Mexico and Chocolate

We got home last week from two wonderful weeks in the Yucatan Peninsula and the Mountains of Chiapas. Here's a link to some general pictures from the trip. The picture above in a fruit stand in the city of Tulum. I was struck by the way they hang the pineapples - really cool display technique! (Yes, I'm a produce nerd!) They must grow pineapples in that region - we saw so many beautiful perfectly ripe ones for sale. One of my favorite things about visiting Mexico is the fruit - to have mangoes, pineapples, papaya, bananas that are all local and in season in February truly is a wondrous thing!



These two pictures are from the large Mercado in Merida. All over the Yucatan I noticed this style of fruit stacking - a bunch of little piles balanced into pyramids....I like it! I'm not exactly sure what these are - plums maybe? As much as I know about produce, there were definitely a lot of things that even I couldn't identify in some of the markets that I visited.



These two pictures were taken on the road between San Cristobal de las Casas (way up in the mountains in the State of Chiapas) and the ancient ruins of Palenque. I believe it's coffee drying. It was everywhere, mostly just in people's front-yards - no big coffee plantations here! From what I understand, coffee in Chiapas is "shade grown" in the jungle, of which there is plenty!


I'm not sure what this machine is for - it was one of the coffee shops in San Cristobal. Their coffee was organic, local, and really good. They had 20 or so different kinds of beans, each from a particular collective of farmers.



This is another restaurant in San Cristobal, where the waiter prepared a Caesar salad (dressing and all) right in front of us. I've had a Caesar salad this way before, strangely enough, in Mexico -in Mazatlan on the Pacific Coast.

He started with the ingredients above.......

Mixed the dressing together: Anchovies, Mustard, Olive Oil, Worcestershire Sauce, Egg Yolk, Balsamic Vinegar, and Soy Sauce.....


Then he coated each leaf of lettuce thoroughly with dressing...............



Added Croutons and Parmesan Cheese, and it's done! Salad has never been so fun!






We also had some sushi in San Cristobal. I know...sushi in Mexico? it wasn't really what we were used to, but it tasted good, and it was presented beautifully! I've realized that when you eat things like Mexican sushi, you have to be ready to get rid of any preconceived notions about what you're eating, and approach it with an open mind!


This was one of the most interesting dishes I had. The bottom is like a savory cheese cake, topped with a ring of sauteed squash blossoms and a cuilacoche sauce. Cuilacoche is also known as "Corn Smut," (that's what I grew up calling it.) It's a fungus that grows on corn. It can either be looked at as an unfortunate infestation of a corn field, or a culinary delicacy - take your pick! It's actually pretty good, you just have to get past it's intense black color.





I also had the chance to try some pretty amazing Chocolate in Chiapas. this is one of the bars I bought. I randomly walked into a tiny little "organic" store in San Cristobal. It was a nice mix of local organic products, and a few imports like Peace brand organic cereal, Eden organic oils, and Amy's brand organic pasta sauce. I would definitely shop here if I lived in the city! The lady at the counter gave me a few samples of this chocolate. I believe she said her husband makes it? My Spanish could be better, but I'm pretty sure that's what she said. It's pretty amazing stuff. The best way I can describe it is compared to a regular chocolate bar, this tastes like Whole Wheat Bread compared to Wonder Bread - unprocessed. It was less sweet, less creamy, but, to me, more delicious, and more real tasting.



I picked up this chocolate at the same store. It's for making Mexican Hot Chocolate. I got about 6 of these disks...mmmm.......you just break them up and dissolve them into hot water or milk.


Here's the label. All of this chocolate I got is from Chiapas. The really cool thing about that is that this is where Chocolate was first used - by the Toltecs and later the Maya. In San Cristobal, I bought a book (The True History of Chocolate, by Sophie and Michael Coe) on the history of Chocolate and read it while we were traveling. Apparently people in what is now Venezuela and Colombia first domesticated the Cacao plant, but they only used it for the sweet pulp that surrounds the Cacao beans, not for the beans themselves. People on the Mexican Pacific coast of Chiapas first processed the beans it into what we know of as Chocolate, and from there it spread to the state of Tobasco on the Gulf of Mexico, where the Toltecs used it, and then to the Yucatan where the Maya used it, and finally up into the Valley of Mexico where it was widely drank by the Aztecs. All these ancient cultures drank it either hot or cold. Hard eating chocolate as we know it in bar or candy shapes is a relatively recent invention and requires a lot of processing......



As luck would have it, I got home to find that someone had dropped off a sample of some organic raw cacao beans at the Co-op. I'm not sure if we'll carry them, but I hope we do - I'd buy them! This is how cacao was known in the ancient world. The native people in Central America used them not only to make a drink, but also as a form of currency. When the Spanish showed up, they couldn't understand what all the fuss about these "almonds" was about, but they soon figured it out! They're actually pretty tasty plain, if you can get past the bitterness. They've got quite a bit of fat, but also an amazing amount of Vitamin C, Iron (one 8oz serving has over 300% of the daily recommended allowance!) and other antioxidants. I think I'm going to attempt to make an ancient Mayan version of Hot Chocolate with these.....more to come on that later......
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Thai Food and Mexico Excitment

The crocuses are blooming! At home in Wisconsin this is the first sign of spring, but here it happens in the middle of winter. We've had some really nice weather the past few days, and I can almost trick myself into thinking it is spring.....at least until the next big storm comes through.....

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A friend came to stay with us last weekend, and we made one of my favorite meals - Tom Ka Gai soup and Pad Thai. I make this meal quite often since we don't have any decent Thai restaurants in the area, and sometimes I just have to have Thai food. Certainly my methods of preparation aren't traditional - I just kind of made it up as I went, and considered myself successful when it tasted right.


This is my friend Melanie doing a beautiful job of cutting the Galangal Root (aka Thai Ginger) into chunks. It's pretty fibrous stuff, and cutting it takes some real arm strength!

Here's the finished soup. We started by sauteing the Galangal Root with Onions, Carrots, and Potatoes in a little Olive Oil until they were almost cooked, and then I added Chicken Stock. I also put in some Lemon Grass and a few Kaffir Lime Leaves (I have a Kaffir Lime Tree on my front porch, and a Lemon Grass plant in the living room, which is lucky since both are a must for this soup, and they're impossible to find in any markets in this town.) As all that was simmering, Mel chopped up mushrooms, green onions, and picked the leaves off of a whole lot of cilantro as I fried the tofu. I usually use chicken for this soup, but since Melanie is a vegetarian, we made it with Tofu. It's really just as good. I cut the Tofu into triangles and fried it in a whole lot of Olive Oil and a splash of Fish Sauce (kind of like Thai Soy Sauce, Fish Sauce is salty and made from fermented fish - it's totally essential for Thai cooking.) When the veggies were tender, we added the Mushrooms, a can of Baby Corn, and half of the Tofu, the Green Onions, and the Cilantro. Then came two cans of Coconut Milk. This goes in at the end since it curdles if you cook it too much. The last step is to season the soup to perfection by adding Chili Garlic Sauce (very spicy!) tons of Lime Juice, and more Fish Sauce. Mmmmmm.... I was suffering from a cold, and this soup totally hit the spot. I just love the coconut/lime/spicy flavor!

Here's the Pad Thai. This dish is really easy since I use Thai Kitchen Pad Thai Sauce. Someday, I'll attempt my own sauce, but so far I haven't had the time. Making the soup at the same time is enough! This Pad Thai is a mixture of Pad Thai noodles, Mung Bean Sprouts, Green Onions, Cilantro, Peanuts, Tofu (or chicken,) Eggs (we didn't use any this time, but usually I do,) Pad Thai Sauce, Fish Sauce, Lime Juice, and Chili Garlic Sauce. It's handy that both the soup and the Pad Thai have Green Onions, Cilantro, and Tofu - we just used the other half of what Mel had already chopped. The Pad Thai Sauce is pretty sweet - Tamarind Paste, Sugar, and Fish Sauce as the main ingredients. It's great with lots of hot sauce added at the table!

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We're leaving this week for a two week Mexico adventure! I'm really excited, not least about the food. I love going to open air markets in Mexico and checking out all the exotic tropical fruits and veggies! Here's a map of where we're planning on going:


The plan is to fly into Cancun and then make a large loop through Chiapas, and then back. I have hotel reservations for the first two nights and a car rental reservation for the whole time, but that's it. I want to keep most of it unplanned....a real adventure! I made similar trips with my family when I was five years old and again when I was fourteen, so I'm somewhat familiar with the area. We have a good road map and travel guide, so I feel comfortable trusting a lot to fate. We leave Thursday night - I can't wait!
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Marina di Chioggia Gnocchi

It's been way too long since I've posted anything. I hate to admit it, but I'm just not as inspired to cook elaborate meals in the winter time. This time of year, other concerns tend to take center stage. Simple meals such as yams with feta cheese and salad or baked chicken and potatoes are all I've had the energy to create. Not that these things aren't delicious, they just don't seem exciting enough to blog about.

I have been consciously trying to limit my diet to season items. both in my professional and personal life I've been advocating eliminating hot weather veggies from one's menu. Zucchini, tomatoes, basil, bell peppers.....all these things are being trucked up from Mexico now. It just seems to me that we should enjoy them when they're at their prime close to home, and not bother with them when they're picked unripe and shipped such long distances. Not only does the shipping use unnecessary fossil fuels, but these things are way too expensive, and they just don't taste very good. There's plenty of things to eat that are seasonal if not local - chard, kale, salad mix, root crops, winter squash, kiwi, potatoes. All of these are delicious, and relatively inexpensive right now. All that said, I have been thoroughly enjoying the delicious Kent Mangos coming from Ecuador and Peru.....

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A few weeks ago I finally summoned the energy to cook my Marina di Chioggia. I bought this squash way back in September. It was grown in Willow Creek, and weighed over 10lb. When I bought it it was all dark green, but as it's aged it's ripened into a dark orange color. Sitting on our dining room table for so long made it seem like a member of the family. I was a little sad to cut it up!



I didn't save any of the seeds, although maybe I should have. This would be a fun one to grow. Marina di Chioggia literally translates to "Chioggia Sea Pumpkin." Chioggia is the town in Italy near Venice where it came from - also the homeland of the Chioggia Beet. This squash is rare, but it's said to be one of the finest Italian heirlooms, and it's featured in Barbra Kingsolver's book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Traditionally it is used for gnocchi (pronounced nyoki) or ravioli. A friend of mine lent me a wonderful book called The Complete Squash: A Passionate Growers Guide to Pumpkins, Squashes, and Gourds by Amy Goldman and Victor Schrager. It praises the Marina di Chioggia heavily and gives a recipe for gnocchi. I decided I had to try it.

Here's just half of it cooked. I could barely fit the whole thing in the oven! We ate about 1/8 of it plain with feta cheese and Annie's Goddess Dressing for dinner the night we cooked it. We eat this meal with either winter squash or yams almost once a week in the winter time. It's easy, hearty, and healthy. The Marina di Chioggia was really good - very sweet and rich with an almost carmel-y flavor.
Another aspect of winter at our house is the annual ant invasion. This may be part of the reason we don't cook as much: having to wipe ants off the counter before you begin cooking is just not that appetizing! I've done everything I could think of to get rid of them, but nothing seems to work. At least they have good taste - they really seemed to like the squash. This ant was trying to make off with a piece that was way too big for him.....it was pretty humerus to watch him teetering on the edge of the counter.

The next day we made the gnocchi. the dough was about the stickiest thing I've ever dealt with. It's a mixture of mashed potatoes, squash, flour, nutmeg, salt, and white pepper. You roll the dough out into ropes, cut them into bite-sized chunks, and then press them on the tines of a fork to create these shapes. This sounds simple, but the dough was so amazingly sticky, that we had a hard time of it. I doubled the recipe to use as much squash as possible, but we ran out of time and energy to make it all into gnocchi, so we froze most of it in it's raw dough form. We figured we could thaw it out and make gnocchi whenever we want to. The picture above is the gnocchi before it was cooked. It's covered with flour so as to not stick to itself or the pan.


From there it went into boiling water to cook. You cook it in small batches until it floats to the top of the boiling water and then for about 30 seconds more. The whole process of making the dough, forming the gnocchi, and cooking it took about 4 or 5 hours. It seemed like a whole lot of effort for what we got, but it was really good, and we have enough frozen dough to make many more meals. I suppose the first time making anything this involved is always going to be a challenge.....

This is the sauce I made for it. Spicy sausage, Arugula from the garden, walnuts, and cream. It was good, although the Arugula was really strong. I wasn't expecting it to be since I had cooked some a few weeks prior and we had marveled at how mild it was. I guess the older it gets the stronger it gets. It wasn't bad, but I wish I had used a little less Arugula.

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Here's the Arugula patch last weekend. It snowed here, which is very unusual on the coast. Big, beautiful flakes fell for more than 2 hours at our house. I don't think it hurt anything since it melted pretty quickly, but it was fun to watch!
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Happy Humboldt Cows in their pasture. They were grazing so picturesquely when I drove up, but as soon as I started taking pictures they proved what camera hogs they really are!

Here's a few meals we've had in the past weeks.....

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First, our favorite "quick and easy" meal - baked Winter Squash and salad with Feta Cheese and Annie's Goddess Dressing.

The only work in preparing this is cutting the squash and putting it in the oven an hour or so before dinner. They we just use Goddess and Feta directly from the fridge.

The salad mix is local - it is simply amazing right now! The cool weather makes it heartier and more vibrant. Salad like this in January just seems too good to be true!

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Beef Stroganoff was actually much easier than I had anticipated. First I browned the beef and set it aside, then added:

Garlic and local Shallots. I cooked these in the beef drippings for a while and then added:

Local Wild Hedgehog Mushrooms. Beef Stroganoff is traditionally made with wild mushrooms.

Apparently many parts of Russia have a lot of them, much like we do here in the Pacific Northwest. When all that was pretty well cooked, I added the beef back in and cooked it for a while more. then I added:

Lots of organic Sour Cream, and salt and pepper.

Here's the completed dish. Traditionally, beef Stroganoff is served with Kashi, a Buckwheat dish, but I didn't have the time to figure that out, so I just used noodles. That's how I've always had Beef Stroganoff anyway. It was delicious!

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For another relatively easy weekend meal, we roasted chicken pieces with olive oil and....

Local Brussels Sprouts....

Meyer Lemon....


Fresh Turmeric. This is kind of an odd item that we sell at the Co-op. It's a relative of ginger, but it doesn't have the same bite. It has a mild yet noticeable flavor, and an incredible yellow color.Local Yellow Finn Potatoes.
and here it is! The turmeric is shredded, but you can tell it's there by how yellow everything is.

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We made apple butter again this week. We had way too many apples to start with (they were seconds from wor,) so we made the biggest batch we had ever attempted. Both of our biggest stock pots were jammed full.....

We cooked it on low for 4 days. We usually process it sooner than that, but we were just too busy to deal with it. By the time we got around to it, it was thicker and richer than ever before....


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Christmas 2007

The holidays have been a blur! I barely had time to make everything I did - finding time to blog about it was truly impossible. I didn't want to give all my Christmas gifts away beforehand anyway. Now all the gifts have been given and I'm free to blog about them!

Along with the Lemon Curd, I gave Lavender Oat Cakes and jars of the tea pictured above. Sort of a tea party in a box...the tea is a mixture of Jasmine Tea, Lemon Verbena, Rose Petals, and Lavender Flowers. It was extremely fragrant and flowery - definitely a feminine blend, but delicious just the same!

Here it is all mixed together

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The oat cakes are a Scottish recipe, I think. I remember them from when I was a kid.

The main ingredient is blended oats (pictured above.) Here's the entire recipe:

3 Cups Blended Oats
1 1/2 Cups Flour
1/2 tsp. Salt
1/2 tsp. Baking Soda
1/2 Cup Butter
1/2 Cup Brown Sugar
1/3 Cup Scalded Milk or Table Cream

Mix Oatmeal, Flour, and Salt. Cut in Butter with hands. Dissolve Soda in Hot Milk (I used half and half,) and add to dry mixture. Roll to 1/8-1/4 inch thick. I used a glass to get the round shape. Bake in moderate oven (325-250) for 10 minutes. The hardest part about the recipe is rolling out the dough. It's pretty dry and cracky, but I had it down by the last batch!

I added some lavender to the dough make them a little fancier. They were really good - crispy and not too sweet. The went perfectly with the Lemon Curd!

I packed them in cellophane, tissue paper, and in tins. Very pretty!

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I also made Chocolate Covered Brandied Cherries.

These Cherries had been soaking in Brandy since July of 2006! We had an amazing glut of Cherries that summer, and I wanted to preserve some. Brandied Cherries seemed like a good idea, but we never used them. Their alcohol content was a little scary by this point! The dark ones are Bings and the light ones are Raniers.

After draining the Cherries, the first step was to coat them with this mixture of powdered sugar, water, and Cherry Brandy. It makes a Play-Dough like substance. You make a ball out of the sugar mixture......
....flatten it into a thin disc.....
and wrap it around the Cherry.

Then you let them cool for a half hour or so in the fridge. Then I double dipped them in chocolate, but that was just too messy to take pictures of! They were a little overwhelming in your mouth, but delicious none the less!

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Last, but not least, I made this trail mix - mostly for my brother, who is a student and sometimes forgets to eat. Chocolate Chips, Almonds, Pistachios, Salted Cashews, Pumpkin Seeds, Banana Chips, Raisins, and tiny little pieces of Crystallized Ginger. Not exactly healthy, but it's all organic and not too unhealthy....

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Before I left to go home for Christmas, we ate the last of the local broccoli. It was really dark green, and really good. It's frosted a few times here this fall, but nothing too heavy. We rarely get a hard frost, even in the winter. The hardest part about growing things in the winter here is that there's just not enough daylight hours for things to put on much growth. Plants tend to survive, but just sit there without growing. Anyway, this broccoli was delicious! It was the last available from the local farm who supplies the Co-op, but I'm sure there's home gardeners out there who will be eating it year round.

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OK, now just a few pictures from Christmas in Wisconsin. I was home for about a week visiting family. Madison is drowning in snow!


I forgot to bring my camera, but my brother was good enough to take a few....

These are the last tomatoes my Mom had picked before the frost killed the plants in November. They were mostly rotten, but I managed to salvage a a little for our salad. She had been keeping them in the basement.....

This is the Coffee Cake she made for Christmas brunch. I should have watched more carefully how she shaped it.... It's filled with a raisin/brown sugar mixture. Mmmmm....reminds me of childhood....

Here's the Brunch spread: Coffee Cake, Roasted Potatoes, (with rosemary, garlic, and capers!) 3 kinds of quiche, a citrus-y fruit salad, a green salad, and don't forget the catchup! The whole thing was truly delicious - a good variety of flavor and texture, but somehow it all complemented itself really well.

Christmas dinner was Guinness Beef Stew made chiefly by my brother and I. My mom made Irish Brown Bread and Salad to go with it, and my Step-dad made Cheese Cake for dessert. It was quite a scene as we all tried to cook in the same smallish kitchen!

We dredged the beef in a little flower and browned it. We set that aside and cooked onions, carrots, and potatoes in the meat drippings. We poured 2 cans of Guinness in and let it cook for a while. We asked Mom what spices she thought would be Irish, and surprisingly, she said she remembered Curry in the food when she visited Ireland. We decided to give it a try and added just a smidgen of Curry Powder, Salt, Pepper, and Bay Leaves, added the Beef again and some Beef Stock and let the whole thing cook down.

This is just the vegetables in beer. I don't have a picture of the finished stew, but I have to say, I was pretty proud of it. It was thick and rich and meaty - very hearty, and perfect for a cold Christmas night with my family of Irish descendants. The Potatoes, Carrots, Onions, and Beef were all local, I believe. Thank goodness for root crops, meat, and dairy! Without them life in the upper Mid-West would have been impossible a hundred years ago.

That's it - Happy New Year!
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