Apollo's Journey

Posted from Oaxaca, Oaxaca, Mexico.

La Comida de las Calles (Street Food)

Hey, everyone.  Thanks for your patience.  We left Oaxaca yesterday (well, mostly – my heart is still there) and are now again on the road.  But we still have a lot of Oaxacan goodness (and deliciousness) to share.

See! Piñatas await your arrival when you dine out!

In the last post, I talked about some of the Oaxacan and Oaxacan-inspired foods we attempted to create in the kitchen in the apartment we rented while there.  But, to tell you the truth, as much as I enjoy cooking – and as much as I miss having a kitchen to cook in regularly – it’s just more fun to go out to eat in Oaxaca.  And it’s incredibly cost effective.  In fact, depending on where you eat, the cost is usually the same as buying your own food or sometimes even cheaper.  And yes, there are very nice places in Oaxaca where the cost will, of course, be more – but still far less than in the States.

Oh, where to begin.  How about breakfast?

Breakfast Appetizer of Champions

Breakfasts traditionally begin with an unexpectedly large cup of hot chocolate (chocolate caliente), one of the two things Oaxaca is regularly praised for, mole being the other.  The chocolate mixture itself usually is a little more sugary than I would prefer, but ground into the cocoa is cinnamon and often a nut like almond or walnut.  Anytime you order chocolate caliente they ask if you want it made with water or milk.  I’ve heard that water is more authentic, but I prefer milk.  And then your soup-bowl-sized morning beverage is accompanied with either pan de yema (an sweetish, eggy bread) or a selection of breads (usually on the sweeter side).  Then the fun begins… What to order.

Waiting for his birthday breakfast

We love enmoladas: tortillas coated in mole and folded onto your plate.  The tortillas are nice as all, but they are really the cake to the frosting that is mole.  Mole negro (dark or black) and mole rojo (red) are usual choices.  Most breakfast plates are served with blacks beans and your choice of meat: carne de res, a thin cut of steak; tasajo, thin of steak in a chile rub; chorizo, sausage; pollo, chicken, and sometimes cecina – like tasajo but pork instead of beef.  Eat this at 10:00 a.m. and you won’t need another meal until after 6:00 p.m.   Instead of enmoladas, we have swooned over chilaquiles, which are kind of like leftover tortillas broken into pieces (maybe like nacho chips but obviously way better), slathered in mole verde (green), and also enchiladas covered in mole coloradito (reddish).  Are you sensing a mole theme yet?  We’ve also had eggs and beans covered in salsa – Erik’s birthday breakfast – which was also very delicious and filling.

Early morning tamale

Just a couple of days ago, as Oaxaca was concluding an incredible week of music to celebrate its 480th anniversary, those who were awake at 7:00 a.m. were treated to free tamales and atole.  Really, only the offer of free Oaxacan food would get my tired butt out of bed at 6:45 and walking down the street in the chilly morning air.  Erik’s tamale was studded with chepil, a green herb common in this area but virtually unknown in the U.S., and mine was filled with shredded beef and mole negro.  Erik’s was pleasantly flavorful, but let’s face it: mine was as rich and decadent as chocolate cake.  The atole was wonderful as well, containing a little rice and cinnamon – the perfect hot morning beverage to warm you up while listening to some official Oaxacan guy give a speech about Oaxaca in Spanish and watching the ever-growing crowds of Oaxacans charge the tables of free food, oblivious (but soon made aware) of the fact that there were lines of patiently waiting and hungry people off to the side.

No, we didn't eat this.

Lunch, we learned a little late in the game, doesn’t begin in the restaurants until 2:00 p.m.  Yes, we literally once walked into a restaurant at 1:40 p.m. and were offered exclusively breakfast options.  But the great thing is that almost all restaurants, from cheap comedores and fondas inside the mercados to higher-priced, fancier options, offer a menu of the day – a fixed lunch menu for a set price.  The menú del día or comida corrida are impressive with the amount of food you get: usually a starter, a main course, dessert, and beverage.  The highest price we have seen is $100 mxn pesos, or roughly US$8.  These are usually great and affordable options and give you the opportunity to try new things.  And, yes, many of these things are covered in… wait for it… mole.

What Erik had for lunch on his birthday

What Pepe had for lunch on Erik's birthday

For Erik’s birthday lunch (April 10) we splurged a little at well-known and highly recommended restaurant called La Olla.  I had some type of fish, rolled up, and covered in mole verde while Erik enjoyed a very rich and satisfying lunch of pork and rice topped with a dark mole.  Chiles rellenos (poblano peppers stuffed with either cheese or meat) is another popular Oaxacan dish; the stuffed pepper is deep fried but not – I repeat, not – covered in mole.  But empanadas, one filled with potatoes and chorizo and another with squash blossoms and quesillo (Oaxacan cheese), have also successfully filled our tummies.  Whether it’s something simpler, like a tamale on the run or a torta (think Mexican panini) with quesillo and a meat like cecina, tinga, or chorizo, or something more extravagant like braised pork medallions accompanied by fennel-tinged refried beans, lunch is the meal your day revolves around.  After lunch, we found that there is really no need to make a big deal about supper.  Sometimes, there was no need to eat supper.  But you can’t just not eat anything, right?  Which brings us to my favorite part of Oaxaca…

Street Food!

Street vendors are far more common in Mexico than in the U.S., which we’ve mentioned in previous posts.  In the mornings before work, you can see a crowd people gathered around a vendor selling breakfast foods and atoles, and late at night people vie for space around the taco or tlayuda carts.  In the States I would never eat from a street cart – not because the food was bad or anything like that, but mostly because I’m cheap and always knew that there was food at home waiting for me.  But here it’s just a different mindset and the food actually is cheap.  I caved, and I caved often.

You know you want to try it.

As mentioned in Oaxaca Diary 1, one of the first things we did upon arriving in Oaxaca was try (in Spanish we say probar: to test or taste – a verb I used A LOT while there) street corn.  You can have free kernels scooped into a cup, or you can have a whole ear intact either boiled or grilled.  The corn itself, is chewier (especially when grilled), tougher, and less sweet than what we eat on the Fourth of July in the States.  Therefore, it holds up well to the usual condiments; if you want everything (“con todo”), you get mayonnaise (which helps everything else stick to it), a white crumbly cheese, chili powder, and a sprinkle of limón juice.  Yes, it sounds odd but it’s quite good.  Or else I wouldn’t have had it again and again and again.

Another very popular street snack is the tlayuda (which, honestly, is a terrible word to have to type), a humungous tortilla folded in half and stuffed with good stuff.  The first thing spread on the tortilla is pork lard (which may or may not account for Erik’s bout with salmonella last month…), then black bean paste, and then your choice of meat and then finally strands of quesillo.  The by-now-quite-heavy mass is put onto the grill until cooked, and when it’s unceremoniously delivered to you, you can bet your last peso that both ends will have no choice but to be spilling over the edges of your plate because it’s so darned big.

You want something a little closer to home?  How about a hamburger or a hot dog?  Yes, they are here, too, and they are wickedly wonderful.  The hot dogs are wrapped in bacon (are you listening? – bacon!) before hitting the griddle and then topped with fun stuff like diced tomatoes and jalapeños.  The hamburgers (as mentioned in a previous post) are also little more than a vehicle for a great array of condiments, including two kinds of fried cheese, sometimes sauerkraut, normal things like lettuce and tomato, and then anything that can be squeezed out of a plastic bottle.  Just a word of warning: don’t try to eat one while wearing fancy clothes.  Here in Mexico, papas fritas are potato chips and papas a la francesa are French Fries; that isn’t the case in every country.  But here chips are easy to find, either freshly sliced and fried as you watch, or being toted around the Zocalo by strolling vendors, and you always get a wedge of limón to squirt over them as well as the option of a thin picante sauce.

Popeye's - a seller of yummy frozen treats on a stick

For those with a sweet tooth (yes, my area of expertise) there are also some fun options and some that are worth trying just once to satisfy your curiosity.  Nieve sellers are pretty easy to find; nieve is a frozen treat, kind of the child that would be born if ice cream and granita got together.  It’s ice-cream-like but icier and comes in a lot of fun, un-American flavors like burnt milk and cactus fruit.  But there are also the classics like pistachio or strawberry.  Pastries are also easy to find, either in the mercados during the day or in portable vending cases on the street at night.  Although you can get doughnuts or little pastry cones stuffed with pastry cream, or pasty shells filled with creamy meringue, or chewy, wet cookies topped with sweetened coconut, my warning is that most of these things will satisfy your craving but almost always look better than they taste.  And although for Erik’s birthday we did visit a café and each enjoyed a decent piece of tres leches cake, we avoid cakes in Mexico, because, well, they usually just aren’t that good.  (Sorry, Mexico!  It’s not you; it’s me.  But you have other wonderful traits!)

Alegría bar, made from amaranth

There are plenty more fun things to mention, from the cart that sells syrupy-sweet preserved fruits and rice pudding, to the bird-seed-looking but tasty snack bars made from the very healthy grain amaranth, but let’s end with another favorite topic, booze.  Although getting decent wine in Oaxaca is easier than in other cities, the selection is still far more limited that what we are used to in the States – unless you are able to make a trip to a specialty store.  But during our month we purchased a few bottles of wine, each made in Mexico.  Although Baja California and the far northwestern areas of Mexico are more well-known for wines (because their climates are an extension of that of southern Calfornia), there is a valley not far from Monterrey that is also churning out some nice reds.

¡Salud!

But mezcal (or mescal) is what this area is really known for, and often it is provided complimentarily with your meal in a restaurant.  Mezcal is made from the maguey plant and comes in a wide array of regular forms as well as in dangerously easy-to-drink cream-based versions which are flavored with fruits.  If you can take a booze and make a frappé-type drink with it, oh yeah it’s going to have popular appeal.  But the regular puts-hair-on-your-chest type of mezcal is very enjoyable as well; we both think of it as a cross between Scotch whisky and tequila, taking smokiness from the Scotch and the sweetness and smoothness from tequila.  One of the most unusual preparations of anything that we have heard of, but extremely common in the production of mezcal, is the act of suspending a raw chicken breast into the large batch of mezcal before it’s bottled, to import another level of flavor.  (Or maybe that would explain Erik’s salmonella…)  Actually, it’s regularly done and totally sanitary – you can’t get salmonella from it.  Erik really enjoyed his tasting of the raw chicken breast-infused mezcal, but I didn’t see what the big fuss was about.  And mezcal is traditionally served with orange wedges and sal de gusanito which is ground up dried worms, dried chiles and salt.  No, it doesn’t taste like worms, not that I have a great frame of reference there.

Fancy dessert

As I think I said in some earlier post, even though we had a whole month in Oaxaca, it still wasn’t enough time (for me) to experience all the fun flavors and foods, as well as all the differing variations of them.  Sure, mole coloradito can be found in almost any restaurant or household, but everyone’s mole coloradito is different from her neighbor’s – and there’s often a sense of competition.  (Just like in the States with, say, blueberry pie or chicken soup – they’re easy to find but everyone’s is different.)  And food is one of the two ways Oaxaqueños celebrate anything, which is very, very fun.  If it’s a special occasion, out comes the special food.  But they aren’t stingy with it here; there’s no need to tax your brain to come up with a special occasion.  And, just so you know, not only was American fast-food difficult to find here (there are a couple of Domino’s Pizzas joints and one Burger King not far from the Zocalo), but recently the residents successfully rose up against McDonald’s and prevented them from building a restaurant near the Zocalo.  Impressive.

Coming up...

I mentioned that food was one of two ways to celebrate here, the other one will also have an entire post devoted to it: music!  It just doesn’t stop here and it’s fantastic.  Thanks for reading.  Now go eat whatever it is that has been calling to you since you’ve been reading this.

Rooftop seating on Erik's birthday

Posted from Oaxaca, Oaxaca, Mexico.

In-house Food Adventures

As we mentioned in Oaxaca Diary 1, the city of Oaxaca (or Oaxaca de Juarez, as it is also known) is considered the culinary capital of Mexico and is known as one of the greatest food cities in the entire world.  There is plenty of food tradition here, some of it – like the beverage tejate – is hundreds and hundreds of years old; and then some of it – such as corn on the cob with mayonnaise, lime juice, cheese, and chili powder – is… not.  Of course, all the culinary specialities were created using local ingredients and methods.  In other words, avocado foam will not be garnishing any of your street snacks. But when the food is good enough on its own, cleverness is no match for flavor.

Erik froths up some chocolate caliente

The thought of staying in an apartment in Oaxaca had me excited for many months before we arrived, because I knew we would have a kitchen.  Exactly what kind of kitchen, how big, what appliances and cookware would be provided… I had no idea but was hoping for the best.  It turns out the kitchen is fine – not large or extravagant, but it has the necessities.  We would be able to make smoothies in the blender (and by the way, why couldn’t someone come up with a better name than “smoothie” before it was too late?  It’s awful.  And now it’s stuck with us forever.  It’s even less original than “brownie,” which is so a part of our vernacular that no one every notices what a lazy moniker that one is as well.  But I just feel stupid when I have to say “smoothie”.  Anyway…), cook in the oven or on the stove top, and reheat things in the microwave.  It is working just fine, it even has nice view of the courtyard to boot.

Decisions, decisions

We had already with us some pantry supplies such as black beans, rice, cooking oils, salt, etc., so all we had to do was fill in the blanks with fresh produce and maybe a meat or two.  This is what makes the markets so awesome.  Sure, you have to remember that if it’s not in season or if it’s not grown in this part of the world, you can’t or shouldn’t buy it.  How many times have you seen a beautiful pint of strawberries (on sale!) in the grocery store in the middle of winter in Minnesota, all nice and bright red and perfectly shaped, only to get them home, have them taste like absolutely nothing and then they start to mold within a day?  I learned that lesson long ago: eat what’s in season and what is freshest.  That’s what makes shopping at the mercados so simple.  For the most part, if it’s there, it should be just fine to eat.

Gratuitous shot of some cleverly recycled leftovers

As I mentioned in the first post, my head was spinning from the dozens of different kinds of chiles, both fresh and dried, spices, and even fruits and vegetables that I couldn’t name to save my life.  Never saw them before.  And then the sellers – they want to help you and of course they want to make a sale, but they just happen to be speaking in the fourth and newest language I’ve tried to learn in my life.  “Yes, yes, I’m sure you are correct and I’m sure that what you are saying would be very helpful to me, but I missed 78% of the words you just hurled at me.”

I won’t waste your time telling you the boring things we’ve prepared, so here are some of the more fun of our Oaxacan kitchen experiments.

Sticky fun

1.  Plantains:  We’ve made fried plantains, which are always tasty.  You slowly cook them in oil until they are browned – super simple.  Topped with a little sugar or yogurt, and you’ve got a winning dessert.  We’ve also cooked them in water, mashed them, and stuffed them – ready for this – with Oaxacan quesillo (think string cheese but better) and a segment of jalapeño pepper, then fried these little torpedos until brown and the cheese was melted.  It was a recipe from our Mexican cookbook.  Yes, it was a little strange.  Maybe stranger still since we actually made them for breakfast one morning, but I would try them again – maybe as an appetizer before dinner?

2.  Black beans: nothing too interesting here except that we added the very Mexican herb epazote to the beans (in addition to a carrot, an onion, and some garlic) and that we didn’t soak the beans beforehand.  After two hours, they had a lot of flavor.  They are ready to eat as they are, or you can put them in the blender (probably with a little liquid), puree them, and then you are ready to make refried beans, which we’ve also done quite successfully here.

French Bread via Mexico

3.  Bread:  Erik is the bread maker of the household, and one day he had the irrepressible urge to make French bread.  The recipe was basic, but he enjoyed the experience of making and kneading the dough (without a stand mixer, btw), and we both enjoyed the experience of eating fresh bread.  We haven’t found any good butter around here (finding a stick of butter in the mountains of margarine in the stores is a hard enough task) but after mixing our yellowish dairy spread with plenty of raw garlic and dried thyme, we had a tasty little snack.

Italy via Mexico

4.  Pasta sauce: okay, not traditionally Mexican, but when you use Mexican chorizo, a couple different types of chiles, Mexican oregano, and some random herbs and spices that we just have too much of, it can be kind of Mexican.  Tomatoes, sad to say, are usually not anything too exciting at the markets.  95% of what you will find are bland-tasting Roma varieties, but they worked fine for making sauce.  Served with a Mexican cabernet sauvignon, some simply prepared fava beans, and the garlic bread mentioned above, it was a tasty meal with Mexican flair.

Sweet and healthy!

5.  Garbanzos dulces: I mentioned this in the previous post, but if you missed it I want to give a shout-out to this crazy awesome dessert.  Another Mexican recipe, this is nothing more than garbanzos, panela (Mexican dark brown sugar), pineapple, and Mexican cinnamon – and plenty of time peeling garbanzos (you can’t use canned beans in this recipe).  I will definitely be making this one again later in life.

6.  Chocolate Caliente:  It was my hope to make my own chocolate mix here in Oaxaca.  It is a very easy thing to do, but because I was afraid of having more than we could use and storing it, etc., we decided to go ahead and buy some from Mayordomo, the major chocolate outlet here.  Hot chocolate is everywhere and is served is every restaurant.  Most of the chocolates have plenty of sugar but also Mexican cinnamon and often ground nuts such as almonds or walnuts.  We don’t make it every day, but almost.

7.  MOLE COLORADITO!  Yes, we made a mole.  Originally I had hoped to make mole negro, which is a dark mole, but it requires a couple of tricky chiles to find this time of year (even here) and requires the blackening of several of the ingredients, which we didn’t want to attempt in our little kitchen.  So we went with the slightly simpler mole coloradito.  It took a good part of the day, required more than 20 ingredients, necessitated the use of the world’s cheapest blender and a stove which does not turn down low enough to simmer, but it was pretty successful…

[Quick mole refresher: pronounced "MOH-lay", it is a sauce used in Mexico, and Oaxaca is famous for its seven moles, named mainly for their resulting colors: mole negro, colorado (or rojo), amarillo, verde, chichilo, coloradito, and mancha manteles ("tablecloth stainer").  Mole Coloradito is reddish-orangish in color (notice the sides of this website).  Each mole has a distinct and rather long list of ingredients as well as slightly different cooking methods.  Yes, some of them include chocolate, but we're not talking about covering your steak with chocolate sauce.  The test of a good mole, it is said, is that when it is done it doesn't taste like any one of the separate ingredients; instead it is a perfect combination of them all, resulting in one new flavor.]

Chicken in a pot

The first thing we did was cook a chicken.  Yes, we bought the chicken from a chicken guy at the market, not a prepackaged chicken at a grocery store, and requested the butcher to cut it up for us, which he did in about 10 seconds.  We wanted to serve the mole over the chicken, but we also wanted to use the chicken stock to prepare the sauce.  Mexican chicken stock is lighter than French stocks, the cooking time being about an hour as opposed to three or four (which I would do in the States).  Although poaching chicken may not be a favorite cooking method for many people, especially in the U.S. because the chicken often gets dried out and tough, it is traditional here and – this is weird – it just works better here.  Because of the biology of the chickens themselves here (I can’t go into more details because… well, I’m not that smart, but these are not factory-produced birds constantly tipping onto their beaks because their breasts are freakishly large) poaching chicken is a very successful preparation here and very tasty – and then you have stock to use as well!

All the ingredients for the mole

Next we had to prepare all ingredients for the mole, including nuts and seeds, dried chiles, cinnamon and cloves, raisins, onions, tomatoes, garlic – you get the idea.  Oh – and chocolate, of course!  The chiles needed to be deseeded and then toasted.

Cute little toasty garlic cloves

I was such a genius and a little worried about getting the mole done in time that day that I plowed ahead with the chiles before taking the time to put in my contact lenses.  Later on, even though I had washed my hands three times, my eyes and I would regret this oversight probably more than almost any other mistake of my past.  Everything – everything - got toasted: chiles, seeds, spices, onions, garlic.  We were a little toasting assembly line.

Toasting and then soaking dried chiles

Chiles before (below) and after (above)

Magic makes sure that we are following the directions correctly

After everything was toasted and the dried (and toasted) chiles had soaked in hot water for a while to soften them up, everything headed for the blender.  I’m not complaining: it was wonderful to know that we would have a blender in the apartment, because they just seem to use blenders more here in Mexico.  But this blender probably cost less than the ingredients going into it for the mole.  I’m not sure what it was designed for, but it wasn’t for grinding cinnamon sticks and almonds.  It took a lot of patience, a lot of scraping, and a lot of small batches, but we pureed all of our ingredients into a reddish-brownish, gloppy liquid.  This needed to be cooked down into a paste, the act of which made our stove look like a prop in a bloody horror movie, and then it was ready to go.

A big bowl of paste

To make the paste into a sauce, we added a couple of pureed tomatoes and about a quart of our freshly made chicken stock to a cup of our paste; we cooked it down until we liked the consistency, and it was time to eat.  Partnered with some garlic and chile rice and a simple avocado salad, this was a pretty impressive meal for two gringos in a humble but well-meaning kitchen.  The mole coloradito is slightly spicy not only because of the chiles but because all the seeds are also used in the mixture.  The flavor is challenging to describe… it actually tastes like “red”.  It’s complex, a little tangy, and a little bright; it’s not deep and heavy like a dark mole, but it’s still very rich and flavorful. Traditionally mole is used as a sauce over meats, but as this is a vegetarian recipe at its heart (you can thin it with water instead of chicken stock), this can be used over rice or something like that as well – and because of the nuts and seeds it has a decent amount of protein.

Pastes at the mercado

And now we are still eating the mole, because we made quite a lot.  I hope my sister is game for trying it in a few weeks when we see her near Tulum.  Oh – another great thing: according to the recipe book, the mole paste will keep unrefrigerated for weeks or refrigerated for about a year!  This knowledge will bring you comfort as you walk through the market, passing countless tubs of different kinds of mole pastes just sitting out in the open.

Final product

I don’t think we’ll be doing too many more cooking extravaganzas in the apartment because we are leaving in just over a week but still have plenty of already-made food to get through (mole coloradito, anyone?) and want to keep enjoying the foods from the restaurants and vendors outside the house.  And that will be the next post – foods from around Oaxaca.  ¡Buen provecho!