From Xico

Carlos Slim's Art Museum in Mexico City

in process.  Photo from ArtDaily.org on Friday, January 28, 2011.  (Scroll down to find it.)

MEXICO CITY - Mexican Alfonso Miranda, directorof the Soumaya Musuem poses in front of the Soumaya Museum which belongs to Carlos Slim,  It was designed by Fernando Romero whom I think is his son-in.law.  It is supposed to open in April.

From Carlos Slim's website: (my translation)

The mission of the Museo Soumaya of the Carlos Slim Foundation is to share the arts with the Mexican public as well as with foreigners for their education and esthetic enjoyment. at the same time that it guarantees conservation of art and research.

It is a space for an encounter with the arts. Especially outstanding is the collection of sculpture by Auguste Rodin, the most important outside of France, as is also the work of ancient European masters, of impressionism, and of the moderns.  Tours of the museum connect visitors with the sensibility of El Greco, Murillo, Rubens, Cranach, Brueghel, Tiziano and Tintoretto as well as Van Gogh, Toulouse. Lautrec, Rouault, Matisse, Picasso, Miró, Dalí and others.

Mexican epochs are given expression in mesoamerican and colonial works, as well as works from independent Mexico from nationalism and The Rupture.  The religious canvases of José de Páez, Miguel Cabrera, and Juan Carrea, the portraits of José Agustín Arrieta, Hermenogildo Bustos, Jossé María Estrada, the landscapes of European artists such as Rugendas, Löhr, Egerton, Chapman, the universality of the painters of the the 20th scentury such as Rivera, Siquieros, Orozco and Tamayo, and those who undertook different roads such as Soriano, Cuevas and Toledo enrich the  diversity of this region.

Applied arts also are presented here to give a living context to other epochs.  Textiles, fashion, photography, ceramics, coins, medals, miniature portraits and reliquaries enrich the vision of ancient forms of life.

In the environment of this colleciton of collections, Museo Soumaya includes a broad offering of permanent, temporary and traveling exhibits, courses, conferences, workshops, activities, publications and suervices with the purpose of bringing art to a variety of publics.

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This link will take you to a much more extensive description of the very unusual building that is to house the museum.  It's worth looking at.  It is an extraordinary effort.

Soumaya was the name of Slim's late wife, and it was she who started collecting art and it is I would say for her that Slim has continued on such a grand scale.  It seems their marriage was truly a marriage of amores de sus vidas.  Slim has never remarried.

I for one am eagerly looking forward to visiting it when it opens.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sargent Shriver

When I was a junior or senior at Barnard College, at that time the place women who wanted to go to Columbia went, Sargent Shriver came to speak on the Columbia Campus.  Before he spoke, I had found the idea of the Peace Corps appealing but frightening. You could go to India or some poor African or Latin American country.  I thought of snakes in trees and filthy water and chronic diseases picked up while you were sweating under a tropical sun.  Sargent Shriver must have hypnotized his entire audience, because I think most people, who started out with forbidding reservations like mine were determined to go by the time he finished talking.  He gave us to understand that life could be rich and exciting and joyful if we didn’t just do safe things, that in fact doing safe things was the cowardly choice.  He helped us to see that faraway places, places we thought of in those days as dangerous or primitive, had all kinds of wonderful things to teach us.  He told us that our experience would do more for us than it ever did for the people we went to serve.

So I went home and told my parents I was going to join the Peace Corps.  They were aghast, as was my college advisor who said the Peace Corps was for people who wanted to “escape”.  He wanted me to go to graduate school.  Finally I agreed to work for a year before deciding whether I would apply.  So after graduation and a summer in Europe,  I got a job at LIFE magazine and sometime around Christmas, I applied to the Peace Corps and ended up not only in the Peace Corps but with a new husband in Uganda.

Sargent Shriver was right.  It wasn’t simply his charisma, which he had in buckets, that led us to far off and interesting places, it was his awareness of what made lives worthwhile which he could communicate to a packed auditorium as well as if he were speaking to each one of us by ourselves. 

And as Scott Sossel, Shriver's biographer says, it isn’t simply that Shriver was a product of his times.  He was an extraordinary man, committed and compelling and devoted to doing good.  He was as Stossel says, a Catholic who tried to model his life in some ways at least after the life Jesus lived.  What we can remember today in these cynical times is that Jesus also lived in what might be termed cynical times, times which were very difficult for the downtrodden, for the Jews, not only against other groups, but among themselves.  For me, Shriver’s legacy is that indeed one should try to live one’s life as if it mattered.  One should, Christian or not, remember Shriver’s impact and Jesus’s on his followers.

This link is to a wonderful commemoration to Sargent Shriver by Sossel, in the Atlantic Montly wehre he is an associate editor.

 

Gabriel Orozco, Mexican Artist, World Artist

Gabriel Orozco,  a Mexican contemporary artist with an international identity, is now the subject of an exhibit at the Tate Modern in London. An article on the exhibit can be found via www.artdaily.org. Irony of ironies, this article appeared just days after I said I wished Art Daily would have more on Latin American artists.

Orozco is a Mexican by birth and early training. He still carries within him Mexican traditions, though he does much more. As many Mexican artists do, Orozco sees art as a means for making political and social points, but his wide-ranging mind and curiosity might have picked academic philosophy or mathematics or history, for instance, as as the place to express himself and his ideas. Instead he has chosen art and many of its resources, traditional as well as twenty-first century technological, found and new, with which to do it.  He was born in Xalapa, leaving to  to study at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plasticas in Mexico City.  He went on to Madrid and from there to become a resident of the world.

Here is a photo of his Citroen, from the Museum of Modern Art in New York City:

Below is his photo of his work called black kites.

This link to PBS's Art21 is a rich source of information, including interviews, slide shows and videos of work.

 

 

Omertà May Be Dead - the Mafia Isn’t - NYTimes.com

QUITE a coincidence: In January 1961, Robert F. Kennedy, newly appointed as attorney general of the United States, orchestrated the first concentrated attack on the American Mafia. Almost to the day 50 years later, the government swept up more than 120 people in a smorgasbord of racketeering indictments, mainly in the New York area.

via www.nytimes.com

Speaking of the Mafia, here is an interesting column on the Mafia from today's New York Times. Going after sophisticated gangs seems like a "whack-a-mole" proposition.

Xalapa Shootout

Thursday night of last week, army units and state police were involved in a shoot-out in Xalapa with armed gangsters. This was the first event of this kind in, I think, modern times in Xalapa. Of course it scared everybody with its seemingly very strong similarity to violence in the narco-riddled areas of the country. The apparent instigation was a citizen call reporting that black arms-bearing SUVs had been seen going to and leaving a house in a Xalapa neighborhood near Las Animas.  Exactly how it started or why is, however, still unclear, and the outcome is a bit peculiar, given that it was reported that 100 soldiers and additional members of the state police force turned up at the site, were shot at and returned the fire.  Questions involve why so many police and soldiers were involved; how, if so few weapons were ultimately confiscated, there could have been such aggression by the alleged narcos, what happened to the bodies and why no one was wounded, only killed, and apparently no one escaped.  Also of great concern is the issue of whether the incident represents some escalation of a narco presence in Xalapa. This doesn’t seem likely.  As the column below indicates, there have, for a long time, been elements of organized crime in Xalapa and Veracruz, but Xalapa and the state in general, for whatever reason, does not seem to be considered turf to fight over and turf wars seem to be at the root of much of the gang violence in other areas.  The situation reminds me of that which existed in New York City when I was growing up.  The Mafia was in charge of some businesses and some politicians. I remember garbage in particular.  Mafia and police took payoffs from local stores in return for safety.  There were also teen gangs that were pretty dangerous (and less pretty than in West Side Story).   Periodically there’d be a blowup of one sort or another and rumors would fly and then everything would settle down again to normal, which, in New York meant, in a good sense, a lot of energy and in a bad sense, an ever-present edginess, but not fear.  I guess as a New Yorker, I became inured to the fact that criminals’ lives were interwoven with mine.  My friends and I got used to the fact that if we didn’t take precautions, our wallets would be stolen. If we wandered around alone at night, we could be assaulted, usually for our wallets again, etc. etc. We got a perverse thrill out of patronizing an Italian restaurant that was a mafia favorite. I have a few more dramatic true stories that I used to like to drag out to shock my more naïve friends from out of town, but except for relatively minor brushes with danger, we all developed street smarts and grew up relatively unscathed if shorter a few dollars and some stuff.  I’m not sure of the lesson to be derived from my youthful experiences.  New York just witnessed another mafia roundup: 100 people “brought to justice”.  New York also now has one of the lowest violent crime rates for cities in the US, Mafia, Russian gangs, Latin gangs, whoever is currently making their home there notwithstanding.  It always was and  still is definitely more dangerous than Xalapa.  

Not that long ago, Xalapa was pretty small.  The first time we visited it, twenty some odd years ago, you could still walk to its edge from the center.  Its flavor was very different: conservative, respectable. Women and girls simply did not wear slacks, let alone jeans.  Men and boys didn’t wear T-shirts on the street, least of all with logos and pictures on them.  Now it is a city of maybe a million people, crowded, noisy, messy, and way too much traffic crawling along narrow streets. And Xalapa is full of life. Pedestrians everywhere, and much more informally dressed.  Everyone wears pants, especially jeans.  Even rich women wear jeans, sometimes showing their status with arms and necks encrusted with gold jewelry and shoulders lugging heavy, lumpy designer bags.  Women wear pants of all kinds: some older working women wear pants suits with chunky square shouldered tops.  Young girls and not so young girls wear tights and big blouses or not such big blouses.  They sometimes wear skin-clinging shirts which stop above their navals and all kinds of pants that hang on their hips.  Younger Xalapa women amaze me, moving fast, dodging and weaving, skirting holes and ridges in the sidewalks, while wearing four or five inch heels and looking graceful as they do it.  

All kinds of food: vendors selling cotton candy and esquites and candy and ice cream and sodas and cups of fresh fruit you can dust with chili powder. And fruit juices: a half liter of pure sweet orange juice for ten pesos.  There are counter restaurants where you can grab tacos al pastor or sandwhiches on those round, soft, flour dusted rolls called pombazas. Restaurants put out their comida corridas from two to four in the afternoon, a three or four course meal often for less than five dollars, or even four: caldos and guisados and carne de res and fish a la veracruzana. And there are foreign restaurants selling Arab food and Chinese food and Italian food and there is even sushi in the local supermarkets. Marimba bands crowd the sidewalk and in El Teatro del Estado, a world class symphony orchestra makes its home; lone clarinetists play in el Parque Juarez and jazz festivals sprawl across venues from the university to local clubs.  And there are clubs for gays.  And commerce: Indian women selling woven plastic baskets to drivers at stoplights and men pushing wheelbarrows filled with flowers  and local  markets and holes-in-the wall, their goods tumbling out into the street. Stores that specialize in shoes and seeds and electronics and plastics and religious stuff and wedding dresses cram against each other. And if you don't like all that, there’s Wal-Mart: two of them in fact and shopping malls and shopping strips with Costco and Kentucky Fried Chicken and Office Max and Office Depot and Home Depot and Pizza Hut and Burger King. 

 I know there are older people, well-off ones, who lament the passing of the safe and calm Xalapa.  In those days, Xalapa didn't have some of the urban problems it has today: homeless kids, drug use, violence among family members and among local teenagers, slums.  However, there was still poverty and inequality.  And while there may have been a period of time when violent crime wasn't a problem, Mexico, since the Conquest has generally had problems: highway robbers, railway robbers, street violence, and terrible, ten year long struggles for freedom and rights.

There are two truths here.  One is that cities like Xalapa all over the world are tangled places and part of what makes them so appealing is this tangle of lives.  Dealing with crime in a city is a tricky business because of the very nature of a free city.  I don’t think you can eliminate the danger.  The goal may have to be to keep people reasonably safe in its presence.  

The second truth is that in some parts of Mexico, the most notable being Ciudad Juárez, the situation has been for some time way past what can be considered tolerable.  How did it get that way?  What went so terribly wrong?  

Below is some commentary on the situation in Xalapa following the shootout.  Its title is Public Affairs: Security operations and rumors and it is by Edwardo Coronel Chiu.  It first appeared in the Xalapa daily, AZ Xalapa and Veracruz. I found it on the news blog, EnlaceVeracruz 212.  The somewhat hasty translation is mine.  It provides some good insights into the situation.

After the battle loosed on Thursday night by  army and state police forces in the colonia of Casablanca de Xalapa against an organized crime gang, we are even less able to say  that in matters of insecurity in Veracruz, nothing [bad] happens.  But, on the other hand, neither is the extreme opposite perspective reasonable, the one that says the state is falling apart and that violence and insecurity are here to stay in the capital.

On the one hand, acts of violence have to be put in proportion, but on the other, the authorities should not only guarantee the security of people and their goods, but also inform them promptly and in an opportune manner of the results of official actions while respecting the discretion necessary for the work of capturing criminals.

The country and our state, the people and especially the media are very sensitive to news of organized crime’s battles and the territorial fights between cartels, executions, thefts, and kidnappings and as such are collateral victims of this war that no one has wanted, but which has become, with Felipe Calderon’s presidency this past four years, the government’s top priority.

Public opinion surveys show that there is an increase in the perception of insecurity and fear among the people of the country.  This has obviously not occurred in a vacuum, and it corresponds with criminal statistics which show the growth of the number of deaths during Calderón’s presidency to more than 35 thousand.  This is a figure that is consistent across diverse sources, from journalists to official reports. In this context, Veracruz has been relatively peaceful. Crime statistics here are very much lower than the national average.  Of course Veracruz is not  exempt from criminal events and security operations, which the press has punctually recorded, but this state cannot be compared with those states which have such deeply rooted problems of crime that the state, which should be the legitimate police force, has lost control of its territory and its monopoly of violence .  Veracruz is not an island, either in economic matters nor in matters affecting security.  Its territory is a natural traffic route and provides markets of the sort in which organized crime operates, such as, for example, in wholesale drugs, piratería [in this context illegal copies of movies music, software, etc], kidnapping and trafficking in migrants.  But there is a lot of distance between the situation here and the overflow of violence and the speculation about cartels’ fight for territory redeveloping in states [where gang wars are entrenched]. 

Sensationalism sells, and that’s well known. Communicators are confronted with a thin line that separates legitimate information from ethical dilemmas (when they are present). Confrontations and deaths serve the critical opportunist aiming at the level of authority which [convenga al propósito de sacar raja política I don’t know why, but this phrase defeats me. ]

The operation on Thursday night in Xalapa and the level of fear which it provoked in the population, indeed broke the period of relative peace with which Governor Javier Duarte de Ochoa began his administration, but his handling of it doesn’t leave him in a bad place at all.

It emphasizes, in principle, the cooperation of his government with the Federal Government, in this case, with the Army.  Knowing the form in which the federal forces have acted on other occasions in which they’ve shunted state governments to the side, the effective coordination of this operation signifies that there was no lack of confidence in the governor on the part of the army, for instance there was no suggestion of politicizing security actions, nor of the idea that  Veracruz is protecting criminals.

On the other hand, while the day after the shootout, the governor and the military head of the zone jointly spoke about the events and the outcomes and about the count of  fourteen deaths, twelve criminals and two soldiers, and about the decommissioned weapons, there was no precision about how many and who the criminals were nor what their criminal actions were. Nor was there any recounting in detail of the operation, which from looking at it, was related to the shootout in Indeco Animas [a Xalapa neighborhood.  In the news we saw, everything was considered one event, from the shooting at Indeco Animas to action resumed in a nature reserve and an additional neighborhood.  As one event with separate parts, it was reported to take six hours.  This is all pretty blurry, too.  The author of this column, Coronel Chiu, seems to see possibly at least two separate incidents. ] that night, nor did they show the bodies, although various individuals spread the word that they had seen handcuffed cadavers.  Nor is it known if anyone was able to escape.

Because of all this, while the authorities of the state and the army presented their communiqué, rumors spread from person to person and in the media.  Friday morning  was marked by the wave of rumors of shootings in the streets of Xalapa and the fear spread, so that even schools were closed.  Added to the cold weather, it resulted in Xalapeños beings isolated in their houses.  Other violent episodes from that day and the next worsened the picture.  There was an attempt on a family on the Veracruz-Boca del Río line [On the coast, about 65 or so miles from Xalapa] and a (levantón) of a police commander.

The media spreading rumors left us with the lesson that Veracruz is fertile territory for the manipulation of gullibility, which indicates that one has to equip oneself with an adequate strategy of communication based on timely, sufficient, true and reliable information and through adequate channels to avoid generating panic.  

 

Moctezuma's Head Dress

Who knew?Moctezuma's head dress still exists, is intact and is in, of all places, Austria.  Art Daily reports that relevant agencies in Austria and INAH in Mexico are in talks for a temporary return of the artifact to its home. I copied the picture below of the head dress from the Art Daily site.  

Art Daily(artdaily.org) has daily news about all kinds of art, often with vivid illustrations.  You can start your morning with it.  A vegetable soup of articles from all over the world, it has a healthy dose of archaeological stuff from Mexico as well as some coverage (I wish more)of modern art in Latin America among a multitude of places.  

Okay, I know, I know: 70% of the US is blanketed in snow, but it is COLD here, too

In the State of Durango, Mexico, the temperature is 3.2 degrees Fahrenheit.  Here in Colonia Ursulo Galván, in the southeast of Mexico, the current temperature is 53.6F.  Some of you might laugh at us, but people here do not have heating so it is COLD.  You can suffer hypothermia in such temperatures, and I assure you, it is colder at higher (even slightly higher) elevations.  It is raining here. Maybe there will be snow on Cofre de Perote!  Anyway, in our house, without a fire in our wood-burning stove, the temperature has been steady at about 65 all day.  Dog body heat is what it is.

More on flowers for breakfast plus weeds for lunch and more miscellaneous stuff

My friend Judith who now lives in western mexico but who used to live in Xico wrote the following regarding gasparitos ( see my previous post):

"The GASPARITO you showed looks a lot like what I knew in Xico as EQUIMITE, a tree flower. We had [an equimite tree] in our yard in our first house there. I saw it sold on the street in Xico in season. My taste experience of it was of a very delicate flavor but one not perceptible, I imagine, if you boil.. it. Try a gentle saute and by all means don't take the center stalk out. It is not bitter."

At this time of year, when many deciduous trees here are bare, and the landscape is cloaked in dryer, more wintry colors, the gasparitos, which indeed are the same flower Judith remembers, are brilliant against gray branches. You can find pictures of them on the web.  I looked up equimite, which is one of the tree's names as well as a name for the the flower, and found two other names for the tree as well: zompantle and colorin.  If you read Spanish, this site has lots of useful information.  It is apparently a plant of Mexican origin.  Don't eat the seeds!  They are toxic.

Below is a picture of purslane, or, as it's called here and elsewhere in Latin America, verdolaga or berdolaga (b's and v's are often indistinguishable in sound so the letters often get transposed in everyday writing.)

When we first moved into our house almost five years ago, verdolaga was growing in one of the flower beds.  Guillermo, our gardener asked whether he should pull it.  At least that's what I think  he asked.  Back in those olden days, I didn't understand much of what Guillermo or other Spanish speakers said.  I gathered that the previous owners had told him to pull it because it was a weed.  I went along with that. 

Much to my surprise, a bit later our friend and vegetable lady came around SELLING the stuff.  "But it's a WEED," I said.  She was truly offended.  "It certainly isn't," she said.  "It's very good for you and very tasty and you can eat it all kinds of ways."  So I bought a bunch, and as with the gasparitos, that bunch and numerous others slowly died in my refrigerator.  

Finally, at this late date, we, or at least I -- Jim has a very strong, possibly genetically-determined aversion to greens I think and only eats them because he acknowledges the importance of their nutrients -- have been eating them.  They have a tangy, sourish flavor which is quite pleasing. They can be eaten raw or cooked by themselves or stirred into any number of dishes.

When I first decided to give verlaga a try, I asked Doña Vicky across the street what to do with it. Once again she said,  "Boil it before you eat it."  I can hear Judith say, "No, no, no...." And in fact you don't have to. BUT I think the advice is good for a lot of people around here, at least to start with.  Since it is definitely not confined to sterile (hah hah) garden spaces and easily available along roads and so forth, you don't know what animals have made use of it for one thing or another.  Furthermore, the water supply itself is a bit unreliable as far as cleanliness goes.  So BOILING makes sense especially if you can't treat the water you're washing the stuff in.

So verlaga is another one of those extremely nourishing plants that exists all around us and is FREE. Weed?  I don't think so.  

As purslane, verlaga now has champions in the US.  Here is a link to a page with information on it.  As you can see, it is full of nutrients and is the numero uno (apparently) source of omega 3 fatty acid in plants.

Speaking of nutrients, there is a book called The China Study by T. Colin Campbell and Thomas Campbell (father and son) based on, guess what, a project called The China Study in which Cornell University and Oxford University participated.  They studied rural Chinese diets and came up with the conclusion that plant-based diets were better for health than meat- and dairy-based diets. What's really interesting, is that the authors say that nutrition science has been merrily galloping down the wrong path by studying individual nutrients instead of the effects of whole FOODS (not the store) on human health.  Thus, we read that omega 3 fatty acid is good and race to the store to buy whatever has added it.  Or we buy capsules.  And junk food flourishes with its labels of vitamin-enriched, fiber-enriched, etc. And people aren't getting healthier.  Meanwhile, free food that grows in our neighborhood is abandoned by the better-off and plastic wrappers from all manner of junk food dance along the streets (well, not in the colonia.  It's kept pretty clean. But along the roads outside it.)

Now just for fun, here is a plant I picked while it was in the process of making what will be tiny purplish to lavender colored lantern-shaped blossoms:

The leaves are also quite charming, being around three or so inches long and rounded with delicately scalloped edges and light veins.  Unfortunately they are the first part to whither upon picking.  But here is a picture of one anyway:

And finally, our neighbor, Ingrid, who lives right across the street made hundreds of chains of beautiful, vivid flowers out of foam and glitter this past December.  They hung in dazzling array along two of her walls.  People bought them to decorate their altars for the Fiesta de la Virgen de Guadalupe.  I bought two of them, too.  After Christmas, I couldn't bear to put them away so I draped them on a candelabra.  Here is a picture which doesn't really do them justice:

 

 

The old year greets the new and flowers for breakfast

On December 31, our young neighbor Areli and I went to Coatepec to run some errands.  We had to go to an animal feed store for rabbit food and to inquire about baby pigs whose mother had stopped suckling them.  The store is opposite the market.  The owner is very knowledgeable and helpful.  Areli explained that one of the pigs in the small pig nursery behind her house had had three piglets die after our recent bout with cold and had stopped nursing the survivors.  The owner explained what the dueña of the nursery should do and prescribed some temporary food solutions.  Areli also bought food supplement for her two very healthy rabbits.  Most of the time, Areli and here sister walk down the road outside the colonia and select appropriate greens for the rabbits, but she said they also should have some supplement.

We then went to the market.  Areli and I both bought veggies, but Areli also had a special mission. Her sister had manage to get $70 pesos during Las Posadas in our neighborhood and wanted Areli to use it to buy her a shirt.  Las Posadas is when the neighborhood kids go door to door and sing for some small amount of money.  They bring with them a decorated branch of a special tree.  I always associate it with the Jesse tree, but I'm not sure I'm right. During Las Posadas, each main street in our Colonia sponsors a night. The people of the colonia sing and carry candles in procession.  They deliver to designated homes or capillas statues of Mary and Joseph who then remain till the next night.  They are awaiting the arrival of Jesus.  We paid for the piñata that was used for the Las Posadas celebration on our street. it cost about three dollars. Jim has some pictures which I may or may not put up in the future (he stores about 1000 pictures on his camera at a time so access on my part is a bit iffy).

Anyway, Areli and I went to a stall which sells a huge variety of t-shirts and blouses in the market and picked one out for Rosy.

On the 31st of December, groups mostly of boys and men gather together and go out to sing and dance and generally to behave in delightfully foolish ways. They dress as women and babies as well as old men.  The idea is to honor the old New Year, represented as not just one but many old men and to welcome the new, a boy with a diaper on.  The boys and men sometimes also dress as women.  As of now, I still don't get it all.

Here is a picture of some of the boys in a group in the mercado:

Here is a picture of the creche that was sponsored by the mercado.  It was quite large.

Kids and piñatas go together at most celebrations in Mexico, though I think Buenanoche, or Christmas Eve might be the most important.  On December 31 there were still plenty of piñatas for sale for New Years Eve.

The five-pointed star (which these are) is the most traditional piñata form.  It is descended from los Aztecas and probaby earlier people as well.

To change the subject completely, Jim and I were walking along the road from the bus a few days ago and saw that the flowers below had started blooming.  They are perhaps a quarter of an inch in diameter, a pure yellow, almost flat, most unusual.  I picked just a couple and put them in a vase.  

And finally, flowers for breakfast.  This is gasparito season.  Gasparitos are beautiful, deep red, dagger shaped flowers that people boil and serve in scrambled eggs, beans, and various other dishes.  So when Doña Gloria came by on Wednesday selling some, I bought them.  I buy them every year, but I've had no idea how to cook them, so unfortunately, they've gone to waste until now.  This year, Areli and her mother gave me cooking lessons.  Here are some pictures of the process.

Above you see a cluster of buds, the gasparito flower and the part you take out of the flower before cooking.  You eat the buds and the flowers.  The part you take out which I think is the pistil and/or stamen is apparently too bitter and tough to eat.  This is definitely not instant oatmeal.  It takes time to separate the flowers from their innards.

Here they are waiting to boil.

In the picture above, they've been boiled.  Next, you fry them lightly in oil and add eggs and scramble, as below

.

The gasparitos really don't have any flavor of their own.  Per Areli's instructions, I added a bit of oregano to the boiling water.  The gasparitos do add a pleasantly crunchy texture to the eggs (huevos revueltos en español), but no flavor. They are very popular, and they can be free, since all you have to do is walk into the country a bit to find them littering the ground at this time of year.  I wonder what nutrition they provide.  They certainly bulk up the eggs and, as I said, add a pleasant texture.