Yucatan Meals

Instead of posting all the ?touristy? photos from our recent trip across the Yucatan Peninsula, I thought I'd share some more random things we saw and, more importantly, ate! :) My favorite things from the sweet stand were the lime-coconut treats from the top shelf and the pumpkin-papaya treats there in the middle.

I think this was my favorite meal on our entire vacation! We were sitting at an indoor diner right in the middle of the mercado. This is a typical Mayan meal: the one on the left is called 'Salbute.' It's basically, a corn tortilla, with shredded turkey, lettuce, tomato and avocado. The one on the right is called 'Panucho' and the only addition is a layer of black beans. Ironically, we eat this kind of food at home quite often; never knew it was authentic Mayan fare. Oh, and our salsa is not quit as hot! 
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Street food. Hot dogs, fries, corn dogs and other greasy stuff, served on a styrofoam tray and smothered in lime and salsa. 

A beautiful meal of turkey in pumpkin seed mole: ?pipian de pavo.? It was excellent. Poor Tim, at this meal,  ate a tortilla chip loaded with salsa. Unfortunately, it was habanero salsa: seeds, veins, pulp?. the works. It took a few minutes for him to cool down! We love our food nice and spicy, but we found the salsa in the Yucatan to be extremely hot! We were eating at the wildly popular  La Chaya Maya restaurant in Merida.

A most unusual drink made from the chaya leaf.  I could not pass this up - it was like drinking the lawn, but in a really, really refreshing and great way. Supposedly very healthy. Anyone out there ever tasted this one? 

I?ll give anyone three guesses what this is. We had it at happy hour.

Los Tres Amigos

The breads and pastries are very beautiful in Mexico. I think they all taste alike, but that never stops me from buying one of each type.

These women were making corn tortillas. There's not a flour tortilla in sight in the Yucatan. There was a live fire in the container on the bottom and also flames coming from the top. The masa dough was placed in the top and the machine cut  out the tortillas and they rolled down the conveyer belt, between the flames. She kindly handed us a few to snack on. Talk about fresh!

Anyone out there been to the Yucatan? I'd love to swap stories!