It's All About the Food

Okay, I'll be honest. A big reason we travel is because usually where we go the food is so damn good. That's especially true here in Mexico. If you've only eaten Mexican food in the US, then you haven't eaten Mexican food. Yes, there are tacos and enchiladas here (I've never seen a burrito in Mexico), but they are a tiny part of the local cuisine. Since we've been in Puebla we've had many meals that you'd be hard pressed to find in even the best Mexican restaurants in the US.

Today was a perfect example. For breakfast we went into the local mercado. There were all sorts of food stands selling all sorts of the regional foods. Cemitas are big here. These are the local version of the Dagwood sandwich. A fluffy roll, cut in half and piled high with Oaxacan stringy cheese, avocado slices, meats, onions, tomatoes and spicy salsa. These are so popular in one stall that the workers there make the cemitas in an assembly line, many at the same time. But I didn't feel like a cemita, so we looked a little further and found a lady who made consume de carrero.  This is a fantastic soup made with all sorts of sheep parts. Yes, parts.  Better not to ask, just eat. The broth was a beautiful dark red and deliciously spicy and rich.  There were many condiments, including chopped onion, cilantro, spicy red salsa, green salsa and limes.  Oh man, was this good. Amy had tacos made with sliced pieces of sheep meat. Not quite as good, so we dumped the meat in the soup and shared.

Another great regional dish here is Chiles en Nogada. This is a large chile, stuffed with ground meat, raisins, ground nuts, cinnamon and other goodies. The chile is then dipped in a very fluffy egg white batter and deep fried. It is served with a luscious creamy white sauce and sprinkled with pomegranate seeds. I read about a restaurant here, La Fonda, that was supposed to make a good one. They've been in business for 60 years and when you walk into the place it looks like it must have looked 60 years ago. Lots of old pictures on the walls, beautiful talavera pots everywhere, and a cook who looks like she's been there awhile. The chile en Nogada was made fresh, dipped in the batter and fried and brought to the table piping hot. Oh man, was it good. I've had this dish before many times, but this one was by far the best. Amy had Chipoltes Navidenos, also a large chile deep fried and stuffed with cheese but this time the chile is chipotle meaning the chile has been smoked to a deep brick red with lots of smoky, and only lightly spicy, flavor.  Served with fresh limes and a fresh avocado lettuce and tomato salad.   This was also really, really good.  It's a Christmas season dish.

As I mentioned in a prior post, Puebla is famous for its mole. We've had mole many times and it's been good in the fancy restaurants and in the market stalls. There was a special dark brown mole up in Cuetzalan that was probably the best. An amazing combination of sweet and spicy and oh so rich!

But the simple food can be great. The other morning in Cholula there was nothing open for breakfast. But a local man pointed us down the street where two brother in laws have a little street stall and serve the best tamales I've ever had. One was wrapped in a banana leaf and had cheese and a spicy red sauce.

Mexico has truly one of the greatest cuisines in the world. But it takes a trip here, especially to cities like Puebla and Oaxaca, to realize it.

Into the country and back in time

Yesterday, which was Monday, we came back from the mountain trip to wonderful, tropical Quetzalan, to Puebla, and immediately went by bus to cholula. Well despite others giving Cholula great reviews, we didn't really like it as much as other places... Seemed run down and shabby and empty. And catering to tourists. We did have a really good time walking around town especially in the evening, enjoying mexico's version of Halloween in which tiny children go around in costumes for Four Days having a very great time. They don't collect much, since halloween is new here, but are so excited and innocent. Also we had our first day of the dead markets in which many stalls of sugary figures of skulls, sheep, lambs, ducks, small plates of fake foods and chocolate are sold, along with day of the dead bread which is supposed to look like bones, and my favorite, the delicate paper cuts, with hilarious scenes of the dead having a good time. Also we had an amazingly good street breakfast this morning made by two brothers in law which was tamales with chocolate mole and chicken filling, tamales with cheese and strips of roast poblano chile, and a special tamale of corn meal dough with savory chicken or roast chile flavoring, wrapped in banana leaves and steamed. We also for lunch, yesterday, had a three course meal for three dollars which was a soup with crabmeat in a rich red savory broth followed by pesto or shrimp ceviche followed by fish grilled with either garlic, or a rich tamarind sauce, followed by gelato.

Well today we took a chance on another great field trip out of Puebla, to towns called Atlixco and Huaquechula, and this time we loved it. The countryside southwest of Puebla is so beautiful, green rolling hills with distant volcanos, and fields of golden marigolds, being harvested by the truck and container full, alfalfa, amaranth and sesame seed, and corn. There are small volcanic cones here and there. Many of the fields have small crosses out in them, and the whole place feels unite eerie, towns have very special ways of remembering the dead such as in the tiny village of Huaquechula where they set up 3 story white shrines full of angel figures. Our favorite stop of the day was the utterly charming town of Atlixco, with a central square filled with tropical trees and flowers like what we know of only by its Hawaiian nickname of the shark bite tree, with huge crowns of orange blossom. Atlixco has huge markets filled with women shopping for the fragrant flowers they need to build their altars, because custom says that the spirits of dead loved ones will only visit if the aromas entice them, so people were buying white stock, mock orange, fragrant Asian lilies, rosemary and other fragrant flowers by the huge armful. We took combis several times today and there was barely room for human beings because of the bunches of aromatic flowers.
In Atlixco, we ran into a group of pretty teenage girls, all dressed as Catrinas. Catrin and Catrina are famous cartoon figures well known in Mexico, rich skeletons dressed in costumes from the 1890s gilded age, she wears a long dress with a bustle and a veil and a fetching hat. Her husband is a skeleton who wears top hat and tails. And they have a little skeleton dog, too. A smiling happy skeleton dog.
So here was this cute group of fifteen or sixteen year olds, in whiteface, with long velvet dresses and hats and veils. Adorable. Giving away free samples of sweet bread next to the wrought iron "Italian coffee company" pergola in the main square next to the town's "carpet of flowers, " a block long picture of catrina made entirely of potted flowering plants, next to a government building with a rich 1870s facade and an immense fortress like cathedral from the 1670s. We really did not know what century we were in. It was all old world charm and we just sat and sipped cappuccinos and enjoyed ourselves in this lovely park with its tiled benches, wrought iron fences and cute children in little dracula costumes waving plastic Halloween pumpkin baskets.
Then we went into the Casa de Cultura, where local amateur artists had made about 30 paper mâché Catrinas with fanciful faces. There was even a tyrannosaurus Rex catrina! They all had great hats and dresses to complement the imaginative faces.

Tonight we're back in Puebla which is shiny with rain. But we got to see some great 'altars' which high school
Students made, honoring 1) ancient Mexico 2) John Lennon 3) science fiction writers 4) what's good and bad about Mexico today and 5) Steve jobs. All with photos, flowers, paper cutouts, candles and pictures carefully made with flower petals and seeds. And we got to dance in the street to Cumbia music.

"better to die on your feet than live on your knees"

This sign is on posters all over Cholula where we are today, with happy dancing skeletons. Getting ready for Day of the Dead is a very happy time it seems. People are starting to buy the beautiful papercut designs in all colors featuring dancing, marrying, guitar playing, cockfighting and kissing skeletons, and also buying little decorative loaves of bread and huge armsfull of golden marigolds and a deep rose flower called velvet or something like that.
We have not yet seen people setting up many altars in their homes, we'll go to a village where they invite you in to see them on Wednesday, but in the local police station/town hall there are groups setting them up. There is a high table with photos and candles and many Objects that the person treasured or sometimes there's a theme, and the floor in front can have designs made of petals and seed pods and then paper cuts hang everywhere.
The tables are also laden with sugar and chocolate figurines. So today we went into a huge tent in the main square that sells all these things: sugar figures, panoramas with skeletons in action, strands of cut paper, and lately some goulish elements also brought in from our own Halloween. But mostly here the days of the dead are still a time of laughter and fondness, skeletons are friends not threatening and it seems it would be more fun to be on your feet as a happy inhabitant of the skeletal afterlife than live on your knees here. To Mexicans death seems to be a time of joy, without a hint of hell fire or damnation, you get to drink and frolic and dance and play the ukulele or guitar.

"El Combi Pasa"

What would we do without combis. In small town Mexico, you can get anywhere you want, if you can only find the parada de combis, the stop where you find the local van or refitted truck that takes you, your children, your market goods, your huge bale of alfalfa to the village of your choice.
This morning was market day in Cuetzalan, a beautiful hillside town high up in the semitropical rainforest that drains far down into the gulf of Mexico. It's an amazingly beautiful town even today when low rain clouds obscure the views. The local geology is mostly limestone (with a few grubby "meteorites" being peddled by the local kids) so there are some steep cliffs with luxurious waterfalls not far from town, maybe a fifteen minute combi ride, and some pyramid ruins built of blocks of the limestone down in a valley about twenty five minutes the other way.

The town itself is very pleasant because it mixes a lot of nice things. A lot of coffee is grown nearby, so tasty coffee is everywhere, whether it's the sweet pot boiled "cafe de olla" that the local street vendor gives you to drink with her freshly made tlayoyos, which are silver dollar sized freshly fried corn patties with black bean filling, topped with red or green savory sauce and a sprinkling of fresh local cheese, or it's a cappuccino with high foam from a relaxing cafe accompanied by a coffee cheesecake loaded with pecans or walnuts. The food is also amazingly good. There is a local black chocolate mole that is shiny with chocolate and has dark smoky chile flavor and spice. it comes with a piece of chicken leg in it and glossy black beans and rice with small pieces of tomato. There are two sauces made from pipian, a huge flat local pumpkin seed, the green one is spicier, with some green herbs mixed in. There are the most amazing dishes with fresh wild mushrooms. It's kind of like an oyster mushroom, we had it cooked in a chipotle (smoked chile) sauce, we had it cooked in a garlic sauce, it also comes as a soup, or in a quesadilla.

One of the best things about Cuetzalan, is the relative preservation of an older culture under the modern culture.  People in surrounding villages are part of the modern world but they still prefer to speak the old language, Nahuatl, over Spanish, and they have adapted traditional,clothing to modern materials.  So for a Sunday market day, the women tend to wear skirts, with a bright colorful hand,loomed waistband, a white blouse with a square neck framed by (now machine made) embroidery with geometric designs, swans and flowers, and they use a front lacy whitr draping triangular scarf that hangs to the waist, with a little embroidery on the low point of the triangle.  Babies might still be carried in a little v shaped basketry cradle on the back, or in a rebozo, and even though it has been raining a lot off the two days we have been here, many of the women are walking around barefoot in town.  In fact their feet are broad, it seems after a lifetime, modern shoes wouldnt easily fit.  More women have switched to pants but they might still use a variant on the embroidered top if they don't prefer newer styles.  And some of the older ladies still coil their hair up on thir heads, then fold their lacy white scarf up in a flat stack on top of that. It's nice.  At first the only people we saw dressing so traditionally, were trying to sell all us tourists -- who are 99% frommexico -- their local products of embroidery, home woven scarfs or cinnamon or napkin holders; but as market day got rolling the out of towners arrive by combi and older dress styles became common.

The local villagers love white for everyday.  The men wear a white carribean style shirt over baggy white trousers that are cinched in at the calf or ankle.  The women often have both white embroidered tops, and white skirts. The men often wear a very simple unusual huarache like half a flipflop in front, with a roman style strap around the ankle and usually the sole is an old tire.

Everyone is really pretty short.  Midday, we saw a pair of European looking men, bald tall twins, who knew everyone, well those men really towered.  After seeing them we realized, everyone in town knows who craig and I are, we can't hide. And they clearly think we look and dress pretty funny.

Yesterday Craig was pretty sure he had not been detected, photographing a woman and her son wildly chasing a large clean pig around town.  Who knew. Today the same lady called out to us, Next to her now dead clean pig, on the market table, she said, don't you know it's me?  Let's see the pictures!  We all had a good laugh together of her chasing her pig.  And she offered to pose for us again, with mr or miss pig.  We realized, everyone sees us, may as just relax and have fun.

And that's why this entry, is titled The Combi Passes. Combis are our way, of getting to  sit around  with locals, and coming into their territory, to the world where you'd never dream of getting your own taxi, where waiting patiently til the van fills up every seat AND two more in the front seat AND several people standing clutching the bars in the ceiling.  People are kind, and chat, and make sure you get on, because after all you are a welcome stranger and they can study you, right up close.

Up In Coffeeland

Flying to Mexico is always a bit exhausting as I usually end up getting only a couple of hours sleep on the plane. This trip was no exception.  We arrived in Mexico City at 5am, caught the 7am bus to Puebla, and by 10am we were exploring this wonderful city in central Mexico. Puebla is famous for many things, but mostly for its beautiful talavera and mole poblano.

Talavera is pottery. Here it is first class stuff, mostly hand made and hand painted. Te good stuff ain't cheap, but what really nice artwork these days is?  We spent the first morning walking around town, going in practically every talavera shop we saw. Funny thing is, we didn't see anything we liked better then the talavera we got years ago in Dolores Hidalgo, a town near San Miguel.

In between talavera shops, we went into this little chapel, the Templo de Santo Domingo. You could say this chapel is ornate, but that would be putting it mildly. Seriously, this chapel was the most ornate thing I've ever seen. So much carved gilded wood, little statues, tile work, you name it. Gold everywhere. It was amazing.

After a well deserved nap and some more walking around, we went for dinner to the Mural de Puebla, which got a good write up in Lonely Planet.  This restaurant is famous for its seasonal dishes and we were lucky to be here for the delicious Huaxmole, which is a wonderful goat dish.  There is a long history about this dish, but in short, for hundreds of years there was a specific time of year when goats were brought into town and slaughtered and the meat sold to rich folks. But the poor got the not so good bits, including the hip. These folks made this wonderful spicy broth and cooked the goat in it.   And of course now, this is a great delicacy and is no longer for the poor, at least in restaurants where it can be a bit pricy. The goat is oh so tender and the broth is a beautiful red color and spicy. We washed this down with an amazing mescal from Oaxaca, the smoothest most delicious mescal I've ever had. We followed this up with a 5 mole sampler, which included the mole poblano, plus 4 others, a green, a red, a yellow, a light brown and another I can't remember. This was washed down with a Shiraz from northern Mexico that was delicious!

Today we are in Cuetzalan, a beautiful in northern Puebla state, about 4 hours from Puebla. It has been pouring rain since we've been here, but we've still explored the town, which is famous for its coffee. In fact, this town got rich on coffee over 100 years ago.  The people here are very friendly and tomorrow there is a big mercado where indigenous people from all over the region come and sell stuff, including hand made huipiles, which Amy just loves. Tonight we are going to a concert and dance show where we might see the Voladores!

Heavenly goat in Puebla

So there is a scene in the best of children's books, Charlotte's Web, when Templeton, the rat, drags himself in after a great gourmet binge (for a rat).  That's a little bit how we feel tonight after being pampered at Mural de Puebla, a womderful restaurant featuring very lovingly cooked moles and regional dishes and coaxing us into trying fine local mezcal anejo and Shiraz grown in the Mexican border state of Coahuila.

We have enjoyed finishing Day 1 in Puebla.  From the minute we got on our short United Air nonstop to Mexico city, we knew we were already in a different land.  When we disembarked and met Luis, the tall African-Mexican, all American boy who happens to be a pro basketball player who's using his unusual skill to finance living all over the world, we knew we were back in the world of adventure travel.   We love the Mexico city airport now with its odd conglomeration of Mexico city stools:  street food like stalls of chilaquiles next to the "mi sushi" chain next to the "Italian coffee" chain next to McDonalds.  Makes it kinda hard to figure out, what SHOULD we be ordering for breakfast.
Once we were snug on our luxury bus to Puebla, on the front row seats, I apparently slept an hour as the dawn lit up the jagged peaks around Mexico city basin.  There in the early morning sun I work to see two  beautiful volcanoes, one extinct, one live, dominating the sky with wispy steam, with classic volcano steam pooling above in the chilly high altitude air. In front were corn fields and rows of corn stalks and the occasional donkey cart, right up against the modern freeway! Pretty cool.

We spent much of the day just roaming Puebla. Beautiful city. Yeah it's a moder n city so AmeriicanHalloween is big, haunted house shrieks are everywhere,, gazillions of shiny red devil costumes.  But also the tall brick and tile patterned house stand proud and people are beginning to assemble the colors and send of the season, All Souls Day in ireland, but here in Mexico, so much more, a mystical look at lifr and death with huge indigenous overtones,getting ready to embrace and welcome the possible visits from everyone they've lost.

Oops, falling asleep! Too much wine and tequila based alcohol st dimmer.  But boy was  it good!

Celebration of the Dead with the Living!

In Mexico, during the end of October and beginning of November, is a unique celebration of the ancestors, a celebration going way back to pre hispanic days, called Dia de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead.  We've been to Mexico before for this great fiesta, to Patzcuaro in 2003 and Oaxaca in 2007, but we've never been to the state of Puebla, which is where we are going now.

Although the city of Puebla is the fifth largest in Mexico, few Americans go here, preferring of course to go to the beach resorts.  But Puebla is an amazing place, with wonderful traditions, colorful fiestas and delicious cuisine.  This is where mole comes from, in fact the most popular mole in Mexico is called mole poblano after this fair city.  There are more unusual things eaten here, such as chapulines (grasshoppers) and escamole (ant eggs).

During this adventure, we will be visiting some mountain villages with ancient ruins, watch men called Voladores who are suspended 100 feet in the air by their feet and twirl around a pole, visit one of the most active volcanoes in the world, go to a month long fiesta in the city of Tlaxcala, go to local homes to see offrendas (alters that people build to celebrate their ancestors) and who knows what else. So come on along and join us as Amy and I continue our search for the unique, bizarre and fun!