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 6 - Part 1 - Mexican Home Cooking School
2/16/06


Another morning cooking class! I will note that at this point we had spent nine full hours cooking, probably as much time as I usually spend in any given year, as long as I'm not required to count the 1 1/2 minutes per morning of Cheerio prep. And as for all the chopping and peeling and whatnot, well, I don't know when such dramatic actions have last occurred in my kitchen. Perhaps when guests were visiting. Suffice it to say, the week was highly educational, and Estela hoped it was inspirational as well. We shall see. By the way, I think those things in the picture above are nopales in their semi-natural cultivated habitat. First time I've see a cactus farm, that's for sure.

There's really only so much I can say about cooking class. It was always interesting and fun, but on Day 4 I'm starting to run out of things to write about it. So I'll just run down the menu with commentary:

Cream of Poblano Chile Soup. We had such delicious soups every day that we could easily come to blows over which one was the tastiest. This Day 4 soup was definitely in my top 4.

Frijoles Negros (black beans). This recipe, while simple, was substantially more time consuming than getting them out of the can. Plus it required that that you soak them the night before. The night before! I ask you! That kind of planning requirement means that I will never make these in real life, no matter how good they were. And they were very good.

Chipotles en Conserva (canned chipotles). Whooooweee, was this ever spicy! Even mixed with Philadelphia cream cheese and stuck on a tortilla chip it about peeled the top of my mouth off. I guess if you make something with 10 dried chipotles and 4 cloves of garlic you should expect a little heat. Note to self: mix this with lots of very bland food. the recipe says you can use it as a topping for quesadillas, crackers with ricotta, potatoes with chees, fried beans and cheese, etc. All I can say is: Proceed with Caution.

Tinga (shredded skirt steak). here was an example of being able to tone down the chipotle stuff by using it in a recipe. We ended up eating this mixture of shredded steak, chipotles en conserva, garlic, tomatoes, onion and spices on top of "sopes" with lettuce, sour cream and cheese like a mini-tostada. Yummy.

Pipian Rojo (called Red Mole in Oaxaca) with pork was our dinner meal. It was delicious, a bit too spicy for Mom but I think it's a good candidate for A, who can double the chiles and try to blow her husband's head off. He's a bit demented on the spice f ood front - if his eyes aren't watering and nose running it's not sufficiently spicy. My only problem with the recip is that it has 15 ingredients. 15!!

Sopes are fat little mini-tortillas with edges crimped up so you can stick stuff inside, usually beans, guacamole, cheese, etc. They can also be deep-fried, which improves everything of course. When I lived in Veracruz for a summer way back in the day, we would have sopes with spicy green stuff on top most mornings for breakfast.

Guacamole. Like the salsa, we made guacamole with mortar and pestle (probably won't happen in my food-processor world). John assured us, however, that it tastes much better when done this way. It was, indeed, very tasty and with a better consistency than a lot of guacamole. As mentioned earlier, it used tomatillos and did not use lemons - Estela sprinkled olive oil over the top to keep it from turning brown.

More photos:

© 2006 Katy Warren
posted by Katy at 6:58 AM