Mexican Night!

Hola!  Thursday night I invited Ali, Niki, and Anne over for Mexican dinner.  I made Mexican 1 or 2 times a year or two ago for them at the Cingpu house when we all lived together and it got rave reviews so I wanted to invite them over for another Mexican fiesta!

It smelled like Mexico in the apartment but outside it was crazy torrential rain.  Anne and I got drenched walking from work to the Carrefour (groceries) and then back to my apartment; And we had umbrellas!  It didn't seem to matter because the rain was so huge, and blowing sideways enough that my shoes and pants were soaked by the time we reached home.

Anne helped me shop around Carrefour for all the ingredients we needed.  I needed to buy lettuce, tomatoes, ground beef, salsa, cheese, chili flakes, and onions.  After several minutes of exploring, we discovered Carrefour doesn't carry salsa so I picked up some cilantro and a lime to make my own fresh salsa (ended up tasting better anyways).  I can't seem to find chili flakes anywhere either so I picked up some hot sauce.  I thought it was like.. a piquante type sauce but I tried it today on my pasta and it's actually more like Vietnamese thick orange hot sauce. lol... ah well.  I also sold the place out of ground beef.  There were only 2 packages in the whole store despite having a very large meat section.

We arrived home around 7pm and I started getting things ready.  Made the salsa and Ali/Niki arrived at 8pm.  I went down to pick them up from the MRT station and we decided to pick up Come Buy bubble tea for drinks since I don't have any cups in the house yet.  Niki and I ordered the Mango Yogurt Bubble tea.  A really nice light mango smoothie drink.  They were out of yogurt and so it took about 15 minutes of waiting.  At least it wasn't cold out.

Anyways, back up to the apartment and ~45 minutes later: Voila!  Burrito time!  I don't have a microwave and the tortillas were cold from the fridge so I ended up taking a pot and filling it with a small amount of water, then boiling the water and waving the tortillas in the air above the steam.  It seemed to do the trick.

Hey!  Who is that lady in the picture?  Yes Eliza, you were there in spirit!

The burritos received rave reviews!

 
Being the awesome friends that they are, Ali & Niki brought over some gifts.  One was a large bag of cashews (pictured behind the picture of Eliza).  Aparently these are "homemade" by Niki's mom's friend in Hsinchu.  They're very tasty and I think the fact that I know they are "homemade" makes them taste even better psychologically.

Niki had also been in Tainan the day before (southern Taiwan) for work, and brought back bags of this famous Tainan pudding.  Hoo tschuh! ("delicious" and my god is that 'tschuh' word difficult to type phonetically in roman letters.  I'd love to hear people try to pronounce it based solely on my spelling.. lol).

The characters say "Red Brick Pudding".  Red Brick as in the old school houses located in the older parts of Taiwan.

This pudding was sesame seed flavoured. Geez so yummy.  I ate half and saved the rest for the next day (now) which I just finished eating while I was writing this blog.

Well that's it!  Hope to have another Mexican food night again soon.  And now, I have extra tomatoes, cilantro, and onion so I'm going to make some salsa for opened taco chip bag from Costco.