BITES OF MEXICO

My Mexican Fridge

My Mexican fridge currently holds cheap white tequila (I never make Margaritas with brown or over $10 dollar tequila. I reserve more expense than that for mezcal), ripe tiny limes from my tree, poached octopus, freshly hand-made tortillas, coconut ice cream, four different kinds of mysterious (to me) soft and fresh white cheese, enormous green Seville oranges (also from a tree in the garden) tonic, gin, local rum that will freeze your eyebrows, Coke in little glass bottles, containers of left-over salsas, local farm eggs, and black beans that I cooked with chorizo.

I bought the chorizo at the local mercado, freshly made, and wrapped in pig intestine so they looked like tennis ball sized testicles. But I am not going to get into that whole Mexican metaphor of eggs, eggplant, huevos, and bulls. For breakfast (on the days I am not diving, and don’t need a calm stomach).

I took some guajillo dried chilies and roasted them over a wood fire. Blended them dry after removing the stems and seeds. Then I grilled some small tomatillos and put them in a mortar. I grilled 2 cloves of garlic with the skin on (removed before grinding) and a medium peeled red onion. They joined the tomatillos. I worked the mortar and then added the blended chili. I put in a quarter of a cup of extra virgin olive oil and a little sea salt.

I was in local heaven.

A sauce meant for poached octopus that I cooked it in water and bay leaves, just as the fisherwoman in Galicia had told me. But when I went to cut it up I remembered my dive of that day: an octopus had come out of a crevice the same color as the surrounding vermilion coral, immediately turned into carmine becoming purple, and said hello. It caressed a tentacle up my arm and kissed my face, more gently than any lover has ever done. I was in love again (it doesn’t take long or much).

So when it came time to cut it up and eat it, I just couldn’t. I put it back in the sea. As my guests’ hungry clamors rose, I opened the bulging refrigerator and grabbed eggs and the black beans.

First, I warmed the beans into a refried pancake, and then soft boiled the eggs. Making nests in the beans which I filled with hot chorizo, I put the eggs on top and napped them with a sauce of guajillo puree and mayonnaise. In the middle of the table was a jug of margaritas made with cheap white tequila, a wine bucket full of bottles of rose from Provence, cold beers, and an empty bowl in memory of the octopus.

The clamor stilled, sighs of joy filled the room, the octopus forgotten.

I had gotten away with it but would have really liked to have some cold-water oysters to eat with the chorizo. Cold oysters and hot sausage deserve each other. First an oyster, then a piece of hot sausage (lamb chorizo would be perfect), both washed down with an easy rosé like Whispering Angel.

Rock Lobster

I have already written recently of caviar. And of my birthday tradition of a can of Osietra on the London to Paris Eurostar eaten from mother of pearl tablespoons. Now I am thinking of crab those enormous cock (male) crabs from Cornwall (think the crab that produce crab claws in Florida), and the cream that needs to be eaten with a spoon - after you have licked the caviar off it, or course.

And now I would add crumpets: hot, buttered, and covered in caviar or piled high with the crab meat after lashing the crumpet with a lot of the fat from the shell. Or liberally spread with spoonful’s of clotted cream before a final layer of wild damson jam.

That’s High Tea, the day after Christmas. What would we have for dinner?

A simple rock (Caribbean or Spiny) lobster would do very nicely - if I only knew how to cook them.

In the early days of Chez Panisse, I would live to see the rock lobsters from Mexico show up at the Spenger’s wholesale market in Berkeley or even in Chinatown. They fit all the categories of fresh, local (our coast, anyway), delicious and unusual. But I could never figure out how to cook them without the lobster meat taking on a texture of rubber. I did soon learn that freshness with spiny lobsters (one of their many other names) is everything: more than a few hours out of the water and they would start to excrete all sort of surprising mortal fluids.

Then one day on the beach in Mexico’s Zihuatanejo, I saw a woman high heat cooking them in two inches of clarified butter and a wheelbarrow full of freshly chopped garlic that was added in the last half minute of cooking. The lobster was tender and wonderful. Obviously, it wasn’t the garlic, so I tried the high heat method.

It failed.

In Miami at a book-signing cooking demo, I had asked, somewhat fearfully, for some fresh lobster. What arrived in a plastic bag from the supermarket were four enormous tails (out of the shell) of still quivering rock lobster. That settled the presentation question – no shell, no lobster presentation. The tagliatelle that I had planned to toss with some mushroom butter and put in the lobster shell seemed now the central focus of the dish.

I made some fish stock infused with a little white wine and reduced it slightly. Ten minutes before serving time I chopped up the lobster meat. Then over a medium heat I mounted the fish stock with butter, almost to a sauce consistency. When the butter mixture was hot enough to feel it but not so hot that I couldn’t leave my finger in it for a few minutes, I added the chopped lobster meat and stirred until it was all coated with the stock.

And turned off the heat.

By the time the pasta was cooked in boiling salted water (the fabulous Cipriani brand dried egg pasta that took only five minutes), the lobster was cooked almost through, and had cooled down. I heated it up again, but only to eating temperature and nowhere near a boil. I tossed the pasta in the lobster, pulled it out with tongs onto a heated serving platter and then poured the lobster and its sauce over the pasta. I have never tasted more tender spiny lobster ever, unless it was in a Chinese restaurant in Hong Kong where they give it the egg white treatment.

Would I do anything more to the lobster?

Infuse 2 sprigs each of fresh tarragon and flat-leaf parsley in the hot butter mixture for a couple of minutes and then remove them before adding the lobster. And perhaps I would scatter a handful of the same parsley leaves, coarsely chopped, over the pasta and lobster just before serving it.

If I found any eggs on the tails, I wouldn’t put them into the sauce.

Those I would spread on those hot buttered crumpets as a snack with a glass of champagne to keep my strength up before the guests arrived.

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