bathroom. On the other side of the shower, another sliding glass door led to a small, roofless room whose only purpose was to be a small, roofless room next to the shower.

The villa's living room was large enough to include an L-shaped modular couch, a round dining table for 10 -- with a lazy Susan large enough to do Aztec sacrifices -- various chairs, end tables and lamps, and a square coffee table outfitted with coffee table books. The room also sported a large flat-screen TV, mounted on a wall, but it could hardly compete with the visual treats of the next "room" -- a partially covered outdoor patio as large as the living room that also included a couch and a round breakfast table, but with the addition of a full view of the ocean.

The pool was out there, too, essentially an ocean-ward extension of the patio. Elsewhere were sunbathing recliners and umbrellas, plus flowers in pots. It all sounds cluttered, but it wasn't remotely cluttered. Clutter wasn't in the interior vocabulary of this place, and it would have taken weeks of sustained effort by me, an expert at unorganized accumulation, to make it that way.

Did I mention that the villa faced west? It would have to, of course, to overlook the ocean, since it was the west coast of Mexico. But it's worth mentioning again. We managed to time things to be at the villa to see two out of the three sunsets that occurred when we visited.

A Slight Difference in Latitude

A couple of inches of snow fell last night, meaning that the view from my back door this morning looked pretty much like this again, though it has mostly melted since:

That's actually a picture from Sunday morning, March 29. Roughly 48 hours later, thanks to the infrastructure that makes modern travel possible, I was able to point my camera at this view:

This is the Pacific Ocean at Punta de Mita in the state of Nayarit, Mexico, on the last day of March, 2009. Here in Estados Unidos de América, most of us have heard of Puerto Vallarta. I never actually saw more than about 10 minutes of The Love Boat, yet somehow I know that PV was a major port of call for that vessel. To an even earlier generation, The Night of the Iguana put the town on the map.

Not so Punta de Mita, also simply known as Punta Mita. "I say Punta Mita and I get blank stares," said an American expat we met during our visit. "So I say it's near Puerto Vallarta, and that gets a reaction."

Puerto Vallarta lies midward on the enormous Bay of Banderas, where the Rio Cuale meets the sea, a setting made all the more picturesque by the Sierra Madre in the background. Punta de Mita is a peninsula that defines the northern extent of the Bay of Banderas. The peninsula has a slender neck and more generous proportions toward its tip, with a small set of high hills marking its interior. From there, the land slopes to the sea, mostly in a way suitable for building. The peninsula is ringed by over nine miles of shoreline, sporting the classic white-sand beaches that make it into brochures but also rocky cliffs that look down onto scenes such as this:

As a resort- and second-home development, Punta Mita is in rompers. Serious development of the peninsula really only got under way in the late 1990s, with the Four Seasons Punta Mita opening in 1999. Later developments include a St. Regis resort, which opened in 2007, a number of residential properties and a couple of Jack Nicklaus-designed golf courses. A fair amount of other development has yet to be realized, though in the fullness of time I don't doubt that DINE, the master developer of the area, will achieve its aims. DINE, formerly a unit of Mexican conglomerate DESC but now a standalone commercial developer, probably Mexico's largest, is also at work on properties at Punta Ixtapa and Punta Gorda on the Pacific coast of Mexico.

My visit was in the dry season, so outside the lush green areas of the resorts and residential properties -- with their bright flowers and towering palms -- brown and gray and other earth tones dominated landscape, something like the one I see from my window at home this time of year. Northern Illinois is waiting for sustained warmth. The coast of Nayarit is waiting for the wet season, which I was told evokes a sudden, tremendous eruption of greenery and wildflowers.

Further South Than I've Been in Years

The fellow who looked at my boarding pass last Monday as I entered the passengers-only zone at O'Hare couldn't have been older than about 23, a lad in the new uniform of the Transportation Security Administration. But a good-natured lad at that moment. He took a look at me in my traveling clothes, a gray suit with a blue shirt but no tie.

"Going to Puerto Vallarta on business?" he asked, more in an conversational tone than an interrogational one.

"Yes, I am."

"That sucks."

He waved me through. Often enough "business trip" means a few days in climate-controlled meeting rooms struggling against yawns and heavy eyelids, and that would have been bad. But that isn't the kind of business trip I took. I went to look at properties about 20 miles up the coast from Puerto Vallarta, and write about them later.

Not just any resort properties, but exquisite Mexican-flavored residences overlooking wide views of the Pacific horizon, enlivened by frequent flights of seabirds, the sound of the ocean thumping the rocks below, and regularly scheduled sunsets. That describes my villa, at least, but all of the properties had considerable charm, and sometimes arresting designs.

Other writers had been gathered to see the properties as well, three from Canada and one other American -- an amiable, well-traveled group. Comparing destinations was a continuing subject of conversation, but hardly the only one. Besides touring resort- and second-home properties, we participated in the slow-food movement at a number of fine restaurants, mostly open-air establishments.

One afternoon a boat ride was on the schedule, too, taking us near offshore islands that functioned as seabird cities, complete with the smell of guano. I'd say that was a first for any business trip of mine.

I Wish I Was In Tijuana, Eating Barbecued Iguana

Spring break is here. For me, anyway. I'll be posting again around April 5. If all goes according to plan, I'll have been there and seen that by then, and be able to relay some details.

Till then, some amusements to share. I don't remember where I saw this sign, but I liked it enough to take a picture a few years ago. Talk about tough parking enforcement (but gift cards are available!).

"Mexican Radio" and even its video, provided they're still on YouTube, have their charms. Including one of my favorite lines from a pop song -- the one about chowing down, south of the border.

All things considered, I wouldn't want to be in Tijuana just now, and I won't be unless something completely unexpected happens, like being picked up and taken there by space aliens. As for iguana, I would certainly try it, but not at $60/lb.

Down Mexico Way

There are scholars who keep track of children’s rhymes, as well there should be. But all I want to do here is record one Lilly brought home from a field trip today. She and the rest of the first grade went to the Shedd Aquarium in downtown Chicago to ogle the fishes and monsters of the deep. Definitely a cool destination. Wish I'd had something like that around when I was that age, though I did see a world’s fair, but not as a school trip.

Anyway, the kids entertained themselves on the bus, as kids do. After Lilly returned for the day we headed out, and from the back seat of the car I heard:

“I don’t want to go to Mexico any more, more, more.
There’s a big fat policeman
At my door, door, door.
He grabs me by the collar
He makes me pay a dollar.
I don’t want to go to Mexico any more, more, more.”

For all I know, this could be something filtered down from some cartoon I’ve never watched, like South Park, or one I’ve seen sporadically, like The Simpsons, or any of a number of others, or some movie, or some song. I’ve missed a lot of pop culture since about 1980, and I don’t care who knows it.

I ran some of the keys words of the rhyme through Google, and no link to the mass media turned up. A couple of sites did mention it, however, including one that said it has been popular with black kids in recent years, and perhaps originated from something called “I Don’t Want to Go to Macy’s,” recorded in the 1930s. But no further information about that turned up; my source didn’t even say whether that was a mainstream song or what.

But it’s enough to know that it’s a bone fide children’s rhyme, and one I’d never heard. It contains a nugget of lore too, at least when it comes to Mexican law enforcement’s reputation for petty (or not-so-petty) corruption.