The Mija Chronicles

Mexican food and culture, on both sides of the border

Lesley Tellez

Not a Spanish speaker, or an English speaker either

by



Lately when I’ve been talking, my brain’s had trouble deciding which language to use.

Twice now I’ve said “exactlo” instead of exactly. (A hybrid of exacto + exactly.) I’ve used the phrase “por lo minimum.” With Spanish-speaking friends, I’ll switch to English without even realizing that I’m doing it. And then I’ll look at them and they’ll look at me, and I feel kind of like an idiot. This has happened to me in cooking class in the past few weeks. I’ve been calling out to my partners about whether they need a pan, or if they’ve seen the sugar. Pero en inglés.

The annoying thing is that I have no control over any of it. It’s not that I’m pausing and searching for the right word — I’m just speaking normally and then boom, out comes a word in another language. But I’m guessing this is a step forward in my Spanish journey, right? I was embarrassed of my Spanish when I moved here, and then I gained more confidence and didn’t care if I messed up. Then slowly — poco a poco, as they say — I added a few choice slang words, and started noticing people’s cadences and accents. Lately I’ve also begun wondering if my cadence is “fresa,” although I’m still not entirely sure what that sounds like yet.

Just a few weeks ago I interviewed a prospective guide for Eat Mexico on the phone. He told me later, after we met in person and had a much longer talk, that he had originally assumed from our phone conversation that I was Mexican. I took it as compliment, but it’s just weird to think about. Sounding Mexican is something I’ve wanted since I was in my early twenties. How could it be that I’ve accomplished this already? There are so many nuanced cultural things I still don’t get, like how to end a phone conversation with “ándale pues” and who gets an “un beso” and who doesn’t.

Has this happened to you, where you find yourself in this weird, hybrid-language zone where the words just come out without knowing which language you’re speaking? I guess this is a form of Spanglish, but it’s not like any Spanglish I’ve ever known. I’d defined Spanglish as something conscious — the act of physically latching onto whatever word pops up in my head first. Not creating new words faster than my mind can keep up.

Spanglish

Photo from Flickr user Satanslaudromat

Sopa seca de quinoa (Mexican-style quinoa)

by

When I first moved here, I went a little crazy trying to find quinoa, the nutty, protein-rich seed that’s related to amaranth. I tried smuggling some in from the States, but it didn’t work. Mexican customs agents confiscated my supply. (Later they let me keep my brown rice flakes from India, which shows that their policies make no sense.)

Eventually I found quinoa at Green Corner, a natural-foods store in Mexico City. And then I just kept buying and buying, until the bags of quinoa began multiplying in my pantry.

Faced with an issue I’d never thought I’d have in Mexico — I have too much quinoa! — I tried to think of a way to use it, besides the usual steaming. My first thought was quinoa mexicana.

It’s basically the same thing as sopa seca de fideo or Mexican rice, except with quinoa as the main grain. I’d actually tried to make this in Dallas once and it didn’t work out too well. But this time around, it was pretty fantastic: the quinoa soaked up the tomato puree, and I couldn’t detect any of the bitterness/earthiness that quinoa sometimes exudes after cooking. (This is why Crayton isn’t the hugest quinoa fan. But he loved the Mexican version.)

Toasting the quinoa also toughened the seeds up a bit, which meant they had a nice, hearty texture. It wasn’t quite in the Israeli cous-cous realm, but the dish was definitely more fun to eat than rice or noodles. Plus quinoa has more protein. How can you go wrong?

I ate several tostadas with this quinoa slathered on top and served it twice as a side dish. In the future I might add a dollop of crema or some diced, fried chile pasilla. Adding a wee bit of chipotle en adobo to the tomato sauce might be a good idea, too.

Sopa seca de quinoa
Serves 4 to 6 as a side dish

Note: I used boxed tomato puree for this because it’s easy, but if you want to make your own tomato puree, blend perhaps three medium-sized tomatoes in a blender and pour into a pan heated with a little bit of oil. Season with salt and cook over medium-low heat until the tomato mixture turns a deeper red color and no longer tastes raw, perhaps 10 to 15 minutes. Add a little water if the mixture looks too thick.

Ingredients

1 tablespoon oil
3 slices of onion, about 1/4-inch thick
1 cup quinoa
1 3/4 cups water
1 210-gram box of tomato puree (or a small can of tomato sauce, if you live in the States)
salt

Heat your oil in a heavy-bottomed saucepan and, when hot, add onion and quinoa. Stir constantly (this will burn if you leave it too long), until quinoa starts to brown and releases a pleasant, toasty smell. Add water and tomato sauce and stir. But be careful, because the pan might hiss and spit. Add salt to taste. Bring to boil, and then lower heat to simmer. Cook for 30 minutes (this is how long it took me in Mexico), or perhaps half that if you’re at normal altitude. Feel free to check on the quinoa as it cooks. It won’t hurt the dish.

The quinoa may look wet when it’s done cooking, but it solidifies a bit as it cools. If you find it too wet for your taste, cook with the lid off and let some of the liquid evaporate.

Mexico City street candy: Muéganos

by

mueganos para todos!!

A pile of muéganos, from Flickr user Jackie Palacios

Per my usual food experience in Mexico City, I kept seeing muéganos on the street and had no idea what they were. Was this a nutty popcorn ball of sorts? Or a sickly sweet, praline concoction where you could feel the sugar granules under your teeth?

Fany’s cookbook had a recipe. It turns out muéganos are fried-dough balls, stuck together with piloncillo syrup. Since I am the girl who orders a buñuelo off the street and then greedily eats the whole thing, muéganos were not a snack that I could miss.

So, a few days ago, I ventured to the candy vendor who sits outside the Palacio de Hierro parking lot under a blue umbrella. (I’m guessing he hands people candy through their car windows.) Like a lot of other street candy vendors, he sells gaznates — tube-shaped pastries stuffed with meringue — and cocadas. One muégano was kind of expensive: 15 pesos, or more than a dollar.

Being a good food blogger, I meant to take my muégano home and get a photo first. But just knowing there was fried, sticky-sweet dough ball in my purse, I couldn’t help myself and bit into it right away.

Wow. This thing was dangerous. A lot of Mexican candies are overwhelmingly sweet, but the muégano seemed balanced, with the caramel taste of Cracker Jack popcorn. It was kind of like eating a syrup-soaked buñuelo that had hardened in the sun somehow.

I loved it.

My partially eaten muégano

Obviously I can’t order them every day, but I may get one again, when an alegría doesn’t suffice.

Have you tried muéganos before?

Cooking traditional Mexican food with Marilau

by

One of my goals in San Miguel de Allende was to take a cooking class. San Miguel has plenty of those, but I wanted something intensive — a place where I could seriously discuss the food and explore some basics that I hadn’t yet grasped in my Thursday night cooking class.

A while back, Rachel Laudan had recommended a woman named Marilau in San Miguel. Marilau’s website was impressive: she had a techniques class that taught how to capear and how to clean nopales, and another called the ABCs of Mexican cooking that taught salsas, moles, pipianes and adobos.

The latter sounded perfect for me. Luckily she had availability, and at my request she graciously squeezed the normally four-day long class into two days.
…

Read More

Guacamayas in San Miguel de Allende

by

I hadn’t spent much time in San Miguel de Allende until about a week ago, when I went for the annual writers’ conference.

To be honest, I didn’t really have a high opinion of the place — Crayton and I spent one afternoon there in 2007 and I remember feeling annoyed with all the English-speaking, the tourists in shorts, the expensive artesanía.

This time I went with a more open mind. I stayed at a beautiful bed and breakfast, Casa Luna, with one of my favorite girlfriends in the world. I took some cooking classes with the incomparable Marilau. (More on her later.) The city was much prettier than I remembered — probably the most well-preserved colonial Mexican town I’ve ever seen. The English-speaking didn’t bother me much. What bugged me more was constantly receiving flour tortillas instead of corn, because the waiters thought I’d like them more. (Flour tortillas are for the north. We eat corn in Central Mexico.)

One of my favorite snacks in San Miguel was the guacamaya, a chicharrón sandwich made on a bolillo roll. A very cool children’s book author I met, who happened to be a San Miguel native, told me about them. Apparently the sandwiches are quite popular in León.

I spotted a stand through the window of a car one afternoon and made the driver, a new friend, pull over.

I’d thought the salsa would be more like a torta ahogada, but it was much fresher, like a pico de gallo. It soaked into the chicharrón, creating this layer that was soggy in parts and crunchy in others. Somehow it tasted light, much lighter than the gringa al pastor I had the first night in town. (The gringa was awesome, by the way. But different.)

I may go back to San Miguel later this year for more cooking classes. If you’ve got any tips on interesting local foods, or if you know anything about guacamayas (like how they got their name!), I’d love to hear your comments. You can find more San Miguel food photos in my Picasa album.

Savory pumpkin and chorizo tamales

by

Remember those pumpkins I bought in Oaxaca? One was huge. (YUGE, as one of my former bosses used to say. I think she was from Houston.)

I didn’t even know what to do with so much pumpkin, it pains me to say. I made calabaza batida and a batch of pumpkin tamales with sage and thyme. Both were fine, but the recipes needed more tweaking. I baked some sliced pumpkin with tomatoes and parmesan, but it turned out… equis. Afterward I was kind of in a pumpkin-inspired funk. Can I really not come up with anything good to do with pumpkin?

Then I found a batch of leftover chorizo crumbles in the fridge.

Chorizo and pumpkin is not an unusual combination, but it was new to me. I sprinkled the meat on top of the squash and had a PB&J-type of epiphany. The sweetness! The saltiness! This was a combination you don’t just stumble on every day.

I already had corn flour and lard lying around, so I decided to give the pumpkin tamales another go. Used a mish-mash of leftover pumpkin in the fridge, and fresh chorizo that I bought at Mercado Medellín. I also added vinegar to my crumbles, because they’d been prepared that way in the leftovers, which were from a salad. I liked the tang.

When the tamales were done steaming, they were even better than the baked pumpkin I’d sprinkled with chorizo. In the steamer, the chorizo had turned soft and almost buttery in parts, like the little creamy bits of fat you get in a chicharrón prensado taco.

“This is good,” I said, after a few bites. Then, after a few more: “This is really good.” Mary Claire, who’d come over to graciously film me folding tamales, agreed. I think we both ate three.
…

Read More

Tips on making tamales, for beginners and/or perfectionists

by

Fresh corn husks, waiting to be filled with masa

I’m going to be honest with you: the idea of making tamales from scratch used to scare the heck out of me.

Even after I hosted my first tamalada in December 2009, I still felt like I had no idea what I was doing. What if I added too much masa? Too little? What if my tamales broke open and fell apart in the steamer? What if my masa turned out too dry? God forbid, what if I spent an entire afternoon making them and they weren’t any good?

A few weeks ago, I had a tamale breakthrough. It was during the Día de la Candelaria cooking course. Everyone was working quietly, divided into teams of two and three. I was scooping corn into probably my 20th tamal de elote when I realized… it didn’t really matter how much masa goes into the husk. Well, okay, it did — I couldn’t put so much that the masa oozed out. Outside of that, though, the tamal was going to steam no matter what. It would turn out fine.

This was a true epiphany for me: The tamal would behave responsibly. I just had to release control, and let it.

In that vein, here are a few tips on making homemade tamales, in case you’re still battling with the tamal like I was.

…

Read More

Homemade mini-gorditas de nata

by

In Mexico City, gorditas de nata refer to two things. They can be round, lightly sweet English-muffin type breads, sold at the markets in plastic bags. Or they’re dense, almost creamy cakes, served warm off the comal. “Nata” means clotted cream — it’s what rises to the top when fresh milk is boiled.

I prefer the comal version of gorditas de nata, but it’s not easy to find them in DF, at least not in my neighborhood. I saw a few stands pop up after midnight on Independence Day here and the smell was enough to make me want to buy a dozen right then and there. The aroma is strong and sweet, almost like yellow cake.

Nata is easy to find locally — the Friday Condesa tianguis sells it, and so do the Productos Oaxaqueños trucks. So last Friday I bought some, envisioning myself standing in front of my own hot comal studded with golden-brown gorditas.

I wanted to make my own recipe, but I wasn’t sure which ratios I should use. Was this a type of thick pancake? A biscuit? In the end, I used a recipe I found from Ana Paula Garcia. I liked that she included condensed milk. It made the gorditas sound rich.

The gorditas didn’t take long — I mixed my dough in the KitchenAid, rolled it out, and cut it into circles with a biscuit cutter. (Because we’re only two people in this house, and I’ve eaten way more sugar than I should lately, I made these smaller than what’s sold on the street.)

I grilled the discs on the comal until they were crisp, which took less than five minutes. One bite was exactly what I’d wanted: sweet, creamy, almost doughy.

A little bit of butter and a drizzle of honey, and Crayton and I were both licking our fingers. These would be great for breakfast. Or an afternoon snack with tea.


…

Read More

Concha Taste Test #15: Pastelería Suiza

by

Let me blow your mind for a second. In Mexico, there exists an item known as the whipped-cream filled concha.

One concha. Two halves. Whipped center.

It’s a concha sandwich. With sweet sugared cream for the filling.

I found these conchas at Pastelería Suiza, a bakery in Condesa known for its Rosca de Reyes cakes. The place is charming — it opened in 1942 — but I hadn’t been a fan, due to a mediocre pan de muerto I bought there a few years ago.

Recently, a local chef saw one of my business cards, which are printed with pictures of conchas. She mentioned that one of her staff members adored Pastelería Suiza’s conchas.

I tried twice, and failed, to arrive at Pastelería Suiza when the conchas were coming out of the oven. Finally today around 10:30 a.m., there they were: a tray of conchas lined up in a row, bellies bulging with cream. I bought one cream-filled and two plain, and waited while the cashier wrapped the package carefully in paper and twine. Taking it home, I felt a little bit like bursting into song.

She even wrapped the conchas with strips of cardboard — anti-smoosh protectors, if you will, ensuring that the rolls remained fluffy.

These conchas got an A+ for presentation alone. And I really, really wanted to like them.

However… the cream-filled conchas were too sweet. Mixing the whipped cream with sugar was overload — I felt like I was eating a Hostess cupcake. Plain whipped cream would’ve allowed the bread and topping to shine. (And not make me feel like I need to brush my teeth afterward.)

The plain conchas were the lightest I’ve tried in a long time. The roll sliced easily with my serrated knife, and it had just a whisper of orange blossoms, probably from the addition of orange-blossom water. Unfortunately the crumb was too dry. A bit more butter — not Matisse amounts, but just a wee bit more — would’ve been nice.

I’m still conflicted about whether adding more butter is true to the concha’s original history. I’d love to research early concha recipes, but I’m not sure they even exist. My copy of the Nuevo Cocinero Mexicano, originally printed in 1888, mentions conchas only in a savory context — the word referred to oyster shells and various ways to fill them.

Here’s my final rating on Pastelería Suiza. I’d eat the plain ones again, but they wouldn’t be my first pick.

Appearance: 5.
Taste: 3
Overall: 3

So where should I go next? Anyone have any ideas on where I can research panaderías in Mexico?

Gorditas de maiz quebrado in Querétaro

by

Crayton and I decided last-minute to go to Querétaro this weekend, with our friends Jon and Ale.

We booked our hotel the morning we left, so I didn’t have time to research where we’d eat. Thank goodness for the Querétaro marketing machine — at one of the tourism kiosks in the Centro Histórico, I found a small pamphlet decorated with cookies that listed markets, restaurants and some of Querétaro’s typical foods.

The gorditas de maiz quebrado sounded particularly interesting. They were fried discs made of coarsely-ground masa, stuffed with either chicharrón — in Querétaro it’s called “migajas” — or cheese. A wallop of lettuce went inside. Chilangos, by comparison, don’t eat lettuce in their gorditas. The masa is smooth, the same as tortilla masa. As an aside, there are endless varieties of gorditas in Mexico. Some are baked, some are fried, some are sweet. Ricardo’s dictionary devotes 2 1/2 pages to explaining their differences.

Per the cute Querétaro tourism booklet’s recommendation, we hit the Mercado de la Cruz in the Centro Histórico. Eventually we found Gorditas El Guero y Lupita.

It was a madhouse. Every seat at the medium-sized puesto had been taken, with people sitting along the bar and crowded onto benches. A queue snaked between the register and the fryer, while the owner — El Guero himself — scribbled orders on small pieces of paper. Customers who’d finished eating cried out for more — “Seven more gorditas de queso!” — and El Guero wrote down those orders too, in a messy script.

Equally impressive were the women making the gorditas, who grabbed scoops of masa and stuffed them with cheese and chicharrón, patted them thin, and tossed them into the fryer. They were focused and quick, shaping the masa for only a few seconds before moving onto the next palm-full.

The gigantic fryer

That's masa in the large bowl, and cheese and chicharrón (migajas) in the buckets


…

Read More