Where are the Mexican Bakeries?!

I was talking with Juan last week about Mexican food and Mexican stores in the Huntsville/Madison area (in Alabama) and he brought up a very interesting question, "Where are the Mexican Bakeries?".  Juan is a young guy about 21 and his family is from Mexico.

Juan was right, where are they?  We have restaurants and even small stores...But where are the bakeries?

I had a favorite bakery when I was living in Tyler TX working with a catering company.  I knew which days to go and when to get there so I could pick my still

Watermelon Carving

Have you ever carved something? This past week I carved 2 watermelons for a July 4th BBQ at Church. A lady that knows my wife figured out that I know how to carve watermelons. She then emailed me to see would I be willing to do them with the church logo, and the summer nights logo they use. I said sure. 

It had been over a year since I last carved one. There's not much high demand for carved watermelons in Monrovia Liberia, West Africa (where I was all last year). So as you can imagine I was a bit rusty...but things still seemed to go well. The pictures in this post were taken by one of there photographers then posted on Facebook at Westgate Church. 

Here is a link to an old Chef article that I wrote about watermelon carving. --> Watermelon Carving 

Not much has changed since I wrote that article. I bought some 'special' fruit carving tools from a site that are currently collecting dust. It took too much force to make cuts or work right. This is not the way to make precision graphics or any work you want to do on a fruit.

Moving on...Click on pictures to see them bigger.
  

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The Humorous Herb Garden (a fun idea)

The day I decided to start my herb garden I found a box of children's plastic yard, garden, or beach toys next to the recycle bin. I looked at them and decided that it would be fun to use the toys as ‘pots’ for growing my plants. So I took them back to the apartment and made holes in the bottom of them for water drainage like a proper planting pot.

I originally bought 2 pots and a rectangle planter with a bag of organic potting soil.  But now I have a wheelbarrow, a ship, a bucket, and a small plastic garden watering toy.

To make a long story short I planted mint in the ship by itself because supposedly I got to watch out for that thing going wild.  The rosemary has the same problem, growing out of control.  But I decided to plant it with garlic chives and Italian flat-leaf parsley in the wheelbarrow.  And in my rectangle planter, I have (from left to right) basil, cilantro, lemon thyme, and Greek oregano.  Now according to the ‘instructions/direction’ of the herb plant cards they all like direct sunlight.

Remember me saying I don’t particularly have a ‘green thumb’? At all? Yeah, so now the sun has been literally cooking some of my herbs in the pot, and no, that's not a food cooking pot. Although there has got to be all kinds of puns in that last sentence. I didn’t want to show the updated pictures till I have more time to redeem my plants so the pictures on this page are when I first got everything started. It now looks like my mint, cilantro, and half of the lemon thyme was cooked till the herbs dried out or got crispy on the vine!

And remember the BLT contest due by the end of August 28th? The other two pots that I started my heirloom tomatoes and lettuce in…haven’t seen them yet.  It's not looking good for me to be a contestant in the competition, but we’ll see what happens.  I have a few more tricks up my sleeve.

Once again, Green Thumb FAIL! 

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A tasty trip to San Francisco

We took one more trip to San Francisco to try a couple of places and visit an old favorite before the baby comes.  We visited Dynamo Donuts & Coffee, Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, and for lunch, we went to Rocco's...in the video, you may need to increase the sound to hear my voice sometimes.  It's a work in progress, I am an amateur at any kind of video making.  Enjoy!

Update to Culinary Mystery!

Remember when I wrote this post with pictures:

Culinary Mystery (you need to read this to understand the rest of the post)

Well after almost 2 years someone wrote in with a link to the answer!  But first I want to ask why Arthur from Sheffield England DID NOT KNOW what it was when it came from his neck of the woods!

Joe writes this:  I have come across one of these and Googled to find out what it is. I can confirm, it's a double-sided fork/skewer for serving steak...Hope this helps!

Here is the mystery solved Link.

It's funny because at the time I had exhausted all kinds of Internet searches including Google and had not come up with anything...but first, you got to know what you looking for!  And it was almost 2 years ago!

Thanks, Joe!