Staying next door this weekend is the nicest family. Most of them don't speak English, but fortunately a couple of them can translate between us.

They are the ones who always share their dinner with me. They bring a large wok/skillet thing that is heated with propane (they bring their own tank). In they dump a big mess of finely diced beef, pork, bacon, onions, red peppers, jalapenos, and hot dogs seasoned with chili powder. They chase it around in that wok until it's all browned. Then they take it out and bring out a big pressure cooker full of pink beans. After cleaning out the wok, they melt about a cup of bacon grease in it and dump in the cooked beans and liquid to heat them up and get the flavor of the bacon grease. I'm not sure why they couldn't just add the bacon grease to the cooked beans in the pressure cooker and save a step. At first I thought they were going to make refried beans, but they didn't, just served them up whole.

There were home made corn tortillas to go along - the grandma was out there in the chilly morning making the tortillas with a press and cooking them on the wok thing. We (I have company over here) talked about going over there begging one from her but decided it would be rude.



They gave me a plate of the meat and plate of beans, and some tortillas to take home. It doesn't resemble the Mexican food we get in restaurants - no cheese for one thing, and the flavors are all different. The hot dogs surprised me; last year I thought maybe they had some left over so added them, but today I figured out they are there on purpose, and I wonder what the counterpart is back home in Mexico - chorizo I suppose, but it wouldn't taste the same.

Yesterday when they all pulled up in the yard the brother asked me if I like corn and he had maybe 75 or 100 ears of dried out looking corn tossed in the back of his pickup. "I love corn," I said so I took about 8 ears. But when I got them home it was field corn, starting to dent, and certainly nothing like sweet corn, and I had no idea how they would prepare it.

Tonight about 8:30 the doorbell rang and they wanted to borrow some charcoal because they decided to roast some of that corn. We couldn't figure out how they would prepare it and how it would turn out. We talked about corn nuts, hominy, and roasted corn in general. Finally curiosity got the better of us and we went over there to see. They had put tin foil on the grill and were cooking the corn in the husks (not soaked) until the kernels were transparent, and surprise to us, they were tender and edible, chewier than regular sweet corn, but definitely something you might get a hankering for after supper on a Saturday night.

I made a big pan of cinnamon rolls and took over there to say thank you for the meat and beans. I don't know if they ate them fresh and hot or saved some for breakfast tomorrow.

So it's an international cuisine exchange weekend here on the Big Thompson.

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