The Mija Chronicles

Mexican food and culture, on both sides of the border

Lesley Tellez

Sixteen months in Mexico, and how far we’ve come

by

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

by

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.


…

Read More

The growing popularity of Mexican wine

by

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.
…

Read More

So, in case I didn’t make this clear…

by

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

by

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&]

…

Read More

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

by

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!

Where to eat in Mexico City: Charro

by

Some of my favorite restaurants in Mexico City are the ones that take traditional Mexican ingredients and turn them on their heads. For instance, Mexicans have traditionally eaten amaranth grain as a sort of sweet snack. But why not take amaranth and use it in a savory dish? Heck, why not go the other direction and take a quesadilla and roll it in sugar?

It’s surprising how few Mexico City restaurants veer in this type of direction. They’re either entirely traditional, or Mexican-French, or Mexican-something-else. Nothing wrong with those things, but it can be an absolutely inspiring experience to dine in a place that opens your mind a bit.

Charro in Condesa is exactly this type of restaurant — creative and fun, and playing with the boundaries of what exactly we should consider as Mexican food. The restaurant opened in December on Vicente Suarez street, under the direction of chef Daniel Ovadía.
…

Read More

The Top 10 Tips to finding an apartment for rent in Mexico City

by

Apartment-hunting is never easy, but as a foreigner living in a different country, it’s pretty darn taxing.

Over the past three months, I’ve encountered quite a few issues, most of them in the language-and-culture department. Do I use tú with the broker, or usted? How do you say “I want to put a deposit down to hold this apartment”? (I eventually figured out that to “hold” an apartment you’re interested in is to “apartarlo.”) And then there’s the case when the broker’s values might conflict with your own.

Since Joan recently asked for help in the comments, I thought I’d share some of the things I’ve learned with you, in case anyone else happens to be in the same situation. After the jump: Lesley’s Top 10 Tips to Renting an Apartment in Mexico City.
…

Read More

Deliciously smutty huitlacoche quesadillas

by

While in Xochimilco a few weekends ago, I picked up some fresh huitlacoche from a stand outside the market. Huitlacoche means “corn smut” in English (ha!), and it’s a fungus that grows on corn in blue-black, mushroomy clumps. People like to call huitlacoche “the Mexican truffle,” but I’m not entirely sure how true that is, given that corn smut is pretty cheap and eaten by the mouthful, while truffles are insanely expensive and shaved onto fancy pasta dishes. Anyway.

I’ve had huitlacoche quesadillas at markets in Mexico City, and to be completely honest, I haven’t always liked them. Sometimes they have an intensely earthy taste, like mushrooms on steroids. And they can be very slimy. The good news is that huitlacoche is actually packed with vitamins, according to a recent Associated Press report. It has the same types of soluble fibers as oatmeal, the same ones that have been found to lower cholesterol.

I had never bought fresh huitlacoche, because I wasn’t totally in love with the taste. But they looked so pretty sitting on the Xochimilco tabletop. They had this kind of iridescent bluish color, and they were these round, spongey tufts. I just wanted to touch them. Ruth, ever my culinary door-opener, told me huitlacoche was easy to cook — just mix it with some onion, corn kernels and chicken stock, and simmer for about 20 minutes.

So that’s exactly what I did.

And Ruth was right — it was easy.

By the way, there are lots of debates going on right now about whether “fast and easy” is the death knell of American culinary culture. I tend to believe that fast and easy shouldn’t be the top priority in the kitchen; the most important rule is to cook with fresh ingredients. So yes, this dish was fast, but my first rule was met: I had fresh huitlacoche and fresh corn.

I heated some oil in a skillet, and then added the onion, smut, corn kernels and stock. Simmered everything for about 30 minutes, until the plump bits of huitlacoche had deflated a bit and turned black and slimy. Added more stock whenever the mixture looked too dry.

It looked like of like a pile of shredded, motor-oil soaked rags when it was done. (Oily rags dotted with yellow corn.) But the taste was unlike any other huitlacoche I’ve tried. It was only delicately earthy, not knock-you-over-the-head earthy. Moreover, combined with the cheese, it was almost decadent — a soft, cheesy pile of vegetables, whispering of mushrooms and corn. Gave some to Crayton for lunch two days in a row — a rarity for me, because I like to mix it up — and he loved it.

Huitlacoche is apparently very abundant in Mexico’s rainy season; for more recipe ideas, check out the wonderful Karen Hursh Graber at MexConnect. My simple little recipe is below. This is great as a light dinner, or as an appetizer.
…

Read More

Xochimilco’s Isla de la Muñecas

by

Xochimilco’s Isla de la Muñecas is pretty famous — it’s been featured on Anthony Bourdain’s show, and it’s in all the Mexico guidebooks and magazines. I hadn’t been until last Saturday, because the tour guides always told me it was at least a six-hour boat ride. (Six hours? Eh. No thanks.)

Now I know that when traveling to Xochimilco, especially on a sunny day, an eight-hour boat ride is really the way to go. You can laze on the deck of the boat and stare at the sky. You can order at least two rounds of esquites (lunch and dinner) instead of one. And you get to see the tranquil part of the canals, free of all the partying chilangos and their aviator sunglasses and blaring boomboxes.

The isla, which translates to “doll island,” is about three hours from the Nativitas dock. The story goes that around 50 years ago, a young girl drowned just off the island’s edge. After her death, the island’s sole resident, a farmer, began hanging dolls in the trees to ward off evil spirits. The number of dolls grew over the years and now the island is filled with them — heads hanging from trees, arms suspended from wires.

There’s also a museum and a small bar there, too, where you can learn about the history and sip a tequila shooter.

It’s eerie stuff. More pictures and a few helpful Xochimilco boat-ride tips below…
…

Read More