Lesley Tellez

The sad (and embarassing) state of The News

June 18, 2009 by Lesley Tellez

A few weeks ago word hit that The News, Mexico City’s longstanding English-language daily, had been bought by Grupo Mac, a company that publishes two Mexican newspapers. It was an ugly day: None of the News’ staff knew the sale was coming, and two-thirds of them were laid off in a single day. Fourteen were rehired, but most have since quit. Eight employees resigned this week, according to Mexico Reporter. Only two native English speakers remain.

I wouldn’t usually care so much about this — sadly, I’ve become kind of inured to the newspaper industry’s collapse, thanks to all the job-hemorrhaging going on in the U.S. — but the News has suffered a spectacular decline in quality. I used to enjoy their arts, city and world coverage, and the voices on their editorial page.

This, however, is a Reuters story that appeared in the paper today. A friend actually typed it out and forwarded it me because it’s so rife with translation errors, it’s almost laughable. (If you weren’t also cringing at the same time.) Remember, this used to be a good paper.

Scientists had modified genetically an odd Mexican salamander that the ancient believes of the Aztecs considerate a transformed god, in the hope of that its capacity to regenerate parts of its body someday help to people who have lost limbs by amputation.

This slimy little animal, about 15 centimeters length, crowned with some hairy gill [ed. note: WTF?], and with little eyes, as buttons, had become the best option for a lot of scientists, in spite of its capacity of regenerate its hurt extremities, jaws, skin, and parts of its brain and spine.

The salamanders can make regrow many parts of their bodies several times in his lifetime. -REUTERS

If you squint at the screen grab above, which I took just a few minutes ago, you’ll notice a headline mentioning how ICE agents “will boast arrest power” and the Lakers’ “unbelivable” win. Elsewhere on the site, there’s news of a possible meteor striking Nuevo Leon:

NL readies for hurricane season

The News   NUEVO LEON – Authorities in the northern state of Nuevo Leon announced an enhanced contingency plan to fron the upcoming hurricane season in the Gulf of Mexico, which has hit the state capital Monterrey very hard before.   Governor Jose Natividad González Parás headed the first meeting of the Hydro Meteor Contingency Committee for the 2009 tropical cyclone season.  

[snip]

“We are about to finish putting together the most complete High Risk Atlas that any other state in the nation has”, González said.

  He added that it is of vital importance to continue working with municipalities and the federal government to take preventive actions before a meteor strikes the area. 

I’m not just seeking to make fun here. It’s really, really sad that a formerly solid paper is now like a man who’s had his arms and legs cut off, and is walking around trailing blood everywhere.

It needs to either shape up, or shut down and save itself the misery. At this point I don’t know any English speakers who would read this paper and actually enjoy it.

A day trip to UNAM and Café Azul y Oro

June 17, 2009 by Lesley Tellez

Last week, in the spirit of Exploring Mexico Now That I Don’t Have a Full-Time Job, Alice and I took a trip to Ciudad Universitaria to see UNAM, the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

It’s considered among the largest universities in the Americas, with nearly 200,000 undergrad and grad students enrolled this past school year. Can you imagine? The place is huge.

They’ve also got a lot of really cool murals, and a new contemporary art museum called MUAC. (Which we reached by cab, because we couldn’t figure out how to take the free university shuttle.) It ended up being a neat day trip, though. We saw the famous Central Library mural created by Juan O’Gorman (pic above), and we wandered around and saw kids playing ping-pong and studying outside on bean bag chairs. We stopped at a cafeteria for a snack — a muy rico panela and avocado sandwich — and then hit MUAC, which ended up being this giant, peaceful breath of glass and steel.

We ate our real lunch at Café Azul y Oro, which I’ve been dying to go to. All the local magazines have hailed it as high-quality Mexican cuisine for a fraction of what you’d pay elsewhere. I loved that the place was casual (paper napkins; no AC), and the menu creative — my prehispanic corn-gelatin dessert was officially the highlight of the afternoon — but I’m not sure I’d make a special trip, especially considering it takes me an hour to get down there.

Definitely will eat there again next time I hit UNAM, though. Then hopefully then we can see the murals we missed, and the rogue auditorium that’s been taken over by students.

Lots of photos of UNAM, MUAC and Azul y Oro after the jump.
…

The night I made Crayton eat brains and grasshoppers

June 16, 2009 by Lesley Tellez

My yahoo email account got hacked into last night. I got everything sorted out in a few hours, but by that time I was dying for a beer, and something comforting and horrible for me.

First we tried Chili’s for American brews and queso. (For all the non-Texans out there: Queso is a processed cheese sauce made with Velveeta and Rotel. It’s several notches above Cheese Whiz on the taste hierarchy, but below queso fundido.) Unfortunately, as soon as we sat down, we were informed that Chili’s no longer carries queso. So instead I suggested we go Cantina Belmont, a place I’ve read about in my guidebook.

It’s supposed to be popular with local politicians, and I was expecting a dive-ish place with cheap beer and tacos. Oh no — this place had white tablecloths, and waiters who draped linen napkins on our laps. And… cue the drums… an item called salsa en molcajete, which involved the chef making salsa tableside. Like they do with guacamole in the States. Except, it’s freaking salsa.

So of course we had to order it, and the chef showed up at our table with about a dozen chilies and condiments in separate earthenware bowls.

Among them were charales, tiny fish often served in Patzcuaro; pine-nut sized chilies called pico de pajaro, and dried, fried grasshoppers, among other things. The chef described everything and then asked what I wanted.

I turned to Crayton. “Do you want grasshoppers?” I used the Spanish word, chapulines.

“Sure,” he said.

Surprised at his adventurousness, I nodded at the chef, and he ground up some grasshoppers in the molcajete. Then he added cascabel chilies, chiles de arbol, the pico de pajaros, a good helping of chopped garlic and onion, a few stewed tomatoes, a toss of sea salt and a glug of bottled water. It looked soo good.

He drizzled a bit onto two tortilla chips, and offered them to us. We tasted.

Ooooh. Smoky. Garlicky. Picoso, but not too much. And just a little sweet. I think it was the best salsa I’ve ever had. I told the chef it was perfect, and he nodded and walked back into the kitchen.

“So, can you believe there are grasshoppers in here?” I asked Crayton.

“What?”

“Grasshoppers. I asked and you said you didn’t mind.”

“Ohhh… I thought you said champiñones,” he said. Champiñones means mushrooms.

However, since he’d already tried the grasshoppers, which you really couldn’t taste anyway since they were ground into bits, he let me order a round of quesadillas — one with squash flowers, one with huitlacoche, or corn fungus; one with brains, and one plain. I thought he’d love the brains, since they were meaty and kind of gamey tasting. He pronounced them “an acquired taste.”

For his main dish, he was much more his meat-and-potatoes self. He ordered prime rib tacos. I had a shrimp and octopus cocktail.

A lonely, leftover flor de calabaza quesadilla:

We left happy and stuffed, and got our leftover salsa to go. I might go have some right now. 10 a.m. isn’t too early, right?

A lazy, noisy Sunday around the Centro Histórico

June 15, 2009 by Lesley Tellez

Sometimes I forget that Mexico City is an assault on the senses. Everything is loud — the cars honking, the parking attendants whistling, the branches of homemade brooms scraping the sidewalk, the peseros roaring down the street (they are the only thing that moves with urgency in this country), the vendors yelling about their latest deals.

In the air, odors layer upon odors: Grease, sizzling meat, car exhaust, dirt, garbage. Maybe urine, depending on if you’re walking through an empty section of a park. Sometimes you get stuck in a truly foul-smelling pocket of air, and all you can do is walk faster and hope that it goes away.

On Sunday, bleary-eyed after a late-night dominoes game with friends, Crayton and I went to breakfast at Sanborns at the Casa de los Azulejos in the Centro. The food there is average, but the inside looks like it hasn’t changed in 60 years, so it’s worth it. If you eat at the counter, they’ll serve you coffee in a little stainless steal creamer. It’s adorable.

Anyway, we couldn’t easily find a sitio cab afterward because of all the craziness of the Sunday cicloton, so we decided to walk back. This is what we heard while walking along this spot at Calle Hidalgo (it takes a second to load):

Falling in love with birria at La Polar

June 14, 2009 by Lesley Tellez

Birria is a spicy meat stew from Jalisco. It’s usually made with goat, but sometimes with lamb or mutton.

I’d always roped it into my “I’ll pass” category, along with pozole and menudo, which have never lit my fire for some reason. But then two days ago friends invited us to La Polar, a cantina near our house. It’s probably among the best-known places to get birria in the city, and it’s always recommended in guidebooks and local magazines.

So we went, and ordered tacos and avocado, and a few orders of birria. The menu had no description, so I was expecting meat wrapped in wax paper, like when you order carnitas in Quiroga. Instead it was a gigantic bowl of stew.

When I tasted it: LORD. The meat fell apart in my mouth, and the broth was spicy and chipotle-tinged. I wanted to slurp gulps of it. Instead I held back and picked at my tacos, since I wasn’t technically hungry, as I’d already had dinner like an hour before. (Did I forget to mention that? But sometimes you have to just eat when the opportunity presents itself, and worry about everything later. This is why my pants are getting tighter.)

La Polar also had live mariachis, and a table full of Mexicans singing at the top of their lungs. I loved it. Wish I would have brought my tape recorder, but alas, it was in my other purse. This gives you a good idea of what it was like, though:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GPsMIkGYxFk&hl=es&fs=1&rel=0&border=1]

On the way out, we saw mariachis playing foosball in the parking garage.

Not so scared of Montezuma anymore (and hoping he doesn’t smite me by saying so)

June 11, 2009 by Lesley Tellez

On my first visit to Mexico City in 2003, I didn’t eat any fruit or salads or street food because I was terrified of coming down with Montezuma’s Revenge. I didn’t even want to say the word, or think about it. Contracting… you-know-what… in a land where you can’t even throw your toilet paper in the commode? It sounded completely awful.

Now that I’ve suffered two bacterial infections and have learned the difference between “Montezuma’s Revenge Lite” and “intestinal hell,” I’m much more at peace with the idea of a little gastrointestinal stress as the price to pay to live here. Diarrhea happens. It’s a fact of life. This city has so much to offer in the realm of food and drink that you really can’t get mired down in the fear, because it’d take all the fun out of living here.

For instance, it’s pretty magical to eat a taco standing up and douse it with salsa from a plastic bucket, or to sample the homemade requesón (the Mexican version of ricotta cheese) from the lady at the tianguis. Or to drink a homemade agua de mango, or sip mezcal inside the fading, formerly opulent Bar La Opera, where Pancho Villa once rode in on his horse and fired a shot into the ceiling. I’ve never gotten sick once by doing any of those things.

Of course, one has to exercise caution. But I’ve slipped on that lately. I now brush my teeth with tap water, like everyone else I know. I disinfect only certain items from the tianguis, such as lettuce and tomatoes. Apples and carrots go straight from the market into my mouth. And it’s fine. I even bought chorizo verde from a tianguis dude last Sunday and fried it up last night. Who wants green sausage and eggs.

It’s just funny how things change. We’ve been here barely five months. My dad got a little sick when he came to visit last week, because his stomach wasn’t used to the spicy food. I tried to calm him down by telling him that at least he didn’t have giardia or salmonella.

“If you had that, you’d really be in bad shape,” I told him. “You’re going to be fine. It’ll clear up in a few days.” It did.

So close to grilling, yet so far

June 11, 2009 by Lesley Tellez

After spending a week trying to fill our propane tank — and finally succeeding! — it turns out we have a leak on our grill hose.

Crayton tested everything last night using the method called for in the manual (dish soap/water mixture on the hoses). Sure enough, bubbles appeared near one of the metal fittings.

EEEEEEEEEGGGGGGH. [That’s me cursing the day the grill was born.]

Since we’re still under warranty, he’s going to call customer service in the U.S. and see if they can send us a replacement part. Meanwhile, the little grill sits under our lona and waits. Probably snickering at us.

Mexican chocolate tofu pudding with homemade churros

June 10, 2009 by Lesley Tellez

I’ve been dreaming about Mexican chocolate tofu pudding since Crayton forwarded me the New York Times recipe a few weeks ago. It was my turn on our recipe exchange, so I ditched my Mexican chocolate ice cream idea and told everyone I was making dairy-free pudding. A few people were like, “Wait…. what?” None of us are vegan.

Last night, we feasted before the pudding-making even started. Alice whipped up a batch of pot stickers. Julie brought sweet bread from a Japanese bakery. Tricia brought mini-weenies in barbecue sauce, Joy H. brought spicy guac, and Jesica and Joy V. brought wine. (Which later resulted in extremely blurry churro pictures.)

Jesica graciously offered to let us use two chocolate bars she’d bought in Tabasco. She crushed them on my molcajete….

… and then we melted them in the microwave. They smelled like fresh-baked brownies.

Everything went into the blender, with a box-and-a-half of tofu and some spices.

The result was luscious. It was a creamy, thick, perfect pudding, that required all of five minutes on the stove.

This means a lot to me, because a few months ago I experienced the great Chocolate Pudding Disaster of 2009. I spent hours melting chocolate and worrying about the scalding the milk, only to end up with chocolate soup. I almost swore off chocolate pudding forever after that. But tofu, that wonderful, square-headed, plain block of soy, has saved me.

The churros weren’t as easy. I used a recipe from my 1944 copy of Elena’s Famous Mexican and Spanish Recipes, which called for a simple flour-and-water dough. Unfortunately, the tip on my cheap pastry bag came off as we were piping the dough into the oil. (Eeee!) We rigged up a Ziploc bag with duct tape, which worked marvelously. But piping dough got old after awhile. I was hot and sweaty. My house has no air conditioning.

Next time I might just buy churros from the dude on the corner.

The combination, when it was all done, was to die for, so it’s really worth having them both together.

Recipes and cooking notes after the jump.
…

Could it really be…?

June 9, 2009 by Lesley Tellez

The gas guy buzzed at 7:35 this morning, as promised. Crayton exchanged his tank for ours… and our tank was full. The dude managed to fill it up!

Now we just gotta try it out. No time for grilling this evening — I’ll be making Mexican chocolate tofu pudding and churros with the girls — but maybe tomorrow.

I really hope our house doesn’t blow up when we try to use this thing. Crayton swore over and over that he told the guy propane.

My dad’s favorite spots in Mexico City

June 8, 2009 by Lesley Tellez

Gotta hand it to my dad. He lives in San Diego and drives a convertible, but he decided to spend his vacation in a chaotic megapolis with me. It was his first time here.

It took him a few days to get used to the rhythm, but he ended up embracing the chaos here. He tried arrachera tacos and beef brains, and went with me to the tianguis. He took the Metro and the pesero. He even learned how to cross the street like a Chilango… kind of.

Yesterday he followed my lead when I ran across the street as the light was changing, and scolded me once we got to the other side. “Lesley! You can’t just run across the street in front of cars like that. The laws of physics are the same as they are in the U.S.!”

Unfortunately, he also suffered from stomach ailments, so maybe no arrachera tacos next time.

Here are a few pictures of some of the spots he liked best:

Coyoacán

Drinks at Condesa DF. I’d never been here before, but sipping a Jamaica Margarita on their rooftop terrace is now one of my favorite things to do.

A tour of the Centro Histórico with More Mexico, where we:

Ate fantastic buttery sweet bread at the original Sanborns, inside the Casa de los Azulejos. (Or…er… I ate it, anyway.)

Checked out the cool national mail palace, which is a functioning post office.

Learned about the history of Mexican art at the Museo Nacional de Arte.

Teotihuacán

The view from Chapultepec Castle. “A must-see for any visitor,” my dad says. “To get a true picture of the size of the city, you need to go up there and look.”

Thanks for a great visit, Dad.

« Previous Page