Author Archives: Dianne Hofner Saphiere

Blessings in the New Year!

We had a hard time deciding what to do for New Year’s this year. We’ve done the Machado a few times; it’s great, but the music is too loud for Greg’s ears and there are not great fireworks there. We’ve done the dinner and dancing at a hotel or restaurant; also a lot of fun, but we were feeling more casual this year. Friends kindly and generously invited us to their homes, but we needed something more simple yet memorable and special. We wanted time to reflect, as well as to hope, to celebrate what we loved about 2017 and to let go of and learn from what we didn’t. We all agreed the total solar eclipse was the highlight of the year.

Greg and I planned a romantic picnic, with a citrus salad, jamón ibérico, smoked salmon and champagne, on the beach in the Golden Zone so we could watch the myriad fireworks displays. The best New Year’s gift EVER was that Danny decided to forego his invitations as well, and spend NYE with his parents! We were psyched! God bless the 22 year old! It was the perfect night for us: live music from the Hotel Playa, good food and drink, and incredible fireworks—with views from the Golden Zone to Olas Altas. There were at least ten different sets of professional fireworks we watched, and loads of those launched by families and groups of friends. The beach rocked. Click on any photo to enlarge it or view a slideshow.

We trust your celebrations have been wonderful, and that 2018 will bring Mazatlán, and you and yours, peace, joy and prosperity. Thank you, Lord, for a year of health and joy, much travel and new adventures. Please help Danny in his upcoming, hopefully last semester of university, and in his job quest. May Greg run fast and far, and may my health, and my photography, get stronger and stronger.

Bless you all!

Love Fresh Produce?

Margaret Hefner

Mazatlán is blessed with a cornucopia of fresh locally grown vegetables and fruits, as well as those that arrive here from the interior of the country. Yet the large variety astounds those of us who haven’t grown up here; when we walk through the market or past a street vendor there is so much produce that is new and unfamiliar.

Now there is an interactive book—Frutas y Verduras: A Fresh Food Lover’s Guide to Mexico—that you can download to your phone, tablet or PC to help us learn the name of the item as well as hear an audio recording of its pronunciation in Spanish! You can click to get information on its nutritional composition, tips for storing it most effectively, and chef-created recipes for using that ingredient. What a godsend for anyone not familiar with indigenous Mexican produce!

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The “enhanced e-book” is unlike anything I’ve ever seen. It’s basically a website in e-book format: clicking on a photo, icon or link opens up further information. I learned that you can make pastry dough from cassava (yuca), that taro (malanga) improves digestion and gives you energy, and got a great recipe for prickly pear (tuna) syrup. It can be downloaded to your device from Apple (iBooks) or Kobo; because Kindle doesn’t allow such functionality, the book is not available there.

The volume is authored by Margaret Hefner, a Canadian chef living in Mexico City. When I recently spoke with her about Frutas y Verduras, I imagined we’d be talking about the book and her passion for the food. She surprised me, however, by spending most of our interview talking about her passion for the indigenous growers of Mexico. She has been moved to action in an incredibly heartfelt way by the fact that these farmers are way too often the voiceless in Mexican society, despite the fact that they are the custodians of ancestral knowledge regarding their plants and the medicinal value they contain. She wanted to do something to show her respect and appreciation for the campesinos whose stewardship has made Mexico a world heritage cuisine.

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Photo from Margaret Hefner

Margaret, who was neither an author, publisher or programmer before this project, spent over two years researching, collaborating (with other chefs, UNAM professors, the Herdéz Museum) and experimenting to produce the content for the book. She travelled throughout the central portion of the country as well as to Yucatán, Oaxaca and Chiapas. While every region of Mexico is included in her book, her budget did not allow her to make it to the west coast. Margaret found Ricardo Muñoz Zurita’s “Larousse Diccionario Enciclopédico de la Gastronomía Mexicana” very helpful; she hired a nutritionist in Guatemala to calculate of the nutritional values for each entry. Finally, Margaret spent six months glued to her computer screen programming the book’s interactivity.

The result is an absolutely beautiful and highly practical volume that I am delighted to own. Her goal? That more of us will buy local, from the growers, supporting family farms. She told me she believes many people are uncomfortable speaking to a vendor sitting on the ground; they may feel it uncomfortable, too hierarchical. Yet buying ten pesos worth of produce from that woman could make the difference in whether her children have books or shoes.

Margaret first fell in love with Mexican produce when she worked as a personal chef for an expat family living in San Miguel de Allende. She was used to only having imported produce over the snowy Canadian winters; the year-round fresh food here “blew her mind.” She loved throwing cocktail parties in which every canapé used a different indigenous ingredient in a surprising way. Her book contains multiple photos, indigenous names, and helpful information on over 60 of the hundreds of indigenous fruits and vegetables that exist in Mexico.

During her time in SMA she learned that the ingredients she had grown to love were often associated with the poor; that they had long been out of style and have only regained popularity in the past five years or so thanks to a few celebrity chefs.

Frutas y Verduras has a Facebook page where Margaret encourages people to upload photos of the fruits and vegetables they find throughout Mexico, in order to keep building the information depository. In this way, she hopes also to include more of the indigenous produce of Sinaloa and other regions where she was unable to travel. Margaret is offering a 30% discount to our readers through the month of January 2018. Just go to Kobo, https://www.kobo.com/ca/en/ebook/frutas-y-verduras-1 and enter the code FYVmaz when you check out. You can also choose your own price here: http://fyvmexico.com/fyv-book-pwyw/

 

Chickens for Christmas 2017

DSC_4956I trust you all are enjoying wonderful holidays, and that 2018 will bring you much health and joy.

This year as we handed out chickens and food to over 2500 needy families, the most popular items— other than the food, of course—were the blankets and tools! We had a few drills, some hand tools, and a couple of electric tools, and my oh my did this make the men happy! Fortunately we had 80 blankets, thanks to the generosity of one donor and the intelligence and kindness of an expat couple who traveled to Guadalajara to buy them. If we had had 800, people would have been thrilled. We chose the elderly most in need as recipients of the very soft and warm blankets. Click on any photo to view it larger or watch a slideshow.

 

The spinners and the balls were just some of the many toys that our nieces bought with the proceeds from the sale of their brownies. Lots of local children donated their gently used toys, so this year we were blessed to be able to make over 300 children very happy. Perla and Brisa, the two neighborhood girls who have accompanied us the past five years joined in again; they have gotten really good and bringing Christmas cheer to those in need. Baby things are also very popular: diapers, clothes, blankets.

 

Our group handed out food, clothing, shoes and toys in three places this year: Rincón de Mazatlán (in Colonia Universo/Ébano), El Basurón (the city dump) and Rancho de los Niños. We felt especially blessed that it was just our group this year: our family, our good friends the Hernández, and friends of ours and theirs. It rocked to be together with loved ones on Christmas bringing smiles to the faces of everyone from 90 to 3 months!

We tried a new method of handing things out that worked wonderfully. As you can imagine, people get anxious and over-eager, and that makes for lots of confusion if we don’t manage things well. Well, we lined up our heavily-laden trucks and cars as usual: chickens first, then despensas/food, followed by toys. Once all that was given out, we opened up the clothes, displaying them on the ground on sheets as if in a store, and keeping the line moving steadily.

 

We announced the plan to everyone ahead of time, so that those who wanted clothes would stick around. They were all lined up, the community leaders had made sure of that, and then our volunteers lined up as well, forming a human chain or wall between those in the line and the gifts. At first we felt awkward, but it worked beautifully! No more cutting the line, everyone got something, it felt organized and there was happiness galore. Bless all our volunteers and their smiling faces and love-filled hearts!

We had so many clothes and shoes this time that, despite serving over 350 families, we had extra! I especially loved how everyone tried on shoes to make sure they fit, leaving them for others if they didn’t, and then glowed with happiness when they found the perfect pair of leather flip flops or high heels. We packed up the leftover clothing and shoes and left them with the community leaders to hand out to those in need who couldn’t make our event on Christmas Eve morning.

 

People really love blankets and other bedding, including sheets and pillows. They love pots and pans and kitchen things; most have outdoor kitchens and these items don’t last long. If you have any extra tools you don’t use, or see any at garage sales this summer and you drive down, please bring them! My one great sadness this year was a gentleman who showed up at 11:30 with a ticket for a chicken AND food, but we’d already handed it all out. He didn’t want toys or clothes, and in his disappointment was very upset with us. We had asked them to show up at 8:30, so he was late. But, he really was looking forward to the chicken. I didn’t have any cash on me to give him, and he left in a huff. God bless him; I do hope something else happened to make his Christmas beautiful.

We started loading at Quince Letras about 6am. We are a multinational group of locals and expats, including dozens of young adults, many of whom have been doing this since they were kids and who now bring their friends—the next generation. I love watching them grow in strength of character and love each year. We also have a solid group of children who join in to help. We form bucket brigades or rally lines to load the trucks with food, toys and clothes, then set out on different routes to reach people all the way to Villa Unión. This year we also served the community of desplazados, those displaced by violence in the Sierras; I was thrilled with that! After loading all the trucks and cars, we form a large circle to say a prayer, and then we are off!

 

Our group first went to the Basurón, then Rincón de Mazatlán, and finished up visiting Rancho de los Niños, where we all enjoyed playing with the disabled kids. Hugging and loving on them made for a perfectly wonderful end to our Christmas Eve morning. We saw the new buildings that are being built for Rancho de los Niños by Back to Back Ministries, including a physical therapy pool. The new digs look great and should be ready early in the new year!

 

THANK YOU ALL immensely, for participating in the myriad ways you do! We look forward to seeing you again next year. I have written lots of stories and posted many photos of this event over the past 16 years. Just search for “pollos” or “chicken” in the search box if you’d like to see more. And remember, details can be found at www.VidaMaz.com/Pollos

Best Christmas Ever

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This happy gentleman is deaf and pretty much blind, also. Yet look at the light in his eyes!

Every year, when I go out with Yolanda to pass out tickets for chickens for Mazatlán’s neediest to eat on Christmas, I am amazed at people’s resilience. Living in such difficult conditions—tar paper shacks with rain water trickling (or sometimes crashing) through makeshift roofs and running in on dirt floors, they smile joyfully, decorate their homes with Christmas decorations, plant their yards with flowers, fruit trees and vines, hibiscus and vegetables, and build altars and shrines to those they worship. We find them working hard: washing clothes, sweeping their earthen floors, cooking on outdoor, makeshift stoves. Click on any photo to view it larger or watch a slideshow.

This year, instead of Colonia San Antonio, as we’ve done the past seven years, we went to Rincón de Mazatlán, in Colonia Universo. It’s always difficult. We can’t give chickens and foodstuff to everyone; we only have enough for 2500 families. We try to find the neediest: the disabled, the elderly living alone, those who are ill, injured or unemployed, widows with sick children, families living 13 or 18 people in one tarp-covered lean-to. There are so many of these, sadly.

I was tired when we finished today, yet Yolanda has gone out for the last five days straight, morning and night, to hand out tickets. She seems truly tireless, much more passionate and dedicated than I can dream of being. Oli and his crew have been packing rice, flour, sugar, oil, coffee—two weeks’ worth of foodstuff—every other day for two weeks. Many of you have contributed money, time and talent. A lot of work goes into feeding 2500 families over Christmas, and I am blessed, indeed, to be able to be part of the team. It’s a family tradition; our 22 year old has helped out since he was just six years old. Our nieces make and sell brownies to buy toys for the kids. One local 12 year old this year donated all her Barbie dolls with clothes and accessories in order to make other young girls happy. It’s such a beautiful effort.

Handing out tickets is always challenging. Whoever has a ticket will get a chicken the morning of December 24th. Community leaders want to tell us who to give things to, often because they want to buy votes for their political party with our donations. Or, they don’t want to give a chicken to a family that hasn’t paid their water or gas bill. We don’t want that. We want to help those in need; not play favorites or make demands. Churches will help people, too, but require them to attend their services. We are blessed with people in our community who build homes for the poor, but we are also told how neighbors scam the system, getting ministries to build homes that people who don’t ever plan to live in them rent out to make money.

Today we saw a manufacturing warehouse with an orchard next door, all surrounded by an expensive fence. The owner, we were told, lives in El Cid, and some government official gifted the person seven lots in this squatter community, despite the fact that most living here can barely scrape enough together to pay the property taxes required to eventually claim ownership of the property. Ah, corruption. Finding those who need the most help, who don’t have a voice, is not easy. We were cussed at by one man today when we refused to give him a ticket, yet neighbors told us he sells the surrounding land to unsuspecting buyers, even though he doesn’t own it, cheating them of their life savings. He lived in a nice brick home, and had a late model SUV, in big contrast to most who live here. Different members of families will come to us begging for a ticket, so that can get several sets of chicken and foodstuff; that’s why we need to keep track by house number, and travel with local people who know one the neighborhood and who’s who. Yet, so many people play favorites.

I look forward to Sunday morning, when we hand out the chickens, food, toys and clothes. It is so much fun. It makes Christmas. People are so happy when we arrive, so grateful. If you’d like to help, please join in. It’s a great experience for kids to see how people live without running water and other amenities. The information can be found at http://www.VidaMaz.com/Pollos.

Merry Christmas!I trust your holidays are filled with love and joy, and that the New Year brings you health, peace and community!

Bar with a View

Panoramic cell phone shot of the view from Bar 15

The new Holiday Inn isn’t much to look at, if you ask me. I was rather disappointed with the design as they were building it: small pool, lackluster lobby. But thanks to HI, we now have what is perhaps the most scenic bar in all of Mazatlán: Bar 15!

Opening at 5pm Tuesday through Sunday (closed Monday), it stays open till 1am. Prices are steep by local standards (90 pesos for a cocktail, 40 for a beer), but you are paying for the view! And, having just come back from five weeks in Europe, these prices are a third of what we paid most nice places there.

The view goes clear from Delfín in the north to Centro Histórico and beyond to the south. The deck on the 15th floor wraps around a bit, so you also have a view out over the city.

You can reserve “Bar 15,” Holiday Inn’s rooftop bar, for a private breakfast or lunch party if you have a minimum of 30 people. I know where I want my next shindig!

See you all there soon!