Fruit Punch

This whole "Advent Calendar" idea really fell through. I´m sorry. The posadas have gotten crazy: They are alwyas really late. Fun, but 7 consecutive nights returning home really late and I´m not sure how perky I´m going to be at the one I have tonight....

Yesterday was our family posada, we went in with my uncle. It was hosted at his house, but we were in charge of most of the food. My host mom and I spent the morning making tortas de cochinita (Think Mexican pulled pork sandwiches) and fruit punch.

They pronounce it like "PONE-chay" and at first I was thinking: "Oh, that´s such a cute way to pronounce ´punch´" Now I think maybe we are trying to say ponche. This beverage is a big deal. I always drink it at posadas, but I´ve never made it before. Ponche is the spiced-cider of Tabasco. It can be as complicated as you like. We started with these fruits (This is a small fraction of how many we used):

But everytime my host mom thought of another fruit it became "important for the recipe". I think it´s honestly just whatever fruit you can get access to, as much as you are able to fit into the pots that you own. As I joke, I found a can of peaches in the back of our cupboard: "Hey: do we need to use these too?" ...."YES! Those are an important part of the recipe!" Ok.... But it was acually really fun. So you hack up all of the fruit into pieces, not super dainty and put them in a pot of water to boil. We used: apple, pear, pineapple, guayaba,  tangerine, those little orange things that I can´t remember the name of, a can of fruit coctail, and a can of peaches. Wow. Then you add the jamaica.

Jamaica is a red flower. We use it to make a beverage of the same name. You can drink jamaica hot or cold, with sugar or without. It has a kind of strong flavor, but I really like it. I will miss jamaica. ANYWAY, you add of a bunch of jamaica to the pots too. Then my mom took some sugar cane and just started cutting into pieces about the length of my fingers. Then we took a sticks of cinnamon and just crumbled them up a bit and threw them in. Like I said, not a dainty recipe. When we finished prep-work we had two large pots full. It looks like this:

Pretty, right? After a day of simmering it´s a light brown shade and it´s impossible to tell the fruit apart, but it smells AMAZING. This was simmering all day long and the house smelled like cinnamon-tropical-fruit goodness. It tastes good too. At first the texture weirded me out: lots of mushy, brown, fruit pieces, but now I can appreciate it. It would be very easy to make a Christmas Party out of this (Bring your own fruit) I think.

We also made a ridiculous ammountof meat. Six kilos of meat. SIX KILOS. Check it out:

I could mu head in there two times, it takes up half the stove. Lots o´Meat.

Happy December 18th!