Air travel is pretty expensive these days – not to mention how difficult it can be to go on a trip with a child. In an effort to break the daily monotony, I decided that every couple of weeks we would “travel” to a different country, predominantly picked by my child. Each day involves a special activity, snack and dinner, and a brief discussion about a local language. You can find a list of World Travel Days here.
Our second world travel day took us to Mexico. This one brought back some memories since I’ve been lucky enough to travel there on more than one occasion. I’ve mostly done the tourist thing, though, so it would be nice to return one day and be a little more “in it”, so to speak.
Activities
The main activity for Mexico Day was to make a piñata. Fortunately, my child had never encountered one before, so it was completely acceptable for her that I stuffed it with paper shreds. I prepped all the items – the bag, the glue lines, the tissue paper, so all she had to do was to pick which colour went first.
I shoved a string through the stapled top and it was done. We didn’t end up smashing it. Instead, she enjoyed pretending it was a purse in the weeks following. I highly recommend this craft, though! And if you do have candy around…good for all ages 😉
You can find instructions for making your own paper bag piñata here.
We also did another flag puzzle – the image is in the following section, if you want to make your own!
Language
The indigenous language I chose for Mexico was Nahuatl – the language of the Aztecs. This time I included the word “Hello” and the phrase “Thank you” to learn. But I definitely needed to include pronunciations for this one as I still can’t remember how to say it without them.
Food
For snack we had Mexican Horchata (recipe here) and straight up mango. It was wonderfully uncomplicated – the mango part, at least. The Horchata required prep the night before (that I almost forgot to do!). It was tasty, but I didn’t love its grainy texture. And then, because it didn’t seem right to not have something both spicy and chocolate-y, I made brownies. I was going to share a picture but in all honestly…the pictures aren’t worth sharing. But the recipe is! It can be found over at Oh She Glows. I use sunflower butter instead of almond butter, skip the cane sugar and chocolate chips. And this time, I added a pinch of ground chipotle. I made a full batch (from the cookbook Oh She Glows Everyday), and discovered that they freeze very well. So well, in fact, that they can be eaten straight out of the freezer. Yum.
For dinner, we had Oaxacan-style black beans from the Vegan Mexico cookbook by Jason Wyrick. They were quite delicious, I loved the different flavour and texture. It was a slow cooked black bean dish – at least for the first couple of hours. And then we ran out of time and pressure cooked them. It worked out though! Here is a similar recipe, although the spicing is different.
With the beans, we had baked sweet potatoes with chard and fresh corn tortillas…that we attempted to turn into tacos and failed. Oh well.
All in all, it was a success!
In case you’re interested, you can find our previous world travel day, Peru Day, here.
Going Granola with Age 