Two stomachs can always eat more than one

Oaxaca is an easy place to eat alone. Obviously, there’s fabulous street food that you can always eat on a park bench, and it’s almost better to be alone when you find your face smeared with salsa and your fingers tangled in the long, stretchy strings of Oaxacan quesillo. The only people watching you are the native Oaxaquenos to whom you’re already completely foreign anyway.

So until my lovely lunch with a fellow foodie at Casa Oaxaca today, I’d almost forgotten how enjoyable it can be to sit down and share a meal, compare notes, and revel together in a new, gustatory experience. It’s like seeing a funny movie or looking out at a gorgeous vista: you want someone to hear you say, “Wow, that is really good.” It’s even better, of course, when that person agrees with you, and this was such a meal.

The restaurant is beautiful but casual, with clean white walls, wooden beams, and a courtyard that opens to the sky. It felt very still and very calm, though that might also have been because we were practically the only ones there.



Soon after we sat down, the waiter brought with a flourish a large platter of the fish available that day: mahi-mahi, grouper, dorado, tuna, and some amazing prawns. Jonathan, who claims not to like shellfish, was instantly hypnotized by the prawns. I was so flustered, I forgot to take a picture, but being with someone who takes notes at most of his meals, I felt no shame in asking the waiter, “¿Por favor, podriamos ver el plato de pescados una otra vez?”, and then whipping out my camera.



The bread basket was surprising. It was filled with fried blue corn tortillas and this very curious, nutty and delicious bread with a smear of creamy cheese and red pepper running through the loaf. It tasted like the best pimiento cheese I’d ever had—could Oaxaca and the American South share a culinary ancestor? The bread was served with a blob of decent guacamole, the springy queso fresco, and the stretchy quesillo, as well as two kinds of salsa, one that was sweet like a peppery jelly and one that was more straightforward.

The poor waiters had so little to do, they came towards our table 3-4 times before we were finally able to make our decisions.



We began with two appetizers. “Bursting with flavor” always makes me think of chewing gum commercials, but I can’t think of any other way to describe it. The “chile relleno” stuffed with ceviche and served with a sauce of passionfruit and pomegranate seeds was literally bursting with flavor. I was shocked when I took my first bite and found the chile was actually spicy, a “chile de agua.” Stuffed peppers are some of the most boring things to eat ever—they bring back memories of Yale’s dining hall—but this “chile relleno” may have fully blotted out all other memories. As nouveau as it seemed, it was so representative of what I love most about Mexican food, the riot of flavors and textures that somehow all comes together.



The bean and tortilla soup, garnished with queso fresco and avocado, was good, but not the party in your mouth of the chile relleno. Smooth, just not revelatory.



But I’d be hard pressed to say what was better, the chile relleno or the entrée of prawns served “guajillo” with a little cake of mashed plantain and chayote, capers, oyster mushrooms, and stuffed squash blossoms. The mushrooms were so fragrant, the colors so vivid, and the guajillo chile oil! The guajillo chile has become one of my favorite chiles in the past two weeks. I was already so full, but I had to eat every single one of my allotted prawns, sopping up the chile oil with every bite.



Our second entrée, the mahi-mahi with a mango-chipotle sauce, Jonathan liked better than I did. For me, it was just a little too sweet without enough kick. But it clearly had been cooked with grace and care.



Our third entrée, because how could we not order any mole, was the coloradito with turkey. Sadly, it appeared we had been served turkey breast as it was a tad too dry, but at that point, I had eaten so much, it didn’t matter. All I could do was valiantly dab a blue corn tortilla in the very deep coloradito. It was a bit less sweet than Patty’s coloradito, maybe a bit smokier, and very very fascinating. I’m shocked to be saying this, but there are days when I wonder if I like coloradito maybe, just maybe, more than mole negro.



Finally, and there was an end to all this food, we shared a guava tart served with a scoop of rose-petal nieve (sorbet) on a little fried tortilla. As Jonathan put it, it wouldn’t be Mexican without a little corn. The nieve was the first rose-petal dessert I’d had that didn’t taste like lotion, just fresh and pretty and the perfect complement to the tartness of the guava.

Like all memorable meals, it wasn’t just that the food was fantastic. The whole event felt fortuitous, the kind of thing that can only happen when you’re traveling, to eat and exclaim over a culinary delight with a relative stranger but a fellow chowhound in another country. Is this what it feels like to be a Freemason?

Searching for the famed tlayuda of Oaxaca

Tlayudas, according to people more expert than I, are unique to Oaxaca. Before I came, I learned that they’re very large hand-made corn tortillas, the size of a dinner plate, but different in texture from even your toastiest tortilla. Like much street food here, it’s largely available as a nighttime snack. They might encase meat or cheese or both, and they are grilled over charcoal. I was utterly entranced. “Are they like huaraches?”, I asked my homestay family within days of getting here. “No, not really,” was the short reply since at that point, I couldn’t understand them if they had said much more.

But after two weeks in Oaxaca, I still hadn’t had a chance to try one because I was so busy eating at home. The other night, for my “light evening meal,” I had tortillas fried up in black bean sauce with queso fresco and thin rings of white onions. I could probably eat a bowlful of Patty’s beans every night. I was so sad the night Patty was late getting home and Betty, her mother, made me a ham and American cheese sandwich.



I’d managed to squeeze in a little bit of street food here and there: an “empanada” which is more like a tortilla folded in half in American terms, with flor de calabeza (squash blossoms) and quesillo (Oaxacan string cheese); the esquite and elote with salt, lime, chili, queso fresco, and mayonnaise; a couple of tacos at the Friday tianguis (indigenous market) while another American student looked on, expecting me to keel over from food poisoning any moment; and a cup of tejate, a drink made of corn, mamey, chocolate, and the rosita cacao flower. But no tlayudas, at least not until this past Friday night.

For two weeks, I took notes. When Soledad, my cooking teacher, mentioned a favorite street corner for tlayudas, I painstakingly wrote it down: Libres y Abasola. But when it finally came to actually walking and finding a tlayuda, I chose the Tlayuderia Las Reliquias, which a chowhound had described with loud, loving authority.

The menu listed four ingredients from which you can make any combination: tasajo, cecina, chorizo, and quesillo. It’s a good thing I have no dietary restrictions, because I often find out what something is only after I order it. “One tlayuda with tasajo and quesillo, please.” At least I knew how much it cost, 33 pesos.



As promised, the restaurant was in the open courtyard of the family’s home. They had placed a couple of plastic tables and chairs, the kind you see at bare-bones seaside resorts, in the center of the courtyard, but all around, you could see open doors with furniture, a set of swings and a slide, a typewriter hanging on the wall in a very bohemian-artsy way, and a bright yellow punching bag, just a few feet from the grill.



When I first saw my tlayuda, I almost died. It was the size of a dinner plate all right, the modern gigantic size of dinner plate that makes Americans eat too much and become obese. The guy who took my order, both waiter and cook that night, spread (beans) thinly all over it and set it aside while the tasajo, which turned out to be thinly sliced beef, got cooked on the grill. The tasajo, the stringy quesillo, and a fair amount of cabbage slaw got folded into the tlayuda, and the whole thing was then set on the grill to meld together.

When it arrived at my table, it was even bigger than I’d remembered. Finally, the moment had arrived. I was going to eat a tlayuda.

Oooohhhhh…it was a disappointment. I enjoyed the texture of the tlayuda, the combination of leathery and crunchy, because the outer layers of the tlayuda puff and crumble as it sits on the grill. I loved the stringy Oaxacan cheese called quesillo, which is like an adult version of the string cheese I loved as a child. The salsas the tlayuda came with were powerful. But I felt like all I could taste was smoke, and the beans weren’t assertive enough to balance the smokiness.



Luckily, a few days later, I had another tlayuda for breakfast at Café los Cuiles, the other wireless internet place in town. For 35 pesos, or less than $3.50, I got a cup of Oaxacan coffee, some fruit salad, and another giant tlayuda with beans, quesillo, avocado and tomato. It wasn’t so much that I wanted to give the famed tlayuda another chance, I just wasn’t interested in scrambled eggs or the “whole wheat Belgian waffle.”

It turned out Oaxacan coffee, if Café los Cuiles serves a representative one, is the color of tea and has cinnamon sticks floating in it. Fine if you don’t expect it to be coffee. But the tlayuda was tasty! Made on a coffee shop hot plate, it couldn’t have the full crunchy texture of the first tlayuda, but the beans were saltier, and the avocado and tomato added an important textural and tangy dimension.

Such a relief. I would have been devastated otherwise.

Four down, three to go

I have now tried four of the seven famed moles of Oaxaca, and I’ve been lucky enough to have three of them home-made by Patty, my homestay mother.

Although I am still learning, I think it’s safe to define “mole” (pronounced “mol-ay”) as a sauce, period. Each kind has different ingredients, different kinds of chiles, different kinds of spices, different nuts or seeds, and sometimes even chocolate. The mole might be served over chicken or turkey, to be eaten with rice and tortillas, or mixed into tamales, or spread on a tlayuda. Some are more everyday than others, like the mole verde we whipped up in a blender on class last Wednesday, while the ultimate mole of moles, mole negro, is a serious operation that can take all day and is therefore reserved for Christmas, fiestas, and other special occasions.

I came to Oaxaca ostensibly to learn Spanish. That’s what I told Yale, when I told them I was going on unpaid sabbatical and needed to continue to receive loan repayment assistance. But really, I came to Oaxaca to learn to make mole negro and to eat and ponder each of the seven moles of Oaxaca.

So here’s the score so far:
Mole negro in tamales oaxaquenos, which are wrapped in banana leaves instead of corn husks: an out-of-the-ballpark 10.

Mole coloradito with chicken and rice: an outstanding 9. Such a beautiful deep red. (Sorry, no photo.)

Mole verde with chicken and tortillas made in class at ICO: a satisfying 6.5. Very bright and tasty but not as complex as the others.



Mole amarillo with chicken and rice: a very good 7.5. More orange than yellow, with an interesting flavor that’s deeper than the verde but brighter, perhaps because of the last-minute squeeze of lime, than the coloradito.



So only three more to go: rojo, chichilo, and manchamantel!

Protests and blue tortillas

This is Oaxaca. I took these photos on Thursday, June 14, the anniversary of the “fallido desarojo,” or the beginning of the government's heavy-handed and eventually violent crackdown on the protests that took over the city of Oaxaca last year. So it’s not all tamales and salsa here.

The situation in Oaxaca then and now is almost impossible to decipher from an “objective” perspective. Perhaps everyone can agree on how it began, that the annual teacher strike turned into a months-long demonstration by the APPO (Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca), a coalition that grew to include teachers, indigenous groups, and others agitating for the removal of the Oaxacan state governor, Ulises Ruiz-Ortiz, as well as the more usual demands about wages. But I can’t sift through the little I’ve read in Spanish-language papers, the New York Times, and the State Department warnings for American travelers and say, “I know what happened next.”



On June 13, my teacher Octavio told us what he saw and did during the protests last year. He leaves you in no doubt whose side he is on: he was both a journalist and a supporter of APPO. The class sat in silence as he told us about the people who were killed, about families who still do not know where their relatives are, about being beaten himself by the police. He scoffed at news reports that the protesters were terrorists or guerillas. “I saw a pregnant woman, she was 7 or 8 months pregnant, about to give birth right there, pick up a rock and throw it at the police. I saw a 70-, 80-year-old woman protesting. These people are terrorists? No, they are not terrorists.” Octavio’s tone wasn’t polemic, more half-smiling, half-laughing: “People would call me at home and say, ‘Cuidate, te vamos matar’ (Be careful, we are going to kill you), and I would say, ‘Esta bien’ (That’s good) and hang up. But don’t worry, nothing’s going to happen tomorrow. The government will be careful, everyone will be careful. The world is watching now.”

He had been trying to get us to play a game where we, using various past tense forms, were to tell fantastic yet true stories about our lives.



The next day, after class, I walked down to the zocalo. No one really looked at me, another gawking tourist with a camera. The plaza was packed, with a crowd any American organizer would have been proud of, and there was fresh graffiti on the walls of the cathedral, but it felt more like a carnival than a protest. There were clumps of people sitting around, some listening intently, some less so, to the people reading point by point the pieces of paper in their hands, forming small teach-ins. There was a mini-parade of signs, a few women in indigenous costumes, and a bunch of anarchist teenagers, some masked and armed with spray paint. The people in the bandstand were making speeches that no one seemed to be listening to, and there were people hawking CD’s and T-shirts of the revolucion, as well as your usual balloon and candy sellers. Most comical of all, at least to me, were the large, blown-up photos of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin. Stalin?!?!? The others, I could understand, but Stalin?

On June 13, I’d been moved by Octavio’s story. On June 14, I remembered why movements always annoy me.

And then I went home to have lunch with my family and ate blue corn tortillas for the first time.



There’s so much I can’t see or know as a tourist, not now or ever. I wish it really were as simple as this:

Why I travel, through the prism of a pink popsicle

Everyday after morning classes, I walk through El Llano, a large, rectangular plaza that grandmothers, workers, skateboarders, and children like to hang out in. I'm on my way to the Oaxaca Lending Library for gringos, where they have wireless internet, and on my way, I have to decide, do I get a paleta at Paleteria Popeye? (You would not believe how hard it is to pronounce "Popeye" in Spanish; it's "Pop-eye-yay.")



I'm hungry. I've been in class for 4 hours without eating anything other than endless cups of coffee or manzanilla tea. I won't eat my comida correa, or the main meal, with my family until 2 or 2:30, but I know it will be a mountain of delicious food.

Yes or no? Yes or no?

I've only had 3 since I got here, believe it or not. Cajeta (goat's milk caramel), tuna (the cactus fruit, not the fish), and watermelon, the lovely pink one. I think I will have to try every flavor before I leave.

Even popsicles are different here. Maybe my life will change, too.

"The border means more than a customs house, a passport officer, a man with a gun. Over there everything is going to be different; life is never going to be quite the same again after your passport has been stamped and you find yourself speechless among the money-changers. The man seeking scenery imagines strange woods and unheard-of mountains; the romantic believes that the women over the border will be more beautiful and complaisant than those at home; the unhappy man imagines at least a different hell; the suicidal traveller expects the death he never finds. The atmosphere of the border - it is like starting over again; there is something about it like a good confession: poised for a few happy moments between sin and sin."

- Graham Greene, "The Lawless Roads"

Random delicious things

Esquite: corn kernels that are grilled then boiled right on top of the grill, served in a little Styrofoam cup with lime juice, salt, chili powder, queso, and a little mayonnaise if you like, which I do.



Pepe y limonada: no idea if it’s Mexican, but my favorite café, owned by an American, serves fresh limeade and cucumber juice in a massive beer stein, which I like to order with carbonated water.



Queso de Tehuantepec: a bucket of fresh, salty cheese from the Tehuantepec region of Oaxaca, in the isthmus of Mexico, that someone brought to my family’s home, and which I was lucky to eat a lot of.

Soledad's tamales and entomatadas

Truly, God should strike me down for ever doubting my cooking class at ICO. I love the teacher, Soledad Ramirez. I wish she were my grandmother. She’s one of those tiny, older women who are obviously forces of nature. I asked her the other day if the majority of Mexican families make their own salsa. The way she replied, “Claro!" “Of course!” She pointed out how easy it is these days, now that people have blenders, but that for her, she believes salsa is mas sabrosa, or tastier, when made with a mortar and pestle, a molcajete. No shortcuts for her. Claro!

At the same time, the food Soledad is teaching us is simple food, food made at home for your family, though beloved enough to be served at restaurants. They involve techniques that have always intimidated me, because who was I to know what consistency tamale filling should be, but now I can see, they’re techniques that anyone can learn, if she has the desire. Of course, the subtleties, nuances, and perfect seasoning I’ve found in Soledad’s beans, salsa, and other elements can only come with practice, but now I have hope. The only peril I face is the heavy weight of my backpack if I try to return to NY with my own molcajete, comal (griddle), and jarra (hot chocolate jug).

The simple, heartwarming deliciousness of the food we’ve made has been apparent in the tamales de frijol that we made last Thursday and the entomatadas we made on Monday. For the tamales, Soledad began by mixing masa de maiz (ground corn) with a little lard, salt, and baking powder. She poured in some liquid that she had quickly boiled up, just water with the tomatillo husks she had saved from the day before. She then asked us to knead it by hand for about 10 to 15 minutes.



Soledad showed us step by step how to take a clean corn husk and fill it the masa mixture, then a layer of black beans that I could eat by the potful, and finally a few hierba santa leaves. She made it look so easy, wrapping it up and tying a neat bow on it.



Not surprisingly, the rest of our tamales were not quite so beautiful. They take a long time to cook, about an hour in a steamer, and when we uncovered our pot, masa was oozing out of the ones that had been wrapped not-so-tightly. But no matter, the seasoning had been done by Soledad and even the ugly ones, especially with a little chipotle salsa from the day before, were muy muy ricos.

Perhaps even more amazing to me were the entomatadas we made on Monday. Entomatadas are a Oaxacan specialty, and so easy, it’s almost embarrassing that I haven’t been eating them my entire life. We lined up one by one to try to follow her neat example.

You begin by frying large tortillas in oil, folding them first in half, and then again, to create a neat wedge. You need to be careful to drain them as much as possible of oil, and place them on paper towels to continue draining.



In the meantime, you make a mindblowingly delicious sauce: a kilogram (or about 2 lbs.) of tomatoes, 6 cloves of garlic, and 4 serrano chiles (or 2 jalapenos) simmered in a small cup of water for about 15 minutes. When cool, you put the tomatoes in the blender with a piece, maybe half an onion. You then fry this sauce in a pan with two spoonfuls of oil for about 15 minutes on low heat. You can then add two spoonfuls of bouillon or two small cups of chicken stock.

Finally, it is ready to put together. One at a time, you place a fried wedge of tortilla in the mindblowingly delicious sauce, and make sure it’s thoroughly coated. When you retrieve it, you ladle more sauce onto it. You only need a garnish of cilantro, white onion slices, and crumbled queso to make it better than you ever imagined it could be.



Seriously, entomatadas are just fried tortillas in tomato sauce, but the one I ate in class, made with Soledad’s help, was one of the most delicious things I’ve eaten since I got here. Oh Dios mio.

Alebrijes

Lest you think all I do is eat, I thought I should share a non-food-related activity that made a big impression on me. Hard to believe, isn’t it?

Alebrije is a word of Arabic origin that isn’t even in my Spanish-English dictionary. According to one guidebook, it means something of indefinite form. In Mexico, at least in this part of the country, an alebrije is a wooden, brightly painted animal that’s become the signature craft of the Oaxacan valley town, San Martin Tilcajete.

“A wooden, brightly painted animal” doesn’t sound that exciting, and frankly, most of the ones hawked all over Oaxaca City aren’t. They’re trinkets, cheap toys to pass out to your friends and family when you get home. It’s not an ancient craft, and often, the bright colors seem to fit into a decorative scheme that screams, “MEXICO,” in a way that’s more crude than authentic. Not quite the same effect as when you see a hippie gringo wearing a garish blouse a Mexican wouldn’t be caught dead in, but close.



But on Saturday, I saw alebrijes that were the work of an artist, or more accurately, the work of an artist and his family. Jacobo Angeles and his wife, Maria, along with their children and various nephews and nieces, create alebrijes that are full of movement, carved almost completely from one piece of copal wood. They look at a big branch and think about the animal that might be found within, whether an iguana with a curling tail or a lion turning its head to grab an antelope by the neck. It’s almost Aristotelian—what does the wood want to be?



And then when they paint them, the Angeles family is famous for using paints made from natural sources on their best pieces, rather than the harsher acrylics, and they will show you right on their palms how they can crush pomegranate seeds with a little ground limestone to make a surprising color: green. Or graduate shades of one plant from red to purple to black. They do also use acrylics on their more commercial pieces, or sometimes in combination with the natural paints, but the wholly natural pieces differ obviously in quality.



The family also tends to concentrate on animals and symbols that are important to the Zapotecs, an indigenous group that make up about one third of Oaxaca’s native population. The most intricately painted pieces have symbols found at the temple at Mitla, signifying animals with certain powers and stages of life. For example, an iguana is a symbol of intelligence, a hummingbird one of happiness.

So an Arabic word, borrowed by the Spanish during the Middle Ages, has come to describe a native craft in Mexico, that really began only a generation or two ago. It’s truly mind-boggling.

Their larger pieces are priced like art, a mid-sized one being a couple hundred dollars and the truly large ones a couple hundred more. A large one can take 8 months to complete. They register every major piece and record the name the collector like any proper gallery.



Partly, it’s the care and intense detail that’s impressive. You can’t help but be wowed in the face of great skill. But what moved me most was the combination of choice on the part of the artists, in the colors and patterns, and of fate, in the animals the wood was going to be. An alebrije is a specific form, but each art piece was unique, each piece of wood a specific animal in a specific posture with elements that will never be combined in exactly the same way on any other piece. Isn’t that what we all want to believe, that we can become what we were meant to be?

¡Memelitas! with a big bag o' lard

This is a bag of lard. Look how shiny it is!

I am sorry for ever having called my cooking classes unserious. The teacher, Soledad, is an excellent cook, and everything we have made so far has been from scratch and with care. Everyday, there's something new to learn and taste, and so I'm a little behind. Frankly, I could blog about something new every five hours, but I am trying not to overwhelm my faithful readers.

Last Wednesday, we made memelitas, which are little corn tortillas with a little lip around the edge, the better to hold in a nice spread of manteca de cerdo (lard), frijoles (beans), queso (cheese), and salsa made of guajillo chiles and tomatillos or tomates verdes as they are called in Mexico.



We began by toasting herba sante on the stove and boiling the tomatillos in some water. The guajillo chiles were also toasted and then everything was ground together in a mocajete or mortar. It took a lot of work, a little bit from all of us, to get the right texture.



Previously, Soledad had taken the maiz we had boiled the day before with lime and had it ground. She added water to create a wet dough and asked us to start kneading it.



Again, it took a fair amount of time to knead it to the right stretchy and tight consistency. She then grabbed a small ball of dough and started rolling and patting it into a small tortilla, slightly thicker than the tortillas we normally eat. In a few seconds, there was a perfectly round, flat tortilla in her small hands. Of course, when we tried, the tortilla wouldn't stay round, or it would stick to our hands, leaving gaping holes. When we asked why ours didn't look like hers, she simply said, "Because you're doing it wrong!"



This is my second attempt. My first one was quite grotesque. I realized the second time around that you really need to pat it between your fingers, not between your palms, and to keep turning it as you pat it. You need to pat it with speed and courage, because the longer you think about it and try to make it better, the worse it will get it.

We then put them on the flat griddles on the stove to get toasty and brown. Once they were nicely spotted on each side, Soledad had us pull away at the edges to form a little lip. You have to do it while it's hot, so that the top layer of the tortilla will pull away without leaving a hole. My fingertips burned, but it was a necessary sacrifice.



Then the accoutrements: first a thin layer of lard spread on the inside, then a layer of pureed black beans, then a sprinkle of crumbled queso and the salsa we had already made. It all went back on the griddle to get toasted again. Soledad said, en espanol of course, "You can tell when it's ready because the lard will start bubbling up."



I ate three memelitas. I couldn't help it, todo con manteca, claro. It was a masterful combination, the crunchy texture of the tortilla, the smooth flavor of the beans, with the salt of the cheese and the heat of the salsa. And we were the masters of the universe.

My Mexican stomach

My biggest fear coming to Oaxaca wasn’t theft or machismo or diarrhea. My biggest fear was hunger. Of course, I knew there would be fantastic food in Oaxaca. But my friends who had spent a lot of time in Latin America warned me that the Latino eating schedule would leave me with hunger pangs clawing at my gut like a wild animal. The schedule set by the language school reflected the way Mexicans eat: a light meal for breakfast around 8 am, the biggest meal of the day at 2 or 3 pm, and then a light snack for dinner at 9. For a girl who gets hungry every two hours—and eats every two hours—it was a frightening prospect.

Leslie recommended that I fill a suitcase with Powerbars, Lina told me to be prepared for restaurants and even street vendors being open only at certain times. So along with my sunscreen and my Spanish-English dictionary, I duly packed a box of Kashi peanut butter bars, and a bag of almonds and a bag of chocolate-covered pretzels from Sahadi’s. I figured these would tide me over until I managed to figure out where I could buy and hoard food for those hungry moments between meals.

But I'm not hungry! I haven’t felt serious, decapitating hunger once since I got here.

For the first two days, I packed a snack to take to school. I picked at my snack each morning, but I wasn’t really hungry and I skipped it with no problem on Wednesday. Sure, I eat an enormous plate of fruit and yogurt for breakfast everyday, but at home, I can be hungry an hour after eating two fried eggs and a bagel.

By the time I have my lunch at 2:30, I’m pleased to be eating but not desperate. The other day, I ate a "patele de cajeta" right after class, but more for fun than hunger. "Cajeta" is dulce de leche, but made out of goat milk. How fantastic is that?



Lunch is never a sandwich or a taco. There’s always soup, with a homemade salsa always on the table. Then there’s a plate of meat and starch, like chilaquiles or rice, with maybe some beans or vegetables, including vegetables I've never tried before, like chayote. The homemade salsa is serious stuff, intense heat that isn’t cut by sugar or salt. I like to put it on everything.

And then, between lunch and dinner, I’m not hungry at all. Some days, I don’t even want another meal! I don’t mean to make such a big deal out of my lack of hunger, but seriously, it’s a completely alien feeling. Yesterday, after drinking so much chocolate in cooking class, all I wanted was to eat elote (corn) in the park. The corn here is different from American sweet corn, and more like Korean corn, with firmly separate kernels that pull away easily from the cob. Luckily, I like it “con todo,” since I don’t know the words for all the garnishes: lime juice, salt, mayonnaise, cheese, and chili powder. I ate it while watching Mexican skateboarders—isn’t it amazing how skaters have the same vibe all over the world?



It makes me wonder how much of my hunger in my regular world is the result of boredom, if I needed my stash of nuts and cookies in my drawers at work as much as I needed to read celebrity gossip blogs. I haven't even craved a drink. Maybe this is what my body would want if I didn’t ever have to work again.

Hot chocolate like I've never had it before

Oaxaca is famous for its hot chocolate, even though there are no cacao trees here. They are all in Tabasco or Chiapas, two words which have very strong and non-chocolate connotations for Americans. But Oaxaca is where chocolate is made, where it’s mixed into sweet drinks and savory sauces.



Mexican hot chocolate is one of the few things I’d tried before coming to Oaxaca. I’d first gone ga-ga over the hot chocolate at the Guelaguetza restaurants in LA, and bought a big bag at $15 a pop which I slowly worked through during a cold New York winter. Living far from LA, I’d tried switching to Ibarra, the brand that’s widely available in U.S. supermarkets, but something about its flavor had jarred me, too different from my memories. But I’d felt lucky to already have my very mollina, the special Oaxacan kitchen utensil for mixing and frothing hot chocolate, gifted to me by Lina last winter.

So when our cooking teacher told us “chocolate con agua” would be our first class, I wasn’t thrilled. When we were going to start cooking?



Our first day of class, in addition to visiting the markets downtown, we stopped at Chocolate Mayordomo, a store run by one of the biggest chocolate brands in Mexico. It was set up to look like a factory, and they had big machines that were churning out chocolate, or mixing chocolate with sugar and nuts, and a long factory runway of rolling tubes, but it seemed more like a show for tourists than an actual mill. At one end were boxes of chocolate from the floor to the ceiling, all for sale, and at the other end was a little “chocolate bar,” where cold chocolate was for sale. They brought out samples to try and little dixie cups of cold chocolate, which made me instantly suspicious. Had we been brought here with the expectation we would buy souvenirs?

By Tuesday, when our cooking was supposed to start in earnest, I wasn’t expecting much. Why would we need two hours to learn how to make hot chocolate, something I’d made on my stove so many times?

Stupid know-it-all me. When I got there, Soledad, our teacher, instantly put me and the others to work sorting and cleaning the beans and dried corn kernels. They were going to soak and simmer on the stove for use the next day. She added lime to the corn, which she said was necessary for tortillas and tamales. We were going to make tortillas and tamales? Clearly, this woman believed in making food from scratch.

She also began passing out recipes for “champurrado,” described in parentheses as “atole de maiz mezclado con chocolate,” one of those parentheticals that provides little clarification. It’s easier to describe how it’s made than what it is. I’d tried “atole” before, but not “champurrado,” a very traditional drink for weddings and other celebrations.

We began with dried corn kernels that Soledad had already boiled for about 30 minutes. These corn kernels were big, fat, and more white than yellow. When they had cooled, she poured the corn with the water into a blender, adding more water when necessary. She asked two students to stretch a cheesecloth between them, and then push and strain the pureed corn liquid through, leaving a bucket of milky white liquid and a big ball of corn mush.

The atole went back on the stove, along with a big bar of Mayordomo chocolate. More cooking, and all for a drink. While that was boiling, Soledad began preparing “chocolate con agua.” Oaxaquenos, she explained, make hot chocolate with water, not milk.

Water, not milk! Suddenly, I realized I didn’t know at all what she was talking about. I’d never had “chocolate con agua,” only “chocolate con leche.”



Soledad put the traditional one-handled chocolate pitcher straight on the stovetop and got the water boiling. She then added two big bars of chocolate and started mixing and pushing at the chocolate chunks with the mollino. This one was smooth and dark from years of use, not like my pristine blond one. She began rolling the mollino between her hands, and all of us took a turn, frothing up the chocolate before pouring ourselves a cup.

To be honest, my fat-loving heart had been dubious about the Oaxacan style of hot chocolate. Could it be tan rico con agua? Could it be as meltingly rich as the Mexican hot chocolate I’d made at home?

It was better. It was sweet but strong and straight, like a cup of great coffee. It wasn’t just the difference between dark chocolate and milk chocolate. It was bracing, maybe even fortifying. We dipped pieces of “pan de yema,” an eggy challah-like bread, into our chocolate. It was better than any coffee and donuts I’d ever had.

The class wasn’t even over. We still had the champurrado to drink. “Atole” is another flavor that I think doesn’t fit into an American’s lexicon of flavors. It’s nutty, corny, almost a little gritty. It reminded me a little of the nutty Korean powdered drink my mother had fed me through hot summers. It was almost as good as the chocolate con agua.

The wonders of Mexican ice cream

So far, the food I’ve eaten has been very good in a way that is deeply satisfying. The polite way to say, “I’m full” is “Estoy satisfecho,” which seems particularly appropriate when it is literally true. But nothing was new or revelatory until I ate at “Nieves Chanito” in Mercado Juarez on Tuesday.

After looking longingly at the meat market in Mercado 20 de noviembre, I almost didn’t believe it when our cooking class actually stopped to eat at a stall proclaiming, “Nieves Chanito.” I didn’t even know what “nieve” meant; after all, wasn’t “helado” ice cream? Luckily, I didn’t have to wonder much longer.



The list of flavors in foreign countries is always so exciting: the thrill of ordering a completely unknown flavor. According to Soledad, our teacher, the most “tipico” flavors of Oaxaca are “tuna” (cactus fruit) and “leche quemada” (burnt milk). Since I’d never tried either, it was an easy choice.

“Nieve,” it turned out, isn’t ice cream, but more like a creamy sorbet. And “tuna,” it turned out, means “delicious.” We had just seen a ripe cactus fruit in the market, which you eat by tearing a little hole at one end and squeezing out the soft, pulpy red fruit inside. The tuna nieve looked exactly like the fruit and tasted just as fresh, perfectly balanced between fruity and sweet. It was nothing like the toxic orange sorbets I hated as a child at Baskin-Robbins, and somehow nothing like the artisanal sorbets at Il Laboratorio del Gelato either. I don’t think it was just that it was served in a plastic dixie cup, though I did love the artlessness with which it was all-natural and probably organic.

“Leche quemada” on the other hand, turned out to be an even more unique flavor. I don’t understand how they got the flavor of burnt milk into a creamy white sorbet, but they did. When I told my family what flavor I ate (everyday, I report to them what I ate), they all said, “Que rico!” I’m not sure I would agree. It’s definitely an acquired taste, the kind of taste that just doesn’t exist for an American palate, not even this well-traveled, well-eaten Korean American one. It didn’t taste bad, but I ate all of it more out of curiosity than love. With each bite, I thought, “I don’t get it,” and would eat another spoonful to see if I could.

So much to hear, eat, and taste.

The wonders of the meat market

I need to be careful not to dump all my pictures on this blog in the first week of my stay here, and save a few goodies for later. But I took 43 photos today at the market and it’s hard not to blurt out everything I feel.



Classes began today, and I was placed in Nivea 1B. It’s a very popular level, those who know slightly more than nothing. The campus is beautiful, with a large enclosed courtyard garden in front and a smaller courtyard inside. It’s just the way you want your Spanish school to look, palm trees rising grandly before you, flowering trees, and bright yellow walls with arches and nooks.

Of the students I’ve met so far, there are your college students on summer vacation (who seem painfully young to me), a graduate student studying women’s peace movements in Latin America, teachers who want to gain Spanish language skills, and a middle-aged couple who quit their jobs, sold their house, and are starting a Peace Corps stint in a yet-unknown country in August. Whoa baby! Makes my little 6-month adventure seem ridiculously easy.

This school likes to pack your day. We have three hours of instruction in the morning, then one hour of conversation, a lunch break, then an optional hour of “intercambio” or English-Spanish exchange with a local student, and then an optional 2-hour, 2-week workshop in cooking, ceramics, weaving, or salsa. Guess what I picked?

It’s definitely not a serious cooking class, but it’s nice to do something laid-back in the afternoon. On Mondays, the class goes to market, and so we went to the two everyday markets downtown, Mercado 20 de noviembre and Mercado Juarez.



I’d already been to both markets, but this time, I felt less shy about taking photos, especially of the meat market that had been haunting my dreams. Imagine this: a room lined with stalls with their meat on full display, big chunks hanging on hooks, round red links of sausage, long thin slices that then vendors periodically pat with their hands, like they’re patting a baby. You see everything through a hot haze, because the room is filled with smoke from the little grills at each stall.





When the smoke blows away and you can see the meat and the cebollitas (green onions) getting browned—well, it thrilled me almost as much as when I saw the clouds part above Machu Picchu.



(My guidebook and the orientation packet the school gave us today says, “Do not eat food from street vendors!” But what’s the worst that could happen? I’ve been immunized for hepatitis and I have plenty of Pepto-Bismol.)

The meat was clearly not something to be eaten alone. There were groups of people sitting around large platters of meat with a stack of warm tortillas and all the fixings, radishes, salsa, guacamole. But this wasn’t an eating trip and we had to move on. I felt intensely jealous. One day, I WILL eat the meat at Mercado 20 de noviembre!

Next post: the “nieve de tuna” (cactus fruit sorbet) at Mercado Juarez.

¡En Oaxaca!

(Revised, with photos, June 5, 2007)
God, I wish I could show you a photo of what I´ve eaten already! But I haven´t figured out a way to upload photos from my camera yet. Sooner or later, I´m bound to find a place with wireless internet. (I knew I should have bought a flash drive.) But for now, I´m just going to have to make myself write tantalizingly vivid descriptions to make up for the lack of visual food porn.

I arrived yesterday at Oaxaca International Airport, a short 2.5 hour flight from Houston, Texas. Houston was a good way to ease into a foreign country from New York. The Oaxaca airport, thankfully, was small and easy to navigate, and I found myself easily enough in a cheap airport shuttle that dropped me off at my homestay, the home of Betsy the grandmother, Patty the mother, Homero the father, and their two children, Valeria and Homero, Jr. They´ve had students stay with them for years, and so they´re used to speaking slowly, using easy words, and being very very patient. And lucky for me, Patty is an excellent cocinera (cook)--more on that to come.



Their house is a little north of the center of the city, but still easily walkable to the famous zocalo (square) and the famous cathedrals, and just blocks from my school, Instituto Cultural Oaxaca. It´s on a fairly busy street with a few bodegas, a fancy liquor store, a gas station, and a couple of restaurants, but it´s easy to find because it´s marked with a huge, beautiful tree with vibrant fuschia flowers that planes directly in front of the gates. The family also maintains a little hostel behind the house where another student, 53-year-old Jane from Miami, is staying.

My room, to a New Yorker´s eyes, is huge, half the size of the old tiny tenement apartment I shared with my sister in the East Village. To my happy surprise, unlike most mattresses I´ve encountered outside the U.S., the mattress is firm and I slept better last night than I have in weeks. Probably also helps that I now have absolutely zero responsibilities, ha ha!

I spent an hour or two yesterday just orienting myself in my neighborhood, wandering around with Jane who was in Oaxaca two summers ago. But today is the real day my Oaxaca adventures began, starting with an unbelievable desayuno (breakfast).

When I sat down at the breakfast table, there was a plate of cut-up fruit, banana, papaya, and half a mango, and a bowl of nicely sour yogurt. When Patty asked me last night if I ate todo (everything), I answered with a strong "¡Si!", forgetting how much I loathe papaya. This papaya was a deeper orange than any papaya I´d ever seen, and I thought I would give it a chance. Nope, still tasted like fart. I ate as much of it as I could, dumping small pieces in the yogurt and eating it with the banana to mask the taste. I´ll have to figure out some way to tell them.

I was happy and full, when Patty came out with a big platter--my God, a oaxequeno tamale! Imagine this: the platter covered with unfolded banana leaves, and in the center, chunks of tamale, shredded chicken, the possibly the most complex and delicious sauce in the world, mole negro. "¿Todo para mi?" (All for me?).

Tamales are not my favorite food. Too often, they´re too dense and uninteresting. But a tamale like this, I could eat for breakfast almost everyday. The corny tamale was so flavorful, it was almost fluffy, it was so easy to eat.

I wish I had the words to describe what mole negro means to me. It was already my second mole negro in Oaxaca, as I´d had enchiladas en mole con quesillo (cheese) the day before with Jane, and thought it reasonably enjoyable. But this mole negro made obvious why mole is not something to be taken lightly or eaten mindlessly. Slightly sweet, earthy and deep. Perfecto.

I ate it all.

And then I walked all the way down to the zocalo and sat at a cafe on the western side, drinking pineapple juice and watching people walk by.