Two of the biggest buzzwords in today’s media-dominated culinary world are “fresh” and “local,” and on a recent visit to Mexico’s southern Pacific coast, we found the food to be both. Taking advantage of the region’s abundant fresh ingredients, we shopped, cooked and ate our way through the beach town of Puerto Escondido. We had […]
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Once you have acquired your tortilla press and a comal or griddle, all you will need is some waxed paper, cut into squares to fit the dimensions of the tortilla press, to keep the dough from sticking. Although tortillas are baked on a dry surface, a little oil can be applied to the griddle or comal with a paper […]
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On a recent trip to Oaxaca, I had the pleasure of speaking with Pilar Cabrera, chef, cooking instructor and, most recently, participant in Iron Chef Canada. Chef Cabrera kindly took time out from her busy schedule to sit down and discuss the influences that led to this career, as well as her cooking school, ever-changing menus […]
Continue ReadingSeptember is back-to-school time, so what more fitting topic for this month’s Mexico Kitchen column than a Mexican cooking school? One of the questions most frequently asked by readers concerns the availability of cooking classes here in Mexico. While several cooking schools exist in Mexico City, the best and most authentic regional cuisines are passed […]
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I first met the comadre through a colleague of mine at the University of Puebla, Mexico. I was in the habit of bringing meat loaf, mashed potatoes, and other “gringo food” that the professor’s elderly American father missed, to his house in Cholula, the small town where we both lived, and where the comadre worked as his housekeeper. She […]
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Many years ago, our intrepid little band of gypsies became hopelessly lost on a trip through what was then relatively undeveloped Baja California. Too dark to be on the road, and too late to find accommodations, the situation called for some ingenuity, and we got permission from a farmer to park our van alongside his […]
Continue ReadingWhen asked by the New York Times magazine to write about the most important contribution of the past millennium, Italian author Umberto Eco chose the humble bean. In How the Bean Saved Western Civilization, Eco points out that in the five centuries after the year 1,000 A.D. Europe’s population nearly tripled, and the amount of […]
Continue ReadingBeginning in mid-October, and lasting for a month, a five-hundred-year-old ritual encompassing history, tradition and cuisine takes place in the valley of Tehuacan, in the Mixteca Poblana region of southern Puebla. Traveling through this rocky, hardscrabble land, one wonders how the inhabitants have sustained themselves for thousands of years and marvels at the fact that […]
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Even before the current food obsession permeated a large segment of the population, there were those of us who collected cookbooks. Some we appreciated for the gorgeous, glossy, good-enough-to-eat photographs and some we used over and over until they were dog-eared, splattered with stains from being open in the kitchen, and literally falling apart at […]
Continue ReadingPicture a small tropical city nestled up against sparkling coastal waters, surrounded by fortress walls, complete with drawbridges and moats to keep out invading buccaneers. Where, in the twenty-first century, could this possibly be? No, it isn’t Pirates of the Caribbean at Disneyland. Nothing constructed by a theme park could come close to the real […]
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