Mexican food and culture, on both sides of the border
If you’ve got a few minutes, check out my guest post over on Ever The Nomad, a travel blog maintained by writer Anja Mutic. I wrote about three of my favorite Mexico City markets and why they’re so great. (Hint: pig uterus tacos, anyone?)
Be sure to leave a comment if you like what you read, or if you have your own favorite market experience.
It’s Day of the Dead season in Mexico City, meaning pan de muerto has suddenly appeared in all the bakery windows. The light, sugary loaves taste faintly of orange, and they’re criss-crossed with doughy ropes meant to signify “bones.”
After trying them on my last Concha Taste Test, I wanted to learn how to make my own pan de muerto. So I trolled around the Internet and found a four-hour class at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Santa Fe.
I hesitated signing up at first, worried that I might not understand Spanish baking terms. Or, heaven forbid, that we’d have to stand in front of the class and introduce ourselves. Would I say I was an ama de casa, or an escritora? What if we had to say why we’re taking this class? “Me gusta hacer panadería” would probably sound really lame.
Then again, fearing something means you should probably jump right in. So on Tuesday, I arrived at the class kitchen with an apron and two dish towels tucked into my bag.
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This is the last thing I’ll share about Monterrey, but while we were there last weekend, we came across a party in a covered plaza.
Dozens of senior citizens were dancing, holding each other closely, hands pressed into backs. At the far edge of the dance floor, someone was slicing a sheet cake.
I have no idea what they were celebrating, but the scene was so sweet, I had to record it.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4Zj9deZgsw&hl=en&fs=1&]
Even though we were only in Monterrey for two full days — and we were sleep deprived pretty much the whole weekend, having woke up on Saturday at 4 a.m. to catch our flight, and then lying awake most of that night due to a rock concert outside our door — we managed to get a pretty good feel for regio cuisine. (A regio is the Spanish name for someone from Monterrey.)
I felt like I was in Texas a lot of the time. Tortilla baskets came with flour, not corn, tortillas. Waiters served chips and salsa as soon as we sat down, most places. The salsa reminded me of what you’d get at Mexican restaurants in San Antonio — something mouth-puckeringly tangy and watery. Some places served it warm.
We tried cabrito, or roasted goat, because that’s the regional specialty. El Rey de Cabrito — heralded by guidebooks as the city’s best — was a short walk from our hotel. A row of skewered, roasted animals sat in the window, in case you might have forgotten what you’d be eating.
The goat breast we got looked great, covered in a crackly brown skin, but it was a little too chewy and tough. I expected more for $200 pesos. (About $15 USD.)
My favorite spot ended up being Fonda San Francisco, a tiny, casual spot in the suburb of San Pedro Garza Garcia.
Our cabbie got lost on the way there, but it didn’t matter in the end because we were the only customers, despite it being Saturday night at 8:30 p.m. (Everyone arrived after 9, fueling my lingering confusion about when, exactly, Mexicans eat dinner.) The menu had been painted on a chalkboard, and it included things like pork in plum-guajillo chile sauce, salmon gorditas, and sesame-seed enchiladas.
I wanted all of it. Unfortunately — damn you, stomach, for getting full on chips and guac at the Barra Antigua — I wasn’t extremely hungry. So we ordered three plates, in half-portions: fried goat cheese with strips of nopal; enchiladas in peanut sauce, and the pork in the plum-guajillo sauce.
I’m not the hugest nopal fan, but the goat cheese, which had been seared to deep-golden brown and doused in some type of honey vinaigrette, went perfectly with the tangy strips of cactus. We gobbled them up, and then sopped up the sauce with the restaurant’s thick, homemade corn tortillas.
It was the pork, though, that left me a little breathless. It was covered in a thick, deep-purple compote, and it fell apart as I scooped it onto my plate. I took a bite and felt my eyes light up, catch fire. I closed my eyes and desperately tried to record what I was tasting. Sweet… smoky… jammy…. what was this? I took a picture of my plate, but of course it came out horribly. And I didn’t want to keep taking pictures. This was the type of dish where you wanted to sit, eyes closed, and stay in the moment.
Crayton surprised me. He’d been eating his pork in silence, when he said: “I know this sounds weird, but this reminds me of smoking a cigar. But in a good way. You know? Doesn’t it have that smoky, tobacco taste?”
I nearly fell out of my chair. Wasn’t that supposed to be my line?
And then I felt a twinge of pride. I’ve trained him well.
IF YOU GO
Fonda San Francisco: An intimate fonda with a creative, traditionally Mexican-inspired menu.
Los Aldama 123, Col. San Pedro Garza García
(81) 8336-6706
Cafe Infinito: A dark, romantic spot in the Barrio Antiguo with great thin-crust pizza, and an affordable wine list.
Jardón 904 Ote., in the Barrio Antiguo
(81) 8989-5252
Barra Antigua: We hit this Barrio Antiguo sports bar for beers and bontanas. Highly recommend the chips and guac. (Unless you’re dining at Fonda San Francisco later, in which case, I would try to save room.)
Ave. Constitucion 1030 Ote., in the Barrio Antiguo
(81) 8345-4848
El Rey de Cabrito: Great norteño ambience, with its roasted meat in the window and kitschy decor. The food is pricey and somewhat mediocre, but if you’re dying for cabrito, it’ll do.
Avenida Constitucion 817, in the Barrio Antiguo
(81) 8345-3232
Crayton and I visited Monterrey this weekend to watch the Phoenix Suns, his favorite team, play the Philadelphia 76ers. It was a pre-season game intended to spread the NBA love in Mexico. (This marked the 18th time the NBA has hosted a game in Mexico — the most in any other country besides Canada.)
The whole thing ended up being this really cool, Mexican/American hybrid experience. Jay-Z and Rhianna and FloRida blared through the stadium speakers, while the announcer gave a play-by-play in Spanish. (“Dos puntos para Andre Iguodala!”) Vendors trudged up and down the stairs selling salted peanuts with hot sauce, cotton candy, and those little plastic hand-clappers.
I bought some Japanese-style peanuts, rolled in chili powder…
… And then listened to Steve Nash greet the crowd in Spanish. (He’s my favorite player.) Click below for an audio clip.
Before the game, an announcer warned fans — most of whom appeared to be locals, in jeans and T-shirts and the occasional designer handbag — not to rush the court, or use any “obscene language.” Surprisingly, everybody was exceedingly polite. (Are these the same Mexicans who throw beer at soccer games?) From our seats, somewhere around the 12th row, it was so quiet that we could hear the players yelling at each other. “Red! Red!” a few Sixers kept shouting.
You could also hear the referees, without their microphones.
“Hip check! Number one-four!”
Crayton kept grumbling: “Replacement refs.”
The stadium, a smallish venue with two tiers of seats, was about two-thirds full. Felipe Baloy, a bald, tattooed soccer player for the Rayados de Monterrey, sat two rows in front of us with his wife. During halftime he posed for photos with fans.
The Suns shot horribly during the first half, but there were still some NBA nuggets to keep the fans entertained. People gasped when one Sixers player, racing to keep a loose ball inbounds, dived into a row of journalists, who ducked to avoid getting creamed. Andre Iguodala had some beautiful shots that people applauded, even if, you know, the 76ers were technically the away team.
Mostly everyone stayed until the end of the game, even when it was obvious that the Suns weren’t going to win. After the game, people filed out in an organized fashion, and we found a cab easily in front of the arena. The cabbie asked us what had been going on, and we told him.
“Perdimos!” I said, dejected.
“Eh — the Chicago Bulls are better anyway,” he said.
Crayton snorted.
Overall, I’d go to an NBA game in Mexico again in a heartbeat. The seats were cheaper (we had awesome seats for the price of nosebleed seats in Dallas); the beer was cheaper, and they sold bananas drizzled with chocolate. You can’t beat that.
My friend Hugh moved to New York this week, and we went out to lunch as a last hurrah. He found the place: The Colegio Superior de Gastronomía, a Condesa culinary school that offered a five-course meal for 250 pesos (about $19 USD). The price also included four drinks.
I’ve never eaten at a culinary school restaurant before, but I’ve been intrigued by the idea. Two culinary-school restaurants sit just a 10-minute cab ride from my house, and I’ve been reading a lot about another cooking school restaurant in the south, Alkimia, which is supposed to be one of the top restaurants in the city.
I hadn’t heard anything about this Condesa place, but you can’t beat five courses for $20. Hugh made reservations and arrived before me, so I met him in the open, airy dining room. A flat screen TV played a slideshow of the menu items, including beef wellington with fig compote (pictured above), and slices of duck stuffed with pistachios and spices.
A young waiter (who I think was sweating from nervousness, poor guy) arrived and took our order, announcing that day’s drink special as “green beer.” It was a mix of beer, curacao and lime juice.
Oh hell, why not. The drinks are included!
It was actually kinda good, if you ignored the color.
I was surprised not to see more traditional Mexican dishes on the menu. A lot of the menu items leaned toward molecular gastronomy, which I thought the restaurant world had moved on from — meat topped with airs and foams, deconstructed soups, a chemical-reaction take (picture an oozy puddle of chicken broth, surrounded by dollops of corn) on Mexico’s famous corn-in-the-cup.
I would have loved to see simple dishes, oomphed up with high-quality ingredients. But the “plain food, done well” movement hasn’t really hit here yet. People still really love foams and beef wellingtons.
I ended up ordering the sliced duck, fideos en adobo, tuna with risotto (my only dish that was truly bad; it’d been saturated with wine), and a chocolate tart with beer ice cream.
My favorite dish was the fideos, which were served with a big ol’ scallop that wasn’t mentioned on the menu. Good thing I’m not allergic to shellfish.
Overall: The food was average, but worth the price. I’d go back with a girlfriend or two, because it’s a different experience, and the menu makes you feel like you’re dining somewhere elegant. I don’t think I’d recommend it to visitors, though. Unless they were looking for a deal.
I plan to visit Alkimia in a few weeks — they have a Mexican wine dinner on the last Wednesday of each month, and Crayton and I are going for my birthday. Will let you know how that turns out!
Colegio Superior de Gastronomía
Av. Sonora no. 189
Col. Hipódromo Condesa
México D.F. 06100
To reserve a table: 55 84 38 00 Ext. 103
A five-course meal, including four drinks, is 250 pesos. It’s cash-only.
Even though Crayton doesn’t start work until 8 a.m., we rarely eat breakfast together. I’m usually still in bed, up late from watching iTunes episodes of Mad Men. And he gets free breakfast at work anyway. Most mornings I eat by myself.
It’s actually fine, because sitting alone at the kitchen table, I have an excuse to pamper myself. Toasted pecans on my cereal, maybe. Or oatmeal with agave nectar and diced acitrón. (As I think I’ve mentioned before, Crayton likes things plain and simple. Raisins in his cereal is as far as he’ll go.)
Lately, I’ve been on a cereal-fruit-raisin kick, and feeling kind of blah about it. Then I saw this recipe on Smitten Kitchen a few days ago: warm cinnamon apples, baked in the oven, covered with a crunchy granola topping. You top the whole thing with yogurt for a luxurious breakfast treat. (Sounds like a commercial, doesn’t it?)
Luckily, I had all the ingredients in my pantry — I like to be prepared to make granola, even if I never do — and exactly two apples in my crisper. I bought organic, unsweetened yogurt at Orígenes Orgánicos, a natural foods store and restaurant in Condesa. And I had three teeny gratin dishes I got on sale in Atlanta last month. Aren’t they adorable?
The result — warm apples in a seriously cute dish — was pretty much all the pampering I needed to take me through the rest of the afternoon. (Which ended up being fraught with Wi-Fi and printer problems.) To end the day on an even better note, I went to the bakery and bought a crusty loaf of country bread. Grilled cheeses for dinner.
My scaled-down recipe below.
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Not sure if you heard, but last weekend the Mexican government seized Luz y Fuerza del Centro, Mexico City’s power utility. The government’s reasoning: The company was inefficient and corrupt. (To quote Joan Cusack in High Fidelity: “That is shocking.”)
I’m all for Mexico ramping up its efficiency. And Luz y Fuerza workers were notoriously bad — they’d siphoned so many dollars off the public that they built themselves a $10 million basketball gym. Meanwhile, customers in their offices often had to wait hours, just to speak to a human.
Good on Calderón, for taking a stand. I just wish we knew more about what’s supposed to happen next. According to El Universal, the government has mentioned hiring some of the workers back. But what is the public supposed to do in the meantime? We no longer have an electricity company. (Does anyone else think that’s weird?) It’s gone. Dissolved.
People can still pay their light bills at the bank, but no one has explained where that money is going, or whether we’ll all be in arrears once the new agency opens. And what if you have a power outage? To whom do you complain?
Sporadic outages have popped up around the city, although no one has come out and said, “It’s because they closed Luz y Fuerza!” Yesterday, Alice’s power was shut off, and she came over to store some things in our refrigerator. She mentioned that Contramar had no power, and neither did several comida corrida places in her neighborhood. People were eating in the dark.
“The issue is that no one knows who’s turning the lights on, and who’s turning them off,” she said.
Later, I asked our neighbor Carlos: What happens if we lose power? Whom do we call? I thought that he, being Mexican, would know how to handle all this.
He smiled at me and said, “Don’t suffer if you are not suffering.”
Huh.
Never thought of it that way.
But he’s pretty much right. It seems like in Mexico, all you can do is educate yourself about what’s going on, and then hope and pray that the worst stuff doesn’t happen to you. We have no control over any of it. I have candles, windows, a man I love, friends, a gym to take showers at. I made a particularly awesome apple-granola crisp this morning. I guess those are the things that matter, and not the possibility that we could lose power.
Going to go eat my apple crisp now. And by the way, props to Gancho Blog for helping me understand this whole Luz y Fuerza mess.
Yesterday, feeling crappy and not fit for mingling among the living, I decided to raid my fridge and make soup. I was picturing Caldo A La Lesley: a rich stock of onions and carrots and chicken, dotted with garbanzo beans instead of noodles.
Opening the fridge brought me back to reality. Missy — (sometimes I call myself missy in my head, because it reminds me of my mom, who used to call me that when she was annoyed) — Missy, you have just returned from a week-long trip. You don’t have an onion. Or carrots. Or — even though the freezer does have egg whites, hamburger patties and ice cream — chicken.
I couldn’t go grocery shopping, because that required leaving the house. My head and stuffy nose couldn’t handle that.
So I thought about what I did have: garbanzo beans. And, surprisingly, celery greens. I’d frozen them a few months ago, when I bought a particularly leafy stalk and couldn’t bear to throw the tops away. I’d washed and dried them, wrapped them in plastic wrap and tin foil, and forgotten about them. But their day had finally come. And I could use the dried shitake mushrooms I bought at the Korean market months ago.
Now I had a plan.
So I put my garbanzo beans on the stove, which I’d helpfully soaked overnight, assuming I’d use them for some type of soup. Added my frozen block of celery greens and let the whole thing simmer for about 45 minutes. Then I added my mushrooms, a hefty dose of salt, and let the whole thing simmer for an hour more.
I was surprised how good it turned out. Simple, and light, and kind of sweet from the celery. Not only that, but the greens were actually the star of the dish. (I assumed they’d be overly bitter for some reason.) They were mild, with a soft celery flavor. And they were hearty enough to bite into. They weren’t as toothsome as spinach or kale — two hearty, dark greens I adore — but perhaps only one or two notches below.
And the best part is, I used my entire celery stalk! And made a soup without having any fresh produce.
The recipe’s below. Now that I’ve whet your appetite for celery greens, here are a few other ways to use them:
From Saveur: Crisp Celery Green Fritters
From Serious Eats: Braise them with garlic
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Our flight from New York was delayed last night, so we finally walked in the door at about midnight. We set down our bags and collapsed on the couch.
I stared off into space for awhile. Then I happened to glance over at hubby.
A black, purplish looking bruise had formed underneath his eye, starting from the corner of his eye and tracing underneath his eyelid.
I frowned.
“What’s wrong?” I asked him.
“Huh?”
“What’s wrong with your eye?”
He shrugged.
“You have something on your eye!” I said, a little panicked now. “It looks like a bruise. But it wasn’t there before. And — ” I peered at his other eye, where a faint smudge of black had bloomed, and now appeared to be spreading. “You have it on your other eye too!”
He leaned back on the couch and closed his eyes. “It’s probably nothing. I’m tired.”
“No, it’s not nothing! This has never happened to you before. Those look… really bad.”
Suddenly it hit me that maybe Crayton’s blood had gone sour. Maybe he’d stretched himself to the point of exhaustion, and these two bruises were signs that he cannot live this crazy, work- and travel-all-the-time lifestyle anymore. Maybe he was about to have internal bleeding from the exhaustion, and what was I supposed to do?
Then he spoke.
“You know what?” he said. “I was reading the newspaper. It’s probably just newsprint.”
He raised his harm and rubbed his bruised eye. I winced. But sure enough, the black smudges disappeared.
“You know how I rub my eyes all the time.”
I frowned again. Really? That was it?
“I don’t know…” I said.
“I’m fine.”
Newsprint. Of course. He’d been reading The New York Times on the entire plane ride home. We sat there in silence, and the flutters disappeared from my stomach. My blood-gone-sour theory dissolved, dusted onto the imaginary newspaper pages that now filled my head.
I gave him a tiny smile. He smiled, too.
“Sorry,” I said, feeling absolutely lame. “But really, you never know….”