Tag: michoacan

Postcard from Mexico City: Pausing for a playful food break at Mercado Roma

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Close to 60 vendors are squeezed into the multi-story Mercado Roma, yet somehow I ended up with no photo overviews to show you even though we ducked in there several times. I tend not to enjoy the crowds crammed into narrow aisles of gourmet food halls, but, by visiting midday midweek, we found sitting at a counter very pleasant.

Serrano ham, Puebla-style cemitas, Spanish tapas, cheeses. One quickly senses this is a playground for chefs from established restaurants to experiment. So many places seductively beckoned us, but we stopped twice near the front at Saigon Cocina Vietnam. Large, plump shrimp punctuated with lemongrass atop rice starred in a made-to-order daily special. The flavorful scene-stealer proved to be the tuna banh mi spiked with the perfect amount of ginger sandwiched in fresh, firm French bread. A nice bottle of red can be procured from an outpost of Tinto Mx to accompany your meal.

The danger in eating at the counter at Saigon Cocina is posed by its neighbor, Que Bo, lurking behind your back. Chocolatero Jose Ramon Castillo tempts you with a display case full of gleaming Crayola-colored chocolates. On several occasions I managed to limit myself to letting just one melt in my mouth, slowly releasing layers of complex flavors. Also, tucked away in a back corner of Mercado Roma is a booth full of gourmet paletas, Bendita Paleta, that represent successful crossbreeding of traditional Mexican popsicles and Italian gelato waiting to be dipped in a chocolate of your choice.

Saigon Cocina tuna bahn mi
chocolates in the display case of QueBo
Seneri pollo de campo
Seneri crudo de pescado
Seneri avocado and cheese amuse bouche
Seneri fried charl taquito amuse bouche
Seneri
Que Bo box of chocolate toys
open kitchen at counter of Saigon Cocina Vietnam
Bendita Paleta
Saigon Cocina Vietnam arroz with shrimp and lemongrass lunch special
Seneri callo (scallops) y fresas
Seneri Uruapan helado de aguacate

On a Saturday when the market was hopping, we opted to seek refuge in the soothing, serene surroundings of a full-service restaurant upstairs, Seneri. Chef Fernando Martinez adds a contemporary twist to traditional foods from his home state of Michoacán, and he won us over immediately with an amuse-bouche of a rustic corn taquito topped with a sassy-looking fried charral, a crispy little whitefish we enjoyed mountains of served aboard one of the floating boat/restaurants on Lake Patzcuaro about 25 years ago. The crudo de pescado nestled in a foamy bed adorned with perky flowers was almost too pretty to eat, but we managed. Chicken de campo was enriched by a sauce of wild mushrooms. Avocado ice-cream served as a refreshing but not-too-sweet dessert. The entire meal was perfectly paced. We were never rushed, yet never left glancing toward the kitchen in search of the next course.

Mercado Roma might have won me over on the concept of gourmet food halls.

Leaving you with a glance at more of the chocolatero’s mouth-watering creations….

Attention, monarchs: Please fly south now for your winter vacation.

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The migrating butterflies were extremely late and unusually reproductive this year. Migrating butterflies do not typically reproduce. Rather, they save their energy for a spring orgy in Mexico that launches the following year’s first generation of butterflies.

As October gave way to the first day of November and the hottest temperatures in history, Monarchs continued their reproductive activities–dropping eggs, hatching caterpillars and forming chrysalises up until Election Day. Scientists, citizen scientists and casual observers all wondered: what the heck is going on?

Monica Maeckle, Texas Butterfly Ranch

butterfly2The monarchs are worrying me. They are still here, yet they have so far to go. Large ones* flutter in the trees across the yard from my writer’s perch. The small new beds of milkweed along the river in the King William area are covered with them,* and caterpillars still are stripping leaves to bulk up for their conversion into flyers. They don’t seem worried at all.

caterpillarAlways have been amazed that some of these fluttering flimsy-seeming creatures fly all the way from Montreal, Canada, to Michoacán, Mexico. The caterpillar in the photo is a lucky one we spied on a friend’s patio in Queretaro last month. When he sprouts wings, he will have a much shorter journey to the monarchs’ winter haven.

But the ones on the river and outside my window need to hurry southward before a freeze heads this way. We’re not sure we can count on Nurse Jane Fuzzy Wuzzy to spring from the pages of Uncle Wiggily to patch frozen wings with marshmallow cream.

In Flight Behavior, author Barbara Kingsolver weaves a tale of climate changes confusing migrating monarchs, causing them to lose their bearings and tragically roost in Appalachia one winter.

Entomologist Dr. Ovid Byron speaking to television journalist, Tina, who says, re: global warming, “Scientists of course are in disagreement about whether this is happening and whether humans have a role.”

He replies: “The Arctic is genuinely collapsing. Scientists used to call these things the canary in the mine. What they say now is, The canary is dead. We are at the top of Niagara Falls, Tina, in a canoe. There is an image for your viewers. We got here by drifting, but we cannot turn around for a lazy paddle back when you finally stop pissing around. We have arrived at the point of an audible roar. Does it strike you as a good time to debate the existence of the falls?”

Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior

*Assuming these are monarchs and not monarch mimickers? My expertise in identifying butterflies is nonexistent.