3rd House Journal

Comida Mexicana en Casa

[Avocado mousse; 4/2/2013]

When I first went in 2005, Maddy told me that I'd never starve on our trip to Mexico. She was more than right. With fresh fruits and vegetables everywhere, and some of the most delicious food anywhere, Mexico is foodie heaven. On this latest trip, to San Miguel de Allende last month, I missed having fresh (rinded) fruit dusted with chili, salt and lime from the street vendors, but this was more than made up for by our cook/maid, Tina. Tina has been with R, the daughter of my friend/host T, for many years - no doubt in large part for her culinary talents as much as for her sweet disposition. For our friend M's birthday, Tina made her very special dessert, avocado mousse, which was to die for. (I didn't get the exact proportions, but I believe it's made of avocados, vanilla ice cream, powdered sugar, and a bit of lime. She also made candied Marcona almonds for the top.)

[Salad with salmon, avocado, and pear slices]

Tina also prepared wonderful mid-day meals for us, including salmon and avocado salads, cilantro soup, and fresh guacamole. She cooked up enchiladas verdes and curried chicken with delicately spiced rice.

[Enchiladas verdes]

[Curried chicken]

I'm afraid I don't have a photo of the chiles rellenos she made for us, which may have been my favorite of all. She left them for us while we were off for the day to the hot springs park, and we had a couple of friends of T's come to joins us just after we got home. So the five perfect chiles rellenos plus rice fed us all with little muss or fuss. The poblano chiles were filled with ground beef, chopped almonds and raisins, and they were baked in a tomato sauce. I found a somewhat similar looking recipe online that I must try when I have some time.

Tina also left us cut strawberries and fresh mangos for us to have with yogurt for breakfast before she arrived each day. We had fresh roasted organic coffee from Chiapas, too, from a little coffee shop in the center called La Ventana - for its window from which people often buy their coffee to go to sit and sip in the nearby plaza, the Jardin.

What I've posted here is just what we had at home, en casa, never mind the food we had when we went out to restaurants. I'll save that for another post!

Murales de Colores

[Mural, Colonia Guadalupe, San Miguel de Allende; 4/1/13]

Getting back to my brief visit to Mexico a few weeks ago...  We drove out for breakfast one morning to the Via Organica cafe, which is run by a nonprofit Mexican organization committed to organic food production, just commerce, and a healthy lifestyle for the planet. We drank delicious fresh jugo verde (green juice - if I recall, parsley, celery, cucumber, cactus and pineapple), ate huevos rancheros and cinnamon buns, and finished off with capuccinos. The cafe is located in the Guadalupe neighborhood, which sported many walls colorfully painted with lively murals. I would have loved to wander more, but my photographing was squeezed between breakfast and a subsequent trip out to the Aurora art galleries. We'd just arrived less than 30 hours earlier and I thought I'd have more time.

[Mural con moto]

[Comics mural (Oaxacan?)]

[Nature mural]

Click to see any photo larger.

Pajaros

[Mexican grackle holding forth; 4/3/13]

Being situated directly overlooking the Parquez Juarez, the terrace at our casa offered prime viewing (and listening) for local bird life. Our first morning started with fireworks somewhere across town -- 6 AM, barely light -- and then the first started in their raucous chorus, joined by barking dogs and then the bells chiming in the towers of a nearby church. I jumped out of bed and watched first from the small balcony in my room and then went up to the terrace for the full performance. The local denizens, human and otherwise, sure know how to welcome the day!

[Cardinal; 3/31/13]

I'm not a birder, so bear with me... (and birders, feel free to correct any misconceptions!).

We had hummingbirds feeding on the flowers draping down within our courtyard and back patio, doves that perched on the edge of our terrace, and a rather vocal sleek black Mexican grackle with a beautiful long tail who liked to hang out atop a nearby lime tree. But the most conspicuous birds were the snowy egrets who flew over our heads into the hills to retrieve twigs and sailed back downcurrent into the trees in the park where they were building their nests. Back and forth, back and forth for much of the day. I'd have my little point-and-shoot camera at the ready after one would pass close by, give up waiting, and another would sail right past again. I have lots of blurry shots of them mid-flight, but caught one (see last photo in previous post) in a nearby tree having plucked a prize twig.

[Dove (paloma) perched on our terrace; 4/4/13]

[Egrets nesting in the Parquez Juarez; 4/1/13]

We also noticed long semicircular strings of birds high in the sky wending their way out to the valley at dusk as well as the reverse migration in the early hours of dawn. We found out that these were glossy ibises who fly out to the lake for the evening and return to the hills every morning.

[Glossy ibis migration to the lake near San Miguel; 4/6/13]

More later...

(Not) On Mexican Time

[Morning in San Miguel de Allende; 4/6/13]

I'm back from Mexico with pics and a few stories. As I said when I blogged about my first trip to Mexico in 2005, you gotta start somewhere...

I'm still sorting my photos and need time to collect my thoughts, but as an overview I'll say this was a very different trip from my last two. My first trip was an eye-opening immersion into Mexico with my friend and guide Maddy, who had been many times, loves the culture, speaks pretty decent Spanish and talked to the locals everywhere we went. We even went to visit a friend of hers in the little town of Pueblo Nuevo where we were awakened in the morning by a chorus of chickens on the roof across the street and a guy with a loudspeaker atop his car hawking propane. It was Semana Santa (Holy Week) and Mexican families were everywhere on vacation. We arrived in San Miguel (after visiting Guanajuato and Pueblo Nuevo) just in time for the solemn Viernes Santo (Good Friday) processions and left the day after Easter for Guadalajara.

On my second trip, in 2006, I arrived first in San Miguel on my own for a couple of days before some friends joined me. I had a miserable cold I'd come down with just before flying down and I was cranky about the overwhelming presence of American retirees in town. It wasn't Easter time so it wasn't full of Mexicans on holiday, leaving the American presence more visible. But I had lots of rest time to deal with my cold, my friends arrived and we had fun, and after a week one friend and I headed off on a bus to see Morelia.

This most recent trip, seven years after the last one, was solely to San Miguel for a week, arriving the day before Easter and leaving 9 days later. It was still Mexican holiday time. We stayed with my friend T, whose daughter and grandchildren live there much of the year. They'd gone traveling elsewhere, so T invited a couple of her friends (M and myself) down to stay the week in their beautiful rented casa in a gated community overlooking the Parquez Juarez, not too far from the center of town.

[From the terrace toward the top floor of the house]

The views from the terrace were beautiful. Every morning I watched snowy egrets ferrying twigs from the hills where we sat across to the park, building their nests. Sunsets were glorious, whether from the terrace or from the other vantage points around town -- rooftop bars and the terraces of T's friends we visited. T is very social. Having spent quite a bit of time staying with her daughter and looking after her grandchildren, T has made friends with many ex-pat Americans living in San Miguel. They were all creative types from New York, a couple of them formerly in the fashion industry. They were fun people to hang out with, and we did a lot of socializing with them. T, once out of the house, is an indefatigable socializer. Her friends there independently noted that when she's in town they prepare for nonstop activity. Fun, but utterly exhausting. We were definitely not on Mexican time. Let's just say it was not a trip for The Sensitive Traveler.*

[Sunset from the terrasa; 4/6/13]

[Snowy egret in a tree near the terrace]

 

*I used to have a blog called The Sensitive Traveler, long since shut down (alas with no backup - I was tired once I started working full-time at the writing sweatshop my job).

Stegner's Morelia

There's a nice piece in the travel section of today's NY Times on the Mexican city of Morelia, in Michoacán, which I visited last spring. The NY Times piece uses the angle of following in the footsteps of Wallace Stegner's character, Susan Ward (and her real-life inspiration), in Angle of Repose. Funny, it's one of my all-time favorite novels and yet I hardly remembered that the main characters in the novel visited Mexico, much less Morelia. It was a brief section and I read the book a long time ago, certainly long before I'd even dreamed of visiting Mexico. Anyway, nice piece and a nice reminder of my visit. However, I must point out that the article neglected to mention in its "What to See" section one of my favorite spots, the Museo de Dulce - the candy museum. Best hot chocolate I've tasted in my life (made me absolutely high, too!) and interesting history of sweets in Mexico. Shouldn't be missed.

Pátzcuaro

[Plaza Don Vasco, Pátzcuaro, Michoacán; March 26, 2006]

The town of Pátzcuaro was the last place we visited on our tour from Morelia to the Lake Pátzcuaro area. Unfortunately we only had about a half an hour there for reasons that weren't entirely spelled out, but Jodi had an inkling that someone wanted to be back in Morelia by a particular time.

Our guide parked the van in the plaza, right in front of the best ice cream vendor in the state, in his estimation. Pátzcuaro is apparently known for its nieve de pasta, an ice cream flavored with cinnamon, almond and honey. This finally explained the word pasta that Jodi and I kept seeing around Morelia on the signs of the ice cream carts, which would often have only two flavors, pasta and limón. Pasta ice cream?? We couldn't figure it out. Pasta means "paste" in Spanish, so that didn't help. I also recalled my favorite Spanish teacher demonstrating the expression poca pasta, pulling out the pockets of his pants to show "very little money."

So in Pátzcuaro another mystery was solved, but only partially since it was unclear what exactly the flavoring of nieve de pasta was (found it here). The ice cream stand, outside under the portal of a colonial building on the plaza, had an ungodly variety of ice cream flavors - tequila, cinnamon, berry, avocado... I had a scoop of the pasta and another of chocolate. Delicious.

The others in the group were apparently tired out from the day and got back on the van, while Jodi and I were given 15 minutes to stroll around the pretty little plaza. There were restaurants and more vendors of artesenias, but we were pretty much shopped out so we didn't miss anything there. We finished our nieves and returned to the van, enjoying the Cantinflas video on the way back and arriving in Morelia at 7pm. A full day. Well, not quite over; after a shower and a rest, we went back out to sit in the cafes to enjoy a margarita, have a bite to eat, listen to the estudiantinas (strolling musicians) and, since it was Saturday night in Morelia, experience the unexpected delight of seeing fireworks over the catedral.


[Restaurant under the portales in the plaza at Pátzcuaro]

Janitzio

[A restaurant on the Isla de Janitzio, Michoacán; March 25, 2006]]

Isla de Janitzio

[Isla de Janitzio, on Lake Pátzcuaro, Michoacán; March 25, 2006]

The highlight of our tour from Morelia to Lake Pátzcuaro was taking a boat out to the island of Janitzio. About 25 people - our group of eight plus some families enjoying their Saturday tiempo libre - loaded up in the low, covered boat for the 20-minute trip. Once out on the lake, a fresh breeze blew in through the open sides, dispersing the heat and diesel fumes that had built up inside while we waited for everyone to board. The water, rather muddy brown and probably polluted, smelled fine. Approaching the island, the most striking feature is the huge (130-foot) statue of War of Independence hero José María Morelos raising his fist from the top of the island.


[José María Morelos statue over Janitzio]

On the way up the steep, narrow alleyways to the top of the island, 365 steps we were told, you're ambushed on both sides by a continuous onslaught of food stalls and vendors of all kinds of artesenias and odd stuff. The food stalls were gorgeous - overflowing in fruits and vegetables, fresh charales (small lake fish) and chilis frying in flat frying pans or set out in bowls, full-grown white fish laid out on ice, soup in giant tureens, and the ever-present fresh corn tortillas.


[Frying charales and chilis along an alleyway to the top of Janitzio]

Our guide was apparently friends with the people at one of the restaurants near the top of the island, and he led us there. We placed our orders, then had 30-40 minutes to go up and explore the top of the island before returning for our comida, the mid-day meal. We snacked on fried charales (a bit fishy for my taste) and salsa, then most of us had fried white fish filets, beans and tortillas along with a cerveza to wash it down.


[Cooks fry tortillas and charales at our restaurant near the top of the island]

The top of the island, which you pay a few pesos to enter, is relatively open after the nearly claustrophobic alleys on the way up, but there are a few vendors up there as well as a park and, of course, the base of the Morelos statue. You can enter the statue and climb to the top, but I prefered to enjoy the view and the fresh breezes from off the lake.


[View from the base of the Morelos statue on Janitzio]

Redes de pesca

[Small fishnets; Janitzio, Michoacán, Mexico; March 25, 2006]

These colorful fishnets were popular with the kids visiting the island of Janitzio on Lake Pátzcuaro. I don't know if adults actually use these or if they're just for kids or for souvenirs. Unfortunately we weren't there at prime fishing time to see how the big boys fish with their magnificent nets.

Tzintzuntzan

[Templo de Nuestra Señora de la Soledad, Tzintzuntzan; 3/25/06]

The next stop on our tour of Lake Pátzcuaro was the town of Tzintzuntzan, founded by Purépecha (or Tarascan) Indians as their capital city in the 13th century. (There's a nice history of the town here, or see the capsule version on wikipedia.) After the rather tacky handicrafts stores of Quiroga, the garden of the Ex-Convento de San Francisco was peaceful and expansive. Spread out across the tranquil grounds are 33 ancient, gnarled olive trees (one for every year of Christ's life), planted almost 500 years ago by Don Vasco de Quiroga, a champion of the Purépecha people. Beside the Templo de San Francisco, built earlier for the Spanish, is the Templo de Nuestra Señora de la Soledad, built for the Purépechan people. [Click photo to view larger.]

With thunder rumbling over the lake but never moving in, we listened to our guide's explanation of the history of the place, then we all dispersed to wander, photograph, and explore for a half an hour or so before returning to our van.


[500-year-old olive tree in the garden of San Francisco in Tzintzuntzan]