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:
Cook time:
Total time:
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:
Peel the guayabas and pierce them to the center with a sharp knife and set aside.
Boil the water with the cinnamon sticks until the water turns pinkish.
Add the sugar and boil for another 10 or 15 minutes.
Add the peeled guayabas and boil them until they feel soft when you pierce them with a fork.
Nopales (cactus) boiled with cloves of garlic and strained
So much of what the indigenous people of Mexico eat is finger food, picked up gingerly and eaten with the hands, while it is hot, freshly made, and handed to those gathered around the hot comal. Freshly nixtamalized corn is shaped into small tortillas, gorditas, tlacoyos, huaraches, or sopes...all vessels that will carry the vegetables, the beans, or the meats to those hungry mouths. You simply can't eat some of these things with a fork. They won't even taste the same. The base of all 'wrappings' in Mexican food is, of course, this corn dough, sometimes thickly patted by hand, sometimes flattened thinly in a tortilla press...small, large, oval, round, fried, cooked on a comal, or steamed, but it's all corn dough. Sopes fit into the category of small, edible 'plates' of corn with diverse toppings, usually offered ahead of a meal. You make your masa (dough) using commercial corn dough like Maseca if you're not lucky enough to live in Mexico where you can always find freshly ground corn dough. For your dough, use slightly more water than the recipe calls for so that your dough doesn't crack on the edges. Here's a recipe for sopes made in an oval shape. These are not fried the way you often find them sometimes and the topping is an amazing mixture of nopal (cactus, or prickly pear) with dried shrimp which is rehydrated with warm water. I've mixed a red chile ancho sauce. We don't yet have all the evidence to call cactus a superfood, but we know it's part of a healthy diet: it's high in fiber and antioxidants. My aunt, Tía Leila, helped me make these in San Miguel de Allende last time we were there. Tía Leila, who is in her 80's, explained to me they were often eaten during Lent in our family when she was a child and later when she was raising her family.
Dried shrimp after rehydration
Sope topped with shrimp, cactus, and chile guajillo salsa
Sopes with Shrimp and Cactus
Recipe Type: Appetiser
Cuisine: Mexican
Author: Gilda Valdez Carbonaro
Prep time:
Cook time:
Total time:
Serves: 4
Dried shrimp is an ingredient that is usually found in Latino stores, but you can substitute boiled fresh shrimp, of course. I've seen the cactus paddles very often now in regular grocery stores. I recommend you prepare a chile guajillo sauce ahead of time: http://culinarianexpeditions.blogspot.com/2012/04/la-madrina-salsa-recipes.html
Ingredients:
3 cups chopped cactus
2 cloves garlic
2 cups small dried shrimp (or fresh tiny boiled shrimp)
4 cups commercial corn dough (following the recipe on the package)
red chile guajillo salsa, see http://culinarianexpeditions.blogspot.com/2012/04/la-madrina-salsa-recipes.html
chopped cilantro, optional
Instructions:
Place the dried shrimp in a bowl of hot water to soak for about 30 minutes.
Boil the cactus for about 10 minutes with the peeled cloves of garlic, then strain and set aside.
Drain the shrimp, peel it and chop it.
Place the shrimp and the drained, cooked cactus in a bowl.
Stir in enough chile guajillo salsa to your preference, see recipe http://culinarianexpeditions.blogspot.com/2012/04/la-madrina-salsa-recipes.html
Make the corn masa according to the instructions on the package, adding a few extra tablespoons of water to make it more pliable.
Shape balls of dough about ping pong sized into cylinders.
Flatten them between your hands until you have oval shapes about 1/8 inch thick. (Keep your hands slightly damp)
Place the oval shapes (sopes) on a medium comal (iron griddle) and cook them on both sides until you see spots on the dough.
Remove the sopes from the comal and pinch the sides so they all have ridges on the edges.
Spoon your shrimp/cactus mixture onto the sopes and place them on the comal again for a few minutes before placing them on a tray.
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:
Cook time:
Total time:
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
When the syrup stops moving, turn the mold upside down on the wax paper to cool and let any excess syrup run out.
Custard
In a 1 – 1 ½ quart saucepan, bring the milk almost to a boil over moderate heat.
Remove the pan from the stove and add the vanilla extract.
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.
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)
Strain this mixture through a sieve into your mold and place the mold in a large pan on the middle shelf of the oven.
Pour boiling water into the pan until it comes about halfway up the sides of the mold.
Bake the flan, but be careful to lower the temperature of the oven if you see the water in the pan beginning to boil.
After about an hour, insert a knife in the center. If it comes out clean, it's ready.
Take the mold out of the water and refrigerate the flan for at least 3 hours.
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.
Rap the plate on a table and the flan should slide easily out of the mold.
Pour any extra caramel remaining in the mold over the flan.
Yesterday, Memorial Day 2013, I wrote in my journal: On a day like today my son was buried, at the very front of neat, diagonal rows of tombstones. The empty, verdant field in front of his grave where his mother and father gasped in anguish at the sight of his casket on that day, is now a fully populated landscape, filled with the lost dreams of young lives ripped away from this earth so early, so incomprehensibly. The rows grew from Alex's grave in all directions, of those young who still lived, breathed, and dreamed they would survive, when Alex was lowered into the ground. So much was lost and buried forever, never to be found again. I could not bear to write about celebratory food. I longed to write about memories of times past, memories that didn't tread anywhere near the symbols of this day. Would you humor me with my recipe for empanadas which I learned from my aunt in Mexico? Because...after that moment in our lives seven years ago, we ever so slowly learned to live again, and food once again became the expression of love that it had always been. These chilacayote empanadas are truly special, divine little folded pockets of love, flaky on the outside with a golden, angel-hair surprise spilling out of every bite. My elderly aunt, Leyla, prepared the filling in the little town of Marfil, Guanajuato, recently, and then packed the jars filled with the angel hair chilacayote in her suitcase for her bus ride to San Miguel de Allende where she visited us. It all reminded me of those days so long ago in Laredo when the aunts arrived with bags full of delicacies from Monterrey, Puebla, or Villaldama.
Chilacayote is a squash that favors a mountain micro climate, very common in the area around San Miguel de Allende; its mottled sage green color is a delight to the eyes, and, as it turns out, you can prepare a million different things from chilacayote, just take a look online.
One of my favorites is candied chilacayote and another is agua de chilacayote. Anyway, Tía Leyla arrived with the cooked, amber colored angel hair chilacayote filling and it was a perfect beginning for a tray of empanadas. We put our aprons on the next morning and got to work, cranking out dozens of empanadas ready to offer friends arriving at our house from out of town later that day. I lost myself that day in the good moments shared with a beloved aunt and the conviviality of those days that followed with friends that came and went, exclaiming over our seemingly endless supply of empanadas.
Chilacayote Empanadas
Recipe Type: dessert
Cuisine: Mexican
Author: Gilda Valdez Carbonaro
Prep time:
Cook time:
Total time:
Serves: 15
This recipe is on the difficult side but well worth it if you can find chilacayotes where you live.
Ingredients:
a 5 lb chilacayote (more or less)
brown sugar or piloncillo (you will measure half the weight of your baked squash)
2 cloves
1 stick cinnamon
grated peel of one orange
Instructions:
Cut the chilacayote in half and bake covered for one hour in a 350 degree oven.
Remove from the oven and scoop out the flesh.
You don't have to remove the seeds, they're good for you!
Weigh it and place in a large pot covered with water, half the weight in sugar, the cloves, the stick of cinnamon and the grated peel of the orange.
Cook at medium heat for about 45 minutes until it all caramelizes and the water evaporates.
Take care to stir often so it doesn't stick.
Notes
The recipe for the pastry is here: http://culinarianexpeditions.blogspot.com/2011/11/floria-pumpkin-empanadas.html
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.
I recently purchased Diana Kennedy's book Oaxaca al Gusto, a 400 page tome on the indigenous food of Oaxaca, which, in many cases, is unknown even to many Mexicans outside of these valleys. Here you will find recipes with the fundamental building blocks of the food of the region: chocolate, chiles, and corn. And, as Adriana Legaspi has argued, these meals are not just a means of nourishment, but, rather, an important way to understand how they fit within ancient traditions practiced by the community.
On a warm spring day of my youth, a bowl and rolling pin marked the beginning of my new life as an independent woman. I was heading off to college and my mother took me to Woolworth's in Laredo, Texas to make the purchase. The bowl was a sturdy green ceramic that couldn't have cost more than two dollars and the rolling pin might have cost even less, a far cry from some of the things I crave nowadays from places that sell gourmet cookware. Through the years and through all my moves, I carried them around with me like a passport, a reminder of who I was and where I came from, until I finally lost track of both the bowl and the palote (rolling pin). But the shopping trip to buy them remains one of the fondest memories I have of my mother.
I imagine it was a bittersweet moment for her; I was her first-born daughter and the first to travel far away to study. She knew I would probably never again live at home, not to mention in the same town. Yet she didn't betray her emotions. I did not understand what she must have felt that day until I became a mother myself. All these years later, I remember we bought the bowl and palote and celebrated the joy of the moment over a fountain coke at the drugstore counter.
We bought the bowl and the palote to make sure I would have the tools necessary to amasar, to prepare the dough for the daily morning ritual of making the tortillas needed to accompany breakfast. In time, as a busy student and later as a working mother, I would come to abandon the idea of having to make them from scratch. The fat content in the shortening traditionally used in flour tortillas also became a reason to go without. I began to prefer corn tortillas that I bought at the grocery store. The flour ones became a special treat to look forward to when my mother visited. Corn tortillas are the norm in most of Mexico. However, in northern Mexico and along the U.S. border, both wheat flour and corn tortillas are eaten; wheat are for breakfast and corn for lunch and dinner.
I've adapted this recipe from my mother's, cutting the quantity for shortening in half and substituting with peanut or canola oil for health considerations. Also, in my house, we didn't stack our flour tortillas. We liked them flaky, so we separated each one, leaning them against the inside of a basket where they could cool slightly without becoming sweaty or gummy. And we would eat them like that, fresh, warm, and delightfully flaky.
Tortillas de Harina/Flour Tortillas
Author: Gilda V. Carbonaro
Prep time:
Cook time:
Total time:
Serves: 4
Ingredients:
2 cups flour
1 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons shortening
2 tablespoons peanut or canola oil
1/2 cup warm water
Instructions:
In a large bowl mix the salt with the flour.
Add the shortening and oil and mix thoroughly with your hands.
Form a dough by adding the water slowly with one hand as you mix the dough with the other, until a soft dough is formed.
Roll out the tortillas and cook on a warm griddle, turning on both sides.
Place in a basket without stacking them as they come out.
There is a movement afoot in Mexico to preserve the traditions of its indigenous cuisine and the ancient knowledge of the use of curative herbs. It involves the rescue and preservation of the ingredients, methods, and utensils common in the pre-colombian past of Mesoamerica in the hopes that they do not flicker out of existence in our lifetime. With globalization and the proliferation of fast food franchises, it is no surprise that these ancient traditions are becoming a distant memory. In twenty-five years, who will know how to prepare tecorral tea, muicle, tlacoyos, or tamales de atepocate or know what they are, for that matter?
Enter Adriana Legaspi, founder of Gastrotour Prehispánico Malinalco, an anthropologist of the palate and a woman on a mission to preserve these traditions. She is neither the first nor the only person in Mexico bent on what Adriana calls "the ethnogastronomic rescue" but she certainly stands out with her passion and conviction. A multi-faceted business woman who is not only proficient in the kitchen, Adriana also has degrees in communications, political science, and public affairs. Many years ago, she and her husband purchased a weekend home in the cobble-stoned mountain village of Malinalco outside of Mexico City. Adriana found herself in her element, naturally drawn to the wizened old 'doñas' in the ancient market of Malinalco, chatting, learning recipes and listening to their stories of old times and ways. With encouragement from friends and with a penchant for social causes, Adriana founded a project which would direct her seemingly boundless energy toward two goals: to preserve the culture and identity of the region and to help the women with a much needed income. This was the genesis of the Gastrotour Prehispánico of Malinalco. The tour consists of a hands-on cooking class on weekends, starting with a visit to the market in Malinalco to buy organic fruits, vegetables and herbs grown by the seller herself at zero kilometers. She invites her guests to observe the fauna and the flora depicted on a convent wall, thus ensuring a thorough understanding of the historical backdrop of the food they are preparing. What follows is the first of a two-part interview with Adriana about her work to preserve the Mexican identity through its prehispanic cuisine:
When did you first become interested in cooking?
The truth is that I'm a product of a generation that did not hold cooking in high regard because it was associated with a lack of culture or professional status. I am the first generation of female college graduates in a family where the women had always considered marriage and the running of a household as the first priority. My sisters and cousins began to take on minor professions in banks. The more professional we felt, the more we shunned the kitchen. Nevertheless, I'm a descendent of Italian immigrants to Mexico on my father's side for whom food and its preparation were of utmost importance in daily life. The quantity, the quality, freshness, uniqueness, and delectability for a traditional community in Northern Mexico where we lived, set us apart. As soon as I began my career in the hospitality industry, my own personal history became relevant as I found myself charged with the responsibility of organizing unique dining experiences at the empresarial level.
How did you come to get involved in the gastronomic tours of prehispanic cuisine in Malinalco?
This is a very long story whose chapters played out slowly starting from the first moment I arrived in Malinalco with my husband over 20 years ago. In spite of the enormous cultural offerings we enjoyed living in Mexico City, on weekends we spilled out of the city in search of open spaces and fresh air. That's how we ended up in Malinalco on many a weekend enjoying lunch in the subtropical climate of this town 88 kms from Mexico City. We often ate at a restaurant called El Tecorral situated in a grand old house dating from the 17th century where we took in the gardens, the climate, and the people. Soon we found ourselves buying a property in a place where every neighborhood had its Caocalli or Teocalli typical of Indian villages with a prehispanic past. The Augustin monks who arrived in Malinalco to evangelize in the 16th century built the Convento de la Transfiguracieon del Señor and directed every barrio to have its own saint and chapel. Ours came with a chapel; we purchased it from a seller who still has a a Nahua surname: Donaciano de la Fuente Tecayahuatl.
Little by little I became involved in the life of the town, admiring its geography, its ecology, and naturally, its cuisine. I became aware of the strength of its indigenous origins and the pride in its traditions evident in daily life. Imagine a prehispanic market where you can find tlacoyos, a type of oval tortilla filled with fava bean paste or ricotta spiced with chilies, cooked on a clay comal by vendors like Doña Carmen. I started, then, to make a mental inventory of all that grabbed my attention to begin my ethnographic research. I began interviewing the elders, finding and documenting ingredients, looking for their existence in a precolombian past. The rest came naturally. I felt the need to help the economic possibilities of the women of the market who rely on their own meager income. The weekend visitors were not necessarily buying their products; hence, the beginning of my classes: to teach my students the importance of this food, its contextualization, the value in its freshness, helping these students to understand who we are and why we eat as we do. Then, going home to turn the ingredients into a meal.
Why do you think it's important to get back to authentic roots in mexican cuisine?
First of all, because the Mesoamerican diet is healthy... and because to eat guided by prehispanic and Mesoamerican principles of when to eat something is healthy. Eating guayabas before and during winter, for example, provides the body with the vitamin C necessary for the immunological system to withstand the freezing weather of the central high plains of Mexico.
What is the attitude and/or interest now of the professional (upper and middle) classes in Mexico regarding authentic prehispanic cuisine?
Well, in reality, I think there is growing interest throughout the world, among those who can afford it, to eat authentic and traditional food. The designation of Mexican food as a world heritage cuisine has made it stylish, and chefs throughout Mexico are recuperating the tastes and recipes, creating them with modern techniques and charging exhorbitant prices. To be continued...
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.
I appreciate Thanksgiving for the way in which the holiday brings together friends and family and reminds us to give thanks for each other and the goodness in life. But I still often think about how Thanksgiving came about and the ways in which it misrepresents the relationship between America's first colonizers and its native people. (See our post about the origins of Thanksgiving here.)
Interestingly, none of the Hispanic countries (those colonized by Spain) of the Americas have such a holiday as far as I know. The Mexican mestizo soul is complex and opaque. Most Mexicans identify proudly with the indigenous people who blended with the Spanish colonizers to create the mestizo race. (However, don't be surprised to hear epithets hurled at either the indigenous culture or at their European ancestors when a little Tequila is going around. Mexicans know how to make light of these "problems of the psyche!")
This Thanksgiving, I thought it would be appropriate to give you a recipe that is quite possibly prehispanic and can be made with the native bird of the Americas and of this holiday: guajolote (nahuatl for turkey). I had to go through a stack of old handwritten recipes to find it. It's Tía Oralia's recipe for pipian verde, a kind of green mole, which is usually made for chicken. I see from my notes that she was dictating it to me and I was barely keeping up with my writing, but the essentials are here. It looks like my pipian sauce needed more broth, just add as you like to get the proper texture and serve this with a good white rice and warm corn tortillas. To all those with a loved one who did not return from Iraq or Afghanistan, may your bounty of friends and relatives help dry your tears and fill the void of the empty chair at your table.
Pipian Verde with Guajolote (Turkey)
Recipe Type: main, fowl, sauce, mole
Cuisine: Mexican
Author: Gilda Valdez Carbonaro
Prep time:
Cook time:
Total time:
Serves: 4
Pipian verde goes perfectly on a bed of white rice, cooked Mexican style.
Ingredients:
1lb tomatillo
1 serrano chile
¾ cup raw, unsalted pumpkin seeds (pepitas)
2 cloves peeled garlic
1/2 onion
1 sprig epazote (optional)
3 green leaves, approximately, from radishes, swiss chard, kale, or collard greens
4 tablespoons olive oil
1 cup roughly chopped cilantro (without stems)
1 chicken cut up or 6 turkey drumsticks
salt to taste
3 cups chicken or turkey broth
For broth:
3 carrots
2 sticks celery
1 onion
salt to taste
1 cut up chicken or 6 turkey drumsticks
Instructions:
Bring water to a boil and place cut chicken pieces or turkey drumsticks, bringing the flame down to a low simmer.
After about ½ hour, place the vegetables in the skimmed broth and add salt.
Continue to cook at a low simmer for another 45 minutes, partially covered.
Set the broth aside when it's ready, strain it and pull out the chicken or drumsticks, placing them on a plate, to be used later.
Start preparing the pipian by browning the pumpkin seeds and the clove of garlic in half of the oil on a skillet for about 3 minutes, until they are puffy; take care not to burn them, as this will make them bitter; keep the flame low.
In the meantime, boil the de-husked tomatillos with the serrano pepper and onion for about 10 minutes. (You can also broil them if you prefer)
After this all cools, put the tomatillos, the serrano, the garlic, the sprig of epazote and the toasted pumpkin seeds (pepitas) in the blender with about a cup of the cooled broth, blending it until it's as smooth as possible.
Place this mixture on a skillet again with the last half of the oil and begin to cook it again, to amalgamate it for about 5 minutes.
Place the cilantro in the blender and the leaves of green along another cup of the cooled broth and blend together.
Add this to your mixture in the skillet and add remaining broth, slowly to get the consistency you want.
Add the pieces of chicken or turkey to your skillet and make sure you are able to turn the pieces so they can all be coated with the sauce.
Cover and cook for another 5 minutes at a very low flame, checking that nothing sticks or the sauce doesn't become too thick.
Arrange on a plate with a good white rice and warm corn tortillas.
I have lived seven Novembers without him and somehow survived them in different ways. We knew that November 2005 could be the last with our son, Alex. He was about to deploy to a raging battleground in Iraq for the second time. Our hearts were heavy and so he asked that we celebrate Thanksgiving twice, once on the Thursday and again on Friday. So we did. We went around the table articulating our thanks for special things in our lives. When it came to Alex, he looked at us and thanked us for having been his parents and loving him as we did. Then he left, and we would never again be blessed with seeing this child, this man, whom we loved so much. We would never see him grow old, become a father, raise children and teach us things only our children can teach us. Our lives would change dramatically.
Last year I began to practice a remembrance of Alex through the Día de los Muertos tradition, finding comfort in the connection to this prehispanic ritual. I made pan de muertos and set up an altar with ofrendas arranged with things Alex might have liked. In fact, I have begun doing this with the children I teach. They also set up altares to their loved ones in my classroom, gaining a hands-on understanding of the spirituality of this day and the mystery of life.
This year I've made the usual things in remembrance: empanadas, hojarascas, capirotada, and pan de muertos. The empanadas, especially, are for my mother, who comforted me in this loss through her profound understanding of my sorrow. But today I'll post something that can't be put in an ofrenda: a soup I began to make for Alex after he started eating solid food as a baby. Last night I ate this soup, savoring slowly the taste and texture of the alphabet-shaped pasta, the flavors of the vegetables, and I was transported back to those days that went by much too quickly.
Memory in a Soup - Dia de los Muertos
Recipe Type: Soup
Cuisine: Mexican
Author: Gilda Valdez Carbonaro
Prep time:
Cook time:
Total time:
Serves: 4
The browning of the vegetables enhances the taste of the soup, but if you prefer not to have the additional olive oil in the soup, just skip this step and throw the vegetables directly into the boiling broth until they are soft.
Ingredients:
8 cups of chicken broth, either homemade (preferably) or commercial
3-4 carrots, minced
1 stick celery, minced
2 cloves garlic
3/4 cup alphabet pasta
1 onion minced as finely as possible
cilantro or parsley for flavoring at the end
2 leaves of any greens like kale or escarole (chopped very finely)
olive oil to coat the pasta and brown it in a pan (about 2 tablespoons)
olive oil to soften the onion, carrot, celery, and green leaves, (about 2 tablespoons)
Salt to taste
Pepper grindings to taste
Optional: one lime and a few crumbled totopos (corn tortilla that you fry yourself, don't bother buying any)
Instructions:
Brown the pasta with the oil in a thick pan at a low heat, about one minute, it will brown quickly.
Brown the peeled garlic, onion, celery, carrots, and green leaves separately in the other 2 tablespoons of oil with a low flame for about 5 minutes. Add a little oil if you need to.
Combine the pasta and the vegetables in a large pot with the broth already boiling and boil together for about 15 minutes.
Check for salt, add pepper grindings if you like, and garnish with cilantro or parsley.
Serve in a bowl for your child and add fried, crunchy corn tortilla, and a few drops of lime juice squeezed into the soup at the last minute.
Fall is at its peak here in the mid-Atlantic. Autumn leaves are falling, each shimmering leaf a memory of the last year, bringing on a melancholy I wear like comfortable pajamas on lazy fall mornings. I look out the window with my hands wrapped around my coffee cup and think, We are the product of all the autumns we've lived. We are hopefully wiser and stronger, more capable of understanding the mysteries of life, more able to withstand the coming winter.
I've gone to the farmer's market here in Bethesda to forage for the last of the fall harvest: diminishing supplies of lima beans, lonely cobs of silver-white corn, a few forlorn Honey Crisp apples. I feel the start of cold weather—a hint of winter's magificent presence—and know I should fill my bag with sweet potatoes, pumpkins, turnips, maybe a pot of marigolds.
But the lima beans and corn are what I need to prepare an aromatic rice my friends love, down to the last toasted grain at the bottom of the pan. The dish is a hybrid: part Mexican, part Spanish, perhaps only the tiniest bit like an Italian risotto. Powdered turmeric and pimentón de la vera (Spanish smoked paprika) gives the rice its yellow color and a healthy quantity of cumin gives it a nuanced flavor. Also, I use a paella rice which is short grained, similar to risotto rice.
Fall Harvest Rice
Recipe Type: Side Dish
Author: Gilda Valdez Carbonaro
Prep time:
Cook time:
Total time:
Serves: 8-10
Ingredients
2 cups short grained rice
8 tablespoons olive oil
1 onion minced finely
1/2 red bell pepper cut in thin strips
1 tablespoon powdered pimenton de la vera
1 tablespoon turmeric
1 tablespoon cumin
2 envelopes powdered chicken soup concentrate
1 cup lima beans
scraped corn from one cob
6 cloves peeled garlic
cilantro for garnish
salt to taste
5 cups water (or chicken broth if you prefer not to use powdered soup)
Instructions
Rinse the rice and drain out the water as much as possible.
Put 5 tablespoons of the oil in a large heavy bottomed skillet and place the rice to brown.
Let it brown, at medium heat, moving it with a spoon for about 3 minutes.
Add the minced onion and stir until the the onion has softened, about 5 minutes.
In the meantime, place the strips of red bell pepper and the cloves of garlic in a pan with the other 3 tablespoons of oil and saute them, until softened and the garlic is golden.
Now, to the rice, add the 5 cups of water, the turmeric, the pimenton de la vera, the powdered chicken soup, the salt and the strips of bell pepper and garlic.
Bring to a boil uncovered, and after 5 minutes, add the lima beans and the corn.
Check for salt and bring the heat down to a very low simmer.
Cook for another half hour approximately and cover loosely for the last 10 minutes.
Garnish the top of the skillet with the cilantro or if you are serving it on a special dish, wait until it cools for 10 minutes.
As I gathered the ingredients for this post, I thought about a woman my family once knew in Laredo. Her name was Ana María. She was born in Nuevo Laredo and moved to the U.S. side of the border after her marriage to a Laredoan. Ana María was an eccentric woman who made it clear in subtle and not so subtle ways that she belonged to Nuevo Laredo's well-connected families. However, in Laredo, Ana María and her husband were as poor as church mice. That is, until the 1980's when gas drilling along the Rio Grande made overnight millionaires out of ordinary people like Ana María and her husband.
My parents had become friends with Ana Maria and her husband some time after I left Laredo. But I remember many funny stories about her and how my mother tolerated some of her crazy ideas. Finally, I met her during a trip to visit my parents. She was a natural beauty, albeit with a strong belief in heavy black eye liner and pitch-black hair dyed to match. Within no time, she told me she knew all the "right" kind of eligible, young men from Nuevo Laredo for me to meet. She was truly from another time and place!
What brought Ana María to mind as I planned this recipe was how much she loved pozole. She often invited my parents over for pozole--too often for my mother, who didn't care much for it. It's not a northern Mexican dish and my mother just didn't understand it. She would often describe how she had avoided another pozole dinner at Ana María's by offering to cook dinner at our home so that she could have some control over the menu. My mother had the nagging suspicion that Ana María's real intention was to end up with a dinner invitation rather than have to cook.
I was always curious about the dish, never having tasted Ana María's famous pozole all those years. Later, during my trips to Mexico, I found many occasions to savor it. There are many versions of the hearty soup and, unlike my mother, I soon became a fan of pozole!
Last month, some friends from New Mexico brought me some dried blue corn kernels. I used them in this pozole recipe in place of canned hominy that is traditionally used. Normally, pozole is served with satellites of garnishes, little dishes of items that can be added to the soup: chopped white onion, sliced radishes, chopped cilantro, sliced limes, and thinly-sliced romaine lettuce. I like to add strips of fried tortilla as well.
Dried Chile Guajillo
My pozole recipe might be too spicy for little children who have not grown up with spicy food but it's substantial enough to serve as a main course. The flavors and textures are like few things I've ever had; the meat of the pork is tender, the corn kernels are chewy and the flavor of the chile guajillo cooked into this thick soup is deep and earthy. And adding a squeeze of lime and the chopped cilantro creates a bright contrast with the savory flavors of the soup.
Blue Corn Pozole
Recipe Type: soup
Cuisine: Mexican
Author: Gilda Valdez Carbonaro
Prep time:
Cook time:
Total time:
Serves: 6
Fall and winter is the perfect time for a hearty soup like pozole.
Ingredients
6 or 7 guajillo chili pods, deveined and seeded
2 cups dried blue corn which has been soaked overnight
2 lbs pork shoulder cut into 1 inch cubes
10 cloves garlic roughly cut
1 1/2 tablespoons dry oregano
1 tablespoon cumin
4 bay leaves
Garnish: finely chopped romaine lettuce or cabbage, minced white onion, limes, cilantro, radishes, and tostadas, or fried corn tortilla strips
Instructions
Soak the corn overnight and then add salt and boil it at a simmer, covered, for about two hours in about 1 quart of water or enough so that there is enough liquid to soften the corn; add more water if it begins to evaporate too fast.
While the corn is cooking, remove the seeds and stems and devein the guajillo chiles, then place them on a heavy skillet or a comal at low heat until they soften, about 5 minutes or less.
After the chilies are soft, place them in a pot of about 5 cups boiling water , set aside to soak, covered, in this water for about 20 minutes.
Place the cubes of pork in a large, heavy bottomed stock pot and brown for about 6 minutes on a medium to high flame.
For an additional 3 minutes and at a lower flame, add the cloves of garlic to sweat as the meat browns. Add salt.
Pour the boiled corn pozole along with its liquid into the stockpot with the seared pork and garlic cloves.
While this is cooking, place the chilies along with their liquid in the blender, and blend. Do this little by little so the blender lid doesn't pop off with the expansion of the liquid.
Add this red liquid into the stock pot and add the oregano, crumbled bay leaf and cumin.
Place the pot lid at a tilt, check for salt and cook at a simmer for about three hours. Check the liquid frequently to make sure the result is brothy.
Fill small plates with garnishes: minced white onion, chopped cilantro, thinly sliced radishes, sliced limes, thinly sliced romain lettuce, and fried strips of tortilla.
