The Mija Chronicles

Mexican food and culture, on both sides of the border

Archives for May 2010

Homemade chicharrón, and puebleando

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A few weeks ago, Crayton and I went puebleando for the first time. “Pueblear” is a Mexican word meaning “to travel to little towns and hang out.” There isn’t really an intinerary with you’re puebleando — you just get in the car and go. When you get to a town, you sit and hang out. Maybe buy an ice cream and people-watch in the square. There is absolutely no pressure to do anything.

We ended up in Zacatlán de las Manzanas, a pleasant, colonial-style town in the northern part of Puebla state. Accompanying us were our friends Jesica and Erik, and Jesica’s parents. They’d been to Zacatlán several times before, and so our first stop was at a panadería to buy some special pan de Zacatlán. They’re soft white rolls or empanadas stuffed with a crumbly, savory, almost cottage-y cheese. (This is also one of my new favorite phrases, because it has so much rhythm. Try saying it: PAHN de zah-caht-LAHN.)

I loved trying the bread — and to be honest, we bought a wee bit more than the local bread; also donuts and conchas and a muffin stuffed with cream — but the best part of the trip happened while we were walking to the church. On a little side street, a man stood in front of a huge cauldron of bubbling pork fat, making homemade chicharrón.

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A Mexico City taquería, in pictures

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The first time I saw Taquería Jalisco, it was right after we moved to Cuauhtémoc, and Crayton and I were walking down Rio Lerma at night, checking out our new environs. (Or “rumbos,” as Mexicans say.)

Taquería Jalisco looked charming: it was a tiny fonda-slash-puesto, half indoors, half out, situated next to a parking garage. A few plastic tables and chairs had been set up near the driveway. Four orange stools, accented with chrome, stood in front of a small counter area. A big bunch of greens sprouted from a tin can.

Steam wafted about about the taqueros heads as they moved about, chopping and scooping and slicing. I was across the street, but I could almost smell that greasy meat smell. I wanted that greasy meat smell.

Taquería Jalisco offers several types of tacos, but my favorite is their suadero, a tender, fatty cut that comes from the area underneath the cow’s skin. (The definition from Ricardo Muñoz Zurita’s Mexican gastronomic dictionary.) When suadero’s cooked, it’s greasy, crisp, meaty. Topped with a spritz of lime juice and a spoonful of red salsa, it’s very hard to eat just two, which is my usual limit with street tacos. Last time I visited Taquería Jalisco, I ate four.

Really, it’s not just about the taste for me, but the way taco-making works in Mexico. The precision of it, the efficiency. The taquero tosses a handful of meat onto the comal, and watches the fat bubble and sizzle. He palms a few barely silver-dollar-sized corn tortillas, scoops up the meat, and tosses it, meat-side up, onto a plastic plate that’s lined with a square of paper. He asks: “Con todo?” and that’s a shortened code for “Do you want cilantro and onions?” The whole transaction — the making of the taco itself, whether you’ve ordered one or four — is done in under 30 seconds. It’s like this everywhere.

My pictorial tribute is below. Oh, and here’s the info on the place, should you ever be in the ‘hood:

Taquería Jalisco
On Rio Lerma, between Rio Sena and Rio Tigris
Col. Cuauhtémoc
They’re open 10 a.m. to 2 a.m. Monday through Saturday.
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Tortilla casserole with guajillo chiles, chicken, squash and panela cheese

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You ever have those moments when you’re super busy, but you add one more thing to your plate anyway? And it comes with this tickle of dread, like, oh shoot, should I really be doing this? Do I have time?

I’m always cramming a million things into my schedule. Usually it turns out fine. But sometimes — like with this casserole — it doesn’t. Here I am, moving and packing, and I thought: “I’m going to make one last big meal in the kitchen!” At that moment I should have stepped outside myself, and given myself a “WTF?” look. But no. I listened. I brought out Diana Kennedy and bookmarked the “Caserola de Tortillas en Chiles Guajillos” page.

Fast forward one hour later. I was frantically pushing the sauce through a fine-mesh sieve, while it slowly dripped out the other side, one tablespoon at a time. It was 3 p.m. Crayton and I had not eaten since breakfast. My stomach growled. My feet hurt. My face felt flushed and my fingertips tingled, from seeding and de-veining more than a dozen dried chiles. Plus I’d toasted and ground some cumin seeds in my molcajete.

Diana’s recipe called for cooking the casserole on the stove, in a flame-proof dish. I don’t own one and figured I could just bake it in the oven. But now, faced with having to actually make that decision, I panicked. Wouldn’t baking it dry it out? Did I need more guajillo chile sauce? More broth? A more melty cheese? I’d also strayed from Diana’s recipe in other ways — adding chicken for some heft, adding veggies. I dunked the tortillas in the sauce and left them whole, instead of cutting them into pieces and pouring the sauce over them.

Really, my “authentic” caserola had become something else entirely: a pastel-azteca-sopa-seca hybrid. But what did that mean in terms of taste, and cooking time? Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough time to think about my desired end result, and devise a plan to get there.

So I winged it. Layered the tortillas in my casserole dish, interspersed with my fillings. I didn’t strain the sauce fully, because that took forever. Who cares if we all end up picking guajillo chiles out of our teeth.

The panela didn’t melt well, which I knew it wouldn’t, but I had secretly prayed that I would be wrong. We had no cilantro as garnish. Most terribly, I forgot to salt the sauce.

Lunch went on the table at 4:15 p.m., after two hours of cooking. I took a bite and kind of wanted to cry. It wasn’t inedible… it just wasn’t good, necessarily.

“I like it,” Crayton pronounced. He’s such a good husband.

The three lessons I learned that day:

1. Do not throw your kitchen a goodbye party when you’re in the process of moving, no matter how much you desire to give it the proper send off.

2. Do not crack open Diana Kennedy’s “The Essential Cuisines of Mexico” when you’re in a hurry to eat. The next time I pick a DK recipe — and it will be soon, because I adore her books — I will scan it to see what can be made in advance. For example, this chile sauce totally could have been made the day before. Then I would’ve remembered to add salt, and had time to fry my tortillas properly.

3. Experimenting in the kitchen is great, but not when you’re starving and your partner is depending on you for his sustenance. Next time order him a torta.

By the way, if you have any favorite guajillo chile combinations, I’d love to hear them. They just didn’t wow me this time around. (Or maybe it was the fact that they needed salt.) Maybe cinnamon?

Pictures of the new place

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I’ve got moving brain. Been up since 6 a.m. this morning, thinking about whether the TV is going to fit through the curved entry way, how to pack up the rest of the kitchen, and how to take the pantry items over without spilling everything, because I don’t have any small boxes left. Wait — I can use the laundry basket for pantry stuff. Score!

Wish I had a button to turn it all off. Maybe I’ll gift myself a spa treatment when this is all over.

Because it’s all I’m thinking about anyway, here are a few shots of the new place.
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Sixteen months in Mexico, and how far we’ve come

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It hit me yesterday that a year ago, we probably couldn’t have done any of this.

Our Spanish skills weren’t yet good enough to find a place completely on our own, or to call and transfer our cable and home phone accounts to the new place. I still internally scream at Telmex for charging me 280 pesos to change my address, but at least I understand the customer service lady. And I don’t throw the phone down in disgust when nobody picks up until the fourth try.

A year ago, it would’ve been much more stressful to navigate the rental contract and fiador intricacies; I would’ve worried about seeming like a helpless gringo to my new landlord. I’m still slightly helpless — I rely on “cómo se llama, es que no sé la palabra en español” a lot — but at least I knew to ask her for a copy of the last electric bill, and a copy of her insurance policy. And dude: she is a sophisticated lady, and not, as my mom used to say, one of my little friends. (One of my mom’s popular lines when I was a teenager: “Don’t use that tone with me missy, I’m not one of your little friends.”) Our landlady is a professional person, and I am able to be completely professional with her.

We’re now comfortable with the small things about the move, like how the heck we’re going to hang the TV up on the wall. (Hiring a local service.) And which dear friends we could ask to take some of our framed pictures over in their SUV, to lessen the chances of the movers breaking anything. (Thanks, Carlos and Daniela.)

What I’m trying to say with all of this is: it’s funny how you go about realizing that your new home is truly home. I’d felt like that after six months here; but really, it’s still continuing to happen, slowly, with these types of small achievements. And all this makes me feel really good, and proud, because you know — I want to embrace life here. That was the whole point of moving to Mexico City.

I don’t often allow myself any pats on the back, but this time I am allowing myself a tiny one. We are chilagos, people. Chilangos!

Pictures of the new place to come.

A stroll through Chimalistac

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Last week I met a new friend, Rachel, a food historian here in Mexico who blogs about all sorts of interesting things, such as what couscous must have been like in Mexico in the 1800s. (I’m fascinated by her blog.) She invited me for coffee down in her neighborhood, Chimalistac.

I was excited. I was looking forward to meeting Rachel, and I’d never heard of Chimalistac before. Perhaps it was near Tecamachalco, the other hard-to-pronounce colonia with a prehispanic name?

Turns out, no. Chimalistac is next to San Angel, south of the center of town, near the Metrobus La Bombilla stop. And as for me not knowing about it — I’m sure that if I lived there I’d want to keep it to myself, too, lest tourists start crowding the streets and gawking at the ornately carved front-doors. (Yes, I did this.)

Chimalistac feels like a far-flung pueblo. It’s leafy and quiet, with cobblestone streets, colonial churches and flowering bushes that leave their petals all over the road. In prehispanic times, the neighborhood was called Temalistac, meaning “the place where sacrificial stones are made.” Supposedly the famous Aztec sun stone was made there.

The land eventually became part of San Angel’s Carmelite convent. You can still see bridges the friars constructed from lava rocks, over what used to be a river. (The river is now a dirt path.)

It’s funny, because being so close to San Angel, you’d think Chimalistac would have a similar high-end, upscale type of character. It doesn’t. There are no fancy stores or hip young people dining at sidewalk cafes. It’s just… a quiet residential neighborhood. A really lovely one. That also happens to be extremely close to Insurgentes and the Metrobus.

After we walked around the neighborhood, Rachel and I sat in her garden and drank agua de guayaba. It was so quiet that you could actually hear the breeze. This was a little jarring. Tranquilidad in Mexico City? I thought at the very least I’d be able to hear the Metrobus’s puny Roadrunner-sounding horn. But no. There were no traffic sounds. No horns. No nothing.

Chimalistac is now on my list of “Places to Buy a Home and Live Forever and Ever.”

More pictures below.


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The growing popularity of Mexican wine

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Last Saturday our friends Carlos and Daniela had us over for dinner. After we’d finished Carlos’s sublime lime-cucumber-mint-tequila cocktail, and a bottle of muy suave Mexican Sauvignon Blanc, I started hollering about how difficult it is to find great Mexican wine in the stores here.

“You go to a restaurant and have an amazing bottle, and then you leave and you can never find it again. You can’t find it anywhere!” I said. “You can’t find it anywhere!” (Did I mention that you can’t find it anywhere? God. This is when I should probably have stopped drinking wine, and I did, but then we switched to mescal. And then tequila. Eeek.)

Don’t get me wrong: You can find Mexican wine in Mexico City. It’s just very hard to find the smaller, less-commercialized varieties. Near Reforma where I live, the supermarket sells a handful of big-label brands for around $15 to $35 USD each. La Naval, a high-end liquor store and gourmet deli in Condesa, has a larger selection, but they still tend to concentrate on the Big Mexican Heavies: L.A. Cetto, Domecq, Monte Xanic, Santo Tomás.

This is why I like Grado Único, a small, boutique-style wine store that opened last October in the Zona Rosa. They specialize in Mexican wine, and specifically the harder-to-find stuff. The first time I stopped by in January, I found a bottle of Mariatinto — an intense red blend that Crayton and I had ordered once at Pujol. We’d asked the restaurant sommelier where to buy it and she said we’d have to get in touch with the distributor. But now, here the bottle was, just a few blocks from my house. I bought it immediately.

Since then I’ve gone to Grado Único three or four more times and the owners, Elsa Perez and Mario Ortega, have been pretty spot-on about recommending something I might like. I just about died over the 2007 Adobe Guadalupe Jardín Secreto, a seductive tempranillo blend that we served at a barbecue, with grilled chicken tacos. (Oh man. Fabulous.)

I had a short chat with Perez last weekend, and she said she’s been really grateful for loyal customers. Mexican wine tends to cost more than imported brands, because Mexican winemakers are taxed horrendously by the government — in some cases up to 43 percent, according to this 2008 report in M Semanal, Milenio’s weekly magazine. The taxes are a mix of both IVA and IEPS, and depend on where the wine is produced and how much alcohol it has.

Interestingly, despite all the taxes, the culture of wine-drinking is definitely growing in Mexico. There’s a Mexican magazine, Vinísfera, devoted to national wine culture, and at least one Mexico City organization — Nación de Vinos — dedicated to promoting Mexican wine.

Statistically speaking, consumption of national wine rose in Mexico in 2008 while consumption of imported wine fell, according to numbers from the Asociación Nacional de Vitivinicultores. But Mexicans still aren’t drinking wine on the levels of say, France, or even the United States. One distributor I met at a recent Freixenet de México tasting said the average per capita consumption among Mexicans has jumped over the years from a half-glass to a liter. In 2008, Americans drank nine liters per capita.

Still, Mexican wine, in my experience, can be just as interesting and complex as any imported varietal. And it has a fascinating history — wine-drinking in Mexico can be traced back to the Spanish conquest.
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So, in case I didn’t make this clear…

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We got the apartment in Roma! We’ll be in the new place as of June 1.

I’m really excited. When we went back to sign the papers, the apartment looked even better than I remembered. The bedroom I’m using as an office actually gets a lot of sun, and the walk-in closet is muy amplio. We’ll have a pantry and a dishwasher — I thought the latter was an urban legend in Mexico City, but it isn’t! — and two very nice tiled bathrooms. And we will not be on the first floor anymore, living next door to an office, where the owner just happens to take on Sunday-morning construction projects at 8:30 a.m. (This happened to us yesterday, the morning after we went out partying with friends and got home at 3:30. A power drill grinding into the wall when you’ve had just a wee bit too much tequila… not. fun. at all.)

Wish I would’ve thought to take a picture of the building, but I’ll post some later. In the meantime, gotta start hacking away at my moving task list, which is now about 100 items long.

Tostilocos: The Mexico street food nacho, Frito-pie hybrid

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A few days ago, my friend Jesica told me about a video she’d seen on YouTube. A Mexican guy had filmed a short segment on Tostilocos, a street food in which a bag of nacho-flavored Tostitos are cut open along the vertical and then topped with the following: cucumber, pickled pork skin (known as cueritos), lime juice, Valentina hot sauce, chamoy, tajín chile powder, salt and Japanese peanuts. Japanese peanuts are a popular Mexican bar snack — they’re regular peanuts covered in a brown, crunchy shell.

“Es una bomba de sodio!” Jesica exclaimed, a little gleefully. Translation: It’s a sodium bomb!

We are both advocates of eating healthy. But, you know, this whole idea of taking a bag of chips and topping them with various condiments fascinated me. This dish recalled Frito Pie — the Texan specialty in which chili and cheese are poured over an open bag of Fritos — but it was so much crazier, all the salty condiments so insanely Mexican. I wondered if I could recreate this magic dish at home, maybe using bacon instead of cueritos. It’s not that I didn’t want to use cueritos — I personally enjoy their rubbery texture — but I wasn’t exactly sure where to find them at my local supermarket.

Before I get to the recipe part of this post, you really must watch the Tostilocos video. My favorite part is the end, when the host chews thoughtfully and says, in a manner that recalls an Iron Chef judge, “Wow. This is a completely new taste. The mix is — just spectacular. You can become addicted to this.”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jU4N-METflY&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

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How Mexicans celebrate Cinco de Mayo (hint: it’s not with sombreros and maracas)

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It’s funny. Last year I don’t remember there being such hoopla in the States over Cinco de Mayo. Or maybe there was and I ignored it because it seemed normal. This year, multiple friends in the States have asked me about Cinco de Mayo celebrations here. My Twitter feed and Google Alerts have blown up with various Cinco de Mayo party tips and recipe ideas.

It seems a little strange, because people in Mexico — or at least, people in Mexico City — don’t celebrate Cinco de Mayo. No one has the day off. There are no two-for-one margarita happy hour specials. (Chilangos don’t drink margaritas, unless they have American friends in town.) No one really throws any parties, and there aren’t any parades in the streets. The latter is really saying something, because there are parades for just about any holiday here.

Mexico City’s largest newspaper, El Universal, doesn’t even mention Cinco de Mayo on its website today. There is a big story on Paulina Rubio being pregnant.

The truth is, Cinco de Mayo has become more important in the United States than it has in Mexico. Kind of cool, isn’t it? It’s the one day out of the year when we get to acknowledge that Mexico has influenced who we are as Americans, through food and drink and music. (For a little Cinco de Mayo food history, check this AOL News story, which traces the American roots of a few popular dishes.)

The most important part of the holiday, to me, is the idea that Mexican influence and Mexican-American identity are positive things, and not anything we should ignore or view with suspicion.

My senior year in college, my roommates and I threw a big Cinco de Mayo party and I remember being really happy about it, because at the time — living in Boston — I felt pretty culturally isolated. (Most Latinos in the city then were either Puerto Rican or Dominican.)

I remember standing by the stove for much of the night, and not minding it at all, because I was warming tortillas and making quesadillas and who knows what else. People seemed very impressed that there was another way to warm tortillas besides in the microwave. And very few people had ever had homemade Mexican food before. We played mariachi music and I wore an embroidered Mexican blouse, which I promptly spilled red enchilada sauce on. It was a great night.

For a detailed history on Cinco de Mayo and how it’s celebrated in the United States, I highly recommend Wikipedia.

Feliz Cinco de Mayo to you!