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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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.

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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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.

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.