Food

The Mexican culture has a unique selection of foods. They thoroughly enjoy eating any and all variety of meat, beans, and rice with tortillas. Something unique to their culture as well is their taste for spice on all their food!

I served my mission in Southern California and had many opportunities to eat Mexican cuisine. Being from Montana, eating spice on my food wasn't a normal occurrence. I can remember many a meal where I had to "grin and bear it" as they say because I wasn't used to having my mouth burned off at every dinner.

One such occasion was one of my first dinners early on in my mission. My companion and I were going over to Joel and Cesi's house and I had no idea what we were going to have. We sat down at the table upon arriving and there is the normal meat, beans, and rice rolled up in a tortilla. It was very tasty until they told me that I had to put salsa on it. I knew they were doing it just to tease me and they kept insisting telling me that I would speak better Spanish if I ate more salsa. I had to appease them so I put some on. It was very hot to me and I had to drink a lot of what they called water to keep it down. For dessert we were having diced watermelon, which I was very much looking forward to. Much to my chagrin, it had pepper powder all over it and some weird lumpy cheese on it as well. The taste was quite shocking to my mouth. I had never before had such exciting food before and it was a very good learning experience.