Saturday in Bilbao

The Mercado de Ribera in Bilbao, two floors of fish, meat, fruit and vegetables.



And a sugary bun filled with whipped cream before my train ride to Guernia/Gernika. Such a lovely Saturday morning.

People in Galicia are so nice

I bought the bread and cheese at the Mercado de Abastos in Santiago de Compostela. The bread is “pan de maiz,” or cornbread, though nothing like the cornbread we know in America, and the cheese is “tetilla” cheese, a mild, tangy, Galician cheese. The pan de maiz is crumbly like soda bread and the cornmeal is definitely mixed in with flour, but it has that characteristic, hearty flavor of “honest bread,” as M.F.K. Fisher would say. I ate it for days, even on the 12-hour bus to Bilbao; neither bread nor cheese went bad just sitting in my hotel room.

Even more than the cheese and bread, and the green-skinned freixoa fruit I tried, I liked the way the women at the market smiled at me when I bought it. Maybe I am getting starved for company, but people in Santiago de Compostela are so nice! People started asking me again where I was from and telling me that I spoke Spanish well and smiling such warm, genuine smiles at me. It was almost like I was in Mexico again. I wonder if it means anything that so many Galicians emigrated to Latin America.

Tripe and preguntas

I finally got a Spaniard to ask me where I was from, while eating breakfast solo at El Quim in La Boqueria, my last full day in Barcelona.

In Mexico, I got asked 5 times a day where I was from, from the cabdriver to the waitress to the guy working in the cemetery who insisted that I see where Benito Juarez’s daughter was buried and then shyly showed me photos of him riding a bull attached to his keychain. Almost always, the question was asked with curiosity, warmth and kindness. But in Spain, in the 3 weeks I have been here, I have been asked that question once.

El Quim belongs a Spanish food genre that doesn’t exist in the U.S., not quite a restaurant, more of a counter, but not like a diner, as it may very well serve wine, beer, and sparkling Spanish cava, not to mention razor clams, calamari, and jamon iberico. El Quim, even within this marvelous class, is near the very top. It’s a wonder just to watch the owner and his assistants move with sureness and speed in the little space that serves as their kitchen behind the counter. El Quim is one of the young upstarts that have started to challenge the legend of Pinotxo at La Boqueria, and I say, “The more the merrier!”

Although El Quim does list a menu on a board behind the counter, it’s not actually comprehensible. There are clearly things displayed in the glass case on the counter that are not on the board, and I did what I have learned to do brazenly, gawk at what others are eating. I even made a full circuit around the U-shaped bar, dismissing the tortilla espanola as old hat, dismissing eggs as too typically American for breakfast. Finally, on my second turn around the stall, I noticed a man at one end eating a round, flat earthenware dish of a red, chunky stew.

“Cual es?” I asked. I don’t know why I bothered, as I didn’t understand the response, “Callos,” but it looked very much like tripe, one of my favorite things to eat. THAT would not be a typically American breakfast for sure. So I sat down next to him and ordered the same.

My God, it was so good! The tripe was wonderful, so tender and yet still springy. There were chunks of sausage and plenty of tomato sauce that I sopped up with pieces of good crusty bread. The nice guy behind the counter had filled my plate almost to overflowing, but I couldn’t stop eating. It may go down in memory as one of the best breakfasts I have ever had, if not one of the best meals.

As I ate in gusto, I could tell the man next to me was glancing at me from time to time. I recognized the question emanating from him: who was this Asian woman who spoke Spanish with an American accent, who thought nothing of eating tripe for breakfast? In Mexico, he would have asked the question immediately, but it stalled for awhile. But in the end, he had to ask.

I had done it, me and my stomach. I had finally made someone in Spain ask, "De donde eres?"

How to Pick a Good Ham

Before I left for Spain, I had a friend say to me, “You know, my friend So-and-So didn’t really like the food in Spain.” To which I replied, “But she doesn't eat pork!” And my friend had to agree that So-and-So would probably not be the best judge of food in Spain.

Spain is famous for its jamón, or ham, giant hind legs of the pig, complete with hoof, that you see hanging everywhere. The hoof, I’ve learned, is attached to the leg for an important reason, but I’ll get to that later. The first time I saw them displayed, I got very excited and started taking pictures, but the sight of them is almost passé to me now. Eating them, of course, will never be passé.

Anne and I arrived in Barcelona on Monday afternoon and stayed in Barcelona proper for two nights before heading to Vilafranca del Penedés, a town of about 35,000 people an hour outside of Barcelona, where our friend Mao-Mei lives with her Catalan husband, Isaac. (I’m going to have to go back and write more about Madrid.) Barcelona immediately felt very different from Madrid—warmer, both in terms of temperature and attitude, and very open, with its Paris-like wide boulevards as beautiful and as striking as the medieval warren of streets of the the Barri Gotic. The Moderniste architecture by Gaudi and others adds an immediately whimsical feel to the city, but Anne and I may also like Barcelona so much because after all the churches and castles of Madrid, we took a bike tour and a cooking class in Barcelona.



The cooking class included a market tour of La Boqueria, the oldest market in Barcelona and the most famous. Located right off the Ramblas, the main thoroughfare as touristy as Times Square but more attractive, La Boqueria draws a lot of tourists as well. But it’s also a real, functioning market. I saw one butcher showing off pictures of her granddaughter to a regular, and as Bego, our teacher pointed out, you could see the changes in Spanish society by the new stands focused on Asian or Latin American ingredients. I even saw a Korean stand called “Macitta,” which means “delicious” in Korean, though they seemed mainly to sell a lot of prepared food and instant ramen.



For an American who glories in gory food, La Boqueria was heaven. There were chickens with their heads still on, heads of lambs complete with eyeballs, and skinned rabbits laid-out with their little butts facing up, like darling little sunbathers.



And the seafood! My God, when I think of the fish stands of your average American supermarket and how you can’t find a freakin’ whole fish. I saw big octopi with their tentacles spreading like blooming flowers, shiny little herrings, entire stands devoted to bacalao or salt cod, and funny fish heads that I almost wanted to talk to.



But the highlight of the market tour, to be sure, was when Bego explained how to pick a good ham. First, you get what you pay for. Second, the “pata negra” or the black hoof belongs to the best pigs, the black ones who feed on acorns and wander free-range in the Extremedura. This is what is called jamón iberico, and as it’s the priciest, you need to make sure that you are truly getting jam from a black pig. Show me the hoof! One seller we saw had a flat-screen TV showing his pigs, presumably, frolicking in the meadow.



Once the ham has been sliced through, you can look for things like a thick, white rather than yellow layer of fat around the ham. There should also be small white specks in the red part of the ham itself, as that indicates that it has been well-cured.

Once you have such a fine ham, Bego advised that it had to be served correctly, always at room temperature. If vacuum-packed, the ham should be opened for at least half an hour before serving.

When I asked how long a ham would last, Bego smiled and said, “It goes very fast.” But if you ration yourself, your ham can last as long as three months. You can leave it hanging out at room temperature, using the outer layer of fat to cover the cut area. I instantly had a beautiful image of a ham hanging from the ceiling in my Brooklyn kitchen, but can you imagine me trying to squeeze a giant leg of ham into my backpack? Dreams, sueños, dreams.

Oaxacan breads and sweets, part II

I take back everything I said about the bread being bad in Oaxaca.

Two Saturdays ago, I’d mainly perused modern bakeries, selling traditional breads in part, but very different from the bakers in markets with their goods on trays or in deep woven baskets. My experiences with the breads in the markets had been mixed—good pan de yema in hot chocolate making class, but sort of stale and dry at other times, and then other moments that were so lacking I can’t even remember what I ate.

But last week, I wandered up to Mercado Sanchez Pascuas to buy some fruit and decided it was time to take the plunge. There were several bread vendors there, on the white counters near the west end of the market. I chose the man furthest north, a few meters down from the vegetable seller. I would eat the bread with the pink sugar on top. And then for good measure, I asked for another plain, dark and wheatier looking roll. 4.5 pesos, total.



Well, let’s just say I’m not going to be wasting any more of my hard-saved money on “European artisanal bread” at Pan & Co. Mexican bread is good enough for me! The crust on both was hard but not tough, and the bread inside chewy yet soft and flavorful. The roll with the pink sugar on top had a sweet glaze all over the top that made my plastic bag sticky immediately, but it was a pleasant combination with the plain texture of the roll inside and more soothing for an early morning meal than something like a cinnamon roll or a muffin, which are both sweet and heavy with butter. The roll also had a big hollow inside, the tell-tale sign that yeast had been given time to do its thing.

The other roll, with its sprinkling of sesame seeds, was even better. It perhaps could have used a tad more salt, but it had no need to be embarrassed that it was otherwise unadorned. It didn’t rise to the level of a great French baguette, but then, very few breads do, even in New York. This flat little roll had more flavor than most of the bread in the U.S., and probably most of the bread in New York, too.

Two days later, I went back and got another flat, plain roll with sesame seeds and then something that looked like a brioche with its little topknot. This time, sadly, the roll was a tad stale, but with a strong enough flavor to stand up well to slices of avocado with salt and a bit of pepper, a simple and filling breakfast I learned from Erin. The brioche, though, blew my mind. There was whole wheat flour in it, but not enough to keep the crumb tender, and then surprising ribbons of cinnamon and dots of raisins.

This vendor is clearly something special. When Mimi and I went back to get a bag of bread, hoping to soothe Alex's stomach with something relatively bland, we bought a few rolls from the woman next to him and then a big brioche roll and a little flat roll with sugary sesame seeds and crushed nuts on top. The big bag of bread from the other baker was fine, but this guy's stuff just shined.

I’m so glad. I hated not liking a whole category of Mexican food.

Ricas tostadas en El Pochote

This tostada is on my top 10 list of things I love to eat in Oaxaca, and pretty high up, too.

I’ve raved before the Mercado Organico at El Pochote before, but I will rave again. On the far wall from the entrance, next to the lovely Korean woman selling baked goods, there is a husband-and-wife pair that sells tostadas with a wide range of topping choices. A tostada is a crunchy taco, but not those U-shaped boats we all ate growing up, made by Taco Bello or Dos Pasos or whatever they called themselves. It's flat, a little ripply usually, and not as hard-crunchy as a tortilla chip, thinner and crisper.

There are an array of topping choices, sparkling with different colors. Each tostada starts with a thin base of black bean puree, and then, you have to start making some decisions. There are nopales, cactus paddles, one that is spicier than the other, but both deliciously tart and fresh. There are sauteed mushrooms, and one type has small kernels of corn, too. There's spicy chicken tinga, shredded white chicken breast, and then two kinds of requeson, a fresh ricotta-like cheese. One has green specks, herby, and the other is spicier and redder, but not actually hot. Just fragrantly spicy. You can thin avocado sauce drizzled over everything, as well as salsa. No matter what combination you get, one topping or 3, it's 15 pesos. You feel almost righteously healthy eating so many vegetables, but you're not making any sacrifices.

Probably my favorite is half spicy nopales, half mushrooms with bits of corn, topped with the spicy requeson, and then drizzled with both salsa and guacamole. It’s so simple and yet illustrates so perfectly what I love most about Mexican food, the way fresh, bright flavors and textures contrast and complement each other. (To think, melted cheese over everything represents Mexican food to most Americans!) The slightly tart nopales, the savory mushrooms, the spicy salsa, the creamy requeson, the crunchy tostada. It’s hard not to get it all over your face, but it’s worth every messy bite.

I think the wife recognizes me now, she smiled so broadly at me this weekend. It's my Saturday morning ritual!

(This is my 100th post. Can you believe it?)

Rice and greens, or arroz con quelites

Mercado Hidalgo is considered a little “fresa,” which literally means “strawberry” but is also Mexican slang meaning “snobby.” It’s located in upper-class Colonia Reforma, on Emilio Carranza on the block north of Palmeras, and its produce does sparkle. I saw stuff that I hadn’t seen in other markets in Oaxaca, like huitlacoche and fresh figs. I almost flipped when I saw the figs, as it doesn’t quite feel like summer unless I eat some fresh figs.



They also had beautiful bunches of quelites, a type of Mexican green, leafy vegetable, which inspired me to actually try one of the recipes from my new Mexican cookbook, “Alquimias y Atmosferas de Sabor,” by Carmen Ramirez Degollado, the chef and owner of the beloved “El Bajio” in Mexico City. I’ve been trying to read more Spanish, since I remember more from reading than hearing, but the only thing that really holds my interest enough to get through more than a few pages are cookbooks and food magazines. Unfortunately, reading them doesn’t challenge me as much as reading literature or news articles would because I know enough about how recipes are constructed to figure out most of what I read through context. For example, as I read a recipe calling for “chayotes tiernos,” I guessed that “tierno” meant fresh or tender, didn’t bother looking it up in the dictionary, and then was shocked when my Spanish teacher described her ex-boyfriend as acting very gentlemanly and very “tierno” on their first date. It turns a man can be as tender as a vegetable.

Rick Bayless translates “quelites” as “lamb’s quarters,” and recommends substituting it in his recipes with chard or collard greens in the U.S., some green with strong flavors. But I’m not sure that he’s describing the same thing I bought, as my “quelites” were more like spinach, just better. They had a similar sweet flavor, and reminded me a lot of Korean spinach with its leggy stems, but without the furry aftertaste of a lot of American spinach. Also, I know that the word “quelites” is used to describe a whole category of Mexican greens, including even amaranth leaves which are also called “quintonil,” and amaranth leaves are distinctly stronger and more bitter, more like chard.

But I digress. The recipe was very simple, a rice with greens dish, calling for the rice to be fried with pureed raw onion and garlic. Then broth was to be added with the bunch of raw quelites, two parts broth to one part rice. Like most Mexican recipes, it assumed a lot of knowledge on the part of the reader, and I wondered, “Stalks and all? Should I pulverize the leaves and make it a green rice? Should I throw the leaves in whole?” Finally, I decided to just destem them, chop them roughly and throw them in with the broth leftover from cooking my pork shoulder.

Well, I put in way too much broth, forgetting the leaves would emit a fair amount of water themselves, and I ended up with a rice with greens porridge. I mistakenly thought I could avoid burning the rice this time by adding more broth earlier on. I also think there’s a reason chicken broth is normally used to cook rice, not pork broth, because although the flavor was richer than it would have been with water, it wasn’t rich in quite the right way. But the quelites didn’t turn turd green, I got to try cooking with them, and I still enjoyed my rice mush very much. Thank God I had my shameless solitude.

Tacos of picadillo, a.k.a., delicious shredded pork

The Mercado Sanchez Pascuas, just a little north of Quetzalcoatl with its bright green entrances on both Porfirio Diaz and Tinoco y Palacios, is probably my favorite everyday market in Oaxaca. It’s not as overwhelming as the Mercado Abastos, or as colorful as Mercado Juarez, and it doesn’t have the steamy meat market-slash-taco stands of Mercado 20 de noviembre, but it feels like a neighborhood market, and increasingly, like my neighborhood market. It’s smaller than the ones closer to the zocalo described in the all the guidebooks, and on a weekday afternoon, you might even think it was half-empty. But every Saturday and Sunday morning, it’s bustling with people buying fresh blandas, flowers, tamales, all kinds of produce, various jugos, and even some barro verde, the pottery with the dark green glaze. Unlike the surly people at Mercado Juarez, the people at Mercado Sanchez don’t mind if you handle and pick your fruit yourself. Because it’s smaller, you can also see more clearly where people are clustering to buy their chicken or pork and gauge which carnicerias have the freshest meat. It’s also easier to notice who has criollo tomatoes, those heirloom tomatoes that have so much more flavor, or even criollo avocados with their enormous pits and a high, clean taste, if somewhat less rich and creamy in flavor. (You can find some fantastic photos from Planeta.com.)



This past Sunday, after a fortifying breakfast of chocolatle atole and empanadas, I enlisted my Spanish teacher and friend Lety to help in sussing out the best places to get the ingredients for the picadillo pork tacos I planned to make that afternoon. She pointed in one direction to indicate her favorite carniceria, but from across the market, I misjudged where she was pointing and had already started talking to a woman in a very smelly stand when she came over and whispered, “I meant that one.” I murmured my apologies, pretending I wasn’t quite sure what I wanted, and we quietly scurried all the way to the other end of the meat section.

I didn’t know if I could literally translate English phrases for pork cuts into Spanish, if pork shoulder is “espalda” or “pierna” or something completely different, so to our new butcher, I just asked for the cut of meat that had a lot of “grasa” or fat. “Ah, espaldita!” he said. He proudly showed off the layer of fat glistening on the piece of pork, and Lety nodded with approval. Later, when I asked her if I should trim some of the fat off before we cooked it, she said, “But that will remove the flavor!” God, I love Mexico.

After seeing the “picadillo” recipe in Rick Bayless’s cookbook last weekend, I had spent all week just thinking about it, when and where I should buy the meat, whether I should cook it on Saturday or Sunday. I had read the recipe over and over, charmed by the thought of taking shredded, cooked pork shoulder, and then browning it, scraping it up as it stuck to the pot, with chopped onion, a handful of raisins, a handful of chopped almonds, a little cinnamon, an even smaller pinch of freshly ground cloves, and a roasted tomato-pasilla oaxaquena sauce. But I’d never even tried it, so I was thankful to have Lety there to say, “Oh, it looks a little dry,” or “Add a little sugar.”

The picadillo was as easy as promised, even though it took about 2 and half hours to make, to simmer the pork shoulder with all its fat, to grind the cloves in a little molcajete, to chop and toast the almonds, to make the sweet smoky salsa, and then to cook it all together. But it was very laid-back cooking, though there was a moment when I realized trying to understand Spanish and chop almonds at the same time is the kind of multi-tasking that is yet beyond me. But otherwise, we chatted easily as she told me about the terrible people at her workplace and I told her about the horrible blind date I went on before I left New York.

Lety even showed me how to make horchata:

1) Carefully clean and wash about 1 cup of rice. Let it soak in water about 2 inches above the rice with some broken canela, the equivalent probably of 2 American cinnamon sticks. Let it sit for about 2 hours, until the rice gets soft enough that you can pinch a kernel in half.

2) Blend everything in the blender as smooth as possible.

3) Strain into a pitcher, reserving any rice-cinnamon paste for “atole de arroz.” (I only had a strainer, but I imagine a cheesecloth would be better.)

4) Add water and sugar to taste. Make sure to stir it up immediately before pouring it into a glass, as some sediment will sink to the bottom.

Incredibly clean and pure. I can totally see myself doing this in Brooklyn on a hot summer day. Other recipes I’ve seen say that you should add ground almonds, and I imagine that would be wonderful, too, as well as some pureed bright red, tiny cactus fruits with their prickly armor of skin.



I chopped up some jicama, radishes, avocado, and pickled jalapeno for garnish and heated up some of this week’s pot of black beans while Lety warmed and wrapped the tortillas in a towel. With the bright pink pitcher of horchata and a little leftover mezcal, we had a very colorful feast.

And the picadillo I liked as much as last Sunday’s supper of greens, onions, and cheese tacos. It wasn’t at all spicy—which Lety assured me was normal—but it had such a range of flavors, from smoky to rich to slightly sweet and nutty. It was complex and yet easily appealing, almost as warming as Lety’s company. Definitely one to add to the taco buffet dinner I intend to host when I get back to New York.

Seasons of My Heart, Part I

{So much to catch up on! I was in Mexico City and then hiking in the Sierra Norte with my friend Erin for a week, and i've gotten behind.]



“The vanilla extract we use is made in Veracruz, from a flower that blooms every four years for only two hours. Because there usually aren’t enough bees, it needs to be pollinated by hand. It takes 9 months to grow the vanilla beans, then 5 months to cure them in the sun. They can tell whether the beans are ready or not by the heat of the beans, when they hold them in their hands.”

“This is the only salt we use here, hand-harvested from the sea by women in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.”

“You can make fruit vinegar by putting rinds of fresh pineapple on a plate outside to catch the first morning dew, but before the sun’s rays hit them. Then you add piloncillo, unrefined sugar, in a clay pot, stick it in a closet, and let it ferment. It’ll become tepate, or pineapple beer, first, but if you let it keep fermenting, it’ll become vinegar. You’ll see a thick sludge on top, which they call “madre,” and you can cut it up to start the fermenting process all over again.”

“If you don’t eat pork, try grasshoppers.”

Susana Trilling is serious about food. I tend to be skeptical of cooking schools for amateurs—I never feel like I learn any real skills, and they feel suspiciously like corporate team-building exercises. But as I sat in the big, bright Mexican-tiled kitchen, festooned with the Mexican paper cut-outs I love so much, and graced with enormous and obviously well-loved Le Creuset pots in a riot of colors, I scribbled so fast and yet could barely keep up with the wealth of information falling from Susana’s lips. I felt so lucky to be there, and especially to have friends like Angela and Lina, who gifted me with the class at Seasons of My Heart as my 30th birthday gift.

Susana also had that hard-ass voice of authority I respect, like when she emphasized the great importance of adding enough salt to the arroz azafran con pina, or saffron rice with caramelized pineapple. I could tell, that like most chefs, she was a serious control-freak, and yet she managed to run her school and teach novices with grace and patience. Given that I won’t let certain friends chop vegetables for me, I felt I could learn a lot from her.



We had started the day at the Wednesday market in Etla, tasting and smelling everywhere we went. The tour was designed for people new to Oaxaca, but even though I had already been poking around markets for a month, it was a relief to have a guide who patiently answered my questions in English. One thing I’ve noticed about Mexico is that people here are generally so nice, but they can’t conceive of what outsiders don’t know. When I ask for directions, they often just say, “Oh, it’s over there!” And I’m left to say, “To the left? To the right?” So when I ask in a market, “What is this?”, I usually get an answer like, “equilemefo-mush-mush.”



Our guide pointed out herbs for eating like chepil, hierba de conejo; herbs for cleansing like rosemary, which isn’t really used in cooking in Oaxaca; and different kinds of cheese including requeson, a soft and rich cheese remniscent of the best ricotta.



She also explained, to my great enlightenment, that that cheesy looking white stuff was actually a sweet dessert made of corn and milk called nicuatole. It really tasted like a sweet cheese, which I liked but probably wouldn’t eat in great quantities.



I saw jicama popsicles, ready to be dipped in the flavors of your choice! We ate so much. We tried different flavors of nieve, every type of tamal the woman had, and something that looked like spinach when it’s cooked. I bought some spicy pickled vegetables to assuage my kimchi cravings.



Most interesting to me, we had chocolate atole. There was a mini-debate on Chowhound recently about whether chocolate atole is the same thing is champurrado. I can now add my two cents and say definitively that they are not the same. Champurrado is atole of corn mixed with hot chocolate, for a thick, nutty, almost sludgy (though I don’t meant that pejoratively) flavor. Chocolate atole involves an atole that’s made of rice and white chocolate, which isn’t our non-cacao bean white chocolate, but something that’s made by fermenting chocolate underground. It’s then poured into a bowl with chocolate spuma that’s made by whipping hot chocolate into a frothy frenzy.

We were then supposed to eat enfrijoladas or entomatadas at one of the fondas, since we wouldn’t be eating our comida until much later, but we had already eaten so much, I was the only person to eat a full plate of food. If I believed in God, I would thank Him for the metabolism that keeps me from blowing up like a balloon.

Neuroticos Anonimos always feel better when they eat good food

I thought I was going to Ocotlán to check out their Friday market. I didn’t know I was going to find the solace I had been searching for.

The market was sprawling, but with arms radiating out rather than the dense block upon block at Mercado Abastos. Each arm was clearly dedicated to specific items—leather belts or fresh produce or random plastic items. My favorite was the turkey gauntlet, where people formed two long lines while holding their very placid turkeys under their arms. It felt almost stately, like a very dignified beauty pageant. I couldn’t quite tell who was buying and who was displaying, as everyone just stood there with his or her bird(s). I really wanted to take a picture, but I know most people don’t like to have their pictures taken, and I generally don’t ask unless I buy something. This was definitely something I could not take home.

I was there early enough to see the nieve, or sorbet, sellers making their ice cream. They place one bucket inside another bucket of ice and presumably salt, and they just keep turning the inner bucket to churn it to the right consistency. None of it was ready for me to eat, hence, no picture of this either.



But I did feel entitled to take pictures of everything I bought and consumed. I started with a breakfast of enfrijoladas, which are like entomatadas but in bean sauce, rather than tomatoes. It honestly tastes better than you would think. I washed it all down with a nice cup of chocolate con agua, which came with a soft bun with crumbly, sugary top and a hard little pretzel-shaped biscuit. I’ve realized that nearly all the bread in Oaxaca improves vastly when it’s dunked into some hot chocolate. Hot morning drinks, for some reason, always taste better in a bowl than a mug. I think it’s the particularly warm feeling you get when your fingers and palms are wrapped around the smooth curves of a bowl.



I then found a couple of benches full of families eating something I’d never seen before. The women ladled out bowls of dark red soup in the back, while the senora out front chopped at a soft, quivering mass of steamed meat. Chopped hot peppers, onions, cilantro and salsa were on every table, and every few minutes, a woman would walk by offering “blandas,” tortillas that are softer and tastier than their name implies. I wasn’t quite sure what to do, but when I sat down and a blanda seller approached me, a young woman at the next table gave a quick, almost imperceptible smile and nod, so I bought two. It was sort of “build-your-own-picnic,” as her family had also bought some avocados and other garnishes to add to their meal.



The soup turned out to be full of potatoes, carrots, and green beans, as well as several different kinds of unidentifiable organ meat. This thing that looks like a bit of felt is flesh—I know, I ate it.



But even I had my limits. I looked at something that looked like liver, but a tiny bite revealed it definitely was not liver. There was something else that had gelatinous folds, a whole system of mountains and valleys in a bit of meat. I decided not to eat that either.

According to Lety, my Spanish teacher, I ate menudo. Hooray! I’d always wanted to eat menudo.

I bought some albahaca, or basil, since I keep thinking I’m going to make spaghetti with tomato sauce, though it looks and smells distinctly more like Thai basil than sweet basil. I watched several goats go by, bleating wildly. Perhaps they knew something the turkeys didn’t.

My heart never leaps at the thought of touring a church, but I was actually moved when I stopped at the church that had been restored with the help of Rodolfo Morales, the local boy who became a great artist. My pictures don’t capture how fresh and light it looks, or how lovely the ceilings are with their serpentine gilt vines. It was, however, slightly alarming to see mannequins dressed in cheap satin, representing Christ or saints, encased in glass. Catholicism seems sort of blithely unselfconscious about its morbidity.

And then I went to the Casa of the artist himself, which is quite a funny little place. It’s just off the main square in Ocotlan, and when I walked into the arched entryway, there was a young, bearded, artsy-looking guy just sitting on a bench. The gate was closed, but he assured me it was open, and when I approached the gate, a woman appeared with a young boy. They welcomed me in, the woman telling me I could leave my shopping bag on a bench, and the boy wordlessly leading me up the stairs to the second floor with its exhibition hall.

The exhibit showcased the collages Morales had been making near the end of his life, with ribbon, antique images, lace, even faces I recognized as having been cut-out of Benetton ads. The exhibition hall was right next to what used to be his studio, complete with rolls of ribbon.

When I wandered back downstairs, I began to realize what a strange house I was in. He only died in 2001, and you could peer into his bedroom, his kitchen, and his dining room, presumably preserved as he’d left it. On a shelf by the staircase, you could see 30 or so empty perfume bottles, just sitting there like the tchotckes of any older person. But it also became clear that his family was still living in the house day to day.



A senora, older than the woman who’d let me in, was in the gorgeous kitchen when I came in, and she began showing me around, telling me how this horse sculpture made of wood was very old, or how that baby doll in a glass case was very old. The china cabinet was filled with crystal, but it also held a plastic thermos and one antique cup with Japanese faces that the senora had hoped I could identify. As we were talking, we heard a wail come across the courtyard, rising above the birds in their cages. Suddenly, a girl with long curly hair appeared, carrying a smaller little girl who was crying. She stopped crying when she saw me, but she started again after the older girl took her into their bedroom. When I asked where the bathroom was, the senora thought for a bit, and then kindly let me use the family bathroom. As I left, the senora told me that the lady of the house had gone to the market for bread and sodas, so I was very welcome to come back and have a snack with them.

When I left the house, the bearded boy was still there and he asked me what I liked the best. “Oh, the kitchen!” I said.



But before I went back to Oaxaca, I had to eat one last thing: a molote. I hadn’t seen these before, these little torpedo-shaped fried dumplings filled with potato and chorizo. As always, I felt slightly sheepish ordering “un molote,” but the lady was so nice. She asked me with the warmest smile, “Te gusta?”, knowing the answer already. It’s in these moments that I’m glad to be a particularly freaky foreigner—an Asian AND a woman traveling alone. The novelty of seeing me eat and enjoy their food seems to make up for the fact that I can only buy 2 blandas or one molote. When I got back to Oaxaca, I found out from Lety that molotes aren’t easy to find, as they’re usually the kind of food sold in driveways of private houses on Sunday mornings. If only I’d known, I would have bought a bagful.

But perhaps as much as my memories of the food I ate and the art I saw, I think I will treasure the brochure I found at the church for “Neuróticos Anónimos.” According to the brochure, “Neurosis” is “caused by a person’s innate egoism that keeps him from having the ability to love.” It advises the reader to read and answer the quiz in the calmest possible manner, with the most honesty possible. The questions include, among many, “Do you believe the whole world is watching you?” “Do you lie without necessity?” “Do you do things that you consider stupid?” “Do you live disgusted with the entire world?”

So in Ocotlán, I ate several things I’d never eaten before, saw an artist’s home, and learned that I’m not as neurotic as I think I am.

Finding peace in ice cream

Oaxaca is surprisingly noisy. I thought I was leaving the biggest, baddest city in the world, to come to a place that was almost rural and definitely simpler. But Oaxaca is really, really noisy.

I’m living now in an apartment that faces the street. It’s not a major thruway, but because it’s on a slope, every car has to rev its engine to make it up the hill, and the ones that want to go fast are as macho as any motorcycle. Are there no decent mufflers in this town? There are also rockets or fireworks that go off almost everyday. I first started to hear a spate of them on June 14, the anniversary of the government’s first failed attempt to expel the teachers demonstrating in the zocalo, but apparently, today’s rockets were let loose by the multitude of churches that cluster downtown to celebrate, I don’t know, the saint of fireworks? If I close the windows, it’s much better though by no means quiet, but that means I give up the night breezes that give us all hope during the heat of midday.

I’m starting to feel the annoyance of life again. It was so easy not to have a cellphone, and as much as I missed living alone during my homestay, it was also so easy not to cook or to clean or to think about anything like where to get drinkable water. I miss my Brooklyn block, which only has three early-morning motorcyclers and your occasional loud party down the block. I miss my friends, who are all friends of choice, not of convenience. I wish I had taken that other apartment in nearly suburban Colonia Reforma. My God, if it’s this noisy on a Sunday, what will it be like tomorrow?

So I have to focus on what is good and right: strawberry ice cream at the Mercado Organico.

It was only during my third trip to the market that I noticed the vendor selling sweet rolls and hot chocolate was also selling freshly made ice cream. I had been getting ready to leave, having already consumed a delicious, chewy piece of pizza-flatbread and the best cup of coffee in Oaxaca, but then I saw a man walk by with three blue dixie-cups filled with ice cream. It called to something deep in my soul and I practically ran back to the stall.

It was fresh. Creamier than most “nieve,” the sorbet-like ice cream most available in Oaxaca, it was studded with fresh, tart strawberries and pecan bits. It was being kept cold in a wooden pail packed with ice and salt, but it wasn’t just the romance of the old-fashioned ice-cream making that made it taste so good. It could have come out of a high-tech, stainless steel freezer and I would still have been rolling my eyes to heaven. It’s rare and magical when ice cream hits that perfect balancing point between rich and fresh, sweet and tart, creamy and yet refreshing.

The ice cream will be the subject of my meditation every time I feel like screaming because of the noise outside my windows.

A wall of pork rinds, and a swim in the mountains

Have you ever seen a wall of fried pork rinds? I hadn’t, until I went to the big weekly Sunday market at Tlacolula, a pueblo about 25 minutes east of Oaxaca City.



As soon as we got out of our “colectivo taxi,” a shared taxi, we saw two Zapotec women walking with turkeys tucked under their arms, like they were footballs. This market also sold everything under the sun, from big tin buckets



to large metates for grinding corn



to pink kernels of dried corn. I have no idea how or why they are this way.



I’d eaten an enormous breakfast of eggs cooked in salsa, then wrapped with beans in tortillas, so I couldn’t work up much of an appetite, even for the wall of chicharrones but I did buy some tamales de elote, which turned out to be basically sweet corn bread baked in corn husks. Smokier than American-style cornbread, but not the mushy texture of other tamales. Very hearty and satisfying.



And I saw the most lovable dog. Look at his face!



But I had to admit, it wasn’t as much fun to go to a market when I didn’t have any reason to buy a plastic bag full of nopales (cactus salad), or a big loaf of pan de yema. And I felt badly just taking pictures of everything without buying much.

So the highlight of the day was moving further east to Hierve El Agua, which translates as “boiling water, which is quite an overstatement. It’s actually a slightly lukewarm spring on top of a mountain. But it’s not as boring as it sounds! It’s a lovely place to get away from the big bad city, and to swim in what looks almost like a fancy infinity pool on top of a mountain.



We had taken a “coletivo taxi” or a shared taxi from Oaxaca to Tlacolula, and from Tlacolula to Mitla, where we found a pick-up truck with a covered back taking people to Hierve El Agua. It turned out Hierve El Agua isn’t actually that far from Oaxaca, but it takes an hour and a half to get there because from Mitla, you have to climb a steep, curvy, unpaved road.

Once you enter, you see a fairly bare hilltop, a few spare brick buildings on top of one hill where they serve snacks and drinks, and a few half-constructed buildings that seem to be hopefully anticipating more tourism. Like the rest of Oaxaca, though, Hierve El Agua seemed to be hurting for tourists.



We walked down a stony slope strewn with cacti and other dry plants to find the spring itself, enclosed in a little metal fence as if it were in some danger, and then a beautiful pool facing the mountains across and the valleys below. There were a few families with children splashing around, three Asian tourists with cameras slung around their necks, and us. The water had a slight smell of sulfur and it was warm from the sun, but it wasn’t anything approximating a hot spring. Still, I was so happy to jump in the water and do a few awkward crawls.



I would have liked to take the footpath around the mountain, but we didn’t really have time since we wanted to eat lunch, and I didn’t really care, it was that kind of day.

(Admittedly, it didn’t feel so relaxing when we started making our way back on the same curvy, steep road in pouring rain. I saw the driver cross himself before we started, and then at one point instruct his compañero to put rocks behind the tires so we wouldn’t slide backwards, but hey, we got back just fine. Such are the joys of public transportation!)

Mercado organico at El Pochote

Now that I’ve been here for over three weeks, it’s finally hit me that I’m actually living here, in Oaxaca, Mexico. The raw newness of the city has worn off, and there are areas I can navigate without looking at a map. Best of all, I’m starting to have favorite places, and at the top of the list is the little park of El Pochote.

You could walk by El Pochote and not even know it. It’s built into the old aqueducts of the city, with only one small wooden door in a brick wall of arches leading into the enclosed space. Once you’re inside, it’s mainly red dirt with a brick walkway, a small pond with a brush of bamboo, and not much greenery, but there’s something so lovely about its quietness and feeling of secrecy. Oaxaca, despite being a city less than 1/12th the size of New York, can still feel noisy, crowded, and polluted at times, and it’s always a relief to find myself inside El Pochote.

The park regularly shows free art films and hosts events like the bicycle-power generator demonstration I went to Saturday night (inexplicably paired with a series of animated shorts by a Czech filmmaker I’d never heard of, Jan Svankmajer). But the biggest draw of El Pochote for me is undeniably the organic market on Fridays and Saturdays.

Like organic markets in the U.S., the customers appear generally middle- and upper-class, along with a lot of the type of gringos who like to visit places like Oaxaca, lefty, green, well-meaning. The whole market is very well-groomed, pretty white tents on wooden poles, instead of helter-skelter plastic tarps. The only non-food items are tasteful, traditional pottery and all-natural soaps and shampoos, no plastic cups with Disney characters printed on them. And as much as I like the crazed chaos of piñatas juxtaposed with raw meat, I have to admit it’s often a little easier to enjoy the Mercado Organico.



And no market in the U.S., neither the Union Square Greenmarket, or my beloved Alemany Market in San Francisco, or even the gastronomic playland of the Ferry Building in San Francisco has the tlayudas, enchiladas, and tacos I can get at El Pochote. Actually, I don’t think there’s any other market in Oaxaca where I could get the food I ate at El Pochote. Looking at the wide range of sautéed vegetables—squash, mushrooms, dark leafy greens—I suddenly realized what I’d been missing in my diet for the past three weeks. My stomach cried out for something that would taste fresh and simple, not cooked or pureed or seasoned.

I started with a fantastic “taco” of a tortilla rolled around diced chicken piquant with sautéed sweet peppers, mixed with a bit of black bean spread and such lovely, tasty sautéed mushrooms.



I then had two enchiladas smothered in coloradito mole with some shredded chicken, lettuce, and queso sprinkled on top. I think prices here are slightly higher than elsewhere, but they’re still so low by American standards: 23 pesos or a little under $2.30 for a plate of food that would have been more than enough for my lunch. I felt particularly lucky eating these, that I’m here long enough to try multiple versions of my favorite foods. This coloradito had a sophisticated touch of bitterness, but still slightly sweeter and better, I think, than the one I’d tried at Casa Oaxaca.



I drank some chilacayote, a pulpy drink with seeds and all made of a type of sweet squash. I didn’t like it very much, and wished I had gotten tejate in a pretty little gourd instead, like my classmate who graciously wasn’t surprised when I asked to take a picture of her drink.



I bought some candied figs, squash, and chilacayote, which were pretty good, but a little too sweet to eat in the huge chunks they sold them in.



And then I finally tasted some chapulllines, the Oaxacan specialty of fried grasshoppers. I’d been waiting for July or August, when they would be bigger and better, according to Soledad my cooking guru from ICO, but the little old lady selling them was so insistent, I ended up buying a tiny $1 bag. They tasted salty more than anything, not as crunchy as I’d thought they would be, maybe a bit like anchovies. I love anchovies, but I don’t snack on them, and I didn’t finish the bag.

And to take home, I bought a little chocolate crescent-bread from the Korean woman who runs an organic farm and restaurant in Etla, a pueblo outside Oaxaca. I think she and her half-Korean daughters were as surprised to see me as I was to see them, but I was too shy to get her story. I had hovered by her stall for so long, though, that I felt obliged to buy the bread. Lucky for me, it was really good. I loved the cinnamon-y texture and flavor of the bit of chocolate running through the swirls of sweet, eggy bread. It wasn’t at all like eating a crappy pain au chocolate with a stingy bit of chocolate at Au Bon Pain. Most Mexican bread tastes too dry and/or too bland to me, organic or not. This was so much better, wholesome without being boring. (My friend wants to organize a trip to her restaurant, so I hope to get her story sooner or later.)

Heh heh, when I have my own apartment, I can take more food home.

Aqui, Casilda (Here, Casilda)

Such a declaration of place!

Whenever I ask, “Do you know Aguas Casilda,” everyone says, “Ohhh, Aguas Casilda, muy riquissimas!” I doubt Casilda is still there, as she would have to be 97 years old, but regardless, her stall is situated just a few stalls down from the nieve place I also love in Mercado Juarez, making that spot a place of difficult decisions. Even those who are squeamish about street food exclaim, “Y ella es muy limpia,” because the stall uses purified water. When King Juan Carlos of Spain and unspecified presidents of Mexico, governors, actors, actresses, and singers have come to pay homage to Casilda, who established her stall in 1926, who are you to be afraid of diarrhea?

I know all this about Casilda because the laminated menu has a history on the back. If my reading is correct, Casilda was practically a saint, as she is described giving horchata to thirsty, often penniless students, making her, “La Samaritana Oaxaquena.” I don’t think Americans have ever felt that strongly about a drink-maker. Even your biggest, die-hard Coca-Cola fan isn’t likely to want to confer sainthood on the inventor, whatshisname. Their pride in Casilda reminded me a bit of Korea, where the government catalogs every person with a traditional talent or craft, so that Mr. Kim the master of ceramics becomes “National Living Treasure #548.”

But of course, the most important object of pride is not Casilda’s history but her products, the aguas themselves. When I flipped over the laminated history, I could see clearly that pride of place had been given to one drink in particular: horchata con tuna y almendres.



Isn’t it beautiful? I’ve always liked horchata, ever since I tried it at my first taqueria with my first burrito in the Mission in San Francisco, but this version of Mexico’s famous drink made of rice tasted simpler and purer, and definitely less sugary. The tuna, which you remember is cactus fruit, made it rosier and fruitier, as did the chunks of cantaloupe floating in it. The small bits of nuts were definitely not almonds, but probably pecans or “nuez.” Maybe they ran out of almonds. No importa, I love pecans.

Sadly, it was over too quickly. I drained my glass in five minutes.