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This afternoon my mother-in-law and I took a cooking class down here in Houston. Since we don’t have such great Mexican or Tex-Mex food in Boston, I’m all about eating as much as I can of it while I’m here. This class focused on Mexican breakfasts, a meal I don’t normally associate with Mexican food. (That said, one of my favorite egg dishes is huevos rancheros and I pour hot sauce on my scrambled eggs. Huh.)

We took the class at Sylvia’s Enchilada Kitchen, just south of my in-law’s home. Sylvia Casares is in her 50s, although she looks more like 40. Hailing from Brownsville, Texas, down on the U.S./Mexico border, Casares learned to cook from her mother and grandmother.

I was curious to learn the difference between Mexican and Tex-Mex cuisine. As I suspected, I’m more of a fan of Mexican food than I am of Tex-Mex, after I learned Tex-Mex includes more beef, flour tortillas, and yellow cheese. (Mexican food is generally more pork, corn tortillas, and white cheese.)

Casares made a half-dozen breakfast recipes for our group: atole, which is like Cream-of-Wheat made with corn flour and flavored with cinnamon (yum!); flour and corn tortillas; gorditas, which were absolutely delicious on their own, but are typically filled with beans; salsa ranchera; quick refried beans; a tomatillo-based salsa; and migas con huevo. At the end of the demonstration, students could practice their tortilla-making. I’d not planned on doing this, but when I could see students eating their practice tortillas, I went for it. Afterwards we were served a delicious lunch that included some of the dishes “we” created, along with some potent margaritas. (I had to take a nap when I came home — I can’t hold my tequila like I used to!)

Here I am, rolling out a flour tortilla.

It was a fun afternoon, and it rekindled my interest in cooking more Mexican dishes. I’ve been reading Discover Your Inner Economist, and one of the things I agreed with is that one should learn to cook a cuisine that’s not readily available in one’s neighborhood. His example is LA — it would be best to learn to cook German or Scandinavian cuisine if you lived there, since great Asian and Mexican foods are readily available. Thus in Boston, learning to cook fabulous Mexican food is a good investment of my time. Hey, I’m game!

I was scanning a sale announcement from Jessica’s Biscuit, one of my favorite virtual cookbook haunts, and I zoomed in on this book, Consider the Eel, by Richard Schweid. A cookbook about eels? Indeed. The author discusses the fascinating life of eels (did you know every eel starts out in the Sargasso Sea and spends up to three years of its early life drifting to either European or North American rivers? I didn’t!) and includes historic and contemporary recipes for this odd-looking fish. I’m tempted to order the book, although eels squeesh me out, visually and texture-wise. They remind me of snakes, and the few times I’ve eaten eel, the sliminess of it turned me off.

I’ve never seen eel on a U.S. menu, except in sushi restaurants. Eels seems to be more popular in Europe, where I occasionally see it on menus. Next time I’m in Europe, I want to try two new-to-me eel dishes: jellied eel when I visit London (which won’t do much to quell the slime factor) and deep-fried elvers, or baby eels, a Basque specialty.

Until then, you’ll have to look for your eel recipes somewhere else on the web — or order this book from Jessica!

In India earlier this spring, I found myself on the elusive hunt for the perfect masala dhabba, or spice box. I’ve long been fascinated by the dhabbas of my Indian friends, who reverentially carry them to their stoves to work their magic on a meal. Every dhabba is different: some friends keep dried bay leaves and chilis tucked amongst the packed round tins, others keep theirs austere, with a couple tablespoonfuls of each spice in the round tins.

I had no luck finding the dhabba I wanted while in India. My dream was to find a box with some kind of decorative design hammered into the top lid. In Mumbai, our tour guide took me to several kitchen shops, where I was shown small utilitarian tins with see-through tops. Probably perfect for the modern Mumbai housewife, but I wanted something a little more stylish.

I found this one at Global Flavors this morning, an Indian grocer just over the New Hampshire border. No, it’s not the stylish box I’d envisioned, but it was well made, only $12, and inside it smelled just like the spice markets I’d visited in Kerala. I was sold. There are actually two lids on the box: an inner one, which you can see on the left, then a larger one that tamps down over the whole tin.

Since I own quite the collection of spices, I debated all morning what to store in here: but then it just made sense to me to store my favorite Indian spices in there. Considering I cook a lot of Indian food, now I have my own spice box to carry reverentially to the stove.

(Starting from the bright ochre powder and moving clockwise: turmeric, coriander seed, cumin seed, black mustard seed, Kerala cinnamon bark, green cardamom, and whole black tellicherry pepper in the center.)