b-fast

if you find yourself stirring a pot of chocolate and mosh and cinnamon, slow, on a Saturday morning, it means all the American anxiousness over wasted time has finally filtered out of your body. it means you no longer care about morning efficiency, about THINGS you surely have to do and are instead mandando a la mierda by scraping, over and over again (slowly always slowly), the lumps of almost disintegrated cocoa out of the bottom of the pot. it means the dark, 24-year-long era of cereal and instant oats is over.  

it means: you are not just eating in the morning because you’re hungry, because that’s what was in the house, because you have to eat because it’s “time.” (it also means: the fact that you can consider any of these things is because you’re on vacation.) it means you woke up and saw that it was grey and drizzling outside and this focused your hunger down to a desire for something warm and sweet. and this made you think of the wide world of atoles that exist, at once hearty and delicately textured, cinnamon-accented, hot. and something with crunch a la par, a hunk of good bread.

it means you have to eat pan tostado, and drink atol de chocolate con mosh. it means this deliberateness is not extravagant, not wasteful, but honoring the fact that you’re even awake, that you can be hungry, that on one of the last mornings in your home of the past two and a half years, it’s worth it to make something good.

Mexico #2: ahorita is unknowable, but memelitas are now

The bus that was supposed to leave at 9:30 leaves at 9:55, and when I say leave, I mean backs out from one bus station in town and immediately goes and parks at another. The bus does not show signs of prompt departure, as driver disembarks and says we'll be leaving en un ratito, which is a measurement of time spanning five minutes to eternity. The bus is small and rocking a quality bachata playlist. Two of the bus's occupants, Pato and myself, ate crumbly bread and weak coffee for breakfast, and are bemoaning the fact that we did not think to bring anything more substantive with us. Overwhelmed by bachata and a full bladder, I exit the bus; Pato disappears. Coming back from the bathroom, sin ganas de subir al bus, sin ganas de estar encerrada en el micro todo el pinche dia, I see Pato holding out the fruits of his secret labors: memelitas, expertly retrieved from a woman working a small griddle just outside. 

I don't know if this true for everyone, but edible gifts inspire in me an eagerness, giddy anticipation of the shared discovery we're about to have, almost like a dare -- "we're gonna taste this cool new thing together it looks pretty freakin weird hope we like it there's no knowing oops too late it's in our mouths now anyhow" -- and people who come bearing edible gifts earn a kind of gratitude from me that goes beyond any-other-kind-of-present gratitude. Something to do with being fed = being cared for on both the most basic level there is + the level I like best, that is, the level where I'm eating.  

Anyway -- so the memelitas are brought. Two corn masa griddlecakes/tortilla type things, one a black and white check of beans and queso fresco, the other a savory smear of potato and chorizo. Because Pato bought them, they're also doused liberally in chile -- the papa-chorizo with red, the frijol with green. They're both delicious, but for me the frijol wins the day. The color contrast is matched by the contrast of flavors, the salty, sharp cheese cutting through the savory-smoothness of the beans. We eat them and the prospect of a long day of bus hopping disappears; the future shrinks into the seconds it takes us to scrounge up more monedas to buy MORE MEMELITAS. In an incredible stroke of luck we have enough to get another frijol, another chorizo y papa, and a chicharron, which wins by default because it's chicharron. We inhale them before the bus makes it down the street. 

We agree that everyone else is stupid for not buying memelitas from that lady's stand (there was no line! NO line!) and that Pato earns a thousand points for being pilas and sniffing out what was good within a 100 meter radius from the bus. I have enough time to reflect before falling asleep that I'm lucky to be traveling with someone who recognizes the restorative powers of a well-timed memelita, the hope and goodwill that lots of chile and chicharron can bring. 

*The transbordando that began with this memelita-fueled episode was inconvenient but the reason behind it is worth reading more about. Read en español acá or English here.   

Mexico #1: pambazo

A pambazo is a thing where your friend of a friend, after drinks, after tiny street tacos (al pastor, cabeza, chorizo, chorizo, chorizo, so small the taco man has to pinch them to gather up the meat), after more drinks, after ranchero/banda karaoke, drives you up, up into the outskirts of the DF, up past stand after brightly-lit taco and torta and quesadilla stand – so bright, each one a cheery, county-fair white, small clapboard food beacons guiding you in the dark – until you reach one nestled in the corner of a quiet intersection, so high you can see the silent sweep of the city below you, so high there is a possibility the car crashed en route and you’ve in fact died and gone to Mexican food heaven. A pambazo is a thing where your friend asks the owners (an older woman, a younger woman, a middle-aged man) if they have pambazos, and they shake their heads and sigh, perdón, they’re out of bread, and you and your friend and your boyfriend all shake your heads too because boy that is a fucking lástima if I ever heard it, but then the young woman goes and rummages around and finds a surprise sleeve of bread and it’s all back on. They ask you if you want tradicional, your Mexican friend nods. So you also nod.

 A pambazo is, technically:

1-1 large-ish hamburger-type bun

2-Chili oil

3-Generous helping of chorizo and potato, bien picados, fried together

4-Queso fresco

5-Liquefied meat fat

6-Lettuce?? (doubtful)

7-Possibly more meat

A pambazo is ingredients 3-7 piled onto ingredient 1, then doused in 2, then fried on a flattop, then passed to you on a styrofoam plate, then devoured as you ponder why more things in the world aren’t drowned in chili oil and then fried. Or stuffed with potatoes. It is, in a no-nonsense kind of way, all savory, all spice. It is very good. A pambazo is also when your friend orders a horchata, and you and your boyfriend look longingly at the horchata, and the man sees the longing, and hands you a literal liter of horchata in response. And it’s GOOD, creamy in a way the horchata in Guatemala never seems to be, tasting very specifically of vanilla, of cinnamon. A pambazo is when you try to pay for this horchata and the owners refuse. You didn’t know there were people in the world who would give you a liter of horchata for free just because you looked thirsty; it is probable that these people only live in Mexico (later experiences with extreme Mexican hospitality/friendliness/kindness confirm this). A pambazo is about 20 pesos. A pambazo is a red-tinted, meaty wonder; a pambazo is the first line in a culinary love letter from Mexico, to you.

glossary of bebidas

by no means complete, accurate, or unbiased, this is a bullet-point love letter to all things para tomar*. never again will I choose water to accompany a meal with the same apathy I did before coming to Guatemala.

*specific chelas do not make an appearance here because they deserve, and will receive, their own post.

- Atoles: de arroz con leche, de arroz con chocolate (!), de elote (!!!!! think drinkable corn pudding, sometimes they even put little kernels on top), de haba (flatbean), de avena (oatmeal), de corazon de trigo (wheat heart. whart), blanco (with salt and limon. hear it's by turns gross and good for hangovers). atol makes you feel like it's christmas and you're wearing ridiculous slippers and your grandma is spoonfeeding you something straight from a great canela-scented pot, and it's also murder to drink it when it's hot out because you start sudar-ing from your esophagus outwards, pero hay que sufrir un poco por las cosas buenas de la vida.

-Agua de platano: the murky water you get when you boil plantains to make platanos cocidos. it's fucking BUENO for your salud, as I am told every time it's plantain day for breakfast and the agua de platano gets passed around. a silky essence of platano, what a plantain whisky could be like.

-Chela: see the Fine Palates Chela Taste Test post, when it finally exists.

-Chilacayote, fresco de: buhhhhhHHHHHH squash juice. Like caramelized pumpkin in drink form. The seeds are the nutty/best part.

-Crema, fresco de: have only seen this at the pupusa place on la sexta, but it's an unnatural yellow-orange color and tastes like corn syrup and has the mouthfeel of a liquified creamsicle. A favorite of five year-olds, and me.

-Frutas, fresco de: melon, naranja, sandia, pina, papaya, ...fruit blended in water with some sugar. Maybe limon if you're buscando a specific toque. Alternatively can be made with cascaras (peels) of certain fruits by boiling them in water with sugar.

-Horchata: when it's not cripplingly sweet or made from horchata powder, v rico. not my favorite but a popular party drink. can't lie, didn't understand the horchata craze in spain (made from tiger nuts); also don't get it here (made from rice), but va.

-Jamaica, fresco de: made from dried rosehips. they turn water a deep winey color when boiled together. tastes sharp, leaves your breath vaguely floral. like drinking a fragrant jewel.

-Limonada: u already know. with the chia seeds it's damn good, and also just pretty.

-Michelada: tomato juice, Worcestershire sauce, limon. This also will not be elaborated on here because of the great and powerful love to end all loves that I harbor for this soup-beverage. Will be discussed in a separate post. Woe to the person who calls it a bloody mary with beer, it is so much more than that.

-Tamarindo, fresco de: pungent, brownish. even tempered with sugar so much sugar, still tart, bordering on sour. Causes a warheads-like need to keep consuming.

tamalitos de chipilin

Tamalitos de chipilin. When you mention to your boyfriend’s mama that someone’s going to teach you to make them, she tells you she could make them in her sleep. You both laugh, but a tiny jet of egotistical aspiring master chef rage shoots into your brain, makes you grip the counter with a white-knuckled intensity. You will learn tamalitos. You will learn them so well you will also be able to make them in your sleep, and more of them. Double. Triple, maybe.

Wednesday morning is game day. You race down from breakfast into the school kitchen only to be told by the cooks that the chipilin nor the hojas have arrived. They also laugh a little at your expense because you are clearly very excited (no one gets this excited about tamalitos) and because you are sweating profusely. You also laugh, and think of how stupid you are for wearing a sweater, in summer, to make tamalitos in a steamy kitchen.

NOTE: tamalitos are not the same as tamales are not the same as paches. But maybe they are, because you’re not really sure what differentiates one from the next just yet. At the very least you know that if it only has chipilin or frijo il, and is steamed in a plantain leaf, t’s a tamalito. Also tamales blancos come with pepian and are only plain masa steamed in corn husks. Also you eat paches, filled with spicy-ish chicken, on Thursdays. Also for Navidad you can have sweet tamales with chocolate and raisins, though lastima about the raisins.

So you come back a half hour later and the hojas and chipilin are there, and you begin to pluck the leaves off of the stems of chipilin. Mayra, the head chef, tells you to smell them; they remind you of clover. They are soft and delicately aromatic and you think that if you were a rabbit you would only eat chipilin, ever. You both tear the large plantain leaves in half and save the stems to layer in the bottom of the giant olla, making a kind of natural steamer. You chat and watch her as she mixes corn flour with salt, then water, then vegetable oil (some of the kids don’t like lard. Again, lastima) and finally blocks of queso fresco. She tells you the proper tamalito consistency is on the watery side, that if the masa is tough going into the leaf then it will be even tougher coming out.

Finally (finally!!!!) Mayra asks you if you’re ready to help wrap. She shows you, slowly and with lots of accompanying verbal explanation, how to fold a handful of dough into a leaf. You try and immediately fuck up. She shows you again and you fuck that one up, too. This proves to be a pattern for the next ten or so tamales, but afterward that you kind of start to get it. Side scoop of the hand into masa; lay it on one side of the leaf; bring both sides together and roll down OR wrap one side over the other; then back end down and under, upper end also under. You occasionally refold or try to sneakily add extra leaves to patch the holes where masa spurts put of . You turn out one tamalito for every five of Mayra’s, but she is kind and tells you to keep going, that it’s only a matter of practice.

You drop by, casually, at lunch time later in the day to say hello. You are ever so pleasantly surprised when Mayra offers you a freshly steamed tamalito de chipilin. Unwrap it (you can’t remember ever having been so careful with the leaves) – all damp and shiny, flecked with the dark of the cooked chipilin – take a bite, all vaguely cheesy, salty, chewy-with-give, feels-like-home-even-though-it’s-foreign goodness; see clearly into a possible future, a very possible future, where you’re killin it with the tamalitos, even in your sleep. 

When you move to Guatemala and try to figure out how to cook you perceive that:

There is a right way to cook things. There is a wrong way to cook things.

The right way to cook things means: una olla de presión for your beans; a gigantic metal juicer for your citrus.

The wrong way means: less garlic in your salsa (porque PICA); no cumin in your beans; refusing to acknowledge that cilantro and culantro are the same thing, even after you research and discover that while they are in fact different plants you can request una mano de CUlantro at the market and receive cilantro).

Things learned: that you can picar una cebolla by sticking your knife all which ways into just a sliver around the top and then slicing, carefully, gently towards your finger, and that onion shards will drop onto your cutting board like tiny, wet diamonds; that you can get three piñas for 10 Q at el Mayoreo; that limones yield significantly (surprisingly) more juice when the sides are sliced, rendering the spherical, cubic; that a licuadora is life; that for a good chirmol you should char the tomatoes a bit before chopping them; that you cannot apagar the fuego of the parilla before you echar the platanos. You MUST grill platanos (may you always remember in shame the time you threw water on the painstakingly cultivated fire, only to have to return to the table and see the pity, the disappointment on the faces of the Guatemalans still at the table).

Thoughts changed when: you talk to a woman who tells you que piensa que, más que todo, la cocina es para experimentar, para inventar, para no tener miedo, para siempre echar mucho ajo – the affirmation you feel almost defies description. You think it’s no coincidence that her food is some of the best you’ve had since coming here. The do’s and don’ts that in your most unsure, panic-stricken moments seemed so ironclad – these soften, they give way.

And the miscellaneous: you also did not know that you would become adept at making guacamol, or that the idea of a day without eating frijoles now seems unimaginable/impossible, or that you who once scorned bread (fool.) would relish the ritual of café con pan dulce, a meal in its own right with no fixed hour. That you would come to appreciate tortillas bought at exactly the right moment, so as to still be hot when you unwrap them from their cloth-covered stack on the table. 

churrasquear

Churasquear means:

you stick a bunch of coals and leaves and fatwood and pine needles and other dry-looking shit into the mouth of the brick kiln grill-thing out back and use three packs of matches trying to light it. At one point pour cusha (moonshine-y liquid) on half of it, thinking that alcohol will make things more flammable, when in fact it just makes things damp. despair a bit. by some miracle of wind and an unexpectedly large burst of flame from a spastic lighter, get the damn thing going. watch flame shoot out from several unexpected grill-orifices. have an insane I-am-lord-of-the-elements power trip for a few minutes, then start putting together things to actually cook.

roast the tomatoes from the street market (earlier: be outraged at the price of tomatoes, but buy them at 6Q a libra anyway because a churrasco without chirmol is like a churrasco without guacamol or frijoles, which is to say, not one worth having), mash the aguacates, season the chicken, chop cilantro, dice onions, peel garlic, squeeze limones, run up and down the stairs from the kitchen to the backyard a bunch of times.

revel in hands made black and greasy from pulling things off the grill. prod things unnecessarily with the machete because machete + fire. put on the old school reggaeton playlist, sube el volumen, dance like fools.

keep throwing cebollines, tortillas and papas on the grate until it's too dark to see. then put on four steaks. smear chimichurri someone just brought from walmart on everything that hasn't already been carried to the table. make sure no one tries the micheladas until 4 more limes have been added. run out for more tortillas and several liters of beer.

fall onto your stool. inhale the bean-tortilla-guacamole-chirmol-beer-chicken mixture you've piled onto your plate. when so full you begin to slump out of your chair, somehow manage to make more room for pan dulce and cafe. don't fall asleep, don't let the night end.

is this a commune?

a few clarifications while this sputtering project of a food blog gets restarted:

-while I am no longer in college, it is safe to say I am still on a college student's budget

-the questions/support of several former readers (evanka, madison, adri, jordan, steph, anna, mame, this is your shoutout) made me consider, and eventually decide to, restart the blog. also this makes it sound like there's some big ole readership floating out there in the interwebs. there's not, but the people who were reading it seemed to like it, which is encouragement enough.

-going to try and make this as non-traveler-voyeuristic as possible. if it veers into that territory please god yall let me know.  

I wanted to keep this up last year. I really did. A series of strange, slow and occasionally uncomfortable personal revelations kept me away from writing in general BUT. but. Trying to get that whole bit up and going again. So we'll see how it goes.

Now onto the meat of the post:

Just started a new job in Guatemala in a suburb of the city called Villa Nueva. The neighborhood where I'm living happens to be v close to a large market (series of markets is probably more accurate), which is lovely because last year the part of town where I was living had a 40 min roundtrip bus ride involved whenever one wished to go to the market. a deterrent. But now it's gone + on top of that the neighborhood has a number of people who sell fruit/veggies/meat from their houses, so fresh & cheap foodstuffs are closer than ever. also 1Q (think a dollar divided by 7.5. or work it out. this isn't a math blog so I won't) chocofrutas aka sticks of frozen chocolate-covered fruit. blessings abound.

now people are in the kitchen making salsa, roasting vegetables, mashing avocados (3x10Q) together. two people just worked together to string lights across the rooftop and into the room. there's a shelf full of baskets with all of our names on them where we can store our things, and one community basket (sharing <3 I'm a kitchen mooch so this is a dream come true). there's also apparently a community food budget. and we have group dinners most nights of the week, if this is a commune (is it a commune???) it's pretty nice so far.

PS a sizeable chunk of the roof of the school building is a GARDEN with HERBS and EDIBLE FLOWERS. also there's a compost bin. possibilities. let the horitcultural scheming begin.