Lesley Tellez

What it means to be home

June 17, 2013 by Lesley Tellez

The New York City skyline at dusk, captured from the Hudson River in April 2013.

Yesterday, my friend Fany and I were trying to make plans to hang out, and I told her I’d be in Mexico for the next two weeks. “Again?” she said. “You know, you haven’t arrived.”

She was right: I hadn’t arrived. I’d moved to New York at the end of January, but I’d been gone in Mexico twice already (more than a month in Mexico, if you counted up the days), in San Diego once, and in Portland and San Francisco. Being in New York still felt like an extended business trip. I didn’t feel yet like I was here to stay.

I kept repeating that little sentence in my head — I haven’t arrived — and it made me feel better about this anxiousness I’d been feeling lately, this need to establish myself right away, to do something big and important now. Arriving in Mexico City, I’m sure I’d felt the same way, but my freshest memories were of how routine and comfortable everything was.

I’m curious: when you moved to a new city for the first time, what little things made you feel like you’d truly arrived? How long did it take you to really feel like you were home?

Concha taste test #17: Rosetta Bakery

June 7, 2013 by Lesley Tellez

The conchas at Mexico City’s Rosetta bakery are quilted in dark, chocolate-sugar diamonds. The rolls are dense but somehow airy; yeasty, but not too chewy or sweet. On a recent visit, I gobbled almost en entire chocolate concha before my coffee had even arrived.

The secret to these conchas is slow fermentation and a small amount of yeast, which creates a soft, airier crumb, says chef and owner Elena Reygadas, who was hanging out at the bakery recently and answered a few of my questions.

“We don’t put a lot of butter,” Reygadas says. “We want to respect the Mexican village-style bread.”

Mexico City is undergoing a bakery renaissance, and Rosetta — a sister establishment to the Rosetta Italian restaurant a block away — is among those leading the pack. The narrow, warm Colonia Roma cafe invites you to sit and stay awhile. Creamy subway tile covers the walls, and fresh-baked loaves stack neatly inside wooden crates. (One of those loaves is pan de pulque, which is a rare find in Mexico City.) Croissants and chocolatínes mingle in a glass display case near the entrance, along with bulbous popovers bursting out of their little accordion-shaped paper cups.

The overall effect is sort of European. But due to the small, sausage-shaped size of the place — the bakery was once the driveway and garage of a fancy Roma mansion — it’s also quirky, pleasantly chilango.

Get there by 8 a.m. on a weekday to snag one of the spot’s few coveted seats and to try the conchas. (At 10 a.m. one morning, they’d already disappeared.)

The shop’s vanilla conchas also contain real vanilla bean. Reygadas admitted it was a little expensive, but I’m hoping she continues to spoil her customers.

A concha from Rosetta bakery in Mexico City

Rosetta Bakery (the sign says simply “Panadería)
Colima 178-A, at the corner of Orizaba
Colonia Roma

Read about my other Concha Taste Tests in Mexico City here.

Pati Jinich on Mexico City, her new cookbook and love for her native cuisine

May 28, 2013 by Lesley Tellez

Photo by Michael Ventura

Pati Jinich, a Mexican chef with a television show on PBS, almost spent her career as a Latin American policy analyst. (Which is crazy, because she’s excellent on TV: warm, charismatic, approachable.)

Then, about eight years ago, while working for a Washington D.C. think tank and researching a paper on Peru’s Sendero Luminoso, she found her mind wandering to ceviches. She told herself: “This is nuts.”

She quit her job and entered L’Academie de Cuisine in Gaithersburg, Maryland, where she earned a degree in Intensive Culinary Skills. In March, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt published her first cookbook, Pati’s Mexican Table, which carries the same name as her television show.

The book combines personal stories from Jinich’s life — growing up in Mexico City, living as a newlywed in Dallas, and later, putting food on the table for her husband and three boys in Washington D.C. — with the nuts-and-bolts of Mexican cuisine.

She describes the flavors of common dried and fresh chiles, and emphasizes that not all Mexican food is spicy. The cookbook also includes lesser-known recipes from classic Mexico City restaurants, such as Bellinghausen and El Bajio.

Pati and I have followed each other on Twitter for years, and we recently got a chance to meet in person. Over coffee in Chelsea, she told me why she wanted to do a cookbook, what jumpstarted her love for Mexican cuisine, and where she likes to eat when she’s home.

Here’s an excerpt from our conversation, which I’ve edited for length and clarity.
…

A gringa in Mexico City

May 17, 2013 by Lesley Tellez

This morning, at a coffee stand inside the Terminal del Norte bus station in Mexico City:

Me: I’d like a cafe americano with milk, please.

Young woman: We don’t sell an americano with milk. You can get a black coffee or a cappuccino.

Me: Can’t I just get a small amount of milk in my coffee?

YW: No.

Me: What if I paid extra? It’s only a very small amount of milk that I want.

YW: We don’t sell americanos with milk.

Me: What if I paid for a cappuccino? And you could give me an americano with just a little milk in it? Then I would be paying for extra milk, because I want less than you put in a cappuccino.

*She looks at me doubtfully.*

Me: So I would be paying you more money. You would win.

YW: That’ll be 21 pesos. *(Yelling to her compañera)* She wants an americano with milk.

***

A few minutes later, I watch as the barista adds exactly one-half cup of milk to my coffee, the same amount she used in other customers’ cappuccinos.

So much for wanting, as I told the girl in Spanish, “un chorrito de leche, nada más.”

The glory of the Mexican breakfast

May 8, 2013 by Lesley Tellez

Guisados for breakfast in the Centro Histórico.

Breakfast in Mexico City is one of my favorite meals. Usually it’s a fruit plate or a glass of freshly squeezed juice, followed by a heavy, spicy, substantial dish that will keep you satiated until the 3 p.m. lunch hour. Pancakes in DF can be a dinnertime snack.

The most typical Mexican breakfasts offer a lovely array of textures: the half-crunch, half-sog of a perfectly executed plate of chilaquiles; the spongy curl of a piece of chicharrón drowned in salsa verde, the toothsome bite of a grilled cactus paddle paired with a slab of queso panela. Everything comes with a stack of hot corn tortillas, either wrapped in a cotton towel or a straw basket. Breakfasts at restaurants and fondas can sometimes stretch into two hours, but no one ever hurries you.

Here in New York I’ve been eating muffins or oatmeal in the mornings, which has been fine, because you know, es lo que hay. But I’m totally missing the presence of chilaquiles, cecina, huevos divorciados, and those thick, dreamy bean sauces they used to serve in the cafeteria at my old gym.

Here are some of my favorite Mexican breakfast photos from my archives. Hope you’ll enjoy them as much as I do.

Please feel free to share your favorite Mexican breakfast (and why) in the comments!

Eggs, salsa and a rice tamal, at Cafe Raíz in Mexico City

Verdolagas con espinazo en salsa verde, from Fonda La Margarita in Mexico City.

Enchiladas and tasajo, eaten in Santa Catarina Minas, Oaxaca. (This is on my top breakfasts of all time list.)

Chilaquiles with chile pasilla salsa, from Buenas Migas in Mexico City.

A noir-ish plate of chilaquiles rojos, from Café Zena in San Miguel Chapultepec, Mexico City.

Huevos divorciados, anyone?

Grilled queso panela and nopal, from Fonda La Garufa in Condesa, Mexico City.

The chilaquiles I made recently at home in New York.

The chilaquiles I made at home in New York.

Quick chipotle salsa in Puebla York

May 3, 2013 by Lesley Tellez

Since moving to New York, Crayton and I have suffered from intense salsa deprivation.

It took me awhile to start making my own because I kept looking for chile de árbol, the go-to red table salsa ingredient in Mexico City. But the chiles de árbol in Queens always looked stemless and old and sad. The best-looking dried chile in New York, hands down, is the chipotle — a fact no doubt tied to the large numbers of Poblano immigrants who live here. (Qué viva Puebla York!)

The chipotle is hugely popular in Puebla. It’s served in salsa with tacos árabes, and made into sweet-and-spicy rajas that are then slathered on tortas. Fondas serve little bowls of chipotle en escabeche to accompany any meal. The chipotle is a dried jalapeño that’s been smoked using mesquite, and actually the smoking technique was developed in Puebla in prehispanic times, says Alonso Hernández, the chef at Puebla’s well-known Mesón Sacristía restaurant and an intense researcher of Mexican food. The jalapeño itself is native to Veracruz.

The chipotle is spicier than an ancho or guajillo and measures about two inches long, with blackberry-colored skin. In New York they’re often sold loose in the produce section of the supermarket. Whole Foods in Midtown East carries them (I bought four for 30 cents), and so does Met Food in Jackson Heights on 37th Ave. The Mexican bodegas I’ve visited in Corona and Elmhurst tend to offer huge bags of them, which works if you’ve got space to store them.

Making this salsa — a fresh salsa that requires no charring or boiling — takes about 10 minutes, if you don’t count the part where the chiles are soaking in water. For this batch, I seeded the chiles (you don’t have to, if you want more heat), then soaked them, then zapped them in the blender with two very ripe tomatoes and a small amount of onion and garlic.

The result was smoky and garlicky and tart, and, after the addition of some salt, wholly excellent with the homemade spinach empanadas I’d made. (Is it possible that the salsa overshadowed the empanadas? Totally.)

I’ve heard lots of people already complain about finding good Mexican food in New York, but it’s possible to make your own at home, using ingredients you can find at most grocery stores. If the Poblano Yorkers can do it, you can, too.

Quick Chipotle Salsa

Note: What’s known as the chipotle in New York is often called a mora in Mexico City. The rougher, leathery chipotle meco is a little harder to find at the bigger supermarkets here, but you can get it at the smaller bodegas at the edge of Jackson Heights and in Corona. If you use the meco, the salsa won’t be as hot — Hernández says the meco is actually boiled first before it’s smoked, which removes some of the heat.

This salsa keeps in an airtight container for at least 5 days.

Ingredients

4 chipotle chiles (see note)

1 heaping tablespoon diced onion

1 garlic clove, roughly chopped

2 small tomatoes, cut into quarters (I used hothouse tomatoes, similar to the ones seen here)

1/2 teaspoon plus one pinch salt

Directions

1. Using kitchen shears or a knife, make an incision in each chipotle and scoop out the seeds. Fill a small bowl with hot water and add chiles. Let soak for 15 minutes, until skin is plump and pulpy. Once the chiles are fully hydrated, don’t discard your chile water just yet, in case you might need it later.

2. Chop chiles roughly. Place onion, garlic and chopped chiles in a blender jar and pulse a few times. Add half of tomatoes and pulse once or twice. Then add the remaining tomatoes and pulse again a few times, until salsa is a little smoother, but still with some texture. (If you over-blend it’s not the end of the world.) If you like your salsa thinner, now is the time to add in a tablespoon of that chile water you saved.

3. Pour salsa into a bowl and taste, just so you have an idea of what this tastes like without salt. Then add your salt to taste — I thought it was perfect with 1/2 teaspoon plus a pinch. Serve immediately.

A Queens gem: Inthira Thai Market in Woodside

April 29, 2013 by Lesley Tellez

Inthira Thai Market in Woodside, Queens

Until yesterday, I’d never smelled a handful of kaffir lime leaves.

The ones I smelled were frozen, sheathed in a little plastic bag at the Inthira Thai Market in Woodside. Event through plastic the smell was unforgettable: sharp and green and sour like lime juice, with the flowery perfume of a lemon and maybe the grassiness of a curry leaf. I inhaled deeper and actually moaned a little, which might’ve scared my friend Vikas but I think made the Thai lady at the cash register smile.

The market, just a few subway stops from my house, had other goodies. Little cans of curry pastes with colorful labels lay stacked on a shelf, above packages of Mama-brand instant noodles that Vikas, who grew up in Bangkok, swore were loads better than Top Ramen. The freezer case had galangal in both chunks and thin slices, and the back fridge carried a half-dozen varieties of basil with names like “holy” and “Thai lemon.” They’d run out of most of them.

For nearly every item I pointed at, the Thai shopkeeper had an answer about how they’re used in Thai cooking, or what the item tasted like. Very few people have been this friendly to me so far in New York, particularly people in grocery stores. (My representative experience so far has been when I asked the cashier at my local Chinese market about the banana leaf-wrapped bundles near the register. She told me they were not banana leaves, and that was that.)

The shopkeeper chatted with my friend Vikas in Thai and in English, and she even gave me a bag of Thai lemon basil to try, just to see if I liked it. “Make sure you take off the brown leaves,” she advised. “And don’t eat the stems.”

I bought some massaman curry paste (interestingly one of the few Thai curries that does not call for bamboo shoots, she told me) and a few cans of coconut milk, as well as some sweets made with banana, coconut and palm sugar. I also bought Singha beer and chicharrones sealed in a Ziploc bag. The market’s open late every night — I’m sure I’ll be back.

Inthira Thai Market
64-04 39th Avenue (a few blocks from the 69th Street 7 Train Stop)
Open Mon-Thurs 10 a.m. to 9 p.m., and Fri-Sun 10 a.m. to 10 p.m.
(718) 606-2523

Curry pastes at Inthira Market in Woodside, Queens

Dried Mama-brand noodles

Kaokneaw ping with taro, one of the prepared foods available for sale at Inthira Thai Market in Queens.

Mango season in Mexico City

April 19, 2013 by Lesley Tellez

Mangoes at a market in Oaxaca.

Just wanted to steer your attention to this quick piece I wrote for Culinary Backstreets, about mango season in Mexico City and what it means to me now that I’ve developed a mango allergy. Does this mean no more mango pico de gallo for me? Yes, probably. At least I still have avocados.

I’ve seen mangoes a little bit here in New York, but it’s not an explosion like it is in DF. That said, I’m super excited to experience all the other great things about spring and summer here, like fresh tomatoes, corn and peaches. My local green market opens in June.

Mexican foods I love: Tlacoyos

April 5, 2013 by Lesley Tellez

Tlacoyos are small, flattened masa pockets that are stuffed with either beans, cheese or fava beans and then grilled on a comal. They’re a Mexico City street snack made almost exclusively by women, and usually you can find them near any subway station, market or tianguis.

A well-made tlacoyo has a crisp exterior, creamy innards and a tang from a drizzle of salsa and a handful of diced nopales on top. They’re also healthy, since most tlacoyeras don’t add oil.

I have enthused about them before. But I’m not sure if I’ve ever made it clear that tlacoyos are actually my favorite Mexico City street snack. A freshly made tlacoyo is — as I have just learned in my slightly vulgar Mexican slang dictionary, purchased in the Centro Histórico — chingonométrico.

Here are some of my favorite tlacoyo photographs that I’ve taken over the years.

A three-bite sized tlacoyo, on an Eat Mexico tour.

A piece of a bean tlacoyo topped with green salsa, on an Eat Mexico tour.

A tlacoyo de requesón.

A tetela, similar to a tlacoyo but smaller and triangle-shaped. We made this one in Oaxaca.

A tetela, similar to a tlacoyo but smaller and triangle-shaped. We made this one at Susana Trilling’s cooking class in Oaxaca.

Folding tlacoyos — these were called “tlayoyos” — at the Mole Festival in Puebla in 2012.

Tlacoyos filled with alberjón, a type of garbanzo, and avocado leaf, at the Mole Festival in Puebla 2012.

Small blue-corn tlacoyos, also at Puebla’s Mole Festival.

Tlacoyos cooked on a clay comal at the Corn and Nixtamal Fair near Xochimilco, Mexico City.

A tlacoyo from the same Corn & Nixtamal Fair.

Tlacoyos from Tlaxcala.

My very own homemade tlacoyos, made in Madrid, Spain in the summer of 2012.

A quick visit back to Mexico City

March 28, 2013 by Lesley Tellez

Sunset in the Col. Condesa, Mexico City. Photo taken by me in March 2013.

I’d been kind of nervous about visiting Mexico City so soon after moving to New York.

Five weeks in a new place is not long enough to put down roots, and a glimpse of my former life — a two-week glimpse amid gorgeous weather — might unravel the fragile routine I’d built for myself. I had already come to grips with the icy Queens wind (the secret is a warm coat with a hood), and the long hike up the subway steps (burns calories), and the fact that we can’t go out as much because everything costs too much money.

When the plane was about to land in Mexico City, I already felt like I was home. I snapped a picture of the lumpy, jeweled blanket of the city and posted it on Facebook. At Puerta 9 inside the airport, that first whiff of sewer air hit me just like it always does in that spot. (Good ol’ aguas negras.) That night at Ruth’s house, my nose promptly stuffed up from the dust and particles in the air like it used to, too. (I hadn’t missed that.)

Before I went to bed, the tamales oaxaqueños guy sang his little jingle outside the window. I really wanted to exchange a knowing glance with Crayton, but he hadn’t come on this trip because he had to work.

The next morning was eerie. I wore the same flowered shirt I’d worn in my old life, and rubbed the same moisturizer on my face. I looked in the mirror and the same tired face stared back at me. What had changed?

I walked to my cooking class just like I had a million times before, and everything was the same but different somehow. The morning sun shone harsher, more flourescent. The food stands looked too quiet, and the drivers weren’t zany enough. Then I realized the biggest thing missing was Crayton. He wouldn’t be there that night when I got home.

After class I walked for about 20 minutes, trying to find a medical supply shop that would sell me a wrist splint. On the way there, I remembered how many times I’d tripped on the cracked sidewalks, and how slowly people walked, and how they took up the entire width of the sidewalk even if they were only three people. Other details I hadn’t noticed much when I lived there jumped out at me: kids maybe five years old sitting on the sidewalk and begging for change. An old woman carrying a bulging rebozo on her back who asked me for “una caridad.” The hordes of young office workers lining up outside Banamex, waiting to use the ATM.

It took me less than 24 hours to realize that I didn’t miss Mexico City as much as I thought I would. Not because New York was necessarily better, but because I’d been so comfortable in DF for so long. Maybe for that reason alone, it had been time to move on, and the universe knew before I did. (When we originally found out we were moving, I cried for three days.)

Arriving to New York in the dead of winter required a level of patience — mostly with myself — that I didn’t think I possessed. One afternoon I found myself blinking back tears on the subway platform just because I was so overwhelmed with living out of a suitcase, being constantly cold, and not knowing anything about the trains or how long it took to get anywhere. I’d gotten through that okay. Once I peeled back those layers, I actually liked New York and my new life.

I spent the rest of the week feeling blissful about Mexico City, seeing friends, eating tacos and tlacoyos, riding my bike, drinking mezcal. The happiest part was knowing that I had a home and a husband to return to, and a city where I’m still finding my way.

Some more pictures: