BLOCHO'S TACOS

Today is Day 7 of my cleanse. It is also a beautiful Sunday in NYC and I got up early to seize the day!  Carpe Diem! I walked from my apartment North West through SoHo and the West Village.  I passed plenty of shops, boutiques, restaurants, cafes, bakeries, and shoe repairs.  Some were familiar, others not as much. If I were not cleansing I would have likely stopped in 2 or 3 of these locales for a cup of tea or coffee, maybe a gluten-free treat, or just to browse. Today, I didn't. I do not feel deprived from taste or nutrition with my cleanse, but perhaps a bit deprived in experience.  So much of my life is about trying new foods in new places so now I must focus on just trying new things....new activities, new adventures.  Changing my mindest and adapting is a great exercise. So now, I sit in a Le Pain Quotidien, sipping on a mint tea infusion and I write to you, my elusive reader.  I hope you have a beautiful Sunday filled with experience...

When my sister first visited and then lived in Buenos Aires in 2010 she spoke (and blogged) about yerba mate .  This tea-style drink was an Argentine staple, and actually fairly common throughout South America.  I had heard of "mate" from my visits to Argo Tea  when I enjoyed the Roasted Mate or Mate Latte.  The flavor, I recalled, was slightly bitter, but very robust and "chewy" and Argo did a great job of making this drink accessible to the masses. When I walked out of Ezeiza Airport in Buenos Aires in August 2010, my sister greeted me with an enormous hug and thrust a wooden cup/chalice with a metal spoon/straw in my face.  This was mate. Well, actually the cup was the mate and the green stuff inside was the yerba .  The metal straw was a bombilla and I was not allowed to touch it.  The tea was delicious and when I handed the "empty" (water-less) mate back to my sister and said "Gracias, Julia" she quickly noted that saying "Grac...