SOME BITES OF MEXICO

Some of my favorites and some which did not survive the pandemic. But they are still great flavors and tastes of Mexico and, if you are thinking of looking south, this is what they were and are.

When Some friends were coming over for dinner, I went to my favorite breakfast taco joint in my Santiago neighborhood market, “La Lupita” to think about the menu.

I go there three or four times a week, depending on whether I plan on lunch at my favorite lunch taco joint around the corner from my house, “El Cangrejito,” or not. The latter one can find in most guidebooks, and one of my favorite things there was the look on North American first-time tourists who, looking down at guidebook open in hand to check the address, look up and see what must be THE definition of hole in the wall. Such a hole that they have to look back at the book, check the address again, peer in with a panicked look on their faces, and slink off back down Calle 57 towards the T-shirt and hammock shops.

I would go there for the venison tacos with radish, lime, cilantro, habanero and cucumber salsa, but it was La Lupita today for the manitas de puerco or poached and boned pig’s trotters that are then breaded and fried. On my three tacos they appeared chopped up and topped with those famous beet colored onions of the Yucatan.

Of course, I added some lime juice in which sliced orange and green habaneros had been soaking.

Half way through my liter of fresh carrot and mandarin orange juice the main dish for the dinner popped into my head, mainly because one of my guests wanted me to use the mole she had bought in Oaxaca. I was fighting against chicken because it shows up every day somewhere around here. The lamb is frozen from New Zealand and no good, but can’t wait to try it when it is. “Duck!’ was my eureka moment, startling the people next to me. That’s it then. Poach the duck today, with ginger, cilantro, all the usual ‘aromatics,’ and one ancho chili, portion it, and steep it in the mole until tomorrow night.

It’s a rich dish, so something simple for the fairly conservatively minded people who will be at table. Hard boiled eggs prepared like deviled, but the yolks mixed with olive oil and my salt-preserved and finely minced. Xcatic chilies.

Put them on a plate cut-face down and spoon over some fresh pea puree mayonnaise with a hint of garlic. Some olive-oil mounted cooked beet juice around the plate, and a salad of cooked and finely shredded snow peas with an undetectable hint of fresh ginger and sesame oil.

For openers very chilled ‘up’ cocktails with vodka and the juice of ripe limes (in season for 3 weeks) they call here China lima. For wines I long and pine for anything made by Eric Pfifferling Tavel Rosés, but alas, nothing doing.

Duck aside, I looked for some Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean fish called Hogfish or Boquinete. None in view.

I looked at the octopus.

And then, reluctantly, remembered the documentary My Octopus Teacher and couldn’t buy any.

Here is what was decided.

Start with lettuce wraps with either cochanita or barbacoa. Salt preserved Xcatic chili and lime salsa. Can buy that and do in minutes since the chilies already in my fridge. Perhaps capellini with fresh pea and fresh hierba buena (spearmint, garden mint, common mint, lamb mint and mackerel mint) butter sauce which, with a food processor, is only 15 minutes. A lot of fat, but it is cold – it’s gone down to 65 degrees at night. Then perhaps, after all, local chicken with garlic and rosemary (same market), ending with vanilla Hagen Dazs covered in candied papaya sauce. I had been dying to try this fruit cured in caustic or pickling lime (calcium hydroxide) and unprocessed cone sugar or piloncillo, but it is too weird sounding and looking for gringos.

“No,” said my inner voice, ‘they want lobsters.’ Who doesn’t?

Lobster with what I had in house (avocados, freshly shelled white beans) I could still make a trip to the beach at noon with some investors and still be back in time to prepare dinner. At two my lawyer was at the door panting “c’mon or we will miss lunch.” Lunch! We would barely make it back in time to cook, and there was a big beach project riding on this dinner. Sure enough we passed my favorite restaurant in Chuburna, and we saw fisherman dragging in a basket of Boquinete. Screeching to a stop we bagged a few, told the waiter to hold us a table. We had a few moments to grab a few lobsters from my fisherman, Abram.

And then headed to the beach.

And its restaurants where I eyed the beautiful deep fried Boquinete swooping by my table.

And ordered one.

By 9:00 that night the moneybags sat around avocado with red radish salsa (lime juice, salt, sesame oil), Boquinete filets in butter with yellow cherry tomato and local basil sauce, and piles of lobster steamed with garlic and olive oil served on top of the silky and flavorful white beans. Finishing with Ice cream and berries.

At 2 in the morning I washed the last dish and drained the last Sol. Nothing for it the next “crudo” morning than to give a weak ‘yes’ to a friend’s demand to revisit the beach for fried fish. Sure enough, more fried fish, more Sol.

With the bill the waiter slyly and undercover produced a bag of fresh white blue crab meat, shelled moments ago.

“Today I am eating no more protein,” I told him.

‘Crazy gringo’ was the look on his face.

Quintana Roo: Infant Eagle Ray

I knew some fishermen on the Yucatan Peninsula’s Holbox Island (around the corner from Cancun) and dropped by to see them the moment after I was checked into my hotel. I was after fresh pompano and lobster head soup, both of which I had heard from them I just had to taste and never had.

On the way out in our skiff, heading closer into the beach for pompano the fisherman in front spotted an eagle ray. An infant. No more than 15 inches across instead of the adult 10 feet. First, he yelled in excitement and then speared it. The sight of it flapping at my feet, a cup of blood splashing over my white flip flops, had my breakfast threatening to join it in the bottom of the boat. I was horrified. Asking why he could kill such an animal, his answer was “Because it’s delicious. Esper y verás. Wait and see.”

He gutted it, flayed it open, and hung it on a clothesline to dry for a couple of hours, and then cooked it on a very slow fire for 10 minutes on each side. Much to my dismay for the future of eagle rays, it was one of the best things out of the ocean I have ever tasted.

Endless Summer

This morning, at 6 a.m., the sky is the kind of blue that could be described as almost perfectly baby blue.

So perfect, that I can only think that in another half hour, when the last moisture of the evening air burns off, it will be completely that color. It will be such an inspiring one that it makes me wonder, and quietly smile, at the memory of so many people who, in the three months before I boarded my non-stop plane from Newark to Cozumel, wondered out loud what I would be doing down here.

Taking time, I say.

Taking enough so that it overtakes me. An endless summer, you might say. At least for the winter.

The kind of time it takes to read Samuel Pepys diaries again, starting first with the wonderful biography about him called "The Unequaled Self," and by The Atlantic Monthly: "A magnificent triumph." It's hard to pass up such a victory when one is taking time. And it's hard to not read about it when on any given page there are phrases like "my darling and dalilah lusts," or spot-on observations like the diaries being a summation of how impossible it is to make a tidy account of one's life. What we become most aware of (in the Diaries) is the bursting, disorganized, uncontrollable quality of Pepys’ experience.

There's nothing that out of control about the sky this morning, now not an errant cloud in sight, and, furthermore, no hint that there might be one in the coming hours. The promising perfection of the day, as I contemplate letting it wash over me, could fall within another observation, this one by Mark Twain: "The difference between the almost-right word and the right word is ... the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning."

And the difference between chili molido, and chili piquin molida con sal.

On the dive boat I use in Cozumel they serve for lunch the surprisingly delicious cucumber salad. I say surprisingly, because who would think one could turn the big, fat American cucumbers (instead of the slim, English variety) into anything one would want a lot more of. The dive boat cucumbers are simply sliced lengthwise, seeded and cut across in quarter-inch sections, then marinated for 30 minutes in fresh ripe lime juice (find the Mexican or Key limes) and chili molido.

I ran to the street market the next day and bought some chili molido. I made the salad.

It was inedible.

Mainly because of a fire so intense that even submerged in the deep end of the pool with my mouth open did no good. Bubbles full of screams rose lazily to the surface and scared the iguanas lurking in the hibiscus.

The next day, out on the dive boat, the boat boy and chef told me it had to be milled chili Piquin, with the salt. As soon as I had the right little bag of the coarse, brick red and slightly salty powder, I was putting it on everything.

Two salads: avocado with chopped shrimp, lime, extra virgin olive oil, and its variation. Avocado with lime, mint, hibiscus flowers julienne.

One snack: chopped avocado in a warm, hand-made corn tortilla, with lime and the chili. Two cold soups: pureed cucumber with lime and chili and one with honeydew, mint and pureed cucumber with lime, cream, and the chili. One fish dish: grilled red snapper brochettes with black chili mole and sour orange, served with ancho mayonnaise sauce. One dessert: sliced pineapple simmered two minutes with hibiscus flower sugar syrup, served cold with coconut or guanabana yogurt, and then sprinkled with chili piquin.

As if they just fell out of a perfectly blue, tropical sky.

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