Tag: mescal

Postcard from Puebla, Mexico: My first bilingual dream

postcardsfromsanantonioLeave a comment

The conversion of high season for chiles poblanos, walnuts and pomegranates translates into a prime time to visit one of Mexico’s UNESCO World Heritage Sites – Puebla. The simultaneous ripening of those crops mean chiles en nogado are found on almost every menu. We heeded the call.

The city is ancient, founded by the Spanish as Puebla de los Angeles in 1531. One of the notable characteristics singled out by UNESCO is the logical grid layout of Puebla’s urban center. But logic and sense of direction are not among my strong suits.

Instead of learning the streets by their numbers and compass-orientation during our month of wanderings, I found myself referring to them by their retail occupants. There is the lawnmower street, the backpack street and the street of optician after optician to make price comparisons and style selection easier. There are corners noted for their cemita sandwiches, tacos arabes and, my favorite, freshly fried platano chips.

All extremely memorable landmarks not part of the UNESCO nomination.

There is a block full of shirts for los caballeros, blocks of Cinderella dresses and even a block lined with studio after studio of mariachi musicians.

And, who could not fall under the spell of a city with such an incredible sweet tooth? The main quarter for dulces probably stretches a mile.

While Puebla is one of Mexico’s colonial cities, it is no San Miguel de Allende. Its magic is that it is a bustling urban center clearly demonstrating the increasing rise of the middle class in modern-day Mexico. While there are a lot of tourists from Mexico City, there are relatively few Americans. The Main Plaza and pedestrian streets are filled with people who actually live there year-round.

Which brings me around to my first bilingual dream. With so few Americans staying there long-term, we two gringos spending a month there seemed to represent somewhat of a curiosity. Parents would smile for permission and then send their 12-year-olds over to us to practice their English. Everywhere we went, people were extremely friendly and flattered we had chosen such an extended stay in their city.

Then there was this empresario who was “muy, muy importante,” he explained several times. Yes, he was a bit inebriated in the late afternoon in the company of his adult son and the pouty-lipped, shapely woman of the same age who I misunderstood to be his third wife but actually was, by her own definition, one of his three girlfriends. He started sending us shots of a rich smoky mezcal for toasting. He soon invited himself to partake of them with us at our table, and proceeded to let us know how happy he was to see Americans enjoying Mexico. And how he was important. And how happy he was to see us. And that meant more mescal all around. And it was not easy to escape politely.

Yes, he was obnoxious. But he truly was friendly and exemplified the warmth of the welcome we felt everywhere in Puebla, despite the current rhetoric spewing from the mouths of some American candidates for president.

But the best part was that the empresario led linguistically-impaired me to have a dream in Spanish. That night in my sleep, his mescal-driven dialogue replayed. And, as we rose to escape, I heard him utter yet again: “A proposito….” “By the way….”

 

Postcard from Oaxaca: Grasshoppers leap from barfood to gourmet

postcardsfromsanantonio1 Comment

A grasshopper that sleeps will soon awake in a lizard’s mouth.

African proverb

Given the way grasshoppers can leap, wonder how anyone catches all the mounds of grasshoppers, chapulines, the vendors offer for sale in the markets of Oaxaca.

Debbie Hadley points out on about.com:

If you’ve ever tried to catch a grasshopper, you know how far they can jump to flee danger. If humans could jump the way grasshoppers do, we would easily leap the length of a football field or more. How do they jump so far? It’s all in those big, back legs. A grasshopper’s hind legs function like miniature catapults. When it wants to jump, the grasshopper contracts its large flexor muscles slowly, bending its hind legs at the knee joint. A special piece of cuticle within the knee acts as a spring, storing up all that potential energy. When the grasshopper is ready to jump, it relaxes the leg muscles, allowing the spring to release its energy and catapulting its body into the air.

Plus, they can fly.

Since ancient times, people in the hills and valleys of Oaxaca have consumed insects of various kinds. They are a widely available source of protein.

Grasshoppers, small locusts, can do an incredible amount of damage, the sort of damage resembling the plagues of the Bible. If a grasshopper consumes half its body weight in plants everyday, imagine what swarms can do, the kind of swarms that blocked out the sun in parts of the Midwest during 1931.

In the United States, 2010 was a worry-some year once again in the Midwest. But farmers have a superhero helping them fight such invasions. Charles L. Brown is the American czar of grasshoppers, the national policy manager for Grasshopper Control for the United States Department of Agriculture. And among his arsenal of weapons is metarhizium acridum, a mycoinsecticide. This is regarded as a form of “natural” control using entomopathogenic fungi to invade the grasshoppers bodies, take them over and kill them.

Sounds like your worst nightmare, body-invasion-type of horror film to me. Attack of the Fungi.

Makes the Mexican solution much more palatable as an intelligent form of insect control, perfect for organic gardeners everywhere.

Suppose all of those grasshoppers in the marketplace had been left to hop wherever they wanted, ravaging crops along the way? Instead they are being eaten. After being toasted on a comal with chiles and garlic and seasoned with salt and lime, the crunchy treats can be gobbled up by the handful like popcorn or wrapped in tortillas.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Although I never cared much for the greasy version offered in bars to accompany mezcal, I’m totally open to consumption in more upscale eateries. The enormous shrimp atop a nopal and roasted kale salad at La Olla were crawling with them, and they swarmed the ancho chile relleno at Los Danzantes.

And, true confession, we’ve consumed more insects than just grasshoppers. The Mister’s plate at El Origen was sprinkled with tasty ground black ants, chicatanas.

Oh, and you remember the nasty squirmy-looking worm in the bad bottles of rot-gut mezcal people used to bring home from Mexico as more of a joke? Well, he’s come out of the bottle and onto plates as well. A maguey worm, gusano del maguey, is actually a caterpillar that feeds on the heart of maguey, or agave, plants before emerging as an Aegiale hesperiaris butterfly. The more common red worms, chinicuiles, larvae of a moth that inhabit agave, are ground up with salt and chile to accompany a glass of mezcal, which has gone upscale as well.

Salud!