rancho_gordo

I was watching the tortillas puffing away at Itanoni in Oaxaca and asked how they always got such a nice little balloon and they insisted it was based on the correct thinness (very thin) and the hot skillet.

re nopales, I love them in a blender with pineapple and/or orange juices. Muy swell!

My mantra is: CHILES BEANS CORN If you have ingredients/techniques down, you can go almost anywhere in Mexican cooking. Re: epazote, try it with parma or cotija cheese on a tortilla. Or tossed with sauteed mushrooms. All of a sudden, a little light will go off and it will become a favorite. Re: lard. I know plenty of Mexicans who LOVE olive oil and they fight amongst themselves about lard vs oils. It's not an absolute.

Ceviche is my favorite. But I also make a marinade with olive oil, the banana vinegar, garlic and the oregano indio. It's great over a pork tenderloin. I've also used it on chicken thighs and then cooked them pressed in a clay mattone from Italy.

I might try a potato. I think it would taste great and possible mellow out the heat.

Thank you for this! I was repeating some translated information and clearly I should stick to flavor.

From what I understand, regular sugar is treated with sulfur four times. Regular piloncillo, in the inconvenient cone shape, meets the sulfur just once. Our piloncillo is simply evaporated cane juice. There is no sulfur treatment at all. How they keep it granulated is a secret of the collective who makes it but it's a lot easier to work with than the cones. But they just juice the cane, heat it in vats, break up the results with special shovels and then repeat it over and over again. The cane is also grown by the collective and they've switched from slash and burn to allowing the old plants to regrow each season. The result has been that they save money but now there are more snakes in the area. It's always something.

I thought gloating would be a little unattractive. And they're not just blue corn. Heirloom blue corn. Just sayin'....

Mine is somewhat simpler! Black beans, bacon and nopales with some crema.

Vanilla ice cream with a dousing of piloncillo/banana vinegar sauce. And a Milano cookie.

Back to Veracruz, I found these photos. I took mostly movies there so of course they are still sitting in my old videocam. Platano grove My friend Yunuen and some of the flowers she found on the grounds. Wild tomatoes foraged from around the plantation. The plantain used- somewhere between a banana and a platano macho, or what we call a plantain. ...and while you're in the neighborhood, you can visit El Tajin. Don't think that I don't know I'm the LUCKIEST fellow on the planet. When I go on these trips, I have to pinch myself. How did I end up getting to do this?

I've seen them in glass jars and you pop them out of their skin. I didn't care for them.

I found these photos from my visit to the cooperative. It was a brutal drive on curvy roads but it was really inspiring meeting these guys. They used to slash and burn but now they cut back the sugar cane. The danger is snakes but the payoff is they save money and it's much better for the soil. They literally juice each cane and then heat the juice in big vats and reduce it to a pourable granulated form. It's very hot there and the other crop they have is cotton. Can you imagine two worse crops? The finished product!

Sorry to have missed this. Thanks for all the interest and of course all the kind words! The really interesting thing about this product is that when the price of the plantains gets too low, they let them rot instead of harvesting them and then they "juice" them and let it ferment to become this vinegar. Most flavored vinegars are wine or apple cider based with flavoring added. This is fermented plantain juice. It's pretty wild. Apparently this variety is somewhere between a banana and a plantain. I was horrified to learn that there are many variations of bananas and plantains we just import one boring variety. Driving through Veracruz (where the plantation is located) we came across dozens of great varieties. re the piloncillo, it was the pastry chef at Meadowood Resort in Napa Valley that came up with the piloncillo/vinegar mix as a topping for vanilla ice cream. It's pretty dreamy. If you haven't scouted out piloncillo yet, we've started importing it from a cooperative in the Huasateca of San Luis Potosi that does it all by hand. they juice the sugar cane, heat it, crack it, heat it and repeat until it's almost dry. They have a secret technique to keep it granulated. Apparently sugar is treated four times with sulpher. Traditional piloncillo is treated once and ours not at all. I'll be adding it to the website later tonight. I'm sorry if some of this comes off as too commercial. I'm just intending to share what I know about these odd but cook products.

Even here in Napa, which has a huge Mexican population and once was a part of Mexico, most of the food is crap. It's hard to do real Mexican.

Despite the stupid name, I LOVE Frida's Fiestas. The recipes are a little vague but everything I've made from it has been a winner. And the stories are great too. It was a time after the revolution when Mexico was defining itself and art was in the air. In Mexico it was published with the slightly better title of Las Fiestas de Frida y Diego.

Playing devil's advocate, I never use the caldo powder unless desperate. Or Maggi. And I always have chicken stock on hand. I poach a chicken every week, in the previous week's broth, and any extra gets frozen. It's such an essential ingredient in the way I cook that I just make sure I'm never without it. On the other hand, I have eaten a lot of food from the clever hands of Jaymes and every dish has been memorable!

Well, it's premature to say anything much, but I'm working on it! I met with several growers and if all goes well, it may happen. How's that for being vague? The problem is that there aren't that many growers and for the chilhuacles, the weather has been bad for several years so they haven't had great quality or yields. But how's this for food porn? It's a field of costeño chiles drying in the sun, near Pinotepa Nacional: Chilhuacle blacks on the left and I think those are more costeños on the right but I'm not sure: I'll keep you posted!

I was just in Oaxaca and bought LOTS of chiles. Right off the bat I made the simple salsa with the pasilla de Oaxaca and it's incredible. It's smoked but it's not chipotle. Smothered it all over eggs and chorizo this morning and it almost felt like I was still on the road.....

The women of Semillas de Dioses are incredible and I believe they have a store in Merida where they sell their magical pastes. Website.

Thanks for all of this. The funny thing is that I'm very sympathetic to people with this condition. I imagine having it and then having people dismiss it as a "tummy ache" makes you defensive and maybe even a little nuts after awhile. Having this woman insist we change things when all she had to do was rinse the beans suggests that kind of extremism. But it doesn't help the cause. I'm not sure about the math. She told us the FDA standard for gluten free was 2.5% or less. Again, we were .01%. I hope there's a cure soon and I'm sorry that people have to suffer through this.

When is it you think corn showed up? Silly argument to have, I suppose, Eastgate, and this probably isn't the thread to have it. But... I've read that it's generally accepted by folks that care about and study these things that corn was being grown in the Americas as early as 3000 BC. Yes. With a caveat, tho': the wild corn they started to domesticate produced tiny cobs, roughly 1 cm in length. It took farmers 1500 years worth of artificial selection to develop six inch cobs. The sizes you're used of now, that you'd want to be farming to produce any kind of decent amount of raw cornmeal, are fairly modern. No idea when the production of tortillas started but it's doubtful those tiny corn cobs of 3000BC would've provided the bulk of the diet. I was under the impression that there were no examples of wild corn! I don't want to be dismissive, but this argument is kind of silly. The foundation of the Meso American diet was corn, chiles and beans. We can argue for how many thousands of years, but they've been eating corn for a hell of a long time.

When is it you think corn showed up?

I dont think that would steam them as well.

Traditionally, you don't see hard shells in Mexico. They have some tacos "dorados" where the taco and filling are fried until the taco is crisp but these "U" shaped things are from north of the border, I would bet. Not that they aren't good, but not very typical. I think a tostada would be more likely and now that I think of it, I'd enjoy one with some lettuce and a scoop of picadillo on top.