Last day in La Paz

Susie's meatballs and leftover chilli quesadillas.

After too many days of partying and the resultant hangover yesterday, today's food needed to be practical to allow us time to catch our tails on a bunch of tasks so that we can leave town tomorrow.

We had a smidge of bean chilli and trimmings left over from our Balandra beach gatherings, so Susie put on some quesadillas for lunch with some pointers from Jen, who has mastered them over the last year or so. The tortillas we are using are a little higher in fat content than most which makes for quite a nice result regards how crispy they get, even if they're a little less healthy. The asadero cheese - think mozzarella but slightly drier- worked a treat, and the trimmings of creme fraiche and leftover beef Adobada, and red sauce topped it off nicely- we do love a free lunch.

Susie offered to cook dinner. Given her results with the chicken avocado sandwich, which suggests she's got a great palate, I was looking forward to whatever she made. Meatballs with a tomato sauce, spaghetti and parmesan were knocked out in quick order. Really decent, too. I've always had problems getting meatballs to be quite as soft as when you order them (polpette) in Italy. These were much better than my previous attempts.

Susie told me that she doesn't normally do meatballs, it's more common for her to make a pasta sauce with fresher tomatoes, spicy Italian sausage and seasoning. They've eaten that as a family since way back, so it's one of those staple dishes for them by the sounds of it. The same kind of thing was a firm favourite with me for years at home, less so Jen as she's not a huge fan of the fennel flavour in Italian sausage.

Tomorrow we head for Todo Santos. I've not checked out what the food possibilities are down there yet, but Jen said we can buy fish from the fisherman on the beach, and that someone mentioned having red snapper, so that's got me in the mood for a BBQ on the beach if we can make it come together.

The area we're heading to is much more expensive, so I doubt we'll be hitting any nice restaurants- taco stands, family run joints, and plenty of cooking in the van all be in order.Read more