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 8 - Part 2 - Mexican Home Cooking School
2/18/06

Our final day in the kitchen! I've learned many things from Mom about what pans and appliances and such I have in my kitchen. Frankly, beyond the toaster, saucepan and electric frypan I've never delved too far into the cabinets. You never know what might be lurking in there. Dangerous, raw ingredients, maybe, or unidentifiable cooking apparati. Better to keep those things mysterious.

On to the menu of the day:

Sopa de Lenteja (lentil soup). Honest to god, these soups were so delicious it was enough to make me swear off Campbell's® Healthy Request® condensed. Just throw a bunch of beans and garlic and whatnot in a pot and you've got a whole meal, for crying out loud. It's a revelation.
Mole Poblano. This official Mole, the delicious chocolate and chile sauce, is perhaps the signature dish of the Puebla region but posesses a fatal flaw. It has 21, count 'em, 21 ingredients, including three different kinds of nuts, two seeds, two chiles, mexican chocolate and a plantain, for pity's sake. This is a restaurant meal if I ever saw one.

Arroz con Perejjil (rice with parsley). There was a lovely green color in the rice. Not a great deal of flavor, but it looked great on the plate and was super-easy to make.

Tamales. Crisis!!!! The tamales were surprisingly easy to make -- just dump a bit of tamale dough (very wet stuff) and some salsa and leftover meat or cheese into the cornhusks and steam for a half hour. Sounds so simple, doesn't it? We were scheduled to eat the tamales for dinner, but as the usual dinner hour faded into the distance while we continued to nurse our lethal margaritas, it became obvious that something had gone wrong.

When we finally sat down it was to taquitos, beans and rice instead of tamales. Jon, who had been left in charge of dinner as Estela and Maria deserted him for a family party in Puebla, had found the tamales soaking in the bottom of the pan, rather than sitting in the steamer above the water. After a failed attempt to cook them in the pressure cooker and later in the microwave, and unable to reach Estela by cell phone (helps if it's turned on), he raided the fridge, finding only thef ood intended for breakfast. This was a bit of a disappointment ot us, since mom especially is not a fan of the often heavy flavorless tamales common in the States, and was very much looking forward to trying Estela's Poblano version seeing as all the other food that week was so fabulous. So we hoped something of the damp, beleaguered tamales could be salvaged for breakfast.

It was the next morning when stories began to diverge. According to Jon, Estela took the rap for the disaster and was salvaging what she cood and making new ones as well. According to Estela, whose usual mannerisms of throwing her arms up, rolling her eyes, and smacking her forhead with her palm were very much in evidence here, the tamales from the night before were perfectly fine, not at all undercooked and Jon was a big old drama queen (note: this is a very lose translation, but if Estela had known "drama queen" in English she surely would have used it). Whatever the truth of the situation, we were able to have a whole pile of light, flavorful tamales for breakfast the following morning, so no harm no foul.

Suspiros de Novia (sighs of the bride). Our desert on our final day was a recipe with a nice legend attached. Back in the colonial days when the Spanish colonists took trips back to Spain they would leave wives in the convent (possibly a mistake according to Jon, as the priests were more than willing to, er, console them). Each convent was known for different candies or specialties, and at one convent the lonely wives traditionally made this dessert. While stirring the Karo syrup, lime, cinnamon sticks and sugar over the fire they would sign the name of their absent husband, giving the dish an extra flavor. We tried to get Mom to sigh "Oh, Tom!" while stirring, but she appeared to lack the requisite melancholy. In any efent, the dessert is quite good -- it's hard to go wrong with deep-fried dough covered with Karo and lime syrup. A bit too sweet for me, but then I am a cretin who considers almost any dessert that lacks chocolate to be slightly sub-par. Except those stuffed pastry rolls from earlier in the week -- those were top notch.

Other photos around the MHCS:


© 2006 Katy Warren
posted by Katy at 7:03 AM