Bequia - Mexican Standoff

Walk down the aisles of any grocery store in the States and you will find tortillas. Maybe they'll be by the bread or in the ethnic foods section; you might have to look hard but you'll find them. But the last 3 or 4 countries we've been through seem to never have heard of tortillas. I thought we had plenty in the freezer so on impulse I invited two other couples over to the boat for enchiladas without double-checking. Lesson 1: always check the inventory. Lesson 2: you can't make enchiladas without tortillas. But apparently you CAN make tortillas, according to my standby cookbook "How to Cook Everything". You don't even need a fancy machine like they have at Chevy's (although it helps). Of course the main ingredient is lard (didn't have any of that on board) and it is helpful to have a rolling pin to make them nice and thin (didn't have one of those either), and it's also time-consuming (you can only make them one at a time if you haven't got a big griddle) but they turned out somewhat resembling tortillas. Actually they were more like large round crackers. Ole!

The next step was to acquire some fresh veggies for the enchilada sauce. Bequia has a local farmer's market so we headed there to load up. We walked in and were immediately accosted by the absolute pushiest vendors we've ever seen anywhere. I started to buy things from the least pushy lady but while I was talking to her I was just surrounded by guys trying to get me to buy pineapples, mangoes, passionfruit and everything except the ingredients I needed for enchiladas. Not sure how it happened but somehow Kevin and I got separated (we were the ONLY customers in the marketplace with a dozen vendors working us both over). I look up and I see that Kevin is trying to make his way back to me but a really persistent man won't let him through. Kevin got pretty angry and I honestly thought it was going to come to blows as Kevin kept forcefully saying "I'm just trying to get back to my wife!". They were relentless, but we managed to get everything we needed. So all the ingredients came together and the meal turned out well. We spent a nice evening with the two couples from the other Mantas ("Pirates Hideout" and "Tabascocat").