Category: Flavors

Postcard from Oaxaca: Serious salads

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Gorgeous greens, so incredibly fresh they taste as though the kitchen just harvested them from a rooftop garden.

Not the stereotypical first food post from Oaxaca, but the salads in this capital of respectful fusion of ancient cooking traditions and contemporary presentations are that good. Long-gone are the days when traveling Americans need feel constrained in vegetable consumption, and Oaxaca is about more than mole.

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Among the salads we have sampled recently are:

  • Mounds of fresh watercress – berros – with pears, Roquefort and honey, a wonderful spinach and grapefruit salad and yet another one with roasted nopales, asparagus and smoky quesillo at La Biznaga
  • Spinach salad with a round of goat cheese and crispy adornment at Los Danzantes
  • An organic salad with strawberries and crispy strips of sweet potatoes and one layering fresh nopales and roasted baby kale topped with luscious enormous shrimp covered with chapulines, toasted grasshoppers – a Oaxacaan delicacy – at La Olla
  • Spinach salad topped with pomegranate seeds and a stone-ground mustard vinaigrette at El Morocco Café
  • An abundance of arugula and pears at Mexita

More food posts ahead.

Farmers bring their bounty to Southtown

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Weekend mornings are meant for slow starts. I like to take full advantage of that concept and ease into the day. This means I rarely make it to the farmers markets at Pearl or the Quarry, but Heather Hunter and David Lent actually have brought one to my neighborhood, the Southtown Farmers & Ranchers Market in the parking lot of Blue Star.

I realize early risers get the best picks at a market, and yesterday, as the hand on my watch ticked toward noon, it definitely was too late to ensure a chicken in my pot. Fresh non-GMO and soy-free eggs and whole chickens were all sold out. But there was still an ample supply of most other things remaining for the lazy.

The market’s website profiles the vendors, so hop on over there to get acquainted with the farmers setting up shop every Saturday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. But produce isn’t the only thing available.

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For humans, there are raw milk cheeses from Dos Lunas and luscious pastries from Bakery Lorraine; well-behaved dogs can get rewarded with healthy treats such as savory empanadas stuffed with grass-fed beef or “ginger bones” from Katie’s Jar. Gretchen Bee Ranch harvests honey from 100 hives in 10 apiaries located in Bexar and three neighboring counties, and the beeswax candles are beautiful. Lunch for us can be solved with falafel wraps from Señor Veggie or whole-wheat spinach-filled paratha from Nisha’s.

My favorite sampling yesterday was the spicy Aztec dark chocolate from Peggy Cloar’s High Street Chocolate of Comfort. She said she developed her intensely flavored chocolates to accompany red wine tastings at vineyards. No wine around, but they tasted fine without.

September 2, 2013, Update: John Griffin writes about those interesting striped Armenian cucumbers…

Stepping out our door smack into First Friday

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When we first bought our loft in King William, we walked over to the patio at Azuca for lunch. It immediately hit us that we were going to live in the exact spot we would want to stay if we were on vacation in San Antonio – a block off the river, a quick walk into downtown, in the midst of an emerging restaurant scene.

Last night, we strolled through Southtown’s First Friday for about 20 minutes before sitting down with banh mi sandwiches from the Duk Truck at Alamo Street Eat to listen to a set by Mitch Webb and the Swindles. I snapped a few – well, a lot of – photos on the way, all taken within about a three-block radius of our house.

I would recommend any of the food stops in the photos, and I cheated by throwing in our favorite weekend lunch spot – Tre Trattoria Downtown.