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An early start to complete our packing and wolf down some breakfast before we were picked up for our one day cookery course with Susanah Trilling a US cook, living near Oaxaca who specialises in Mexican cooking. We met our fellow students: Richard, Susan and Nicholas, a family from North Carloina, USA, once on the road we got chatting and got to know a little bit about each other, Richard and Susan are music professors at the North Carolina University, Richard's area of expertise is the violin and 17th/18th century music, Susan's field is choral music, they have a son: Nicholas, 11, who plays the piano, rides a cool scooter and likes to bake. Our driver, drove us to meet Susan at a local town market where Susan showed us around explaining about the different ingredients and herbs we would use, purchasing local chocolate drinks and hand made ice cream for us to taste. Being with a billingual guide who knew the traders and could explain what they were doing and selling was really enlightening. The most facinating for me was watching the lady we purchased our chicken from take the whole bird, killed and plucked this morning, and cut it into the parts we needed. We ate a quick delicious lunch (tomiladas, similar to enchiladas - but qith tomato instead of chillies) at a kitchen in the market.
After our lunch we headed to Susannah's ranch in the Oaxacan countryside to prepare, cook and eat our mexican meal. Susannah's ranch is surrounded by fields and cacti, its where she hosts her cookery courses, run a guest house and her husband grows tomatoes and chilli seedlings for local farmers. Its a wonderful building with a huge open living area and kitchen, Susannah's husband designed and built their house. Once in the kitchen we got our menu cards and split the tasks: Country Style Tortilla Soup (Will), Grilled Nopales Salad (Claire), Rice flavoured with Chepil (Susan and Richard), Grilled Chicken with Papaya and Chipotle Sauce (Claire) and Three Milk Cake with Mocha (Nicholas with help from Susan) - we were all directed and assisted by Susannah and her two helpers.
The soup was pretty straight forward, as was the Salad - Nopales are the prickly-pear cactus, which when cooked releases a goo which the Oaxacan's call "baby-goo" 'cause that's what it looks like. Unfortunately we forgot to get Papaya, which was a blessing in disguise as no one cared too much for it, so Susannah substituted Mango - which was a big hit. The cake was quite a task and took the most amount of effort. Once the cooking was complete we sat down to our meal and savoured the fruits of our effort - all the courses were fantastic. Unfortunately Richard, Susan and Nicholas had to leave quickly to catch a flight to the Oaxacan coast. We said our goodbyes and had a tour of the outer buildings, including a new cookery school where we found out that Susuannah had filmed a couple of programmes with the BBC, including one with Lloyd Grossman whom she said was a "riot", afterweards Susannah drove us back to Oaxaca city to catch the overnight bus to San Cristobal.
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