You say guava, I say guayaba

Escaping the snowy Washington D.C. March winter for a few days in San Miguel de Allende, I was drawn to the sun-kissed, aromatic, tropical fruit found in abundance at the market here: guayaba or guava, as it's called in English. The name guava has always confused me because in Laredo where we grew up everyone called it by its Spanish name, guayaba. A bowl of these, with the floral scent of the tropics and redolent of the warm sun under which they grew, make the most inviting fruit one can have arriving from a frigid nothern climate.

Use firm guayabas so they are easy to peel

At Casa Carmen where I'm staying, the devoted cook of this bed and breakfast, Doña Beatriz, prepared a dessert with guayaba today. This is just one of the ways to eat this delectable fruit, but really, you can simply eat it raw when it's sweet and ripe, have it as an agua fresca, make it into dried fruit paste, marmalade, ice cream or even a sauce to accompany meats. Guayaba is an antioxidant and is a great way to get Vitamin C. It doesn't get any better. Here is Doña Beatriz' recipe.

Guayabas literally bursting with flavor

The sugar/water should syrup have turned pinkish from the cinnamon before you add the peeled guayaba

You say guava, I say guayaba

Recipe Type: Dessert

Cuisine: Mexican

Author: Gilda Valdez Carbonaro

Prep time: 25 mins

Cook time: 30 mins

Total time: 55 mins

Serves: 6

This dessert can be easily prepared several days ahead of time and stored in the refrigerator.

Ingredients:

• 2 lbs guayabas (approximately 12 small guayabas
• 2 sticks cinnamon
• 2 1/2 cups sugar
• 2 1/2 cups water

Instructions:

1. Peel the guayabas and pierce them to the center with a sharp knife and set aside.


2. Boil the water with the cinnamon sticks until the water turns pinkish.


3. Add the sugar and boil for another 10 or 15 minutes.


4. Add the peeled guayabas and boil them until they feel soft when you pierce them with a fork.

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Silky Flan

This started out as a blog about Mexican cuisine, but how well we know that cultures cross, mixing and blending together into improved versions of the original. Many years ago I discovered this flan, otherwise known as crème caramel in French, as a guest at a country house in northern France. Our  hostess served it to my three year old son, my youngest sister  and me at the end of a sumptuous meal at a table set by a roaring fire in this country house. The impeccable French hospitality created a welcoming ambiance, leaving us with warm memories of the evening. I can remember almost everything from that meal about 30 years ago, everything prepared to perfection.  But it was the flan (crème caramel)  that came as a revelation. I wondered why I had ever tolerated those overly sweet, rubbery, rich things that looked like Swiss cheese.

In Mexico and other countries in Latin America, condensed milk is used, rendering it cloyingly sweet. No sugary condensed milk here, only whole milk, resulting in a silky, elegant custard with the smoothest texture imaginable. It makes a supreme arrival at the end of a good meal. It became one of my son's most requested desserts growing up.

Silky Flan

Recipe Type: Dessert

Cuisine: Mexican

Author: Gilda Valdez Carbonaro

Prep time: 20 mins

Cook time: 1 hour

Total time: 1 hour 20 mins

Serves: 6

The preparation time for this dessert does not include the cooling time in the refrigerator, about three hours.

Ingredients:

• For the caramelized sugar
• ½ cup sugar
• ¼ cup water
• ¼ tsp. cream of tartar

For the Custard

• 2 cups milk
• 1 tsp vanilla
• ¼ cup sugar
• 3 eggs plus 2 egg yolks
• zest of one orange (optional)

Instructions:

Preheat oven to 325

Caramel

1. Work quickly to line your 1 quart porcelain mold (or individual molds) and wear mitts if you're worried about getting burned with the melted sugar. Place the mold on a large strip of wax paper.


2. In a small, heavy saucepan, bring the sugar and water to a boil over high heat, stirring until the sugar dissolves and stirring in the cream of tartar.


3. Boil the syrup over moderate heat tipping the pan back and forth almost constantly, until the syrup turns into a rich color of brown that looks like tea. It takes around 10 minutes.


4. Remove the pan and carefully pour the syrup into the mold in a thin stream, tipping and swirling the mold to coat the bottom and sides as evenly as possible.


5. When the syrup stops moving, turn the mold upside down on the wax paper to cool and let any excess syrup run out.

Custard

1. In a 1 – 1 ½ quart saucepan, bring the milk almost to a boil over moderate heat.


2. Remove the pan from the stove and add the vanilla extract.


3. With an electric mixer beat the sugar, eggs, and egg yolks until they're well mixed and thickened. Add the zest if you like this flavor.


4. Stirring gently and constantly, pour in the milk in a thin stream (you don't want to do this all at once because you'll get scrambled eggs)


5. Strain this mixture through a sieve into your mold and place the mold in a large pan on the middle shelf of the oven.


6. Pour boiling water into the pan until it comes about halfway up the sides of the mold.


7. Bake the flan, but be careful to lower the temperature of the oven if you see the water in the pan beginning to boil.


8. After about an hour, insert a knife in the center. If it comes out clean, it's ready.


9. Take the mold out of the water and refrigerate the flan for at least 3 hours.


10. To unmold it, run a sharp knife all around the edge and dip the bottom of the mold briefly in hot water. Then dry the bottom, place your serving plate upside down over the mold and grabbing both sides firmly, quickly turn the plate and mold over.


11. Rap the plate on a table and the flan should slide easily out of the mold.


12. Pour any extra caramel remaining in the mold over the flan.

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Mixing Cultures: Capirotada for Alex

Our son was raised in a household where his Italian father and Mexican mother reigned in the kitchen with battling cuisines. The Italian cuisine won the battles more often than not, but never to anyone's disadvantage. Frankly, during these last thirty-five years of marriage, it has become as easy for me to cook a good risotto as an arroz a la mexicana. So, often it's me cooking Italian with a wary eye to my husband who is known to slip into the kitchen at the least expected moment in a badly timed effort to straighten up the kitchen counter, inadvertently sabotaging my cooking (ie; throwing down the disposal a pound of orange sections from which I've just removed the membrane and put aside.)

Needless to say, meals have been important to us. Through the years we learned to settle for Mexican breakfast: taquitos, quesadillas, atoles, frijoles, huevos a la mexicana. But the rest of the day has often been reserved for Italian family favorites. It hasn't always been easy to 'mix' things, though, because one always wants to reproduce things as they were in our taste bud memories. One morning, discovering I was out of corn oil, my husband and I argued about whether I should mix olive oil with refried beans. The conversation went something like this:

Me (with fanatic conviction): I'm not cooking my pinto beans with olive oil!
My husband (testy): Why not?
Me: Not gonna do it!
Alex (attempting to mediate with the hope of getting breakfast at some point): Papá, she doesn't like to mix her cultures.

So, Alex had gotten to the crux of the matter, as usual. He was mostly right. I've liked to keep my cuisines compartmentalized. But, here, to honor and remember my baby who was born in April almost 32 years ago, I've made a special capirotada. Capirotada is a Lenten-Passover bread pudding that has been made in Mexico in a myriad of ways. The three main ingredients that give this dish its Mexican essence are dark brown sugar (piloncillo), cinnamon and clove.  It is not a typical bread pudding with egg and milk and usually falls limp and floppy on the plate. I've adapted the recipe, keeping the three main ingredients but adding milk and egg to give it the elegance of the mold it is baked in.

I've used my husband's homemade Italian bread which is slightly sour, but you can use any good quality artisan bread. In addition, I have added orange peel and walnuts that bring to mind the desserts of Italy. The fragrance of orange, cinnamon, and clove will fill your kitchen for hours.

Alex, your teasing, lop-sided smile is always with me in the kitchen...looking over my shoulder, prodding, taste-testing, keeping my wine glass filled, putting on my favorite salsa music to cook by. How precious, how short, how bittersweet, the times we shared...

Capirotada

Ingredients:

1 large egg
1 1/3 cup dark brown sugar
4 cups water
1 stick cinnamon
1 teaspoon vanilla
4 cloves
1/3 cup walnuts
1 small loaf French bread or any artisan style bread sliced and left to harden and then toasted, torn up into small chunks and placed in a bowl
3 tablespoons butter
zest of one large orange
2/3 cup whole milk or heavy cream
To garnish: crème fraiche, clotted cream, or Mexican crema if you can find it.

Preparation:
In a saucepan bring the water to boil with the sugar until it dissolves. Add the cloves and cinnamon, cooking at a boil for about 20 minutes, until it becomes syrupy. Remove from the heat, discarding the cinnamon sticks and cloves, adding the butter to melt in the hot syrup. Add the zest as an effusion of flavor into the hot syrup. Let it sit for 10 minutes.

In a bowl beat the egg and the milk or cream together. Pour slowly into the warm syrup mixture taking care not to curdle the eggs. Stir well.

Pour the syrup, egg and cream mixture into the bowl with the bread. Be sure to moisten all the bread with the poured liquid. Add walnuts. Pour this into a buttered flan dish.

Cover with foil and bake for about half an hour at 375 degrees. Remove the foil for 15 more minutes to brown the Capirotada. Set aside for 10 minutes before serving. It can be topped with crème fraiche to counterbalance the sweetness of the piloncillo.

Option: add ½ cup yellow raisins when you pour the syrup, milk and egg mixture into the bread.

Our Pecan Tree

With the arrival of his firstborn daughter, a young father planted a nogal seedling.  The land was barren and stony but the nogal thrived.

Two more daughters were born and, over time, the three sisters grew to play in the shade of the tree's broad branches, climbing, jumping, and staining their clothes with its caramel-colored sap.  The girls gathered the tree's savory pecans, cracking them open and eating them as they played.

Mother's Day Buñuelos

On Mother's Day six years ago, I lost my son, my only child, to the war in Iraq. Every Mother's Day, since that day, I have felt unable to write for this blog about anything else besides what this loss has meant to me. How could I? Our children, for better or for worse, define who we are. At whatever age, they are the sun around which our lives revolve. The loss for me, then, has meant reworking the way I live my life, to find purpose, meaning and direction in the chaos. And to learn to find joy again.

So, on this Mother's Day, I think about my own mother and the gift of optimism that she left me. She taught me to persevere in the face of utter hopelessness. From Floria I also learned that there is a moment when one must not shy away from calling something what it is: she taught me to have the courage to speak the truth even when it's inconvenient to the listener, let alone to me; indeed, she taught me to fight for what is right. She taught me to dream, to believe in myself. My mother gave me my 'mother tongue,' Spanish, even though we were Americans living in Laredo. She understood it was our identity that no one could take away. I inherited from her that 'radar' to 'read' a person, that my son also displayed; a certain sixth sense to understand what someone is saying between the lines. Whatever I am today, I owe partly to her. But there is also much owed to my child, whose wisdom taught me so much. That is what motherhood does, it turns us into complex human beings who learn from the children that are entrusted to us for that brief moment in time.

For now, I am blessed with other people's children, these young children, my students, who look to me for guidance and consolation (and instruction in Spanish) for the short time they pass through my life. And there are the young adults whose lives are interwoven into the fabric of my life, who are more or less contemporaries of Alex and about whom I fuss and worry and offer solicited or unsolicited advice. Life goes on...if I look up from my laptop, out the window, I can see my little poet-philosopher Marine, an image on a ray of light, on this sun-dappled morning, nodding approvingly, smiling, holding out white roses for me, wishing me a perfect Mother's Day.  I'm still a mother, after all.

My recipe for buñuelos is my mother's who made them on occasions when my little friends came over. She would make them with lemonade for us. Enjoy

Mother's Day Buñuelos

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Recipe Type: Dessert, postre

Author: Gilda Valdez Carbonaro

Prep time: 20 mins

Cook time: 10 mins

Total time: 30 mins

Serves: 6

Buñuelos should be light and airy. These fritters are best when you roll out the dough thinly and drop them into very hot oil. They make a perfect after-dinner dessert with tea, hot chocolate, or even a prosecco or dessert wine.

Ingredients

• 1 egg


• 2 cups flour


• 1 tablespoon shortening


• 1/2 cup water


• 1 tablespoon sugar for dough


• oil for deep frying


• 2 tablespoons sugar per 1 tablespoon ground cinnamon for dusting

Instructions

1. Mix the flour and sugar in a bowl.


2. Make a well in the center of the flour and drop the egg and shortening.


3. Mix well with your hands until it attains a corn meal consistency.


4. Add the water a little bit at a time (you may not need it all) and knead until you have a pliable dough.


5. Let the dough rest for about 1/2 hour in the refrigerator.


6. Divide the dough into balls about 1/2 the size of golf balls and roll out thinly; or if it's easier, you can roll them out larger and cut into four wedges, but be sure to roll them out thinly on a floured surface.


7. Heat oil in a skillet and fry the dough quickly on both sides until it is puffed up.

Crepas de Cajeta for Cinco de Mayo

The Battle of Puebla that took place on the 5th of May in 1862 holds little significance for us today.  Many people think that Cinco de Mayo is a celebration of Mexico’s independence from Spain which, in fact, took place 41 years earlier and is celebrated on September 16.  What you need to know for the purposes of this post is that what began as a regional victory celebration upon the Mexican Army’s surprising (albeit temporary) defeat of French forces in Puebla over a century ago is now a virtual symbol for Mexican pride and heritage.

Despite the unabashed commercialization of Cinco de Mayo, the day is an opportunity for Americans to share in the love of Mexican culture and tradition.  For some of us, it is a moment in which to give ourselves over to the beauty and depth of our shared mexicanidad.  To remember—perhaps even learn—about our history, both in Mexico and in the United States.  This, more so than beer and tequila specials, is what draws people to the festivals around the country during the first week in May.
The holiday is an emblem of American diversity but also a cultural marker that buoys an increasingly diverse Mexican-American community.  We are multi-generational, newly-arrived and assimilated, of mixed heritage, biracial, sometimes bilingual, sometimes not.  Yet, we remain committed to a common culture and tethered to time-tested traditions every day of the year much like a nation that annually celebrates its independence but works daily to protect its democratic principles.

It is these sentiments that manifest in the art and music and dance so closely associated with Cinco de Mayo celebrations, examples of human expression and perseverance that stamp our arrival and affirm our sense of belonging.  There is power in symbolism and celebration.

So, whatever your heritage, celebrate Cinco de Mayo!

Toast to the power of art, music and dance that defines a culture. Belt out a Lola Beltran ranchera or join a trio of mariachis for a serenade. Witness the glory of folklorico dancers whose elaborate dresses bloom color with every beat of beautiful music.  Surrender to the rhythms of a spontaneous zapateado on your kitchen floor. Sip a margarita. Read a Laura Esquivel novel or a Gloria Anzaldúa poem.  Write your own poem. Cook an authentic meal completely from scratch with your abuelita and invite your friends to dinner.  Speak Spanish…or Spanglish.

Study the Chicano civil rights movement.

Honor the countless contributions and sacrifices that Mexican-Americans have made to and for the greater good—from the lawyers who litigated landmark civil rights cases in the 1950s to the men and women who served (and serve) in the U.S. Armed Forces.

Above all, remember the power of the people—not just those around you but also those who came before you.

Crepas de Cajeta for Cinco de Mayo

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Recipe Type: dessert

Author: Gilda Valdez Carbonaro

Prep time: 2 hours

Cook time: 15 mins

Total time: 2 hours 15 mins

Serves: 6

Ingredients

• 1 cup milk


• 1 1/4 cup (150 g) all-purpose flour


• 3 eggs


• 1/4 cup water


• 3 tablespoons butter, melted and cooled


• 3 tablespoons butter (melted) and 1 tablespoon canola oil to combined to grease the crepe pan with a brush


• 1 cup cajeta de cabra or regular milk cajeta (can be bought at any store that sells hispanic products)


• ½ cup chopped walnuts


• Optional: Mandarine or orange liqueur for 'flaming' the crepas.

Instructions

1. Throw all ingredients: milk, flour, eggs, water and melted butter in a blender and blend well.


2. Refrigerate it for at least one hour.


3. Heat the crepe skillet at medium high flame for 5 minutes.


4. Dip a kitchen brush (pastry brush) into the melted and combined butter and oil and brush it (you must work quickly) across the hot skillet.


5. With a ladle dip into the blender jar and pour onto the hot skillet, until it coats the entire bottom of the skillet; tilt it from side to side to get it even and pour our any excess.


6. When the edges brown, unstick them with a spatula and then flip it to the other side.


7. Cook the other side, this will brown quickly.


8. Fold in four and place on a warmed plate.


9. Butter the skillet again until you are finished with all the batter (you can adjust the heat if it gets too hot or too cold).


10. Arrange folded crepes on individual plates, sprinkle the walnuts, and spoon the cajeta onto the plate over each crepa.


11. If you like, pour orange or mandarine liqueur and 'light' the crepas for a flambé dessert.

Notes

The crepas can be prepared a day ahead and then warmed quickly in the microwave (covered so they don't dry out).

***A version of this post originally appeared last year on DailyGrito.com.  Post by Gilda Claudine. Photos and recipe by Gilda Valdez Carbonaro.

Regarding Zapote

El hábito no hace al monje or the habit doesn't make the monk.  Who is to judge what is ugly or what is beautiful in nature? Beautiful things can sometimes disguise the nothingness, the insipidness within. When something is not attractive, we tend to overlook it. We humans have our universal rules of beauty or disgust when we judge what we eat. We are enticed by food that is pleasing to the eye, food that delights and triggers beautiful thoughts of past meals. The tropical fruits you find in markets in Mexico are all you need for a perfect and glorious ending to a meal, for example.  What's better than a platter of coral-colored papaya, bright yellow mango, crimson watermelon, and purple tunas arranged in sections like dazzling jewels in a display case?  

In the case of the zapote, I had been eyeing it for years, wondering whether in its ugliness there might be an unappreciated beauty worth discovering. Really, it's not the nicest thing to look at; it's black, dull, and squishy. Once it's scooped out of the peel, the fleshy insides ooze like a glossy chocolate. But it's not chocolate. The zapote sat menacingly on my kitchen counter in San Miguel de Allende for two days while my husband watched it warily, wondering if it was going to end up on his plate. On the third day (to his dismay), I worked up the courage to follow a recipe given to me by Doña Beatriz, the legendary cook of Casa Carmen. The dessert made from zapote was one that Doña Beatriz prepared for my students who stayed at Casa Carmen last year.

As it turns out, this unusual fruit, black zapote, or tzapotl in Nahuatl, is something worth discovering.  Much like persimmon, you have to wait until zapote is overripe to use it and that is how it was sold to me at the market, so ripe it began to leak on the plate once I got home. Handling the fruit turned out to be a cinch.  Zapote must have been created by the gods to be turned into a ready-made pudding. You basically scoop out the the pulp and mix the other ingredients and you have a substance of the creamiest texture. Add rum to the slightly citrusy flavor brought out from combining it with the juice and zest of orange, and you have an unforgettable dessert.  

And, yes, my husband loved it.

Zapote Dessert

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Recipe Type: dessert

Author: Gilda Valdez Carbonaro

Prep time: 15 mins

Total time: 15 mins

Serves: 6

Ingredients

• 3 very ripe zapotes


• 2 oranges for zest and juice, one orange for orange peel decoration


• 3/8 cup whole milk or heavy cream


• 1 tsp cinnamon


• 1 tbsp sugar


• ¼ cup rum

Instructions

1. Cut the zapotes in half and discard the large seeds.


2. With a tablespoon scoop out the pulp onto a bowl and smash with a fork. It will have a pudding-like consistency.


3. Zest the oranges into the mixture.


4. Squeeze their juice into the mixture through a sieve to keep the seeds out.


5. Add the milk, the rum, the cinnamon, and the sugar.


6. Beat with the fork until it is well amalgamated.


7. Arrange in dessert plates with ribbons or strips of peel as a garnish.

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If Life Gives You Blood Oranges, Make Candied Orange Peel

My students at an all boys school are exceptional in many ways, one of which is how they often take the initiative to pursue enrichment through extracurricular activities.  Sometimes, the boys design their own after-school clubs and ask a faculty member if he or she will host it. That is how I came to host the Cooking Club several years ago.

This past Friday my twelve to fourteen year old cooking devotees donned their aprons, washed their hands and readied their knives for the lesson of the day: How to make a Sicilian blood orange and fennel salad. Their bantering about food on this day and any other is nothing short of impressive. This little group is no stranger to terminology such as the locavore ethic, sustainable agriculture, slow food, and are knowledgeable about a myriad of exotic ingredients. They understand simplicity and authenticity in the context of food. Listening to their lively chatter as we sit down to enjoy the products of our labor, I smile to myself knowing they will grow to be men and fathers who will value the importance of sharing healthy meals with family and friends.

To practice what we preach, I asked the boys to save the peels from the blood oranges we used for last week's recipe. I know what you're saying. Blood oranges are not exactly locally grown; they come from who knows how many thousand miles away, but we used every bit of the orange and used the peels to make the delectable candied fruit one finds everywhere in Mexico.

Candied Orange Peel

Recipe Type: Dessert

Author: Gilda Valdez Carbonaro

Prep time: 20 mins

Cook time: 1 hour 30 mins

Total time: 1 hour 50 mins

Serves: 8

This is the ideal thing to have on hand to chop up and add to a dessert bread such as the holiday rosca or pan de muertos.

Ingredients

• Five or 6 oranges or 5 oranges and 2 lemons


• Water in which to boil the orange peel and to make the syrup


• About 1 cup of turbinado cane sugar


• 2 cups regular sugar

Instructions

1. Cut into the citrus as if you were going to quarter the fruit, but don't cut into the orange or lemon itself.


2. Peel off the quartered peel.


3. Slice into strips.


4. Drop into boiling water and cook for 5 minutes.


5. Drain and repeat two more times to remove the bitter taste, then set aside.


6. Dissolve the 2 cups regular sugar in 2 cups water, bring to a boil and add the peels.


7. Stir occasionally; when the syrup is almost completely absorbed (about 50 minutes), remove the peels and drain.


8. Spread the peels on a rack for about an hour to dry ( or in a slightly warm oven)


9. Place the peels in a paper sack with the turbinado sugar and shake to coat them with the sugar.


10. Spread them on wax paper to dry.

Thanks for Thanksgiving

Photo courtesy of Joe Duran a.k.a. Uncle Joe

I’m sitting by the window on a rainy autumn day.  The leaves have fallen from the trees, save for a few stragglers, and I already miss the way the vibrant yellows, oranges, and reds look against dark branches and blue skies.

This is comfort-food weather and a homemade soup is gurgling on the stove while I listen to a talk radio show about the origins of Thanksgiving.  One of the guests is food historian Andrew F. Smith who dedicates a chapter of his book, Eating History: Thirty Turning Points in the Making of American Cuisine, to the real Thanksgiving story.  I hear him say that the Pilgrim-centric Thanksgiving story is a complete myth (no surprise) but I'm flummoxed when I realize how little I know about the holiday I've celebrated every year since I can remember.

It is true that in 1621 the Pilgrims and a group of local Indians shared a meal together, but it was unplanned.  The colonists had just harvested their crops and the then-governor declared it a holiday.  This happened concurrent with a treaty signing between the English colonists and local Native American tribe of which ninety members paid a surprise visit to the colony and shared in the festivities to consummate the treaty.  But this was not a regular occurrence and it was not referred to as Thanksgiving.  Rather, the Pilgrims celebrated many days of “thanksgiving,” a tradition with religious underpinnings that the Europeans brought with them to the New World and which entailed spending the day in solemn worship.

Over the course of the next two hundred years, the religious tradition of giving thanks to God after the fall harvest became more secularized.  In 1841, Alexander Young, a Unitarian minister, published a research paper about the colonists, adding commentary in a footnote that the 1621 event was the first of many Thanksgiving feasts.

Twenty-two years later, Sarah Josepha Hale, a writer who believed that if the nation celebrated a holiday together (at the time there were only two national holidays, George Washington’s birthday and the Fourth of July), its people were destined to be united in all things.  She thusly published a novel in which she wrote a scene about a quintessentially festive dinner of roasted turkey, cranberries and pies, the model for the modern-day Thanksgiving meal.

Hale gained notoriety and became an influential writer and editor with a broad readership.  Over the years, she successfully lobbied Congress and other politicians to declare Thanksgiving a national holiday.  In August of 1863,  at the height of the Civil War and just after the battles at Vicksburg and Gettysburg, victories for which the North was surely thankful, President Lincoln proclaimed Thanksgiving a national holiday.

All of this makes me reflect on how traditions and cuisines evolve over time, shaped by socio-political trends and cultural milieux like beach glass smoothed by ocean waves.  I think about how this happens when immigrants arrive and assimilate in any new country.  According to Smith, the

[r]apid adoption of the Thanksgiving myth has less to do with historical fact and more to do with the arrival of hundreds of thousands of immigrants to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  In the face of this great wave of immigrants from so many lands, the public education system’s major task was to Americanize them by creating a common understanding of the nation’s history, in particular an easily understood history of America.

America is a melting pot, as the saying goes, and I'm thankful for its diversity of people and ideas, important ingredients in an open and democratic society.  I'm also very grateful to be the product of two cultures and for all the perspective that this affords me.  And while Thanksgiving isn't the result of two different communities coming together in appreciation of their cultural differences as we were taught in grade school, I nonetheless appreciate the evolution of a holiday that brings people together to share a home-cooked meal.

So, this year, I say thanks for Thanksgiving!

Floria's Pumpkin Empanadas

Recipe Type: Dessert

Prep time: 45 mins

Cook time: 8 mins

Total time: 53 minsHome

Serves: 8 to 10

Ingredients

• Filling

• 2 15oz cans of pure pumpkin

• 2 cups of brown sugar or piloncillo

• 1 cinnamon stick

• 10 cloves or 1 teaspoon of pumpkin pie spice

• Dough

• 4 cups all-purpose unbleached flour

• 1/4 teaspoon of salt

• 4 tablespoons of sugar

• 1 tablespoon of cinnamon

• 1 1/4 cups of vegetable shortening

• 1 cup of tepid water

• 
  

1. Cook the pumpkin with brown sugar/piloncillo and spices at medium heat for 15 minutes.

1. Let it thicken a bit.

1. Remove the cinnamon sticks and cloves (optional). Set aside to cool.

1. Preheat the oven at 375 degrees.

1. Mix the flour, salt and spices together in a bowl.

1. Place the flour mixture in a food processor and add the shortening.

1. Once the shortening is dispersed throughout the flour (it should look a little like corn meal), slowly add the water. (Add more or less water, as needed.)

1. The dough should be moist and mold easily.

1. Mold into a large ball and wrap in plastic.

1. Place in the refrigerator for at least a 1/2 hour.

1. Remove the dough and dust the surface of a counter or other space with a little flour.

1. Roll out a small ball of dough until it is relatively thin.

1. Cut out circles that are three to four inches in diameter.

1. Add a tablespoon or so of the pumpkin mixture and fold.

1. Use the prongs of a fork to seal the edges.

1. Bake on each side for 4 minutes.

Also, I was left with a surplus of pumpkin filling, so I made a second batch of dough in order to use all of the filling called for in Floria's recipe.

Instructions:

Filling

Dough

Notes

The empanadas are delicious as described above. I added an egg wash and dusted some sugar on them toward the end of the cooking time. This gave them a pretty color and added a little texture.

Membrillo on My Mind

When I was little, membrillo was one of the many gifts our Mexican relatives brought when they visited. I took it for granted. So many years later and so many miles away, I remember this delectable dessert and the loving hands that brought it to my family in Laredo. I remember in particular, Tía Lupita, an elderly, widowed aunt on my father's side who traveled  hundreds of miles by bus at least once every three months all the way from her home in Puebla to visit us. I remember her deeply-lined, smiling face, her wrinkled hands, her warm embraces...and the bags bearing boxes of sweet potato candies wrapped in wax paper, bricks of membrillo, obleas, cinnamon sticks, piloncillo, and beautiful gold religious medallas for all of us.

I was intrigued by the fruit itself from which membrillo is made. Quince or cydonia oblonga was held in high regard by the ancients. For the Greeks quince was a ritual offering to a bride, quince was Paris' gift to Aphrodite, and ancient Roman cookbooks are filled with recipes using quince.

Nowadays, anything can be found at a specialty foods store, even membrillo, but nothing beats the taste of your own. If life hands you a quince tree and you don't know what to do with the stone-hard fruit, make membrillo! But making it is not for the faint-hearted. You'll need some time to spare. Transforming the boiled cream-colored meat of the quince into a fragrant sliced, amber paste shaped into a little brick and arranged with slices of manchego will make your day.

Chopped quince 

Quince paste

Membrillo

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Recipe Type: appetiser, dessert

Author: Gilda Valdez Carbonaro

Prep time: 15 mins

Cook time: 1 hour 40 mins

Total time: 1 hour 55 mins

Serves: 15

Ingredients

• 4 quince (about 3 lbs)


• sugar (about 3 cups, roughly the equivalent of the boiled quince)


• stick cinnamon


• 1 lemon cut in half


• 1 bean vanilla

Instructions

1. Peel the quince and cut in half to boil it with the cinnamon, the vanilla, and ½ of the lemon.


2. After about an hour, when it is soft, drain the water, discard the lemon, the vanilla, and the cinnamon and cut out the cores of the quince.


3. Cut into smaller pieces and either smash it with a bean smasher or, to be more efficient, throw it in a blender or food processor.


4. Measure it and put it in a large pot with an equal amount (or a little less, if you prefer) of sugar. Into this mixture add the zest of the leftover, uncooked lemon half.


5. Cook it for about 40 minutes, at a medium heat, stirring constantly until it turns a pinkish, amber color.


6. After it has thickened into an almost solid mass, pour it into a container and let it dry on its own. After a few hours it will have set into a shape that is easy to slice.


7. Slice it thin and serve it with equally thin slices of manchego cheese.

Notes

Ripe quince is yellow.
Serve as an appetizer or as an after-dinner dessert with a nice Prosecco.

Crazy for Figs

My husband thinks my behavior in the vicinity of figs is a little outrageous. Let's face it, I'm crazy for figs, I can be a little obsessive. In fact, driving through Italy where fig trees seem to grow wild everywhere, I have been known to screech, “Fiiig treeee!!!” My husband, accustomed to this zaniness and wanting this to be over quickly, will pull over while I clamber through snake-infested weeds so I can pluck the delicious prize: ripe and luscious figs. I grab as many as my sticky hands can hold and cram a few in my mouth, darting back to the car, my husband's annoyance mitigated only by the sheer delight of sharing this "manjar de los dioses."

My earliest memories of eating ficus carica was in the hot, dusty Northern Mexican town of Villaldama, Nuevo León, the ancestral home where my father would take my sister and me on a train ride from Laredo to visit our grandmother, Mamá Manuelita. The interior courtyard of my grandmother's modest colonial house was overgrown with fig trees which surrounded an old well in the center. Our cousins would join my sister and me in the shade of the courtyard where we would sit eating the mushy black fruit with the glistening, ruby-red center.

Is it any wonder that here in Maryland I've been successful in growing these trees? They consistently yield a bumper crop each year, providing me with the challenge of figuring out a million ways to use them after I tire from eating them off the tree or pushing them onto friends and neighbors. So, after making jams, tarts, and sorbeto de higo all summer, I've been enjoying them now in November, taking them out of the freezer, already peeled and ready to roast in the oven.  This simple recipe with honey and citrus peel syrup, is one that has probably been around since the time of Adam and Eve.

So, in the spirit of the great Aesop's Fable, The Ant and the Grasshopper, all you grasshoppers out there, take heed from the ant and freeze some figs next year so that in the middle of the fall (or winter) you can pull them out and make this really special dessert for your Thanksgiving or Christmas table.

Honey Roasted Figs

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Recipe Type: Dessert

Author: Gilda Valdez Carbonaro

Prep time: 30 mins

Cook time: 45 mins

Total time: 1 hour 15 mins

Serves: 8

Figs, the first food to be cultivated by humans, even before wheat, are very rich in calcium and other nutrients.

Ingredients

• 1 ½ lbs fresh or frozen figs, peeled


• 1/2 cup sugar


• zest of one lime, one lemon, one tangerine and one orange


• 2 tablespoons honey

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.


2. Place the figs on a baking dish that may be used to serve them.


3. Sprinkle the sugar and drizzle the honey.


4. Bake until the sugar caramelizes, 40-50 minutes.


5. Serve at room temperature.

Notes

Reconstituted dried figs may be used but the baking times will differ.

Merienda Alarm Clock

In the hard drive of the brain are buried the myriad experiences of a lifetime, irrepressible memories ready to spring like a jack-in-the box, surprising us with their unpredictability. For example, around 3:30 on any afternoon at school when I'm not buried in work, when there is an unexpected lag in the usual mad teaching schedule, when the door of my classroom is closed and the rest of the world is on the other side, there is an alarm clock that goes off somewhere in my mind. Suddenly my memories turn to the routine (and the glories) of the merienda hour of my childhood.

A chilly, rainy afternoon like today reminds me of how by this time, my mother would have had the table set with hot cinnamon tea or a glass of milk and a plate of hojarascas, semita, campechanas (her favorites) and conchas for her three daughters. Sometimes we were joined by aunts from across the river or señoras who we knew and whose 'merienda alarm' was propelling them punctually across town in the direction of our welcoming table. We never learned to make these breads and cookies because, ¡qué idea!, who could make them better and more regularly than La Superior, the bakery in Laredo that had the best Mexican pastries? Going there to pick them out was just part of the ritual.

One afternoon, at a merienda at the house of my cousin, Hilda, (yes, I know, there's a confusing amount of Hildas and Gildas in this picture) in San Antonio, I tasted her hojarascas and got her recipe. I was reminded of Hilda's hojarascas when I was in Florence, Italy two weeks ago enjoying my favorite breakfast cookie with a cappuccino at Cibreo's. It's called occhio di bue (bull's eye) because it's a crumbly sablé cookie like the hojarasca except it's made with butter, has no cinnamon, and it has a raspberry jam center that looks like a bull's eye.

In the pure delight of the moment of sitting at a table under the spring sun, watching Italian grandmothers intermittently sipping their coffee, cooing to grandchildren in strollers, and bantering with the barista, I remembered Alex, my son, wishing I could share this precious moment with him.

As a child, Alex loved making cookies with me, the two of us up to our elbows and noses in flour.  His job: to do the cookie cutting.  Mine: to keep him from pinching off two much raw cookie dough to "taste test."  Often, he and I made Hildas' hojarascas. This recipe is a very old northern Mexico recipe which is most probably a new world descendent of European sablés. But in the family recipe, I've substituted the lard with shortening, realizing that's not much better health-wise, but the thing about cookies is that hopefully you don't eat them everyday and making them has the very redeemable feature of luring children into the magic of the kitchen.

The concentrated cinnamon/anise tea that you pour into the dough is the touch that makes them unmistakably Mexican. This is a dough with very little sugar since you will add the sugar on the surface of the cookie. Putting a thin layer of raspberry jam between them would make them divine, in my opinion, since the tartness of the jam juxtaposes well with the cinnamon. But as they appear in this recipe, they are beyond special.

Hilda's Hojarascas

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Recipe Type: Dessert/Postre

Ingredients

• Cookie Dough


• 1/2 cup sugar


• 2 cups Crisco


• 5 cups flour approximately


• A pinch of salt


• Tea


• 2 cups water


• 4 sticks cinnamon


• 1 tablespoon anise

Instructions

Tea

1. Combine the water, cinnamon and anise and boil down to 1/3 cup.

Cookies

1. Heat oven to 375 degrees.


2. Beat Crisco to make it creamy.


3. Add sugar and then tea (cooled).


4. Add salt and flour (some flour may be left over).


5. Don't over knead.


6. Refrigerate for approximately one hour.


7. Then roll out, cut with a cookie cutter and place on buttered cookie sheet.


8. Sprinkle with part of the sugar/cinnamon mixture.


9. Bake for approximately 25 minutes or until they are golden.


10. When cookies are done, put them on cooling rack and then sprinkle them again with more of the sugar/cinnamon mixture.

For Cookie Dusting

1. In blender, grind roughly 2 cinnamon sticks with 1/2 cup sugar.


2. These roughly pulverized bits of cinnamon may also be added to the flour used for the cookie dough.

For the Love of San Miguel de Allende

It would be easy to be selfish and keep the secret of San Miguel de Allende to myself.   But what the heck, Martha Stewart "discovered" it several months ago.  Granted, American GIs started going in droves to this colonial town in central Mexico in the late 40's when Stirling Dickinson, the larger-than-life American expatriate impacted the life of this town forever after.  In 1948, Life Magazine published a three-page spread entitled “GI Paradise: Veterans go to Mexico to study art, live cheaply and have a good time.” This was Stirling Dickinson's legacy.

In the intervening years, this sleepy town—and the cradle of Mexican independence—grew and became flooded with expats from all over the world, especially Americans.  It also became a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Unfortunately, in 2009, stories of the spread of swine flu discouraged tourism.  This was compounded by the astounding stories of how large swaths of Mexico have been taken over by drug cartels, reversing the prosperity the town had enjoyed since those heady days of Stirling Dickinson. The irony is that San Miguel is safer than most American towns and life on the main square is lived almost as it was a hundred years ago.

I am a teacher and several years ago,  with the collaboration of colleagues in my school, we created a program for our middle school students in San Miguel. This is how I ended up in a cooking class with Paco Cárdenas Báez, a pastry chef who owns Petit Four.  Paco's class is foodie heaven.  He takes his students to the market to meet the "real" people of San Miguel: women who sell nopales, blue handmade tortillas, huitlacoche, and roasted corn.

He invites his pupils into his home to cook in a kitchen that is al fresco, the chef and his eager protégés bathed in the golden light of San Miguel.

The Aztecs knew what chocolate was about. So does Paco.   Here is his decadent chocolate mousse with tequila for you to enjoy this Dia del Amor, Valentine's Day.

Chocolate Mousse a la Mexicana Recipe by Chef Paco Cárdenas from El Petit Four M.R.

Ingredients:
1 cup heavy cream
1 cup bittersweet chocolate, finely chopped
¼ cup tequila reposado (aged)
1 cup fresh mixed berries
Optional: ½ cup bittersweet chocolate for decorative flakes; pour on a granite top and scrape with spatula

Preparation:
In the bowl of an electric mixer, using the whisk attachment, beat the cream to soft peaks.
Pour the tequila on top of the cream and mix well.
Melt the chopped chocolate and pour it on top of the tequila cream.
Whisk together until smooth.

To serve:
Place the mousse in a pastry bag with a striped nozzle and pipe the mousse  (or spoon it) in martini glasses, garnish with fresh mixed berries and dark chocolate flakes.