The Mija Chronicles

Mexican food and culture, on both sides of the border

Archives for November 2012

Adventures in quelites: chivitos

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I spotted these at the edge of the Condesa tianguis a few weeks ago, at the stand in front of the Oxxo. The stand is staffed by a man and a woman from Ixtlahuaca, in the State of Mexico, and I like to buy there because they always have farm-fresh produce and homemade tortillas and wild mushrooms when it’s mushroom season.

I hadn’t seen these specific quelites before, so I asked the woman what they were. She said chivitos. I liked their long stems and thin, tender leaves, so I bought a bag for around 15 pesos. Thought about combining them with quelite cenizo in a salad and figured the contrast in shapes would be nice. It was — the cenizo-chivito salad was the best I think I’ve ever made in my life. It was grassy and green, and I was overwhelmed with the sense that I was eating something directly from the ground.

According to my helpful quelites research guide (“Los quelites, tradición milenaria in México” by Delia Castro Lara, Fracisco Basurto Peña, Luz María Mera Ovando and Robert Arthur Bye Boettler), it turns out chivitos (calandrinia micrantha) are one of the handful of “collected” greens in Mexico, which means they’re not cultivated. They tend to grow in corn fields or in the milpa, and they are are also called lengua de pájaro, or bird’s tongue.

The taste is interesting. Chivitos have the crunchy juiciness of lettuce, with a slight bitter aftertaste, like spinach. And they’re herbal and grassy.

Besides the quelites salad, I also used chivitos plain on their own, topped with a little lime juice and olive oil, as a side salad to roasted chicken and potatoes. This morning mixed them with scrambled eggs, topped with some roasted tomato salsa. Yum.

If you want to seek them out, the man-and-woman team usually arrive to the Tuesday Condesa tianguis around 11 a.m. If they’re out of quelites, you could also try another farm-fresh stand on the opposite end of the tianguis, sort of catty-corner to the chicharrón.

Chivitos at the Condesa tianguis

Thanksgiving in Mexico

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I had little patience for Mexico on Thanksgiving Day. It’s just a regular day here, so nobody really knows you’re whipping up a huge, crazy meal in your kitchen and that you need things now. My cheese vendor at Mercado San Juan forgot to create my cheese plate, which he swore he’d have at 11 a.m. The dude I ordered olive tapenade from likewise didn’t have it.

I wanted to kill everyone, but when I went to get a coffee, the coffee guy said, “Hola hola hola! Feliz Día de Thanksgiving guerita!” And the Oaxacan vendor gave me extra charales enchilados. “Señorita Lesley… verdad?”

The tortilla lady greeted me with a hug and a kiss on the cheek and said, “Qué milagro!”

When I went to grab a snack, the tlacoyo lady, who never talks EVER, asked me for the first time, “De dónde es usted?” And then when I said Estados Unidos, she said, “A poco es de allá?” I blabbered on and on, telling her about my fascination with Mexican food, how I fell in love with street food and fondas when I got here, how I really didn’t have any choice but to create a street food-markets-food tourism business, all the while she flipped the hot tlacoyos on the comal. I said goodbye and wished her a happy Thanksgiving. Even the chicken guys didn’t hoot at me while I walked by, I like to think because they recognize me by now. Or maybe it was the great spirit of Thanksgiving.

The meal came together, even without the cheese plate and the tapenade. Here was my Thanksgiving menu:

Appetizers
Panela cheese with epazote and chile cuaresmeño, purchased at Mercado San Juan
Fried charales enchilados, from the same stand

Main dishes*
Quelites salad made with quelite cenizo, parsley, chivito, tomato, organic sprouts and parmesan cheese, with a lemony vinaigrette
Crayton’s mom’s mushroom casserole (mushrooms, parsley and onion bathed in heavy cream and butter, and baked)
Pan-fried brussells sprouts with bacon
Pears poached in red wine (I used a recipe from Joy of Cooking)
Mexican chocolate cream pie — A riff on this Food & Wine recipe

*My friend Pam made the turkey, two types of stuffing, mashed potatoes and baked sweet potatoes.

Hope you all had a wonderful holiday! Would love to hear of any dishes you plan to make again next year.

Chiles rellenos with panela cheese and epazote

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I love eating chiles rellenos, but I haven’t quite figured out yet how to make them a quick job. I usually like to stuff them with beans, and I always forget to soak my beans the night before. Plus I feel compelled to do the capeado if I’m relleno-ing a chile, and sometimes I don’t want to whip egg whites on a Tuesday, you know?

That’s what I love about these panela-stuffed chiles: the simplicity. All you do is char the poblanos on the comal, peel off the skin and scrape out the seeds, cut some panela slices and sprinkle them with fresh epazote, and then put them inside your chile. The cheese slices don’t even have to fit! Actually, it’s better if they don’t, because then the cheese gets sort of melty and soft out the sides.

You pan-fry the stuffed chile in a mix of butter and lard, or butter and olive oil. The butter is key — it draws out the poblano’s natural buttery notes.

I made these on a weeknight and ate the leftovers the rest of the week. My love affair with the Poblano pepper continues.

Chile Rellenos with Panela Cheese & Epazote
Makes 4

4 poblano peppers
8 oz./200g panela cheese cut into 1/4″-1/2″ slices
2 sprigs epazote (about 18 leaves), chopped
2 teaspoons lard
20g (about 2 pats) butter

Directions

To prepare the peppers: Rinse poblano peppers and dry them well with paper towels or a dish cloth. To char them, you can let them sit directly over a gas flame and turn using tongs; or, you can use a comal or dry skillet. I don’t have gas in my apartment (I’m one of the .02% of households in Mexico City that doesn’t), so I use the latter.

Heat the comal over high heat and turn chiles quickly, blackening all over but also making sure they don’t cook too long and turn slimy. Remove chiles to a dish towel once they’re charred, and wrap tightly. Let sit for 20 minutes. This makes the skin easier to peel off.

Peel the skin off chiles — DON’T RINSE UNDER WATER, as this mutes that lovely charred flavor! — and cut an incision into each one. Using your hands or a little spoon, scrape out the seeds as best you can. This is the most annoying part of the dish. Have I mentioned how much I hate seeding poblanos? Peeling, fun. Seeding, lame.

To prepare the filling: Take one slice of panela and sprinkle with epazote. Place the other piece of panela on top, like a sandwich, and sprinkle the whole thing with epazote. Place your panela-epazote sandwich inside the chile.

To cook: I had to do this in two batches. Heat a large (I used 10-inch) skillet over medium heat. Add half the lard and half the butter, and let melt. When hot, add two chiles. Cook until slightly darkened on all sides and cheese starts to melt. Serve with whatever you want — I used some leftover ayocote beans that Janneth brought me from Tepoztlan.

On the barbecue trail in Chinameca, Veracruz

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A big ol’ pile of smoked ribs in Chinameca, Veracruz

It was one of those only-in-Mexico moments: my friend Janneth, yelling into the open window of a stranger’s home.

“Señora!” she called. The living room on the other side of the screen was dark. But an older woman’s voice answered back, from somewhere in the depths of the house.

“What do you want?”

Janneth replied honestly. “We want to learn how you make your carne de Chinameca! They told us it’s very good.” (Important fact: in Mexico, no one ever asks who “they” is.)

We waited a few seconds. Then came the woman’s muffled reply: “I’m busy.”

We had ended up there because we’d become a little obsessed with finding out the secrets of carne de Chinameca, a type of smoked meat that’s popular in Southern Veracruz. I didn’t even realize that barbecue — American-style barbecue — existed in that area of Mexico. Carne de Chinameca reminded me a lot of what norteamericanos might eat on the Fourth of July: a smoky, crispy-grilled meat that tasted like coals and campfire and being outside. I had first tried it on a picadita in Catemaco and it was a jolt to the brain. This wasn’t the salty, cured taste of tasajo. This was different. The smoke enveloped you, and lurking behind it all was some sort of savory flavor that I couldn’t identify.

We first tried to get more information on carne de Chinameca at the Coatzacoalcos market. A row of young girls sold piles of the deep-red colored meat, and they waved floppy pieces at Janneth, Martha and I, with their hands sheathed in plastic grocery bags. “Pásale guerita!” they called, shaking the meat.

We stopped and asked the girls about the marinade. They shrugged, saying the meat was brought to them directly from Chinameca. A woman at the end of the row overheard us and said, “Tiene achiote and pimentón.” Annatto seed and paprika.

We wanted more information, so the following afternoon we drove to Chinameca, about 30 minutes from Coaztacoalcos. I sort of expected to see a Texas Hill Country-type thing, with smokers parked on the roadside. It wasn’t like that — Chinameca turned out to be a collection of well-kept single-story houses, a pharmacy, a taquería. The only sign that it was a barbecue paradise were two open-air stands on the outskirts of town, both of which appeared to be smoking meat.

The first stand, an open-air wooden shack with a cobbled-together roof, had an obscene cluster of longaniza draped over the grill, dripping and smoking and hanging like a fresh pile of entrails.

The owner, a friendly woman, explained that the marinade contained chile guajillo, achiote and pimentón. She first cooked the longaniza on the grill and then smoked for it two to three hours, using pine, nanche or mango tree branches. (That’s when I realized: that flavor I couldn’t identify probably came from the wood.)

She told us about the other woman in town who made carne de Chinameca too. But when we drove over there and Janneth yelled in the window and that lead dried up, we found ourselves back at the friendly woman’s stand, gently prying for more information.

She let us observe her two young charges, teenage girls, who stood with their arms dunked halfway into a big plastic bucket, a stew of achiote and raw pork and water. One of the girls, who wore big hoop earrings and a beaded necklace with a saint’s face dangling off the end, removed her hands and rubbed an almond-sized piece of achiote paste into her palm, almost like soap. Then dragged her pasty red hand across the surface of the ground pork. This would eventually become longaniza — the pork stomach casings lay nearby.

“You have to scrub the achiote like this, because if you just toss it in with the meat, it won’t dissolve and you’ll just have a little ball in there,” she said. Janneth and I nodded knowingly.

I wanted to take pictures but thought that would be too invasive. So we purchased a kilo of meat and said goodbye, the teenagers with their hands in the buckets still when we left.

At the next stand, only 30 feet away at most, another family grilled reddish-orange filets at a grill set back from the street. We asked the young woman at the rustic counter if we could go back for a closer look, and she gave us a curt nod.

About a half-dozen people stood around the grill, and they all sort of stared at us. Janneth, as usual, explained. “We just wanted to see how the carne de Chinameca is smoked.” No one said anything. A young girl of about 10 wore a taquería apron that was too big for her, and she helped an older man cut a huge slice of pork, holding back raw pieces of fat and skin back so he could make a clean cut. We looked for a few seconds more and went back to the counter, where we bought a kilo of gorgeous, reddish-black, fleshy ribs.

In the end, I didn’t get a recipe, but that’s not exactly what I wanted. We learned the basic elements of the marinade. We learned that you’ve got to get your hands and forearms in there, and that handmade achiote paste — the basic stuff, without any seasonings — is a key ingredient. We learned that the kids start young. And, because it’s Mexico, that people will usually answer your questions even if you’re a stranger knocking on their door.

Someday when I have a backyard, I might make my own longaniza and suspend it over the grill, letting it drip its own fat down into the kindling. I’ll rub the achiote with my bare hands, and I’ll remember being in small-town Veracruz and searching for a secret.

The foods of Southern Veracruz

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A memela at Tio Chon, a restaurant outside Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz.

Janneth and I had talked about me visiting her in Coatzacoalcos for months, ever since she came back from Coatza one day and started telling me about all the things she saw there that didn’t exist in Mexico City — tubs of small freshwater fish, crackery tortillas, and puffy, airy quesadillas called empanadas, which were served covered in shredded cabbage. Crayton and I finally had some free days in September so we decided to take a long weekend.

An aeiral view of Coatza from Mexico PostCode.

Coazta isn’t usually where folks stop in Veracruz. It’s an oil town along the state’s southern edge, and nobody really goes there unless they work for Pemex or they know someone who works for Pemex. There is a beach but no one swims in it. One person commented on my Instagram feed that I should visit other cities in Veracruz, because Coatza was bastante “feíto.” (Ugly.)

Coatza has nothing in the way of cool architecture or museums — a reviewer on Trip Advisor called their Museum of Olmec Culture “a pirated version of Epcot Center” — but it’s got good food, which makes it a perfectly reasonable destination in my eyes. After this trip I’m more convinced than ever that good food can be found anywhere in Mexico, even the most feíto towns.

The best of Coatza: gorditas and markets

Janneth grew up in Coatzacoalcos (her dad retired from Pemex), and she graciously offered to not only drive, but let us stay at her parents’ house. Our first morning there we drove to La Picadita Jarocha for breakfast, a bustling cafe open to the street. She insisted we try the balloony sweet gorditas, made with masa speckled with anise seeds and stuffed with mole. They arrived liked little bubbles, and then we cut them open to reveal the mole underneath. I cannot tell you how good these things were.

Look at that mole peeking out from inside. It wants you.

Afterward we wandered around Coatza’s market with Janneth’s mother Martha, a wonderful cook and local food expert. She pointed out more things I’d never seen: black camarones reculones, called as such because they walk backward; little nubs of homemade achiote paste, and hoja blanca leaves used to wrap tamales.

She also showed me the cracker-like totopos that came from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, where she’s from. I’d seen them before outside the 20 de Noviembre Market in Oaxaca, but they seemed to be more prolific here.

Lisa seca, a dried salted fish from the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. Martha said you have to soak it in water several times to remove the salt, then squeeze on lime juice, chopped tomatoes, onion and cilantro. Then you grill it.

Oreganón, an intensely aromatic oregano.

Fresh camarones reculones, AKA “shrimp that move backwards.”

Fresh Mexican blue crab, known as jaiba.

Homemade achiote paste. This is not what you find in the supermarkets in Mexico City — it contains nothing except ground achiote seed and water, cooked in a kettle until concentrated.

Then we made a quick stop at Janneth’s aunt’s restaurant to watch the staff make tamales de masa colada. I’d never actually seen masa colada up close — it’s a tamal dough made from nixtamalized corn that’s cooked almost to a Cream-of-Wheat consistency.

A team of two women worked fast on the back patio, laying down an hoja blanca leaf, a banana leaf, a heaping spoonful of masa colada and then chicken, epazote and red chile sauce. Then they wrapped everything neatly and tying the tamal with a little knot. I tried to make one and the sauce oozed out one end.

Pretty little tamales.

We ended the day at an open-air restaurant with a dirt floor called Tio Chon, located off the old two-lane road to Minatitlán. Janneth instructed us on the proper Coatzacoalcosian way to eat camarones enchipotlados — place the whole shrimp in your mouth, suck off the sauce, then dip it in more sauce when no one is looking. (Her mom immediately told us, don’t do it that way, she’s wrong.)

Just seeing this photo now makes me want to suck off all the chipotle sauce.

I’m calling this a mole sundae: rice topped with fried plantain, egg and rich Veracruzan mole.

The Minatitlán market

Crayton was not exactly enthused to visit another market, but he was powerless against the trio of Janneth, Martha and I, who could together probably spend eight hours talking to vendors and scribbling down recipe notes. We visited another market — the Mercado Popular Campesino — in Minatitlán, a small town about 20 minutes from Coatzacoalcos.

The heat was stifling even at 10 a.m. Ladies in checkered smocks, their faces shiny with sweat, sold various vines and fruits and vegetables, some of which I hadn’t seen at the Coazta market the day before. We tried pópo, a beverage made from toasted cacao beans, rice, cinnamon and a vine called asquiote. One vendor was selling asquiote, too, which excited all of us to no end.

“Look, it’s asquiote!” I told Crayton. He just looked at me and continued checking his Blackberry.

I loved the tortillas de frijol, a crispy plate of a tortilla — sort of like a tlayuda — made from masa mixed with beans. Martha said you eat it with cheese and very hot salsa. I bought one and munched on it while we shopped.

Asquiote, which is chopped and ground and used in the beverage pópo, in Southern Veracruz

A jicara full of pópo, a beverage made from toasted cacao beans, rice, cinnamon, anise seed and asquiote.

This is the tricked-out molinillo — made by hand — used to aerate the pópo, which traditionally is served with a thick layer of foam on top.

Our Minatitlán breakfast. They were out of pejelagarto tamales.

Chile chilpaya, sort of like piquín but rounder and slightly longer.

There was one more food-related activity — hunting down the famous carne de Chinameca — but I’ll save that for the next post.

After only a few days together, I told Janneth and Martha that we should plan another trip together, to Martha’s hometown in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in 2013. If we do go… sorry Crayton, you’re not coming.

How to shape homemade corn tortillas, without a press

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I’m still not an expert at making corn tortillas without a press, but I was in awe of this woman at the Mole Festival in San Pedro Atocpan. Her name is Bertha Reyes Romero and she was the quesadilla-maker at one of the restaurants.

Her hands worked so fast that I asked if I could take a video, and she said yes.

http://youtu.be/SaI1nu89Q5U