home again

So I'm almost a week deep into Mukilteo. Does that sound kind of weird? I don't know if this still counts as home, but calling it "my parents' house" feels strange too. Maybe I can have two homes, it's confusing I guess. Anyway, it's been rainy and cold and gray, but that's just winter over here. It can be a real downer, but it's snowing now and that looks nice. Oh, nope. It's raining again. Well, anyhow, here's some food I've been eating.

1 taco and 1 enchilada and refried beans

I think this is that generic kind of Mexican food that you see in taco shell commercials and that people on Yelp will complain about, and you know, I get it. Compared to other more authentic Mexican food I've had, it's kind of blah, where all the elements seem to be right but it all has sort of the same flavor to it.  But with that said, I enjoyed my meal but not for any of the ways it was supposed to resemble great Mexican food in my mind. I liked it because I love cheese and there was a lot of salty cheese, and I like how soupy soft the rice gets after swimming around in sauce. It's nice to just appreciate food for what it is.

Colin's chicken carintas, which was confusing because I thought "carnitas" meant pork. My 20 second skim of the Wikipedia page tells me it means "little meats" but in food language, it means braised or roasted pork. I dunno, maybe it's just how they cooked the chicken.

My mom's been making lots of soups and stews. My first night home she had made ox tail soup, which is one of my favorites and she cooked it for like over 24 hours. It's nuts, she works full time too, so I'm not really sure how that got done. But then, after we had that plain, she added fermented soy bean paste to it and um, these leafy vegetables. It's so great because after a few extra days, the broth gets richer and deeper, and then adding the soy bean paste gives it another layer of flavor.