A haphazard chronicle of my inevitable misadventures during a year in Vietnam and points east.

p.s. I'll be pitifully grateful if you send me email during my exile: TravelerKaty@hotmail.com

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Day 4 - Part 1 - Mexican Home Cooking School
2/14/06

First day of school! The schedule is set up so that we have breakfast at 9 am, a delightfully decadent time for breakfast. We all caught up on our sleep at the MHCS, not only because we were not overscheduled, but because it was winter in the mountains and the room was so cold in the morning that it was preferable to stay under the 16 blankets allotted to each bed. A insisted that according to recent medical research it was possible, indeed desirable, to "catch up" on sleep missed in the last year. I remain skeptical of this concept.

Class started at 10 a.m. and between 10 and 12:30 we dutifully donned our red aprons and stood behind our appointed cutting boards and big scary knives at the prep table in Estela's beautiful kitchen. Jon, as the sous-chef and fluent English speaker, did all of the preparatory instruction at the table, telling us about various peppers (I never knew there were so many), other mystery ingredients (Nopal leaves, for example - shown at right, they come from cactus) and instructing us on how to cut or treat the various substances that came our way. Scraping the poblano chiles, for example. FYI, they look considerably different than they do from that little can. Once we finished cutting and prepping we carried our offerings over to Estela, who clued us in on the actual cooking of the items we prepared.

It was all very entertaining, and the food was delicious and not too spicy much to Mom's relief. We prepared a mushroom soup with nopal leaves, squash blossoms (both sure to be wildly expensive in the U.S.), and garlic in chicken broth; a nopal leaf salad with avocado, onion , tomato, and some salty Mexican cheese; a delectable chicken dish made by throwing fried almonds, tomatoes, cinnamon sticks, cloves and a couple of serrano chiles into the blender. Honest to god, it made one of the best sauces I've ever had on chicken. We topped it all off with bunuelos, a Spanish dessert very popular in Mexico made of fried dough with sugar. I'm pretty sure I haven't used that much canola oil in my lifetime. Oh, and we also made spinach potato pancakes, which were good but kind of bland. Maybe we needed more chiles!

I learned one very valuable piece of advice -- wash your hands after handling chiles. Jon told us a G-rated cautionary tale of a student who touched her nose after handling them and was forced to stick a piece of tomato up her nose for the remainder of the class, a soothing yet humiliating home remedy. Estela later shared the R-rated version, in which a woman from Texas insisted she knew All About Chiles, and proceeded to acccidentally touch an, er, sensitive part of her anatomy during her trip to the Ladies. She suffered the indignity of having half a tomato stuck in her underwear, not to mention the embarrasment of being a failed know-it-all whose story has no doubt been told to every subsequent cooking class.

Even Mom, a very accomplished and experienced cook, said she learned a lot during the morning class, and I, being more of a peanut-butter-or-takeout variety of "cook" learned quite a bit. For example, I learned how to chop vegetables with a sharp knife. Having never owned a sharp knife, and having had few opportunities to chop vegetables, this was very educational for me and amusing for the rest. I also learned that you can make awesome salsa using the mortar and pestle but it's so time consuming that our experience with it in Cooking Class #1 will be the first and only time I ever make it in this way. Not to mention that that pestle weighs about 57 pounds, and would not be pleasant as part of my carry-on luggage.

Mom learned how to keep your pot from boiling over (you throw in the skin of a tomatillo. Yeah, I know, when am I ever going to have a tomatillo in the fridge? Maybe I can swipe the skins off the tomatillos at the grocery stores when the supermarket detective isn't looking) and how to cut the natural sliminess of nopal leaves or okra (a bit of baking soda in the cooking water). We all learned some great new recipes, some of which I might actually cook again Whereas I'd love to EAT the nopal salad and mushroom/nopal/squash blossom soup again, I'm far more likely to recreat the amazing almond chicken, whose ingredients are readily available at Safeway.







posted by Katy at 7:25 AM