The Mija Chronicles

Mexican food and culture, on both sides of the border

Lesley Tellez

Green bean and chayote salad with queso cotija

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I took a trip to Xalapa, Veracruz recently, and I ate way too much. Gorgeous, grasa-laden picaditas topped with cheese and plantain? Yes please. Mole? Mmm-hmmm. How about a side of it to accompany my cream-drenched enchiladas?

When I got home and stepped on the scale (Lesley, don’t ever step on the scale again), I wanted to cry. Then I vowed to eat more vegetables.

The lettuce at my local market looked a little sad, so I went with green beans, which are available year-round in Mexico because they’re native vegetables. The word “ejote” was “ejotl” in Nahuatl. I had a vision of cold, crisp green beans, mixed with some tomato and a little chayote.

I think the universe really wanted me to eat more vegetables again, because this was the best salad I’d eaten in a long time. The chayote added just the right touch of the sweetness; the crisp green beans gave texture. Crumbled cotija cheese, salty and slightly sour, tied everything together.

I made a simple vinaigrette to accompany this dish, but I didn’t even need it. The cheese was practically the dressing.

Crayton and I didn’t finish this in one sitting. I ate the leftovers out of the bowl for the next few days. Does anyone else besides me love doing that?

Green bean, chayote and cotija cheese salad
Serves 4 generously

Note: I used guaje tomatoes here, a Mexican variety that’s slightly larger than a Roma. Feel free to use the ripest, freshest tomatoes you can find. Queso cotija should be available at most Mexican supermarkets. If you can’t find it, you can substitute another salty, mild cheese. Just make sure it doesn’t taste too aged, because that might overwhelm the other flavors in the dish.

Ingredients

2 chayotes, diced into 1/2″ pieces
8 oz/250g green beans, chopped into about 2” pieces (this equals about 2 heaping cups)
2 ripe tomatoes* (see note), chopped
Good handful cilantro, stems included, chopped
Cotija cheese to taste — I used about 1/4 cup crumbled

Vinaigrette (optional):
3 T. apple cider vinegar
1/2 teaspoon dijon mustard
dollop of agave honey, or sweetener of your choice
4 T. olive oil

Directions

Heat a saucepan of water to boil on the stove. Nearby, fill a large boil with water and ice cubes. (We’re going to blanch the green beans.) When the water in the saucepan is boiling, add your green beans and a hefty dose of salt.

While the green beans cook, place the diced chayote into a microwave-proof bowl and mix generously with salt. Cover with plastic wrap that’s been perforated a few times with a fork, or with a sheet of wax paper. Cook until crisp-tender, about 2 to 3 minutes on high.

Once green beans have boiled for perhaps three to five minutes — they should be just slightly more tender than they were when you placed them in the pot; above all they should still be green — remove them with a slotted spoon, and place them in the bowl of ice water. Let sit for at least five minutes to stop them from cooking further. This will make them nice and crisp later.

Place chayote, hopefully cooled by now, and chilled, drained green beans into a serving bowl. Add the diced tomatoes, cilantro and cheese. Mix until well combined. (Taste here and see if you need more salt.) If making the vinaigrette, combine all ingredients and add the oil last. Whisk quickly until the oil and vinegar look fully integrated.

Serve as a light lunch on its own, or to accompany something else. I used this as a side dish for pasta.

A new Haitian restaurant in Mexico City

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UPDATE: See the reader comments below. It appears this restaurant has closed.

A few weeks ago, my friend David mentioned a new Haitian restaurant he’d heard about in Santa Maria la Ribera. I think I’d had a little too much wine, so I crowed, “Oh my god, Haitian food! We have to go! Haitian food!” Not that I even knew what Haitian food was.

One thing about Mexico City is, we do not get a lot of ethnic foods. There’s a growing Korean neighborhood in the Zona Rosa with fantastic cuisine; other than that, it’s Mexican and some mediocre attempts at Thai and Indian.

I wanted to try Haitian food out of pure curiosity, so David, Jesus and I stopped by the fonda last week. Jesus originally found the place and wrote about it on his blog.

It turns out Haitians eat a lot of fried things. Every plate on the menu had some sort of fried meat, fried fish or fried plantain.

Fried pork and sliced, fried plantains, served with potato salad and cole slaw

This rice is eaten with a thin, tomatoey salsa.

The food was fine. My favorites were the flaky fried fish, and the spicy coleslaw that accompanied everything. (I later found out the coleslaw contained either habanero or manzano chile.)

The service, however, was outstanding. Our waitress Alejandra had a lovely smile, and she asked where we were from and what our names were. She told us she’d been in Mexico for almost 3 years, and that she was a doctoral student at the UNAM. She spoke lilting, French-tinged Spanish.

Our server, Alejandra.

The food wasn’t so spectacular that I’d recommend making a special trip here, based on eating fried Haitian delicacies. But if you’re curious about Haitian food, and you want to support a family that’s getting its first foothold in Mexico City, this place is worth seeking out. The vibe here is comfortable and friendly.

Le Bon Gout, a Haitian fonda
Manuel Carpio 99 #1C, near the corner of Dr. Atl
Note: The entrance is on Dr. Atl. From the corner of Dr. Atl and Manuel Carpio, walk toward the Oaxacan cafe (away from the park). The fonda is just past the Oaxacan café.

More Mexico City markets: Mercado San Cosme

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Tostadas de pata at Mercado San Cosme in Col. San Rafael

The first time I went to Mercado San Cosme, a woman at a comida corrida stand called me cielo.

“Qué le doy cielo? Tenemos lechita, atolito, cafecito…” What can I give you, heaven? We have a little milk, a little atole, a little coffee…

I’ve gone to the market a few more times since then, and it’s become one of my favorites. The vendors are friendly and everything’s clean. Plus the surrounding neighborhood is charming, in an urban Mexico City kind of way. A stand outside the market sells thick slices of cake, in all different flavors; if you walk down Avenida San Cosme, the busy avenue directly north of the market, you’ll find open-air nail salons, advertised by plastic hands tinged in glittery acrylics.

Penny included the market as part of her photo workshop, so we stopped there one morning a few weeks ago. I felt a little more at ease taking pictures of strangers this time, but still not entirely comfortable — which means I need more practice.

I’m itching to visit another market. Any suggestions for which place I should visit next? And if you own a camera and live in Mexico City, do you want to come?

The cake stand outside the market

Filling a gordita with cilantro, onion and cheese

Check out those squash blossoms. They're one of my favorite quesadilla fillings.

Filling a quesadilla with cheese, before it hits the fryer

Puffy, golden quesadillas, from a stand in front of the market

What I love about Mexico City’s Centro Histórico

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The tiny patios, thick with honeysuckle and geraniums that hang from the railings, the clothes on the line, innocuous ghosts the wind sets flying between the green interjections of the parrot with a sulfurous eye, and suddenly, a slender stream of light; a canary singing;

the azure of the lunch-shops and the solferino of the cantinas, the smell of sawdust on the brick floor, the mirrored bar, ambiguous altar where genies with insidious powers sleep captive in the multicolored bottles;

…

the fair and its stalls of frying foods where, amidst the coals and aromatic smoke, the hierophants with cinnamon eyes celebrate the marriage of substances and the transformation of smells and flavors while they slice up meat, sprinkle salt and snowflakes of cheese over bright-green nopals, shred lettuce, bearer of tranquil sleep, grind the solar corn, and consecrate bunches of iridescent chilies;

the fruits and the sweets, gilded mountains of mandarins and sloes, the golden bananas, blood-colored prickly pears, ocher hills of walnuts and peanuts, volcanoes of sugar, towers of amaranth seed cakes, transparent pyramids of biznagas, nougats, the tiny orography of earthly sweetness, the fortress of sugarcane, the white jicamas huddled together in tunics the color of earth, the limes and the lemons: the sudden freshness of the laughter of women bathing in a green river…

— Excerpted from “1930: Scenic Views” by Octavio Paz, originally printed in The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz: 1957-1987, translated by Eliot Weinberger.

The question of huevos

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On my way home from the cleaners today, I saw a taxi driver cut off a pedestrian. The walker was an older gentleman, and he yelled “Huevón!” as the car drove past.

I’m sure it was some sort of insult, but I don’t know exactly what. In fact, the whole scenario reminded me just how many ways the word “huevo” is used in Mexico and how I’m still clueless on about most of them.

The only instance I’m familiar with is vulgar. Huevos is considered another word for testicles. I’m almost sure there were some huevo jokes in my cooking class when we made rompope, because we used more than 30 eggs.

I’ve also heard people use the phrase “Qué hueva!” and just plain old “hueva.”

Any out there kind enough to translate?

A morning at Mercado Merced, and being a tourist again

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Banana stalks, trimmed of their leaves, bunched together at Mercado Merced

Mercado Merced is one of the biggest markets in Mexico City. Up until recently, I wasn’t a fan. I did my shopping as quickly as I could and got the heck out of there, before the crowds could swallow me up. The place felt like the subway during rush hour. Except with offal just a few inches from my face.

Penny said she wanted to visit Merced for her photography workshop, the one I was helping her with as her guide and fixer. I tried to dissuade her.

“I’m overwhelmed every time I go, and I live here,” I said.

“I think it’ll be okay,” she said.

I still wasn’t convinced, but Penny enticed me with conchas at El Popular. So off we went one Saturday, after breakfast, the five of us, all women: Cindy, a photographer from San Francisco; Susan, a photographer from Washington state; Penny and I, and Averie, a blogger from San Diego.

At 8:30 a.m., Merced was the quietest I’d seen. The dude advertising anti-fungal medicine was there on the Circunvalación, blaring his ad full blast. (“Do you have problems with fungus? On your fingernails? Elsewhere?”) People bustled about the streets, getting on and off the peseros. The clothing and shoes vendors, the ones directly in front of the produce building, hadn’t opened yet. That meant we could walk in peace. No loud music, no taco vendors yelling about diez por diez, and nobody heaving gigantic bags of merchandise into our elbows and shoulders.

Mercado Merced is not just one market. It’s a complex of several buildings ringed with dozens (hundreds?) of open-air stands. These vendors sell anything from blenders to scrubbing brushes, to strainers for your tomato caldillo. To get to the meat and produce, you must walk past these vendors first. Or you can take the metro, which exits directly into the fruit-and-vegetable building. The most confusing thing to do is to take a cab to Merced, because it’s impossible to see anything but a sea of tarps. (We took a cab, but only because I knew where we were going.)

I hadn’t looked at Merced with a tourist’s eyes in a long time. The market awed me when I first moved here, with its dried chiles stacked over my head and its energy. I wanted to bring my camera several times. But that urge gradually faded away. I wasn’t a gringa tourist anymore, I was a chilanga who actually bought her dried corn and tamale flour here.

Since I had to leave fairly soon, Penny offered to walk around with me and help me with my camera settings. This meant I had to take photos and look for moments — moments meaning people. The idea scared me. What if the subject got mad and yelled? What if they glared at me? Penny said that if anyone didn’t want their picture taken, no pasa nada, I should just move on.

After a few minutes, I found my first moment: a guy tearing banana leaves off the plant’s long stalks. I liked that he was framed by bunches of plants that he’d already cleaned. I took out my camera and hesitantly started taking a few photos.

“Get closer!” Penny urged.

I got a little closer, and the guy gave me a funny look.

“Keep going. Stay there. Ignore him,” Penny said.

I stayed where I was and kept snapping.

The pictures were not particularly fantastic. But I felt like I’d crossed a line. It was like that first time I rode across Chapultepec Avenue on my bike, pedaling furiously, worried that someone would hit me and I’d get in an accident. Halfway across I realized it was a beautiful, breezy day, and all I had to do was forget about the traffic and relax and feel the wind in my hair. The banana-leaf guy probably thought I was a weirdo, but once I stopped thinking about him, I could concentrate on what he was doing: running a knife down a smooth, green leaf, folding its ends over each other, quickly, expertly. Watching him without fear — this is where the magic was.

My heart pounding (I took a picture of this guy and he didn’t get mad at me!) I told Penny I wanted to hit the meat market. I’d wandered around there on a recent shopping trip, gawking — I know I’m supposed to be a chilanga, but I couldn’t help it — at the chicharrón prensado stacked up eight and nine rows high. Do you know how insane that is? Mountains of chicharrón prensado, destined for the city’s gordita stands. The meat market stood for so many things I loved about Mexico City: the chaos, the absurdity, and all of its glorious pig parts used in so many different ways.

This time I was a little more bold.

A vendor chopping chicharrón prensado

In all, I spent about 40 minutes in the market before I had to leave. But it was enough to make me feel giddy — and just the teensiest bit guilty. Where had I been this past year or so? Why hadn’t I taken more pictures? I lived in one of the greatest food cities in the world, and I have all of this at my fingertips. I needed to remember that more.

For some amazing pictures of Mercado Merced, and Mexico City street food, you should visit Susan’s blog.

Mexico City Street Food

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I’m helping out my friend Penny de los Santos with her photography workshop this weekend. I’ve been leading folks around, taking them to markets and street food stands, and encouraging them to try pulque and mezcal.

In return they’ve encouraged me to take out my camera from its lonely hiding place. It’s not that I haven’t been taking pictures — I have, but in the comfort of my own kitchen and not on the streets.

Here’s just a small set of what I shot, of Mexico City street food. (I’m ignoring the little voice that’s telling me that several of these could’ve been better.) I’ll have more over the coming days, and a little more about what I learned while hanging out with Penny.

Baked, sugar-dusted sweet potato with condensed milk

Palomitas, chicharrones and more for sale on the sidewalk

A carnitas taco

Roasted elote, served with cheese, chile powder and lime juice

Sprinkling salt -- or is it cheese? -- on the roasted corn

Papas, or potato chips, with Valentina sauce

Late night tacos al pastor... more to come on this stand later.

Nieve de tuna (cactus pear sorbet) with mezcal

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The oblong, nubby cactus pear is probably the most abundant fruit in the city right now. Markets have got them at four pounds for less than a dollar. They’re skinned and sheathed in plastic for people who want to eat them right there, with chili powder and lime.

I prefer them plain. The flesh is juicy and so perfumed, you really don’t need anything else.

A few weeks ago, I picked up a big batch with plans to make a nieve, or sorbet. I am not a stranger to this activity — two years ago I made sorbet with tuna roja. But this time I didn’t have an ice cream maker. I’d lost the little plastic part that fit onto my Kitchen Aid mixer, which enabled the churning.

After some fruitless Internet searching, and lots of fretting to Crayton, I emailed Fany. She offered a bunch of helpful tips, including adding an egg white to make the sorbet creamier, and using salt and simple syrup instead of regular sugar. Most importantly, she said there was no reason I couldn’t use my ice-cream maker freezer bowl anyway, and just pop it in the freezer and stir by hand every few hours.

So, one afternoon, I chopped my tunas and blended and tasted, surprised and delighted at how kick-ass this mixture turned out to be. I was so excited, actually, that I broke out a little mezcal — for the sorbet, not for me. It ended up giving the nieve a touch of smoke, which fit with the trailblazing theme of the day.

This sorbet — or perhaps it’s a sherbet because of the egg white — did not turn out as dense as I’d hoped. It wasn’t as scoopable as my nieve de tuna roja. But it was all mine, and it was still really, really good. I took it to a 4th of July party and Carlos, who is a big fan of tuna fruit, pronounced it a winner.

Nieve de tuna with mezcal
Makes about 1 1/2 quarts

Note: When I was researching the proper texture for a sorbet, I couldn’t really find a good answer. I wasn’t sure whether to add water. In the end, Fany said that the more water you add, the more crystallized and icy the texture becomes. I wanted something smooth, so I left the water out. Also, I never realized how important salt could be in a dessert. It really pulled everything together, so don’t leave it out.

Ingredients

21 pieces of cactus fruit (almost 2 kilos or 4 lbs. worth), spines removed
Simple syrup, to taste
Juice of one large lime
3 teaspoons mezcal
salt
1 egg white

Directions

Peel tuna fruit by cutting off the ends and making an incision length-wise. Open one side like a book and peel off; the thick skin should pull away easily.

Cut into quarters and blend until smooth. (I did this in two batches.) Strain out seeds. At this point you should have a pretty pistachio liquid. Add a little simple syrup and lime juice and blend.

Add mezcal and adjust the sweetness or acidity if necessary. Then add the salt — I went with two or three grinds of the salt-shaker — and taste. Add more simple syrup if needed. Lastly, add the raw egg white and blend until mixture is smooth and thickened.

Pour into ice cream maker and blend according to manufacturer’s instructions. OR, if you’ve only got a frozen ice cream bowl and nothing else, pour into the already frozen bowl, freeze and stir every few hours.

Juanita’s rice pudding

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Juanita is a Mexican woman in her 90’s who lives in the Colonia Cuauhtémoc. She still cooks every day, and her food is superb.

Last year I was lucky enough to make chiles rellenos with her in her kitchen. With my friend Lizzie, who was living with Juanita, we charred and seeded the chiles, made the fluffy egg batter and nestled strips of cheese inside the chiles’ green flesh. Juanita had advised us to do it delicately, “as if it were a child you were swaddling.”

A few weeks ago, Lizzie was leaving town, so she invited me over again for lunch. Juanita made chicken-salad sandwiches and we had tomatoey noodle soup and beer. Dessert was rice pudding — something Juanita often makes under the name “dulce de arroz.”

The dish tasted like something she would’ve slaved over. How could something so simple taste so complex? However, when Lizzie finally passed me the recipe (which she got by watching Juanita one day), it was easy. The recipe called for one can of condensed milk, a liter of milk, cinnamon and lime zest. That’s it.

I did not have a great history with rice pudding. The one time I tried to make it last year, I screwed it up. But Juanita’s recipe seemed easy enough. Anything with condensed milk can’t ever taste bad.

So I made the dish for Alice’s baby shower. To my surprise, it turned out just like I’d had it at Juanita’s house: creamy, sweet, with just the right amount of cinnamon. I licked the spoon and really wanted to lick my dessert glass, too, but decided against it.

Juanita’s Rice Pudding
Serves at least 8 as a dessert

Note: The cooking time really varies on this dish, depending on how thick or thin you like your rice pudding. I made two batches and one came out a little thinner, but both still tasted great. If you’ve never made rice pudding before, I’d suggest cooking the mixture until it has noticeably thickened, about 15 minutes or so on a high simmer. (High simmer means the mixture should be bubbling, shouldn’t it be so hot that it’s boiling over.)

The rice pudding thickens considerably once it’s cooled. I fretted over the batch that turned out a little thin, but an overnight sit in the fridge helped firm it up.

You can add a sprinkle of cinnamon while it cools, or wait to add the cinnamon at serving time.

Ingredients

1 cup white rice
3 cinnamon sticks, 3″-4″ long
Zest of 1 lime (around 1/2 teaspoon)
1 liter whole milk
1 can condensed milk
Ground cinnamon

Cook 1 cup white rice (washed) and 2 cups water with 3 cinnamon sticks and the lime zest. Cook 15 to 20 minutes, until the liquid has evaporated and the rice is cooked.

Add 1 liter whole milk and boil for a few minutes.

Add the condensed milk. Cook on a high simmer for 10 minutes or so* (see headnote; cooking times can vary), stirring often so it doesn’t stick to the bottom of the pan. When done, the rice should be soft, and the mixture will have thickened. Top with a sprinkle of ground cinnamon and cool.

The life of a nun in Nueva España

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Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, perhaps the most famous Mexican nun.

One of the things I’ve learned in my Mexican History and Gastronomy program is that to understand Mexican cuisine, you really have to know what was happening in the convents during the viceregal period. The viceregal period refers to when Mexico was ruled by the Spanish crown, from 1521 to 1821.

Yesterday Edmundo gave us a fascinating lecture on what life must have been like for the nuns back then. I didn’t realize the extent that money and class determined the course of their lives.

The first convents in Mexico were segregated. If you were poor and indigenous, you couldn’t enter, except as a servant. Even women from good families might not have been able to afford it — the convent required a dowry, and women who didn’t have one needed a rich benefactor. The rich benefactors preferred light-skinned, virtuous women.

Young women who were about to “take the habits” (the literal translation from Spanish for taking a nun’s oath) had lavish, three-day parties where they paraded around town in jewels and fancy clothes. Families even paid for portraits of these women, as a sort of “before the convent” photo. One of these portraits is hanging in the Frida Kahlo Museum, near the kitchen; a few more are at the wonderful Franz Mayer museum.

If you were a lower-caste woman without means, you had to find a husband, become a servant, or become a prostitute. One Mexican convent, Jesus María, was specifically founded to help prevent women from entering into prostitution, Edmundo said. The Franz Mayer Museum building, which lies just north of the Alameda Central, used to be a hospital exclusively served prostitutes, so this was a very real possibility for women back then.

Even though a woman would’ve paid money to enter the convent, life there wasn’t easy. One historical report that Edmundo read to us last night had the women waking up at 4 a.m. to pray. And there would’ve been various power struggles and scandals that come with sharing the same space with the same women, day after day.

Once enclosed in the convents, the nuns used food as a way to make money — several of their sweets live on today at Dulcería Celaya in the Centro Histórico. But eating was also a way to grow closer to God. These were not simple dishes. Can you imagine that first taste of a hand-ground, creamy walnut sauce, or a manchamanteles spliced with tomatoes and fruit? It had to lift them to the heavens. Heck, it lifts me to the heavens and I’m not living a cloistered existence.

I bought a book of Sor Juana’s recipes at Ghandi yesterday, and I’m excited to check them out and possibly make a few. When I do, I’ll be grateful that I live in 2011 with the freedom to both work and cook.