Cinco de Mayo snacks … Cotija Churros with Guava Sauce

I am extremely prone to jet lag. Back in February, after a particularly long overseas flight, I had the worst bout yet. At one point, a day or two after arriving home, I was wide-awake for a good 36 hours with surprising amounts of energy. It was strange. So I did something I’ve been meaning to do for months – I reorganized all my cookbooks. I have hundreds of cookbooks and over the years, they’d gotten a bit messy. I prefer to organize my cookbooks by subject but they were willy-nilly all over the apartment. The pile next to my coffeetable was taller than the table. It drove me crazy but I hadn’t gotten around to doing anything about it. Now I had the energy so I decided to attack the piles.

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fried little wonders … Chocolate Churros

I can’t even remember the first time I had a churro, that long crispy cinnamon sugar coated piece of fried dough. I’m going to hazard a guess and say it was probably at the Arizona State Fair when I was a young’un. Isn’t that where one typically eats all things fried? Growing up in Arizona, churros were just always there and I didn’t think much it. They were long, straight, ridged, crunchy and a little cakey. Sometimes you could get them filled – with custard or strawberry gunk – but I always liked them plain. As for making them, it wasn’t something I thought was easily do-able until I went to culinary school and realized just what they were. Pate a choux – a building block of French pastry techniques. Well that I can do.

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