The Mija Chronicles

Mexican food and culture, on both sides of the border

Lesley Tellez

Pictures from a Christmas tamalada

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Six really cool women came over for my tamale-making party yesterday — four Americans, one Mexican, one Venezuelan. One of the Americans brought pizza dip. We also had raisin-walnut bread, cookies, a spread of cream cheese and red chile marmalade, and toasted pumpkin-seed dip.

Using fresh masa harina my friend Alejandra bought at a tortillería, which was much moister and fresher than the flour I bought last week at Mercado de la Merced….

… we mixed up a lard-laden tamale masa, fluffy like buttercream frosting.

We soaked corn husks in a big pot, removed them, squeezed them dry, and spread a layer of masa inside.

Added fillings: rajas con queso and salsa verde, chicken with green mole sauce, and tomato-cumin with shredded chicken. Then we rolled ’em up, and tied them closed with strips of corn husk.

We placed them in my steamer pot, which I’d filled partially with water and two 1-peso coins. The coins rattle in boiling water, so when they stopped rattling, we’d know to add more water. The tamales need constant steam in order to cook.

After about 90 minutes, they were done.

And man were they good. Better than my practice version. The masa was spongy and light, just like I’d hoped. We served them with homemade refried beans, boiled in my clay bean pot and then fried in a few tablespoons of lard. (You don’t want to know how much lard we went through yesterday.) And we had champurrado, made with Mexican chocolate I’d purchased in Pátzcuaro.

It was a perfect Christmas moment: friends, a bountiful table and a warm home. So warm, in fact, that the steam from the tamales had condensed on the windows. I can’t wait to do it again next year.

I’ll post the recipe for sweet tamales in the next few days. They were my faves, with cinnamon, sugar, pineapple, nuts and raisins. Yum.

High-class Mediterranean cuisine: Oca in Polanco

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Before I moved to Mexico City, Crayton and I went to fancy restaurants in Dallas about once a month. (Ah, the joys of two incomes!) I studied which restaurants were new and noteworthy, and we’d get dressed up, take a taxi, order a bottle of wine.

I figured I’d dive into the upscale restaurant scene here, but I haven’t. This is partly because the traditional Mexican food cannon interests me more. But also because: what if it’s not any good? In my experience, Mexico City restaurants have been inconsistent. It’s not worth it when you can get fresh, hot street food every day for a fraction of the price.

That said, on Tuesday, I ignored all my past behavior and booked a table at Oca, a new fancy Mediterranean restaurant in Polanco. Chilango gave it great reviews, and I figured: I’ll try just this once.
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A trip to Mercado de la Merced, and the search for a tamalera

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I’d been dragging my feet on buying a tamale steamer pot, called a tamalera, for weeks. It’s a big, bulky steel thing, bigger (I imagined) than a stock pot. I wasn’t entirely sure where to buy it. Or whether I’d be able to carry it home.

Part of me also feared the whole buying process, because I had no idea what I was doing. How do you say “four-chambered steamer” in Spanish? What did a tamale steamer even look like up-close? What if some random vendor knew I was a foreigner, and decided to rip me off?
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Live blogging: Stumbling my way through one dozen tamales

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This weekend I’m hosting a bunch of women for a tamalada, or tamale-making party. Seeing as I haven’t made tamales in like three years, and the last time was with a cooking course — when they chopped everything for me and cleaned up — I figured I should try a practice batch today, just to see how they turn out. And hell, since I’m doing this all by myself, why not live blog it?

I’ve got all my ingredients. Windows are open, as to diffuse any strange cooking smells. Hair is back. Apron, about to be tied on. Music, I need to choose. Other than that I’m ready to go.

Ooooh! Can you feel the excitement? What’ll happen? Will my lard be rancid, as a teensy weensy part of me thinks? (Because I purchased it from a plastic bucket, from a random dude at Mercado Merced.) Will I succumb to the little voice in my head telling me to toss in a handful of romeritos and mole as tamale filling, even though that’s not a typical Mexican Christmas tamale?

Will I eat all of my queso manchego before it makes it into the masa?

And how the heck long is this going to take, anyway?

Find out. Live tamale blogging starts now.
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Sweet potato salad with rajas, onions and oregano dressing

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I’m addicted to this salad. Seriously. I’ve made it maybe four times in the past two months, and each time, I’m scraping the bowl with my spoon and hoping that I have leftovers for the next day.

It’s a cinch to prepare. (Well, “cinch” meaning it takes about an hour with the chopping, but there’s no major cooking involved.) It comes from Rick Bayless’ Mexican Everyday, one of my go-to cookbooks since I’ve moved to Mexico. In the original version, he uses regular potatoes and flaked tuna. I’ve prepared it that way, but also with sweet potatoes, chicken instead of tuna, and no meat at all. They’re all fabulous.

My favorite version is with camote blanco. It’s a purple-skinned sweet potato with white flesh, and it’s not as sweet as the orange sweet potato. It balances perfectly with the tangy herbed vinaigrette. I wanted to take a picture of this salad, but Crayton had the camera, so you’ll have to settle for an iPhone shot.

Here’s the recipe. It pairs really well with a glass of white wine.
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A gourmet Mexico City food fair

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Slow Food Mexico is part of the larger, international organization Slow Food, which supports organic, sustainable eating around the world. Yesterday one of the Mexico chapters sponsored a gourmet food fair in Coyoacán.

Local restaurants and small-business owners from all over the country had set up dozens of items under a white tent: artisan mescal, Mexican wine, Querétaro and Jalisco cheeses, tamales with various fillings, fruit jams, dried and candied xoconostle, heirloom beans, seeds, fresh fish from Michoacán.

I wanted to eat it all, ALL ALL. But I settled for 60 pesos (about $4 USD) to taste three dishes. My friend Emily did the same, and we decided to share.

First up were the tamales, made by El Tajin Chef Adriana of Cafe El Popular in the Centro. The filling contained quelites, a dark, hearty leaf; nata and requesón, a type of mellow Mexican ricotta. It was served with a little olla of salsa. I took a picture before I got to the quelites, because I was too hungry to wait.

Then we tried a strawberry tamale, which had strawberries mixed directly into the masa, and a few bits of gooey strawberry pulp. Yum.

We tried trout from D.O., an upscale Mexico City restaurant. It came with a citrus syrup dotted with orange rind, a toss of pepitas, and a scoop of lentil-wild rice salad. Utterly divine.

Then there was the decadent gut-bomb, in a good way, of a turkey tamale wrapped in hoja santa leaves, doused in tomato sauce and topped with a dollop of nata. God. Can you imagine? It tasted as rich as it looked. I loved the idea of serving it in a cornhusk.

Update: Ruth of Alegria in Mexico says these were made by Gerardo Vazques Lugo of Nico’s restaurant. He’s also the Chapultepec Slow Food convivium leader, and one of the Sunday event’s main organizers, along with Alicia Gironella De’Angeli of El Tajin.

We also tried a wonderful selection of cotija cheeses, aged and crumbly, each sitting in its own little pool of marmalade. (The pineapple marmalade speckled with vanilla bean outshined them all, and I wanted to spoon it into my purse and take it home with me.)

In another aisle, a soon-to-open Condesa bakery called Acento had set up a basket brimming with concha rolls, muffins and chocolate croissants. I watched two people in a row walk by, gaze at the bread and murmur, “Qué bárbaro. Qué delicia!”

Bought a chocolate concha, and it was fine. A little dry. (I’m sticking to my belief that conchas must be tried within an hour or two of baking.)

At the end of the day, I came away with a package of fresh trout, a jar of tecojote marmalade from Michoacán, a bag of heirloom pinto beans, and my favorite, a lead-free clay bean pot, which I bought after being inspired by this refried beans post on Mexico Cooks.

I’m in love with my new pot, which is now sitting on top of my kitchen cabinets. It’s round and chubby and so cute. I plan to make some beans on Saturday, so I’ll definitely have to take a few pictures and show you.

Update: Forgot to mention that the beans and bean pot came from Xoxoc, a husband-and-wife team based in Hidalgo state that make wonderful xoconostle products, and also seek out small-batch bean producers in Mexico. They’ve provided beans to Rancho Gordo, the well-known heirloom bean producer in Napa, California. (Check out the New York Times article on Rancho Gordo here.)

Mailing off a Christmas present, Mexico City style

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How many stops does it take to mail off two Christmas presents from Mexico? I found out last week.

Click on the icons below for more info. (Hint: Start on the green house, and move clockwise, ending with the green push pin.)

[googlemaps http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=105662237355781038208.00047a3fd14f5530d9d86&ll=19.430132,-99.167173&spn=0.003541,0.00456&z=16&output=embed&w=425&h=350]

When a random Mexican dude offers to pick up the tab

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A few weeks ago, I had lunch with my new friend Mary Claire at La Moscota, a cool cantina in the Centro where the food is free if you order a few beers. We ordered sopa de médula and tostadas de picadillo and had a good time. When it came time to pay the check, the waiter removed the 100-peso bill I’d placed inside and said: “Te invitó.”

Me: “Huh?”

“Te invitó.”

I looked at Mary Claire. She looked as bewildered as me.

“I’m sorry,” I told the waiter in Spanish. “I’m a foreigner, and I don’t know what that means.”

“The man behind you wants to pay for you ladies.”

Whaa? This had never happened to me in Mexico. I didn’t want to turn around and see whom the waiter was referring to — that would be rude — so instead I looked helplessly at Mary Claire, and then back at the waiter.

“I’m sorry,” I told him again, in Spanish. “But this is the first time this has happened to me. If we accept, do we have to do something?”

“Nah.”

“But we should thank the guy, right?”

“If you want.”

His nonchalant attitude struck me as strange. I asked Mary Claire if she was cool with some random guy paying, and she said yes. I didn’t mind either. I could use that 100 pesos for a cab ride home.

So we said okay, and the waiter disappeared, and then it was time to leave. I turned around and saw two tables directly behind ours — one with two older men and a woman, and the other with three late 30s-ish men. I guessed it was the latter table. But what was I supposed to say? I eyed each of the men and they eyed me back. One in particular stared longer than the others. My brain scrambled for words, but all I could think of was: “Era…. tú?”

God, was that even grammatically correct?

The man slowly shook his head.

I had no idea what was going on, so I mumbled “gracias” and we left.

“I have no idea what just happened,” I told MC as we were leaving. She didn’t either.

Anyone out there know the proper response? I told Crayton about it later, and he said I should have just turned around and said, “Gracias, muy amable” to no one in particular. But was the waiter correct? If a random guy offers to pay your tab here, will he not be offended if you don’t pull up a chair and sit down? In the U.S., if a man offers to pay for a woman’s drink, 98 percent of the time it’s rude to not chit-chat with him a little bit. (Unless the guy is a complete jerk, or you’re already drunk and have no idea what you’re doing.)

Thoughts?

Hearty corn and oatmeal pancakes

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Last Friday morning, still snuggled in my bed, I suddenly had an intense desire for pancakes. But then I realized I had no flour. My rolling pantry (really a bunch of Elfa drawers from The Container Store) can only fit small packages of flour, and I’d used mine up to make these chocolate and ginger tarts. Whole wheat flour would’ve worked okay. But whole-wheat oatmeal pancakes… ugh, that sounded too dense. (Are you seeing what a picky person I am to live with?)

So I brainstormed alternative pancake flours. Garbanzo… no… semolina… no…. Maseca… hmmm. Yeah. Maseca is a corn flour that most people in Mexico use as a shortcut to make tortillas. I’d bought Maseca to make nicuatole, and it seemed like it was light enough to work in a pancake. To quote Crayton: What’s the worst that could happen?

Oatmeal and corn don’t sound like they go together, and I was expecting them to taste a little strange. But the pancakes actually turned out really well. They didn’t taste overwhelmingly of oatmeal, or of corn, instead rounding out into this generally hearty, grainy taste. I used a combination of plain yogurt and milk, which made them moist. And they were fluffy, too. I couldn’t have asked for anything more. Except maybe a mimosa.

Maple syrup seemed odd in this case, so I slathered them with butter and drizzled on honey. If you have any Maseca in your pantry that you’ve been wondering what to do with, this is a perfect recipe. I made them over the weekend for Crayton — okay, technically he made them, since I was on the phone with my mom — and they got his seal of approval.

Recipe below.
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