Getting Our Hands Dirty in Mexico

Third and last act of our family trip to Mexico.

After all the food we glimpsed at, lingered over, and ate, something was missing. We had to get into the kitchen and start cooking up some real Mexican food. 

Luckily, Maman had that all planned out for us and we embarked on a three hour-long journey through traditional Pueblan cuisine at the Meson Sacristia in the historic district with Chef Alonso Hernandez.

The agenda was tempting in itself. Imagine being given keys to the base of most Mexican cooking, and then seeing an example of what you could do with it. And, imagine being able to eat all of it with fresh hibiscus water as a refreshment. It's not heaven, my friends. It's Mexico.

The festivities started out with the traditional red and green sauces, a huge building block of Mexican food. With the help of a comal, a simple metal plate placed on a flame to cook ingredients, we turned tomatoes, tomatillos and chiles into two delicious sauces (with the help of a few other ingredients). Roasting on a comal gives everything a nice burn, helping the flavors develop and bloom in the blender.

The sauces were only a start. After setting them aside, we learned how the red sauce serves as a base for Mole Poblano. Puebla is the hometown of mole, the traditional Mexican sauce made with chiles and chocolate. Some of you may raise an eyebrow: chocolate in a sauce? A sauce that you can have with meat? "Don't knock it till you try it", as they say. Mole is worth le detour.

Mole takes a little while to make, and may be difficult because you need three different types of chiles: mulato, ancho, and pasilla. Once you've got them, though, you fry them up and let all the flavors explose--you're on your way to making a delicious mole, and that's no small feat.

During the class, my sister, maman and I had our eyes on the large bowls of salsa verde and salsa roja. We could imagine dipping huge tortilla chips and scooping up cup-fuls of the sauce...and why not eat it with a spoon?

We didn't get around to that, though, and made chalupas instead. Pan-fried corn tortillas get smothered in sauce, meat, and chopped white onion: a pretty nice alternative to the chips and salsa situation. 

If you're ever in Puebla, definitely consider taking this class if you can. Alonso Hernandez is eager to show his love for Mexican ingredients and Mexican cuisine, and we had a lot of fun trying out various recipes and cooking techniques. Not to mention that we left with a belly full of delicious food, and that's unbeatable. I wasn't even craving horchata afterward. And that's saying a lot.

Salsa Verde

makes one medium bowl

6 tomatillos

1/2 onion, cut into large slices

10 serrano chiles

1 clove garlic

1 bunch cilantro

1 cup water

salt to taste

Roast every ingredient except cilantro on a comal until tomatillos and onions start to blacken. 

Put all ingredients together in a blender, process until smooth, and add salt to taste. 

Salsa Roja

makes one medium bowl

6 red tomatoes

1/2 onion

4 dried chipotles

1 clove garlic

1 cup water

salt to taste

Roast all ingredients on a comal until they start to blacken. Process with water in a blender until smooth. Add salt to taste.

Am I From Lilliput?, or: Oversized in Mexico

I'm no dwarf. In fact, I'm around 5'8, if you're wondering.

When I eat a sandwich, it usually fits into my mouth. And when I have a drink, I can usually hold it in one hand. Usually. I was quite convinced of it, until our trip to Puebla.

As most of you probably do, we stop in markets whenever we're looking for authentic, fresh local food. Well, we got a lot of it in one sitting. When I say a lot, I do mean very, very much. We stopped in at Las Poblanitas in the Mercado El Carmen for some lunch, eager at the prospect of tasting the traditional cemitas, the Mexican version of a sandwich. Cemitas can have any sort of filling: the ones on offer here were pork, ham, avocado, chiles, and cheese.

We opted for the vegetarian option, but definitely not vegan. Read: cheese, a lot of it. 

See that? That's our cemita. I had trouble actually biting into it, and had to set aside some of that stringy cheese. It was good, though, and I was hungry, so it was actually quite simple to ignore comments like "This cheese looks like dog hair". It's difficult to make me put food down with words. 

What would be better to wash down a cemita than horchata? Rhyming aside, I could drink horchata all day long. For those of you unfamiliar with it, Mexican horchata is usually made with rice water, sugar and cinnamon. It's sweet, refreshing, and has a double action as drink-cum-dessert. We ordered horchata, one each for my sister and I, and ended up with liter-sized cups. I guess they anticipated that a big sandwich needs a big drink, but I definitely felt like I had entered a world where everything is larger than life.

(That didn't stop me from drinking the whole thing.)

Before you start believing all food in Mexico is as large as a table, let me reassure you. Markets are also a place where you can have light (sort of), simple meals. In Taxco, a small historic town surrounded my silver mines, the market was a wonderful place to try different versions of pozole.

Made with hominy, pozole--verde or rojo, made with tomatillos or red tomatoes--is a hearty dish, filled with flavor. Spicy, fresh with avocado, and texturally interesting thanks to the hominy and fried tortilla, it was a wonderful example of Mexican cuisine that can be made at home.

Pair it with fresh mango-carrot juice, and you've got yourself a perfect lunch under the sun. Why, oh why, isn't Mexico next to France?

Tengo Hambre: Getting My Sweet Tooth On

In early March, I kept having the same dream.

I was in a salsa-filled pool, resting on top of a giant piece of corn tortilla, sipping my weight in horchata. You guessed it: I was ready to head to Mexico.

The trip came as quite a surprise, and was planned something like this. Me: "I have a job! I'm taking a pre-job vacation!" My parents: "Come to Mexico with us!" My sister: "I'm coming along!" There it was: a family vacation. For a week, we traveled through Puebla, Taxco, with a last stop in Mexico City.

It won't be difficult for you to guess what we did: we ate. Quite a bit. And we cooked!

Take two sisters who like any dessert made with anything resembling sweetened condensed milk, add a street in Puebla that actually specializes in sweets (6 Oriente at 5 de Mayo), and you've already got a good start. 

The sweets of Puebla are quite diverse, however. There seem to be two main specialties: the torta Santa Clara, a sablé-type cookie with a sweet glaze, and camotes or sweet potato candy. Consider them as a base to your Pueblan sweets pyramid; a myriad of little treats then stack up to create colorful shop windows. Looking for a custard-type bar? Rich and comforting, don't miss them and head to La Central. 

Coconut and sweetened condensed milk also appear throughout shops, making a great snack if you've still got space for one (does anybody ever not? Or am I alone in thinking a meal is never actually over until you've had a couple snacks afterward?). Sinking your teeth into the smooth ball of sweetness and feeling the crunchy texture of the coconut is reason enough to head back over there and get a second one.

In our first hotel, breakfast came to an end with a small snack--now, you see, that was my kind of hotel.

Is this a joke? They brought us rocks? I know I'm said to eat many things, but as of yet I haven't felt the need to eat rocks. Maybe one day, but not now. Oh, ha ha ha! Clearly these weren't rocks. They're chocolate: chocopiedras (chocorocks, if you will). Have one and it's like you've bitten into a Cadbury Mini Egg (I have a running addiction to them, so I like to mention them absolutely all the time). They're irresistible, you can't stop at one. The chocolate is sweet with a sort of harldy-perceptible gritty quality to it. And somehow, there's something really fun in eating rocks. I'm twenty-four and not twelve, in case you were wondering.

I've been known to smuggle things in my pockets--like onion peels, but I was only ten so we can pretend like it never happened--but unfortunately none of these sweets actually made it to my pocket, and went directly into my mouth. Fortunately for my taste buds, then. 

And lest you think I had no stomach space left for anything but candy, think again. Or just come back in a couple of days.