Fighting malaise at El Tule

Last Sunday, eating an empanada de mole amarillo in El Tule, I realized that as long as I have an appetite, I will always be able to cheer myself up. There are those times when even I lose my appetite, like when No-No dumped me and I stopped eating for a week. But general malaise, pshaw!, I can easily get rid of just by going someplace I’ve never been in search for something good to eat.

Sunday morning, my last friends from ICO, who were also my neighbors, left Oaxaca. It had been a difficult, emotional time for them, and even watching them leave as a bystander was so exhausting, I considered forgetting my plans to go to El Tule and just getting in bed with “Black Lamb and Gray Falcon,” the book that will not end. I felt a little sad about being alone in Oaxaca and a little sorry for myself. But after I’d mopped the tiny footprint of my apartment, I was hungry, and I thought I should seize the opportunity to go try one of the famous empanadas de mole amarillo of El Tule, only available on Sundays.



El Tule is otherwise famous for its giant cypress tree, over 2000 or 4000 years old depending on who you talk to. I don’t know how tourism from the tree can be so lucrative when the entrance fee is 3 pesos, but the town seemed to be profiting well from the tree, as the buildings in the center were fresh and brightly painted, almost like Disneyworld, right down to the white-maroon-and-blue church.



I walked right by the entrance booth and around the church, looking for the empanada place recommended to me by my homestay mother, Patty, as “muy limpia.” I don’t know if it was the right place, but it was clean and airy, and I could imagine my middle-class homestay family eating there. It was little more than a straw-roofed shack with plastic tables and chairs, with an arcade attached to it playing loud American rock music, but it a pleasant place to sit on a sunny Sunday afternoon. There was a surly girl working the comal and an older woman swatting flies away from the chicharrones and a sweet-faced man watching a soccer game on TV. I sat down with a bottle of grapefruit soda, in a really good-looking bottle, and waited.



It was my fourth taste of mole amarillo, and if not the best, it was very very good. Instead of cilantro, it had the herby scent of hoja santa, the heart-shaped leaf. The mole sauce was thicker than at Iglesia de Carmen Arriba, but spicy, the kind of spiciness that doesn’t hit you right away but grows in the back of your throat. The tortilla vehicle was perfect, hot and toasty. I was so happy, I ate another empanada, of flor de calabeza and quesillo. I didn’t like it as much, but it didn’t matter.

I walked through the Mercado de Antojitos, or “Market of Appetizers,” across the street but was too full to eat anything else, but next week, I am eating barbacoa, or barbecued goat, for sure. Why don’t we have markets of appetizers in the U.S.? I’m sure it would do a great deal for depression.

Tacos Alvaro

Impressive, no?

The chile-turkey is sitting on top of a refrigerator case of sodas at Tacos Alvaro on Porfirio Diaz at the corner of Quetzalcoatl.



They serve quite good tacos, from 2 pm until late at night, which I would describe in greater detail, except I can’t quite remember whether I ate “buche” or “trompa,” which my dictionary both translate as “mouth” or “maw,” but I’m sure the waiter said one of them was some sort of innards, “como tripa.” Erin and I had the “al pastor” and “carnitas” each, and one was very good and the other very strange, so strange to be inedible even to us, but I can’t remember which was which either.



We were tired after being in the sun and rain all day for Guelaguetza, and on our way to our all-night bus ride to Puerto Escondido, please forgive me.

It's almost too much

I had never tried mole coloradito until I got to Oaxaca, but there have been times when I have wondered if it’s possible that I like it even more than mole negro. After my cooking lesson with Sra. Soledad, that question was answered forever: a good mole negro is king. But mole coloradito continues to run a close second in my affections, and I was thrilled when they honored my request for it at my second cooking class at Seasons of My Heart.

I loved the group at my second class: a contingent of students from a culinary school in Nebraska, two Episcopalian priests married to each other from Texas, their son from Brooklyn who has been working his way through “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” while finishing his dissertation on French literature, two girls from UC Davis who “came to Oaxaca to eat,” and a woman from Cincinnati who didn’t get mad that I got a little bossy about the mole coloradito.

Instead of a market tour in Etla, we started with a cheese-making demonstration by Sylvia in the morning, a woman who grew up in Puebla but met and married a man from Etla and joined the family business of cheese-making. Reyes Etla is famous for its cheese, and even though it is only 30-45 minutes away from Oaxaca, vendors in Oaxacan markets will brag and sometimes even lie that their cheese is from Etla when it’s not. Susana Trilling says you can tell what’s not from Etla because it’s sold in plastic rings, not in the woven straw corsets, nor in the wooden rings that are made from the wood of the tree under which Buddha found enlightenment. (It’s amazing, she says things like this in such a matter-of-fact, wry way.)



Even though Sylvia is from Puebla, she prefers Oaxacan cheese. All three Oaxacan cheeses come from different steps in one, long process. You start with a piece of dried cow stomach for the coagulant, treated with lime and salt and dried on the roof to keep it away from the dogs (though that doesn’t quite make sense to me since people here seem to keep their dogs on their roofs). The cow stomach put in the whey and allowed to release its enzymes for 2-3 days. Then the whey is mixed with cow’s milk. When the curds start to separate from the whey, they look at first like silken tofu. Sylvia just stirred the massive bucket with her hand, waiting for it to get crumblier. When it was ready, maybe 15 minutes later, she passed it through a cheesecloth and squeezed out the whey.

Without salt, the curds form the beginning of requeson, the Oaxacan version of ricotta, as rich and as delicious with honey as ricotta can be. With salt, the fermentation stops, and it becomes queso fresco, the crumblable cheese that can be found in so many Oaxacan dishes. When boiling water is poured on fermenting cheese curds, it becomes a smooth, tacky mass, the beginning of quesillo, the string cheese that is found in the remaining dishes of Oaxaca.



We were each given a small ball to pull and stretch. Mine broke almost immediately, so I ate it. The others were able to pull them sufficiently and them wrap them into tidy little turbaned bundles. It’s harder than it looks, to wrap it up just so. And then we rinsed our hands in the warm whey, which instantly made me want to bathe in it. It's probably better for your skin than your fanciest $100 moisturizer.



While Susana explained what we would be making, we ate our almuerzo, a brunch to fortify us as we cooked, of “salsa de queso” or hunks of queso fresco simmered in a spicy salsa, accompanied by black beans and tortillas. The queso almost took on the texture of cooked tofu, the firm kind this time, with a textured skin and a chewy interior that was cheesy without being gooey.

The menu of our main meal, the whole point of the class, was truly Oaxacan this time, with regional specialties I had never tried before.



The “tetelas de juxtlahuaca” were little turnovers made of masa that looked exactly like hamantaschen, the Jewish cookie made traditionally for Purim, except they were savory rather than sweet and filled with a red bean puree. From the Mixteca Baja region of the mountains near the coast, they were cooked completely on the comal, the circular, slightly concave clay pan that is used to cook tortillas and anything else made of masa, as well as toast chilies and roast tomatoes. They had the wonderful, chewy, toasty exterior of all masa cooked on a comal. Served with a drizzle of Mexican crema, which is like crème fraiche, and then served with a spicy tomato-chile bravo salsa, it was the perfect botana to eat with our beers. Like all good appetizers, it stimulated our appetites for more.



The soup was a pureed soup of garbanzo beans, from mountainous areas like Ixtlan in the Sierra Norte, and simmered with mint, it reminded me so much of Middle Eastern soups, though there wasn’t any cumin. Not so much an exciting soup as a comforting one.



The salad was a happy mélange of green cactus fruit, guavas, red onion, oranges, avocados, pomegranate seeds, and toasted pumpkin seeds, as well as queso fresco, the kind of salad I would throw together without much thought, fruity and tart with lots of crunch. It was fairly complicated, as salads go, if not particularly revelatory, but still a good example of how every good salad should be fruity and tart with lots of crunch.



The accompaniment for the mole coloradito was a rice with “hongos del bosque,” mushrooms with no real English-language equivalent, so the school calls them “little brown mushrooms.” Prosaic, but accurate. The little wrinkly, dried buggers were delicious, and cooked to the point that they were still chewy, a good counterbalance to the tender rice.

And the mole, oh the mole. It’s one of the hardest things in the world to describe what mole tastes like. But that day, I heard a description that made wonderful sense: if you can taste any one ingredient, you haven’t done it right. Like mole negro, the coloradito required substantial toasting of chiles on their comal outside, though this time, just two types, guajillo and ancho, and no full-on burning of chile seeds, which instantly made it more feasible for a Brooklyn dinner. We also toasted the garlic cloves, the whole peppercorns and cloves, a stick of cinnamon, and the white onions.

Everything else got cooked separately on the stove inside: the tomatoes and oregano in one pan, and the fried bread, raisins, sesame seeds, and almonds in another pan. Instead of taking it to the village miller, we used the kitchen’s amazing two-horsepower blender to puree each component separately, and then pushed everything again through a food mill. That blender was both awesome and frightening, like the first time I used a power tool at a Habitat for Humanity construction site.

The pureed chili went in first, a thick, gorgeous mixture that started to get shiny as it started cooking in the cazuela. Susana taught us to look for the “ojo,” the eye that would appear as the sauce bubbled up and then broke on the surface. Then the onion-spice mixture, and when that was ready, the tomato mixture, and when that was ready, the plaintain-bread-raisin mush, and then finally the sesame-almond mixture. Like a good Thai curry, you could taste it grow and evolve with each added ingredient, but the best part was possibly near the end, after almost an hour, when we added a great deal of stock, which not only thinned it to the right consistency, it filled it with even more depth and flavor. Finally, we added the chocolate, and salt and sugar to taste.

In the traditional way, the chicken had been simmered separately to create the stock and was added to the mole when plating. I got a piece of white meat that I just couldn’t understand—it was chewy, but not dry, with real flavor. When I got home, Rick Bayless provided some illumination: Mexican chicken, which is generally free-range without self-consciousness, can handle long-cooking, unlike our “leaner, less-developed American birds.” Ha! I love how he makes it sound like American chickens are just puny, flabby things that haven’t put in sufficient time at the gym. Now I know why I’ve enjoyed the white meat I’ve had here so much.



Dessert in Mexico always feels like an afterthought, and I had actually quite hated the boozy mango dessert we had last time, but for once I loved the dessert, a Mexican chocolate boudin. It probably helped that it was made by the teacher leading the culinary school contingent, and even though she told us it would have been better if the bread had been allowed to soak longer in the crema de café mezcal and get softer, I loved the almost tough, chewy texture of the outer edge, contrasted with the smooth, silky interior and the chunks of strawberries embedded inside. (Koreans just love chewy, jjolgit jjolgit textures.)

It’s almost too much, you know. To make mole negro with Sra. Soledad, to make mole coloradito at Seasons of My Heart. I’ll never be able to complain about my life again.

You don’t know what comfortable is, until you’ve slept in President Vicente Fox’s bed

This is a very typical story about traveling in Mexico:

Erin and I had decided to take a short two-day hiking trip into the Sierra Norte. Oaxaca state is rich enough to have both pristine surfer beaches and mountains with some of the greatest biodiversity in the world. My Spanish teacher, Lety, used to work with the World Wildlife Federation in the Sierra Norte, and heartily recommended that we go visit Ixtlán de Juarez, a town of about 8,000 people, that communally owns the forest around it and provides guided tours through their tourism office, Ecoturixtlan.

When I visited their office in Oaxaca, a tiny one-room office with a woman who probably got a visitor every other day, I was assured that I could easily take a colectivo taxi to Ixtlán any time of day. Colectivo taxis are red and white sedans that shuttle people between the city of Oaxaca and various pueblos outside Oaxaca, for as little as 8 pesos, or about $0.75. The drivers want to fill up before they leave—three in the back, and two in the front next to the driver, but since they’re not spacious cars, the person in the middle in the front can end up sitting with the gearshift between their legs.

Since Ixtlan was in the mountains and about an hour away, I expected to pay about 50 pesos each. Erin and I got up fairly early and made our way to the sitio, the site from which the Ixtlan colectivos would leave. There was an immense line of 20 or so people, but I wasn’t too perturbed, since I’d never had to wait more than 10 minutes or so for a colectivo to leave.

After waiting 40 minutes and seeing one car come by, I finally decided I had to do something. No one else seemed perturbed, but I turned to the old woman next to me and asked, “Is it normal to wait so long?”

“Oh yes, I’ve waited one, two hours before.”

“Ohmigod,” I thought. “Is there any other way to get there?”

“Yes, you can take a special taxi over there, but they charge 50 pesos each.”

This isn’t an exact translation, as what she really said was that there was something “especial aqua.” “Aqua” is a Mexican form of “aqui” or “here,” but since it’s a Mexican word, it means it has a very broad meaning. “Here” doesn’t mean “right here,” this little spot right in front of us. “Here” can mean “right here” or “close to here” or “sort of here.” For natives, “here” has a vast circumference.

Maybe 50 pesos was too much for her, but it wasn’t for me, and I wandered over in the direction she had gestured, leaving Erin sitting on a stump calmly reading the Moon Handbook for Oaxaca. But I found nothing that made sense. There were some colectivos with “Ixtepeji” on the side, indicating a town between Ixtlán and Oaxaca, but nothing else. I asked the woman selling snacks, “Is there another way to get to Ixtlán?” And she told me about a bus that would arrive in an hour, but nothing else.

I went back to the old woman and asked again, “You mean over there? Do you mean the cabs going to Ixtepeji?”

“Yes, they’re special, they charge 50 pesos.”

I went back to the two cab drivers who had been standing around for awhile. “How much to go to Ixtlan?”

“250 pesos.”

“For the car?”

“For the car.”

Well, at this point, Erin and I were definitely willing to split that to get to Ixtlán. But I thought I might as well ask, “Does anyone want to go with us?”, and three women popped up, including the woman who had told me I could hire the Ixtepeji car!

How is it that the non-Spanish-speaking foreigner organized the “especial” car to Ixtlán?!?!?! And why didn’t one of the cab drivers, who were literally 20 feet away, come by and offer to take five people for 250 pesos?

More than anything, Mexico makes me realize how much I as an American assume that if there is money to be spent, it should be easy to spend it. Mexico is a wonderful country in which to de-New York-ify. You can’t control anything, and if you just relax, everything will work out in the end. And to think, I’ve been huffing and puffing for so much of my life, waiting on a subway platform for a train that broke down.



The ride was absolutely beautiful. The road was smooth and well-paved but it turned and turned, in lovely serpentine curves. And when we arrived, we saw a proud little town, so clean and so lovingly maintained. It may be desperately poor, but it didn’t look it, with its fresh paint and its sparkling basketball court right next to the central square.

The Ecoturixltan office seemed to have our lost our reservation for a cabaña, but no matter, they had one available. At 11 a.m., they said it was too late to start for a long day-hike, but after much repeated, slowly-spoken Spanish on the part of the patient receptionist, we agreed to pay for a full-day hike with a guide the next day and to spend the first day walking around the town and the cabañas in the woods.

Yet again, we saw Mexican marketing at work, which is to say it was nonexistent. The receptionist tried to draw us a map, but like most locals in small towns, she had no idea how many turns there were in the roads in her town. We were looking for a “mirador,” a look-out point that most people drive to, but the only existing signs were irregularly placed, and not necessarily at every fork in the road. Erin has traveled in Latin America before, and she’s just a wonderfully patient person anyway, so neither of us really cared that we were stumbling through cornfields and walking through someone’s backyard. We never did find the mirador.

But when we got back, we had the sharp, clean hunger of those who’ve walked in the mountains, and we sat down with easy anticipation for our lunch in the “Cafeteria” next to the Ecoturixtlan office. There were two choices, enchiladas or chicken, and we both ordered the chicken.



My God, it was so good! It was served in a spicy, brightly flavored, tomato-colored sauce made of guajillo chiles and hoja de aguacate, or avocado leaves, which impart a taste that reminds me of fennel and mint at the same time. You would never have expected it, something so tangy and delicious at a tiny restaurant in the mountains serving two dishes a day, and that only made it even more delicious.



The other food revelation of the day was tasting our first “mango pina.” The lady at the market told us to peel a bit of the skin at one end and then just suck the juice out. When we arrived at our cabaña in the mountains, we tried to peel it and cut it into chunks, but soon realized it was too stringy to do anything other than squeeze and hope for the best. It really did have the fragrance of a ripe pineapple, somehow grafted onto a mango. She was also selling insane, giant orange mushrooms, and one of my greatest regrets in Mexico is that I didn’t buy any.

When we fell asleep that night, we sank into the most comfortable king-size bed of our lives. If you are ever in the cabañas in Ixtlán, be sure to ask for Cuarto #4, as you will end up sleeping in the Presidential Suite, the room in which President Vicente Fox stayed, as we were told the following morning.

But Mexico wasn’t done surprising us. When we woke up the next morning, we had no idea if anyone was going to come and get us. We were 4 kilometers, a little less than 3 miles, outside of town, and we hadn’t gotten any real directions about how and where to meet our guide. Around 9:30 a.m., a young man showed up and told us that there weren’t any guides available for a hiking trip, but did we want to go on an automobile tour?

No we did not. I, thankfully, did not go all-NY on him, but I did say, in an insistent voice, “But we paid for a guide to take us on a 7-hour hike. That’s what we were told yesterday.”



I should have known better just to trust. When we got back to town, we found Eduardo, our guide, and Julian, a Swiss agronomist traveling through Mexico who spoke excellent Spanish. (It’s not fair how easily Europeans learn languages.) And we went on our 7-hour hike, through three different kinds of forests, including “el bosque de nubes” or the cloud forest, with its ghostly lichens and mists. Sadly, we didn’t see any jaguars, but we did see some amazing, perfectly round, perfectly red mushrooms, both poisonous and edible. We also saw the prettiest little meadow on our way back to town, which made me want to twirl and burst into song: “The hills are alive….with the sound of music!”



We knew as we got closer back to town that we might not be able to catch another colectivo back to Oaxaca. It was past 6:30 pm, but we found the sitio easily enough and got on line. We waited and waited, ate a banana or two, tried to stay out of the afternoon rain, and waited and waited. The people at the Ecoturixtlan office told us a bus would leave at 8:30 p.m. from the gas station, you know, just straight from the central square.

After 8:15, the entire line of 8 remaining people got up. “Where are you going?”, I asked a smiley guy who had tried to find a truck to take all of us back earlier. “We’re going to the bus!”

When we got to the gas station, though, we found a van that had been stopped by the military checkpoint that was also going to Oaxaca, and we decided to hop on board. Everyone in the van was tired and annoyed, and one woman repeatedly kept shouting, “I’m a lawyer! I’m a teacher! What is the problem?” Erin and I, however, tried to stay inconspicuous and friendly, as we got thoroughly searched as well. By that point, we knew how to relax. As the young photographer from Mexico City shrugged, "Asi Mexico," "That's Mexico." There was a moment when we thought Erin’s backpack with its Camelbak-style plastic waterbag would get confiscated; it was so completely alien to the soldier rifling through her bag. Erin asked me later, “Do you think that soldier was flirting with us?” And I answered, “I don’t know, but given how close his gun was to us, I thought it was best to smile a lot.”

We got home in the end, even after finding another military checkpoint right outside the city. The entire van rose up in chorus, “But we were already searched back there!” I felt like we’d seen everything there is to see about Mexican transportation—resigned patience, good fortune, and military checkpoints. And we got to eat great chicken and fantastic fruit, and sleep in Vicente Fox's bed! How lucky we were, ¡que suerte!

Eagle and Sun

"Bueno."

“Bueno, hi, I have reservations but we went to your old location and we are running late. Where is your restaurant located?”

“Mumble-mumble Louis Vuitton store.”

“Uh, what is the name of the street? At the corner of what?”

It wasn’t a very auspicious beginning to our dinner at the imposingly named Aguila y Sol, meaning Eagle and Sun. Neither Erin nor I are big on white tablecloth restaurants—A) we don’t have the money, and B) we’re too busy slurping saucy foods in places with plastic tablecloths. But Erin suggested we check out one of the nueva cocina mexicana restaurants in Mexico City that are all the rage, and Aguila y Sol had gotten rave reviews. It also turned out she was plotting to treat me to dinner.

Nueva cocina mexicana refers to the trend of young chefs in Mexico City taking Mexican dishes and playing with them, perhaps adding a non-Mexican ingredient or two, but ultimately celebrating the existing complexity of Mexican food traditions, or at least it seemed that way at Aguila y Sol. It reminded me a bit of trendy dim sum in Hong Kong, where the chefs keep the cuisine dynamic and alive, but without creating a gross fusion mess.

For those of you who know Seoul, Polanco reminded me exactly of Apkujongdong. Unlike Rodeo Drive or Fifth Avenue, Polanco isn’t filled with gawking tourists, just very wealthy Mexico City residents who have the option of shopping at Louis Vuitton one moment, and then going upstairs to eat at Aguila y Sol the next. Everything was new and glassy.

The dining room at Aguila y Sol felt a little chilly, with slate-blue velvet high-backed chairs and cube-shaped vases that looked they were going to tip over. Erin reflexively tried to right it as soon as we sat down. The vase glowed with a mysterious, lime-green light, and when it was removed, the mystery was solved—each table was lit from underneath. It wasn’t a hip young place, despite the cutting-edge reputation of nueva cocina, and I felt out of place in my sundress and espradrilles. Everyone else seemed to be hosting American business partners. I eavesdropped on the American catty-corner from me and felt sorry for the waiter, as the American clearly just wanted an Omaha steak.



But then the food started to come, and it stopped feeling quite so removed from the Mexico I knew. The busboy grinned at us, conspiring with us in staging photos of the food, and the margaritas started to relax me. Rimmed in pink sugar with a carnation just sitting on top, they were presented with thought but with more happy festivity than the cool modern design of New York.



Similarly, our cebiche came in a bright red pail with a jaunty chile stuck in it, perfectly crispy and non-greasy potato chips, and a little anthill of red salt. Tender, delicious, slightly picante.



Our other appetizer would have tasted just like high-end broccoli-cheese casserole, but for the mind-altering salsa de chile pasilla. They were little buttery turnovers made of huauzontle, a long stalky green vegetable with broccoli-like florets. It made Erin nostalgic for the food of her Midwestern youth. It made me realize how much chile pasilla could improve broccoli-cheese casserole.

And we ate too much of the bread basket, but how could we resist trying each of the six different rolls? One was filled with mole negro, another the softest, most comforting white bread with pink sugar on top, another spicy, another cheesy.



The entrees were, surprisingly, the most impressive, though sadly we were too full to give them due respect. We had a filet of huachinango or red snapper in the spicy Veracruz-style, with peppers, onions, and slivered almonds. Perfectly cooked, every grain of rice in place in its pyramid.



But the best was the “pollito en leche” rubbed and served in an achiote sauce. It was a small little bird, probably squab, that may have been marinated in milk, giving it an almost creamy tenderness. Achiote paste, according to Rick Bayless, is “spicy-complex without chile,” and “not spicy-hot,” being made only of achiote seeds, allspice, black pepper, oregano, cider vinegar, garlic and salt. I can’t compare it to anything, because it was unlike anything I’d had before. It was a crime that we could eat so little.



The tortillas, though, almost outshone the entrees. They came multi-colored and multi-flavored, with the perfect balance between toothsome chewiness and toasty crust. The tortilla basket included the only flour tortilla I have ever truly loved.



Erin was leaning against dessert, but I persisted. The special was a mousse of cajeta, the goat’s milk dulce de leche, and the waiter assured us it was “pequeno.” Ha! It came in a freakin’ glass mug nestled in a spray-painted gold cornhusk. I loved how over the top the plating was, and even more how light and fluffy, and yet rich the mousse tasted.



It really was too much. And then, good God, we had our petit-fours plate. By then, I was drunk on both the food and the tequila. I think I just mindlessly popped whatever they were, corn cookies and tamarind jellies, in my mouth. We took some gleeful photos with the busboy, who forced the very correct waiter to join in, and then we rode away into the night, feeling like beached whales that had somehow gotten into a taxi in Mexico City.

Happy small finds in Mexico City

Sometimes, it feels like there’s nothing left to discover in New York. I know it’s not true, but given the number of people who care and the number of people nosing around, the odds are nothing really wonderful can stay a secret for very long. So it was a quiet relief to spend my last day in Mexico City just wandering around, relying on some tips, but mainly just eating what I found. Despite or perhaps because of memories of “Introduction to Art History” with Vincent Scully, I’d decided I didn’t need to go with Erin to Teotihuacan to see the Pyramid of the Sun and the Pyramid of the Moon. Erin had the camera, but even that was a relief, too, just to eat.

I decided to go back to Coyoacan, the artsy neighborhood and former home of Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Leon Trotsky, and Octavio Paz (the photos are from our trip there 3 days earlier). Acting on a chowhound tip, I started at the Pasteleria Esperanza right outside the General Anaya metro stop, planning to walk and eat my way west to the Miguel de Aquevedo stop on the other side of Coyoacan.

I ate a sugary dona, or donut, that wasn’t as light as I’d hoped, but it kind of grew on me. It was a Monday morning, around 9:30, but nothing was open and the streets were quiet with people walking their dogs. Coyoacan is what makes Mexico City seem so much like LA to me—a city that is completely oblivious to pedestrian needs (I almost had a car run over my toes at a busy intersection with no pedestrian traffic lights) but with quiet, well-off neighborhoods filled with sidewalk cafes and pink and orange bougainvillea flowing over the walls.



I found a branch of the popular coffee shop, Cafe El Jarocho, and sat on a bench with my café de olla reading Carlos Fuentes’s “The Death of Artemio Cruz” while watching people drive up, just like in LA, for their morning coffee. Coffee isn’t a religion in Mexico, certainly not in Oaxaca, but El Jarocho has good, cheap, strong espressos and cappuchinos.



I wandered on to Plaza Hidalgo with its adjoining smaller plaza and the fountain I love so much, two dogs playing in a spray of water. I saw a man and his grandson buying roast chickens on the northwest corner of the plaza, at a big grocery store called “America,” from a nice young man with a goatee. The sign in the window advertised empanadas de atun, empanadas de bacalao. I don’t know why, but whenever I see the word “bacalao” for salt cod, I have to eat it. This empanada turned out to be a flaky turnover filled with salt cod and onions. Yum.

Then I wended my way back to the Mercado to eat cebiche de jaipa or crab at El Jardin del Pulpo, “The Garden of the Octopus,” in a sundae glass with saltines and fresh wedges of lime. Nothing particularly memorable to report, but I love that name, the Garden of the Octopus.

I had eaten so much, it was clearly time to walk some more. I took the subway back to the center of town to the Mercado Artesanias and bought more souvenirs that I’ll struggle to carry home. As I walked back to our hotel near the Zocalo, through the part of town dedicated to selling bathroom fixtures, I saw a little plaza with some crowded food stalls. All weekend, I’d been seeing street food that I hadn’t seen in Oaxaca, antojitos typical of Verucruz or Michoacan or the Yucatan.

I walked back and forth dragging my tin mirrors behind me, and finally decided to eat a huarache, because the man already standing there looked so happy with his. Besides, they were advertised as “Rico Rico Rico Rico.” I have to take precise note of where it was, on Ayuntamiento near the corner of Aranda, a block from the major street of Lopez, next to the bank on the south side of the street, because the huarache was so good! I’d had huaraches before in Red Hook, Brooklyn, and knew them as long, flat tortilla-like things with taco-like fillings, but this oblong huarache was different, crispier, chewier, with a texture of masa ground more coarsely. The huarache got good and toasty because the cook repeatedly brushed both sides with oil. I ordered one with bisteck, a thin slice of beef he cooked separately on the grill, then added to the huarache already bubbling with red salsa. Topped with crumbled queso fresco, it was heaven. My fingertips burned as I tried to eat the unwieldy thing without getting it all over my face, but it was worth it.

And we still had dinner ahead of us at Aguila y Sol.

My religion is mole negro, and Soledad is my guru

If you have questions about Sra Soledad, please contact me here through my current blog One Fork, One Spoon.

I’ve been telling everyone that if you want to be Zen, there’s no need to go to an ashram in India, you can just come to Mexico. You can’t plan anything, but everything works out in the end. And to make the metaphor complete, I have found my guru.

Even though I told everyone before I left that I was going to Oaxaca to learn to make mole negro, I didn’t really believe I would. I knew that it was an intensive, all-day process, and it seemed like the kind of thing you could only really learn in a Oaxacan home, from a Oaxacan grandmother. How was I, an American tourist who speaks broken Spanish, going to find that woman? It was too much like something Paula Wolfert would do for me to imagine that I could do the same.

But Mexico continues to surprise me at every turn, not only in what is possible, but also what is possible in me. I met Senora Soledad Ramirez Martinez easily enough, at the cooking class at ICO, and immediately fell in love with her. But with my pessimism, I didn’t even plot to learn with her. I just innocently asked in class, as the workshop drew to a close, “Where could I learn to make mole negro?”, and the answer came so readily, “You can come to my home and I’ll teach you.”

Sra Soledad is like that in every way. She’s no-nonsense, very straightforward, and very firm in her opinions: the best chocolate in Oaxaca (Chocolate Mayordomo), whether the vendors advertising “metate-ground” chocolate are lying (they are), whether Mexican families make their own salsa (claro!). Coupled with an incredible generosity of heart, she overwhelms you, and she’s not even five feet tall. My paternal grandmother died before I was born, my maternal grandmother when I was 15, but I didn’t know how much I was missing a grandmother in my life until I met her.

Soledad lives near the archeological site of Monte Alban, in a steep little town with an awe-inspiring view of the city. Her home sits on three terraces, the garage and the rainwater reservoir on the first, the outdoor wood-burning kitchen on the second, and the main living area with its indoor kitchen and patio on the third. She and her husband, Carlos, have four children, and I think two of them live with her, along with their youngest grandchild, five-year-old Carlita.



As Soledad spread out the twenty or so ingredients that make up mole negro, Erin and I sipped hot chocolate and gazed in wonder. The key chile, the hard-to-find chilhuatle or chilhuacle with its inflated, smooth look, is expensive, 400 pesos or $40 per kilo. Then there are the mulatos, which are dark, wrinkled and round; the pasillas mexicanas which are dark, wrinkled and long, and the chipotles mecos, which are tan, wrinkled, and somewhat triangular.

The sweetness comes very slightly from sugar, and mainly from the plaintain, the raisins, and the tomatoes, as well as the Oaxacan chocolate. A subtle, nutty flavor is added by sesame seeds, pecans, and almonds, as well as the eggy and fragrant pan de yema. As if all these flavors were not enough, mole negro requires just a few cloves and fresh peppercorns, a small stick of Mexican canela or cinnamon, and just a spoonful or two of Mexican oregano and thyme, as well as the tartness of tomatillos and the heady dimension of white onion and garlic. Everything gets mellowed and smoothed by chicken broth—sorry, vegetarians. Her recipe is enough to feed 30, as the laborious process of mole negro is honored by and reserved for fiestas, weddings, and other important occasions. Obviously a blend of Spanish-Moorish ingredients and New World flavors, the word mole, appropriately, comes both from the Nahuatl word “molli” for sauce, and the Spanish verb “mollinar,” to grind or blend.



We began by deseeding and deveining the chiles, and then toasting them on her comal in her outdoor, wood-fired kitchen until they were dark but not burned, and stiff. While they soaked in water, the next very important and very strange step was to burn the reserved chile seeds on the comal until absolutely black. This is the part I can’t imagine doing in my Brooklyn kitchen, as I can’t roast a chicken without setting off the smoke detector. Hopefully, my neighbors won’t report me when I set up an illegal Weber grill on my makeshift deck. The seeds were then rinsed in water. The pecans and sesame seeds were toasted last.



In the meantime, the tomatoes and tomatillos were simmering in water on the indoor gas stove for about 20 minutes. We fried the plaintain and the slices of pan de yema, and then the onions, raisins and pecans. We added cinnamon, in a big loose stick, and thyme and oregano. The chicken got simmered separately, creating a light broth for later use.



It was time to go to the neighborhood mollino or miller. It was like Mexican Sesame Street—let’s go visit Mr. Miller! All four of us walked down the hill, Erin, Soledad, Carlita, and me carrying the big bucket, and watched as the miller washed out the corn he had ground in the morning so he could push our mole through.



The hard part was over. All we had to do now was put it in an earthenware cazuela and cook it on a wood fire with a little oil for an hour, stirring constantly. It was amazing to watch it change in color from a chocolate brown to a dark, shiny black. (According to Susana Trilling, if your mole negro isn’t quite black, people will talk.) As we stirred and the fire smoked, the rain started to come down, and the steep slope of their street became a brown river. We tasted at 30 minutes, then 50, then 60. We added Mexican chocolate, the key thing being to use chocolate without milk, just a few spoonfuls of sugar, and then the chicken stock. Soledad asked us what we thought, should we add more sugar? And I was amazed to taste a mole so balanced, more sugar would have made it gawdy and cheap. I felt like a witch stirring a magical brew, because it was.



I’ve written mainly about the ingredients and the steps because at this point, I don’t know how to express in words what else happened that day. If you could see me, I would wave my hands and clutch my heart as I told you how Soledad and her family welcomed us into their home. We paid 350 pesos each, or about $35 for the all-day class, but there’s no price that can match what we found. Carlita, like the confident, well-loved child she is, chattered to us, pretended she was a bull, and served us rice soup in little plastic bowls from her toy kitchen. Carlos, her grandfather, showed us their photo albums with photos of their second wedding when they renewed their vows and their daughter Patty’s quinceanera or Sweet 15 party. Soledad told us how her father had found a big heavy slab of stone and carried it home to be her mother’s metate. They told us more stories while we ate full-flavored chicken in the best mole negro I’ve ever had with perfect rice. It’s not just that they were hospitable, but that their hospitality was almost without thought, it came so naturally. The heavy rains came early that day, and Carlos wasn’t able to find fresh blandas, a type of tortilla, to sop up our sauce, but although Soledad apologized more than once for having only tostadas, there was none of the nervous anxiety that comes with having guests. They made Erin and me feel like family friends, like we had become part of their lives and their memories. We could have sat at their table forever.

If you are ever in Oaxaca, or have friends who want to learn to cook in Oaxaca, please contact me, as I have her phone number and she would be happy to teach anyone who is a friend of “Ae-rin” or “Graciela.” I left Christianity because I hated proselytizing, but with Soledad as my guru, her religion is one I would gladly spread.

Finally, a decent plate of pasta

I did it—I cooked pasta in my kitchen in Oaxaca that wasn’t terrible. Bacon (that had the consistency of ham), plum tomatoes, mushrooms, and the parmiggiano-reggiano Erin smuggled from San Francisco. I think it was the parmesan that did it.

It was my third try. Don’t ever try replacing sweet basil with any other kind of basil in an Italian tomato sauce. You’ll regret it.

A jicama popsicle at Guelaguetza

Two weeks ago, when Erin and I were staying in a hotel in Mexico City, I watched vivid footage of buses burning in Oaxaca, as anti-government protests turned dangerous leading up to the planned “official” Guelaguetza 2007. I watched a group of five or six policemen pushing a man down to the ground and then begin kicking him, oblivious or careless of the news cameras trained on them. Finally, two policemen in different uniforms came in, grabbed the man, hugging him to their bodies, and hustled him away, possibly to beat him in private.

July 23rd marked the first day of Guelaguetza, Oaxaca’s indigenous folk dance festival and its biggest tourist attraction. Also called “Lunes del Cerro,” translatable as “Mondays on the Hill,” the official performance celebrating Oaxaca’s distinct regions and cultures takes place annually on two Mondays in July, at the Cerro del Fortin on the western edge of the historic center, with a beautiful view of the city and the valley beyond. Normally, these two Mondays frame a week of fun, as street food proliferates all over town, crafts vendors set up even more stalls throughout the zocalo, and tourists from all over Mexico and the world pour into the city. To gild the lily, the annual mezcal festival is held at the same time. If you threw a stone, you would hit a marimba band or a dance troupe, on stages around the Ex-Convent of Santo Domingo or just in the streets. To me, it feels like there’s always a fiesta or saint’s day celebration going on in Oaxaca, complete with deafening fireworks, but Guelaguetza just multiples the everyday feel by ten.

Last year, when APPO took over the center of the city in protest of the state governor, the official Guelaguetza was cancelled, for the first time in its history. This year, even as the governor spent millions in promoting and marketing “Guelaguetza 2007,” Ticketmaster promised a full refund if the shows didn’t happen. APPO called for a boycott of the official one, hosted its own on July 16th, and graffiti sprouted around the city, quite well-designed stenciled images with exhortations like, “The art of the pueblos for the pueblos!” In the end, all scheduled performances went on, even in the pouring afternoon rain, and at least during “Lunes del Cerro,” the protests remained peaceful.

There’s no question there have been gross human rights abuses here. But I have no expertise with which to analyze the pros and cons of the boycott, the protests, the demands of APPO. (Erin and I bought tickets to the official one before I realized how fraught the mere act of attendance could be and watched for an hour before we got rained out.) Yet I want to report on what I do know, what amazed and moved me at the two smaller, local Guelaguetzas I saw at Reyes Etla and Tocuela. And that I ate a jicama popsicle.



Guelaguetza is not just for tourists. More than any other folk dance I’ve ever seen, it is truly a celebration for the communities here. The town of Reyes Etla was deserted on July 23rd because the entire town had gone up to their cerro to watch the four-hour show. I was possibly the only tourist at the performance in Tocuela, probably the only non-Mexican, and definitely the only Asian person. I felt like I was at a community talent show or a high school concert, with all the personal warmth the audience felt for the performers.

I had been invited to see the show at Tocuela on July 30th by Senora Soledad, my cooking teacher, as her son was the director of the show, so I sat in the VIP section right next to the stage with her family. Everyone around me wanted to know who I was and where I was from and how long I was in Oaxaca (and of course, whether I was married), and this really beautiful baby was fascinated by my digital camera.



Each dance celebrates a specific region, with the performers wearing gorgeous traditional clothing. There’s a specific repertoire that makes up the Guelaguetza, and everyone ends with the “Danza de la Pluma” and the pineapple girls, but having seen three Guelaguetzas, I can attest that each director puts his personal touches on each show.



Soledad’s son clearly loved playing with the bullfight motif, charged with male-female conflict, as his girls charged the boys waving red handkerchiefs so vigorously, the stage became a Laurel-and-Hardy show of boys tumbling and girls chasing.



But to truly celebrate the region, the performers will throw samples of the regional specialties to the audience, which might be light little things like straw woven fans and dried gourds for drinking mezcal, or dangerous projectiles like mangos and pineapples. Many of these girls do not throw like girls. I only got hit once, in the face with a tortilla, though I did duck a mango or two. Luckily, the region known for its turkeys merely dances with a turkey, rather than throwing one out to the audience. So at the end of every number, there were arms waving frantically in the air and children running up on stage to wheedle more closely.



At Tocuela, the people around me got deeply invested in making sure that I got many “recuerdos” or souvenirs, and kept yelling to their daughter/cousin/niece, “Maria Cruz! Maria Cruz! Over here! Over here!” I came home with two little clay bottles of mezcal, two mangos, a little basket, two tlayudas, one totopo (crispy tortilla from the Isthmus), one passionfruit, three rolls of pan de yema, a piece of sugarcane, a hollowed stick of wood for drinking mezcal with a cord to wear it around my neck, a weird little bar of fruity, brown sugar dessert, and an inedible dessert that seemed to be made from a wedge of sugar cane soaked in a toxic liqueur.

Oaxaca is the most indigenous state in Mexico, with over 30% speaking an indigenous language. People are generally considered indigenous if they speak an indigenous language, like Zapotec or Mixtec, rather than by the color of their skin. Oaxaca is not necessarily representative of Mexico in this regard, but the intense pride I saw in their indigenous heritage at Guelaguetza was overwhelming. I know that indigenous populations are among the poorest in Mexico, and that Guelaguetza may be only a shallow form of recognition, but coming from a country where we don’t even pay lip service to our indigenous cultures, I was so moved by the sense of connection to a deep and rich history. I’m a big believer in the importance of national principles and ideals, even if they’re only aspirational, because how much worse is it not even to aspire to them?



And I finally ate a jicama popsicle! They were selling them at Reyes Etla, big thick slices on a popsicle stick, with so many different containers of colorful powders and spices. I had trouble understanding the vendor, who was very curious where I was from, so I ended up just asking for “lo mejor,” and got something that was spicy and tart and sweet, as if it had been dusted in those chili powder and Kool-Aid.



I also ate molotes, little fried torpedos of masa filled with potatos and chorizo, at the performance in Tocuela, but I think they made me sick. God probably wanted to strike me down for the arrogant way I’ve been bragging about how I never get sick from street food. (For an agnostic, I’m kind of obsessed with God, no?) I’ll spare you the gory details, but I finally had to open my bottle of Pepto Bismol. It was too bad, as they were so perfectly fried.

But for once, the food was not the point.

(Special thanks to Erin for the National Geographic-worthy photos from Etla!)

Neveria, si; pasteleria, no

I am not a fan of Mexican bread. It’s often too dry or too sweet or not sweet enough. I’ve had nothing approaching the heft of a hearty, levain-type bread, what MFK Fisher likes to call “honest bread,” or the delicate crackle of a perfect croissant, or even the homey, soothing quality of super-soft Korean white bread. Most Mexican breads improve greatly upon being dipped in hot chocolate, which is almost always served with any sweetish bread, or “pan dulce.” Still, one can only drink so much hot chocolate, and I miss the excellent toast I normally have for breakfast every morning in NY, along with my favorite butter from Sahadi’s. (When I found little diner packets of Lurpak butter, which isn’t even my favorite, at El Cafecito in Puerto Escondido, I emptied the entire basket into my purse.)



Still, I wanted to see the Pasteleria Ideal in Mexico City. Another old-school place in the Centro Historico, it opened in 1927, but with more gilt-edged elegance than the Churreria “El Moro.” You enter into a large room with majestically high ceilings. You could be in a faded ballroom, except there are trays and trays of donuts, muffins, pastries, and rolls lined up in arrays before you. On Sunday morning, there were wheeled racks of breads being rolled around, nearly blocking the grand staircase, but the sign unequivocally declared that the second floor was the exhibition room for cakes.



Nearly every cake was at least 3 tiers tall—wedding cakes, baby cakes, First Communion cakes. Shrek was clearly, peculiarly popular, as were other cartoon characters. Nearly every cake also had icicles of hardened frosting dripping from each tier. One cake was almost twice as tall as Erin. Mona and Leslie, who make hand-made cookies and truffles that look like they came from a machine, must be rubbing off on me, because all I could think was how sloppy they looked. Erin took some fantastic pictures and I’m glad I went, but I can’t even remember what kind of bread I ate. All the chowhounds who are in awe of Ideal should get on a plane to Korea and go to the basement food wonderland of any upscale department store.



But Mexican ice cream, or nieve, that I truly love and respect as something I have never had before and will likely never have outside Mexico. The Roxy Neveria in Condesa is a legend, too, with the look of an American soda shop, with its striped awning and white-lettered list of flavors, except American shops generally don’t have the Virgin Mary hanging behind the counter.



It was clearly beloved by the Mexican families who double-parked to jump in for a cone or a cup. It was so beloved by me, that after eating my first cone of “nuez de macadamia,” I went back and had a second cone of “rompope.” The macadamia was wonderful, so nutty and rich but also pure, like fresh milk. The rompope, which I ordered because I didn’t know the flavor, a Mexican eggnog spiked with rum, I didn’t like as much, but it was surely not regrettable.



I hesitated for a bit before my second cone, but I felt it was the only fair way to treat my body, as I had just had a very bland meal at a health food store/restaurant across the corner. It was the kind of health food that used to plague America—so tasteless, even a vigorous shake of the salt on the table couldn’t save it. When I ordered my second cone, the boy at the counter urged me to go back to my table and sit down, as he would bring it to me directly. People can be so sweet when they realize how much you love to eat.