The Mija Chronicles

Mexican food and culture, on both sides of the border

Recipes

Swiss chard pesto, with pumpkin seeds and queso añejo

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One of the funny things about living in Mexico City is that it’s tough to find basil here. The big bunches of fresh Genovese basil don’t really exist — I’ve seen them once in two years, at the Mercado El 100.

We also don’t get a large variety of year-round greens. We’ve got spinach and chard, and quintoniles and quelites in the rainy season. But I feel a pang in my heart whenever I hear Americans talking about kale, broccoli rabe and collards. Oh well. We’ve got mamey and drippy, juicy manila mangoes, and they don’t.

The point is: I’m always looking for new ways to prepare my old chard-and-spinach standbys. A few weeks ago, I saw a recipe for swiss chard pesto in Sunset magazine. How perfect! Why hadn’t I ever thought of that before?

(You may be asking what the heck I’m doing thumbing through Sunset magazine when I live in Mexico City. My mom, who lives in Washington, occasionally buys it for me. She subscribed when I was a kid, and the magazine still reminds me of all the things I love about California — the sunshine, the fresh produce, the constant promise of eating dinners outside. Mexico feels like that at times.)

I ended up making Sunset’s pesto recipe a half-dozen times, Mexicanizing the ingredients where possible. I swapped out the walnuts for pine nuts and then pumpkin seeds, and the parmesan for queso añejo. I also added more garlic, because there’s never enough for me. Although I will definitively tell you that five cloves is too much. Aack.

All of the pestos were pretty great: the pine-nut version was creamier and nuttier than other pestos I’ve tried, while the pumpkin seed-añejo was slightly more crumbly, salty and sharp. (I didn’t make it with walnuts, because those are in season only once a year here.) Drizzling the pesto over steamed chayote was just about perfect, even though the entire thing was green. I also bought some beet pasta from a little shop near Mercado San Juan, which made for a colorful purple-and-green dinner. Crayton said it looked like Mardi Gras.

Here’s the recipe, in case you’re looking for something quick to make for dinner. I may even try it with epazote, which is growing like a weed outside my window.

Swiss Chard Pesto
Adapted slightly from Sunset Magazine
Serves 4 with sauce left over

Note: Don’t feel hemmed in by the amount of chard you use. The original recipe called for two cups, but I didn’t want to be bothered with measuring the leaves, so I just started using the entire bunch. You could also save the stems for a soup or to chop and stew into a taco filling later, with some tomatoes and spinach.

Ingredients

1 bunch swiss chard (around 7 ounces), leaves removed, stems discarded or saved for another use
2 cloves garlic, peeled
1/4 cup grated queso añejo, or grated parmesan
1/2 cup pine nuts or pumpkin seeds
1/4 cup olive oil — possibly a little more if you’re using the pumpkin seeds
Salt
Pepper

Directions

In a food processor, add the garlic and pulse to chop. Then add the chard, cheese and nuts or seeds. Pulse until smooth — feel free to scrape down the sides of the bowl to add in any errant cheese or chard bits. Add olive oil and blend until smooth. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Serve with pasta, vegetables, or (as I did with my sister-in-law recently) spread on crusty bread.

Sopa seca de quinoa (Mexican-style quinoa)

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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.

Savory pumpkin and chorizo tamales

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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.
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Homemade mini-gorditas de nata

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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.


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Homemade strawberry tamales and Día de la Candelaria

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Look at that buttery masa. Don't you want to just eat it with a spoon?

February 2 is Día de la Candelaria in Mexico, a Catholic holiday that honors the purification of the Virgin Mary. It’s also an important day for eating tamales.

The holiday is a follow-up to Three Kings Day on Jan. 6, when families serve a Rosca de Reyes cake that’s baked with hidden figurines of the Baby Jesus. Anyone who finds a Niño Dios inside the rosca must make tamales for friends and family on Feb. 2.

It’s been interesting to watch the holiday unfold here — the markets have been filled with ceramic dolls of the Baby Jesus, many with long eyelashes and eyeliner. (Bringing said doll to mass is a big part of the Día de la Candelaria ritual.) However, I didn’t know until recently that Día de la Candelaria is a truly mestizo holiday. February 2 formerly commemorated the first day of the Mexica new year. Guess what the Aztecs used to eat to ring in the festivities? Tamales.

The Christmas tamale-making spirit passed me up this year, so I signed up for a Día de la Candelaria cooking course at the Escuela de Gastronomía Mexicana, where I take classes on Thursday nights. Yuri was teaching and he had a whole slew of tamales on the menu: strawberry, fig, pineapple, bean with chicharrón, corn with pork and epazote, cazón.

I’d wanted to make one of the sweet ones, but he relegated me to the corn group. But I snuck a few peeks at what the strawberry folks were doing.

When they came out of the steamer (as depicted above), I couldn’t believe how amazing the masa was. Made with butter and milk instead of lard and chicken broth like the typical savory tamal, this was almost like a spongecake. A lone strawberry gem lay inside, soft and tart.
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Sikil pak (creamy Mexican pumpkin-seed dip)

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I’ve made sikil pak three times in the past month, and each time I’d stare at the pile of pumpkin seeds in the bowl and think, “There’s no way I’m going to eat all this.” But then I would. Twice I split a batch with Crayton, and the other time I ate the whole thing myself with some tortillas I’d heated up on the stove.

Sikil pak has the comfort of an herbed cream cheese you’d spread on a cracker, and the meatiness of a mushroom or eggplant chutney. It doesn’t contain any dairy or even any major vegetables — just a few scoops of pumpkin seeds ground to dust, mixed with garlic, onion, water and some tomate verde. It’s great on tortilla chips, warm tortillas, cucumber slices, and (I’m imagining for next time) crusty slices of baguette.

I first came across sikil pak about a year ago while thumbing through Diana Kennedy cookbook, searching for things to serve at my tamalada. I hadn’t seen this dish anywhere in Mexico City, so I was intrigued. Kennedy’s directions sounded easy — toast the pumpkin seeds, grind them in a spice or coffee grinder, and add boiled tomatoes and spices. Unfortunately I added too many salted, unshelled pumpkin seeds and the dip came out too sharp and almost woodsy-tasting. Strangely, it tasted like it had meat in it.

A few months ago, I saw another sikil pak recipe in one of my Cocina Estado Por Estado magazines devoted to Campeche. Turns out Sikil Pak is typical to Campeche and the Yucatán, which explains why I hadn’t seen it locally.

This recipe called for using raw, shelled pumpkin seeds and roasted tomate verde, onion and garlic. I decided to make the dish in the molcajete, because my cooking instructors have drilled into me that it’s better.

The result was totally unlike the weird chunky red thing I’d made before. It was thick like hummus and glossy like mayonnaise. Grinding it by hand, I had much more control over the texture — were the seeds too dry and powdery? Did they need water? Pues ándale. I’ll add a few spoonfuls. I got to see how the dip changed with each step, and what gave it that creamy white color. (Water and the juices of the tomatoes.)

The next time I made sikil pak, I used the food processor because I was hungry and tired and didn’t want to spend 30 minutes grinding. The dip wasn’t the same. I was too scared the seeds would turn into peanut butter in the food processor, so I didn’t pulse them finely enough. Instead of hummus/mayonnaise, I had a chunky spread. Not bad, but not as good.

Plus… I don’t know. I missed being closer to the ingredients. To grind everything with my own hands, twisting the tejolete, ignoring the dull ache in my wrist — I was actively involved in preparing the food, and that meant something to me, because food was nourishment and our bodies depended on it.

So yesterday, with the Bears game on TV and both Crayton and I yearning for game-day snacks (well, more me than him), I took out the molcajete and put it on the coffee table. I ground the dip during the first quarter and we enjoyed it with tortilla chips I’d baked in the oven.

I didn’t enjoy every single minute — several times I looked down at the bowl crusted with chunks of half-ground pumpkin seeds and thought, “I just don’t have the wrist strength for this. This dip will never be done.” But in the end, I had my creamy wonder, and I was happy I stuck it out.

Recipe below.
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How to make ponche, the traditional Mexican Christmas punch

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Ponche is a warm tropical-fruit punch. As I mentioned in my previous post — thank you for all the wonderful comments! — it’s traditionally imbibed in Mexico during Christmastime. Vendors sell it at night near the sidewalk Christmas markets. It’s also served with buñuelos during the posadas.

No one seems to know exactly how and why Mexican ponche materialized. In general, historians seem to agree that the punch concept originated in India, where English sailors took a liking to it and brought to Europe. The Spaniards (or the French?) must have carried the tradition to Mexico.

Today, the base of Mexican ponche comprises piloncillo, a dark-brown unrefined cane sugar, mixed with water and cinnamon sticks. To that, you can add pretty much any winter fruits you want: apples, oranges, guavas, tejocotes.

The latter two are key. Tejocotes are small, speckled orange fruits with an apple-pear taste, and their soft flesh turns almost creamy while soaking in the ponche.

Guavas lend just the right amount of tang and citrusy perfume. The smell of guavas cooking with cinnamon and sugar is intoxicating. Someday someone’s going to make a million dollars selling it to Williams-Sonoma as an air freshener.

The ponche workhorses: tejocotes (small orange fruits in front), guavas (left), apples and cinnamon

In addition to the fresh fruit, ponche can contain prunes, raisins, tamarind, walnuts. Some folks add hibiscus flowers, which gives the ponche a pretty burgundy color.

Ponche isn’t an exact science. Everything simmers together until the fruit is tender, and the dried fruits become plump, sugar-swollen nuggets. If you are like me, you will hover over the pan and give yourself a ponche facial, letting that sweet, spicy steam envelope your face.

You can’t see the steam in the picture below, but that’s because I was so smitten once the ponche started to cook that I forgot about my camera, and kept fishing raisins and tamarind pieces out of the pot to eat.

Ponche simmering on the stove

Ponche has a lot of ingredients, but it requires minimal chopping. If you have a helper the whole thing can be on the stove within 20 minutes.

If you like — and we do, in our house — a little nip of brandy, rum or tequila, feel free to add it in. Just make sure to serve the cups with a spoon, so everyone can dig into their boozy (or not) fruits.

Recipe below.
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Verdolagas (purslane) in salsa verde

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Verdolagas, called purslane in English, are a popular edible green in Central Mexico. They’re most commonly stewed with cubes of pork in tomatillo sauce, until the leaves are limp and soft.

I’ve been a bit scared to try them — I’ve met two people so far who absolutely hate verdolagas. (In The Essential Cuisines of Mexico, Diana Kennedy describes verdolagas as “curiously acid” and “very much an acquired taste.”)

But they’re cheap and abundant right now. And they’re much prettier than your average quelite. Verdolagas have these thick, teardrop shaped leaves, jutting out from a tender central stalk.


(Photo from The Kitchn)

No vegetable this beautiful could possibly taste bad. So, a few weekends ago, I bought a kilo at the tianguis. Tore off a raw leaf and ate it when I got home. The leaf tasted acidic and intense, almost minty. But it was not that bad. I wouldn’t put verdolagas in a salad, but I’d most definitely serve them under a blanket of stewed tomatoes.

Marichu had an easy-sounding verdolagas recipe that called for making a boiled tomatillo salsa, frying it, and then adding the greens.

In the end, this seemed like exactly what the verdolagas needed. A fried, liquified tomatillo bath lessened some of the greens’ harshness. In fact, after 20 minutes of cooking, I’d dare call the leaves sweet. They didn’t dissolve under the weight of the salsa, either — the leaves kept their hearty shape and texture.

Served these with leftover alubias and warm tortillas. It was a humble, comforting meal.

I’ll leave you with a few sentences from Ricardo Muñoz Zurita’s Encyclopedic Dicitonary of Mexican food, under the entry for verdolagas. He calls them “meaty and juicy,” which I’m inclined to agree with.

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Portulaca oleracea L. (Portulacáceas). Quelite herbáceo de la familia de las portulcáceas; mide en promedio de 15 a 50 centímetros de largo. Es suave, carnoso, jugoso y de sabor ácido. Se aprecia mucho como verdura, principalmente para elaborar diversos guisos y caldos. Juega un papel importante en la gastronomía del centro del país, donde es especialmente famosa la carne de puerco con verdolagas. Su nombre náhuatl es itzmiquílitl.

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Recipe below.
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Buttery, Mexican-style pan de elote

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Pan de elote literally means “corn bread,” and it’s one of those iconic Mexican desserts I can’t get enough of.

This is not like American cornbread at all. When it’s done right, it’s like the freshest homemade creamed corn crossed with a flan or bread pudding. It’s not so much a bread as a dense, buttery cake-pudding. That you just want to bury your face in. (As an aside, Azul y Oro was the first place that showed me how amazing pan de elote could be. If you go there, please order the pan de elote.)

I’ve been craving both sugar and corn lately, so last week, I picked up a few bags of fresh corn at the tianguis and decided to make pan de elote for the first time.

This being an iconic dish, I assumed there were several ways to make it. So I consulted my Mexican cookbooks to find a recipe I liked. Flipped through Diana Kennedy, Rick Bayless, Zarela Martinez, Josefina Velazquez de Leon and Fany Gerson before settling on Mexico en la Cocina de Marichu, a cookbook of traditional Mexican recipes published in 1969. (I bought it at the La Lagunilla market last year.)

In the “Reposteria” section, next to recipes for a Torta de Zanahoria and a Torta de Melón, was a simple recipe for a Torta de Elote. It contained only five ingredients: corn, butter, sugar, eggs and flour. Unassuming yet satisfying. Bingo.

The recipe called for grinding the corn up front, which would no doubt add that fresh corn flavor I craved. And it called for beating egg whites and folding them into the batter at the end — a step that kind of scared me a bit. I’m always afraid of under- or over-beating egg whites.

In the end, everything went fine, except for my crazy oven cooked the thing too fast. After two separate trips into the oven, the result was exactly what I’d hoped for: a rich, soft cake that tasted somewhere between creamed corn and the fresh, steamed ears they sell on the streets. Only sweet and slathered with butter.

I baked the corn cake in my springform pan because I didn’t want to fuss with removing anything from a greased dish, and I wanted to cut it into triangle-shaped wedges like they do in the restaurants.

Crayton took half of it to work. Later that afternoon I got a text from his coworker, Carlos. It read: “El pastel está GENIAL!”

The recipe’s below. For a similar pan de elote recipe with step-by-step photos, check out Mexico in My Kitchen.

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A plain but lovely pan de muerto, or Day of the Dead bread

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Día de los Muertos is my favorite holiday in Mexico City. I love the orange cempasúchitl flowers that suddenly pop up in the street medians and parks, and the altars sprinkled with flower petals and candles. I love watching the seasonal fall foods finally arrive in the markets: pan de muerto, calabaza en tacha, tejocotes.

Sadly, the Día de los Muertos season pretty much passed me by this year. I was traveling in the States through most of October, and then I got home and promptly caught a head cold. I was too sick to visit the Sugar Skull Market in Toluca like I did last year, or wander around checking out ofrendas.

One thing I could do, though, was make my own pan de muerto. Last year I took a class on how to make the round, orange-flavored loaves, so I was already familiar with what the dough contained — basically flour and a lot of butter — and how to form the ropes on top to make “bones.” The bread has a delicate orange taste, which comes from a few spoonfuls of orange blossom water, known in Spanish as agua de azahar.

I wanted to use Fany Gerson’s Pan de Muerto recipe from My Sweet Mexico. But I had to tweak a few things, because I was too tired and/or I didn’t have enough time to seek out the proper ingredients. Watered-down orange blossom essence became my substitute for agua de azahar, because it was all I could find. I dipped into my abundance of mascabado — unrefined cane sugar — and used that instead of regular white sugar, even though it made the dough less sweet.

Once I started baking, more issues popped up. My yeast starter, made from instant yeast and not active-dry as the recipe had stated, didn’t bubble, sending me into a panic. I couldn’t tell if my dough was too sticky, or not sticky enough. The dough also rose sloooowly: three hours during the first rising, and a whopping five after the dough chilled in the fridge overnight. (Note to Future Lesley: Do not place buttery dough in an heated oven to speed things up, as it’ll turn it into a greasy, sloppy mess.)

While my loaves baked, I discovered my oven temperature was whacked-out. My first batch looked pretty and golden-brown. When I sliced into it, the insides were still doughy and chewy.

So yeah. What I’m trying to say here is that both of my pan de muertos turned out kind of flat and homely.

I didn’t care too much in the end. The bread was the centerpiece of my Día de los Muertos celebration this year, and I was going to enjoy it. I sprinkled one loaf with sugar and the other without, as an experiment. I actually liked the un-sugared one better — it was lightly sweet and perfect with a cup of hot chocolate. Crayton and I each had a wedge for dessert on Nov. 1, while the candles burned on our altar. (Yes, that’s a bottle of Coke below. It’s for Crayton’s relatives in South Carolina.)

Here are the shots of my flattish, but still tasty, breads.

For more pan de muerto adventures, check out Three Clever Sisters (she also used Fany’s recipe, resulting in these cute, plump little loaves) and Steven McCutcheon-Rubio’s post on Serious Eats. If you made pan de muerto this year, send me a picture of it and I’ll post it here.

UPDATE: Here’s a picture of reader Isabel’s pan de muerto…

And Don Cuevas’s bread:

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