Credit: Facebook, Tejano’s Mexican Grill
During our time on Tortola, Debbie and I found ourselves on a very limited budget. I have mentioned that our fun and food budget was $17 per week and it didn’t look like we would have much of either. Even with Harry throwing a bit of work our way, we were still struggling.
Every Friday at noon we hitched a ride into Roadtown, did our grocery shopping, traded in paperbacks at the used bookstore, and hung out by the harbor.
To our good fortune, we ran into a Scottish woman, Trish, who became our best friend.
Trish was teaching in an elementary school as part of the United Kingdom’s Voluntary Services Overseas, the British equivalent of America’s Peace Corps. There was another Scottish teacher whose name I am ashamed to say I have forgotten and the two of them ran around with an English stewardess on an extended holiday named Kate. She pronounced it stewarDESS.
From left: Trish, Kate, myself, and, painfully, the woman whose name I forget.
Debbie and I became part of their ex-patriate gaggle and the five of us would go out Friday nights to eat and drink and dance. We were joined in these forays by other ex-pats from around the world, and as you can imagine, eating out and drinking was playing havoc with our $17 weekly budget.
Debbie and I decided that if we wanted to continue to enjoy Friday night hoorahs with this fun-loving group we were going to have to gamble, and gamble big, with our limited funds. One Friday we announced that we would make dinner for everyone the following Friday at Trish’s apartment. Our hope was that if we made dinner for everyone that following week, someone else would volunteer to host the week after that, etc. Then drinking with dancing would be the only drain on our budget.
We decided to make Mexican food and oddly enough we were able to pull it off when we found canned Old El Paso corn tortillas in the small local market.
I know, I still find it hard to believe there was such a thing as canned tortillas, but we spent about $80 on tortillas, ground beef, chicken, beans to be refried, the ingredients for homemade salsa in the pico de gallo style (diced tomatoes, onions, jalapeno peppers, cilantro and lime juice) and jack cheese. Plus plenty of beer. I never missed an opportunity to buy plenty of beer.
The menu consisted of beef tacos, tostadas (with refried beans, salsa, cheese, onions, and shredded lettuce) and enchiladas with chicken in a red sauce.
When the dozen guests arrived, we walked them through the menu because this was 1980 and most of them had never seen Mexican food before.
The event was a hit, and my favorite part was when an English woman came back for seconds and held up a tortilla which had been fried flat for a tostada and she asked, “And what does one do with these flat biscuits?”
The dinner bet pays off.
Every Friday after our Mexican dinner night our group showed up at a different house for a moveable feast. Two dinners stand out in particular. One was prepared by a Jamaican woman who mentioned that the table-busting array of fish, meat and vegetables had taken three days to prepare, and I have no reason to doubt her. Below is a typical Jamaican festive meal, hers was twice this size and included several whole fish dishes.
The other notable meal was prepared by Trish and the other Scottish woman on January 25th, Bobby Burns Night, a sacred holiday in Scotland in honor of the poet Robert Burns.
The ladies prepared the traditional haggis, neeps and tatties. Haggis is a savory ‘pudding’ which is like a sausage and is traditionally stuffed with ‘sheep’s pluck’ (heart, liver, and lungs) mixed with oatmeal, suet, nutmeg, cinnamon and coriander. It tastes like you might imagine that strange combo to taste. Neeps it turned out are turnips and tatties are, you guessed it, potatoes.
The ladies presented the Haggis in the traditional manner, with bagpipes playing on the cassette recorder, the women entered the room dressed in kilt skirts, holding the haggis high over their heads, and Trish reciting Address to a Haggis as they circled the room. As she completed the last line of the poem Trish drove a knife into the heart of the haggis and a good time was had by all.
Here is a portion of the poem she recited, including some explanation inserted by a Scot because apparently some of the words are so old even Scottish folks don’t recognize them. For the rest of the text, well, your guess is as good as mine.
Address to a Haggis, by Robert Burns, 1786
(Extract of the poem courtesy of wordsforlife.org.uk)
Fair fa’ (good luck to) your honest, sonsie (plump) face,
Great Chieftan o’ the Puddin-race!
Aboon them a’ ye tak your place,
Painch (stomach), tripe or thairm: (intestines)
Weel are ye wordy (worthy) o’ a grace
As lang’s my arm.
The groaning trencher (bowl or plate) there ye fill,
Your hurdies like a distant hill,
Your pin wad help to mend a mill
In time o’ need,
While thro’ your pores the dews distil
Like amber bead.
Trish. Debbie and I had been given a key to Trish’s apartment and we whiled away Friday afternoons waiting for her to finish her school day. I decided to make her a present by creating a pen & ink and watercolor drawing of her apartment. I spent many Fridays working on it and I always had to hide the work in progress when she came rushing through the door shouting, “Move, move! I’m desperate for the loo!”
She explained that the children shared a bathroom with the school staff and the boys were a bit careless in their hygienic habits and their aim, consequently Trish refused to set foot in the school toilet facilities, and she always rushed home, desperate for the loo. Since 1980 whenever I arrive home needing the bathroom I hear Trish’s desperate appeal for the loo.
This is my art, her apartment, and I got fancy by including within the piece, the work in progress in my lap. I like to think that 44 years later it is on a wall somewhere in Scotland.
Out for Justice 