I’ve been taking Spanish classes every Monday night for the past three months.  Tonight I started the level 2 intensive course – 2 hours every Monday and Thursday for the next six weeks.   Back when I signed up, I figured that I’d be over the busy part of the semester by now.  Look how well that prediction turned out.

Tonight’s class seems a huge step up from the previous level.  The tutor spoke in Spanish almost the entire time, and there were lots of things that other students seemed to know that I’d never come across before (like words for animals and fabrics).  However, I’m not too badly off – there were a few others there who seemed to know even less than I do.

Tonight was mostly about reviewing the basics – greetings, numbers and letters, introductions and basic personal information, the verb ‘to be’ and conjugations for a few of the most common regular and irregular verbs.  At one point, we were going around the class describing our personalities and one guy says ‘Soy caliente’.  Caliente means hot in Spanish.  He was trying to say he’s hot-headed and impulsive but we laughed a bit because we thought he was saying that he’s hot (as in attractive).  Turns out that if you use caliente in that context, it actually means ‘I’m horny’.  The tutor was too embarrassed to translate it out loud but he wrote some of the letters on the board until we got the idea.

Then he was talking about how someone would refer to themselves as being hot, as in attractive, and made me rate the guy as to how attractive he was, asking if he was a 60 or an 85 and saying he wouldn’t move on with the class until I’d given him a rating.   I said cien (100) and everyone laughed and the guy made a great show of thanking me.  When it came my turn, I described myself as optimistic, and everyone laughed when the tutor said that my rating the guy 100 was an example of that.

We have to do a regular writing exercise to practice our sentence composition skills.  Currently we only know how to speak in present tense, so we have to keep a diary describing our daily activities in present tense only.  Here’s my first week’s exercise (I have no guarantee that this is in any way correct):

Yo vivo en un apartamento en el centro.  Me levanto a las siete y media todos los días.  Mi trabajo es muy cerca de mi apartamento.  Por la mañana enseño en la universidad.  Hay ochenta y ocho estudiantes in mi clase.  Por la tarde trabajo en mi computadora.  Por la noche, mis amigos y yo bebemos tequila.

My intended translation is this:

I live in an apartment in the city centre.  I get up at 7:30 every day. My work is very close to my apartment.  In the morning I teach in the university.  There are 88 students in my class.  In the afternoon, I work at my computer.  In the evening, my friends and I drink tequila.

My love of tequila is a running joke in the Spanish class, and the tutor makes frequent reference to it.  Another student is travelling to South America to meet girls, and so the tutor often makes reference to him being sad because he’s single and mentioning him finding a girlfriend.

I had a few people over to my place last night for Margaritas and Singstar. The aim of the evening was to find the best Margarita recipe. The three basic Margarita ingredients are tequila, triple sec and lime juice.

We used a blanco tequila – Pepe Lopez silver. You can also use a reposado for a bit more of an oaky taste but I find the blanco better. The more aged (anejo) tequilas aren’t as good for margaritas.

Triple sec is an orange liqueur. We used Cointreau which is a much better orange liqueur but has twice the alcohol content.

Margaritas are best with fresh lemon/lime juice. Apparently lime juice is the best, but limes are very small and expensive so we used half lemon juice and half lime juice which worked just as well. We used 1kg of limes and 1.5kg of lemons.

Most people find Margaritas made with just lemon/lime juice and the alcohol to be far too tart, so it is common to use sweet and sour mix instead of the lime juice. We made ourselves some sugar syrup that was more than 66% sugar and mixed it roughly 50/50 with the lemon & lime juice to get the right balance of sweet and sour.

Salting the rim of the glass is also important, since the salt enhances the taste of the margarita.

How you combine the tequila, triple sec and sour mix to make the margarita turns out to be the area of most variance. I prefer 2:1:1, shaken on the rocks. The others (based on what they had in Texas) prefer 1 part tequila, 1 part cointreau and 2 parts sour mix, for a 1:1:2 ratio served with crushed ice.
Although I didn’t try it last night, I think I’d also quite like a 3:2:1 ratio on the rocks.

The majority conclusion was that 1:1:2 Margaritas are yummy, country music is great, and singing is more fun when everyone is a bit tipsy.

Ingredients:

• 50ml tequila
• 15ml lemon juice
• 5ml white creme de cacao
• 5ml grenadine
• dash of bitters

Instructions:

Shake all ingredients with ice and strain into a cocktail glass. You’re supposed to garnish it with a maraschino cherry & slice of orange, but I don’t really like maraschino cherries and didn’t have any oranges so used lemon instead.

The taste is very … interesting. The tequila dominates and combines well with the lemon, but you can still taste the chocolatey flavour of the creme de cacao and the herby/spicy bitters. The grenadine may have added a bit of sweetness but mostly seems to add colour. I sipped this very slowly over more than an hour and found that it seemed to taste better after time. I think I’ll have to try it again though, it was an interesting set of flavours.

I just bought some more tequila so I finally got to make one of my favourite drinks.

Ingredients:

• 3 parts tequila (I used El Jimador Reposado)
• 2 parts triple sec (I used Cointreau)
• 1 part lime juice or sour mix (I used fresh lime juice)

Instructions:

Shake with ice and strain into a margarita glass or cocktail glass rimmed with ice and garnish with a lime wedge/wheel.

What I made is pretty similar to what you get at the Mexican Cafe (or almost any other bar) except that they normally use sour mix instead of lime juice. Sour mix is lime or lemon juice (or both) sweetened with sugar, and is sometimes called sweet-and-sour mix. It makes the drink a lot sweeter, but I think I actually prefer it with just plain lime juice.

Ingredients:

• 30ml tequila
• 120ml orange juice (depending on the size of your glass)
• dash of Grenadine

Instructions:

Shake/stir tequila and orange juice together and pour into a glass with ice.   Pour a dash of grenadine down the side of the glass.  It will sink to the bottom and then rise up through the bottom of the orange juice.

Tequila is a type of spirit distilled from agave plants.  To be called tequila, it has to be made in specific regions of Mexico and be at least 51% made from the blue agave.  The best tequila is apparently 100% blue agave.  The stuff made from 51% agave & 49% maize or sugarcane is called mixto.

Unaged tequila is clear in colour (often sold as silver tequila or tequila blanco).  If it has been aged for a couple of months (in oak barrels) it is called reposado (rested) and is golden in colour.   If it has been aged over a year, it is called anejo (aged), and is also gold in colour and said to be more mellow (and is more expensive).

If colour and flavour (usually caramel) have been added to make fresh tequila look and taste a bit like reposado or anejo then it is called joven (young), and often sold as ‘gold tequila’.

So far, the only tequila I have ever bought is Jose Cuervo Especiál (Cuervo Gold).  I’m intending to go to the Mexican Café sometime soon and try some different tequilas so I can perhaps buy something nicer next time.