August 4 - Seasons of the Heart Cooking School
I took a day off of Spanish school to go to cooking school. I planned this while I was still back in the U.S.
It was an all-day adventure in shopping and cooking Mexican food with Susana Trilling, a cookbook author and teacher. I had heard a lot about her from the people on www.chowhound.com.
The morning began rather inauspiciously. I was getting ready and looked out the window because the roof dogs across the way were whining and barking a lot.
The puppy on the roof had gotten his head stuck between a piece of fence and the wall, and the other dog, a big rottweiler, was barking to try and bring attention to his friend's plight.
I was so horrified but also freaked out that I would be late to the class. I ran over there and rang the bell a bunch of times, but there was no answer. I came back and wrote a note for Gloria, hoping that she would understand my Spanish. I felt helpless and jangled by the whole thing, and I could still hear the dog whining when I left.
I ended up taking a taxi downtown so I wouldn't be late. Of course I wasn’t late. I was still in Mexico, after all.
I was the first one there. The driver was 35 minutes late, so I had plenty of time to wait and get to know my fellow classmates.
My Classmates
There were about 8 of us total. 3 ladies who had either retired or were going to retire to Oaxaca. Crazy old artist types. A younger woman who had visited Oaxaca 8 times, alone, and who considered it her second home.
A cute old Jewish couple from New York who were joining some family on vacation. They had just arrived the night before and were pretty shell-shocked still.
And a midwestern couple of cooks - one cook and one pastry chef, very young and enthusiastic and knowledgeable about food.
The Etla Mercado
We took a van out to Etla, a little village about 12 miles out of town. It was market day there, and Susana met up with us at the market.
She does the same class every Wednesday, so she has a bunch of market vendors she visits regularly. They all know she is coming and prepare little tastes of local delicacies for the touring gringos.
We tried chapulines (of course. I didn’t, citing my vegetarian diet), pumpkin seeds, roasted water yams (yuca) with honey, sweet potatoes, a type of cornstarch pudding, queso, quesillo, and requeson, which is a type of soft curds like ricotta cooked over a wood fire.
We also tried whole-wheat bread, white bread, pan de conejo (bread shaped like a bunny and glazed with honey), gelatina (gelatin parfaits - I skipped that too), atole de chocolate (chocolate cornstarch drink), and tejate, a very exotic tasting drink made of corn, cacao, mamey seeds and cacao flowers.
It looked like it had the texture of wet cement - it is sort of foamy and grey - but it was delicious and people were lining up for it.
We also got the opportunity to taste nieves, which of course I had had before. I chose something new for me - rompope, which is made with a local eggnog-flavored liqueur manufactured by nuns.
Inside the Etla market, women selling tejate, a drink
It was a real old fashioned market with pans of yellow chicken feet, whole chickens, pig’s trotters, huge ropes of ugly black blood sausage, big wavy sheets of crispy chicharon (pork skin), thin strips of meat hung like rags over wooden dowels, as well as all the usual fruits and veggies and women selling chapulines from trays.
Chapulines (teeny tiny grasshopers) have a very particular, distinctive, and powerful odor that has started to get to me. The market had at least a dozen women circulating with those damn chapulines! I don't know what made it start turning my stomach. Now I try to stay as far away as possible from them, but they sneak up on you when you least expect it.
There were also some kids selling a pan of very fresh, fat red wriggling maguey worms, like you find in the bottom of mezcal bottles.
Apparently you can just toast them and eat them as crunchy snacks.
I bought a few things at market. Yet another embroidered blouse, this one with marguerite daisies on it (I think this makes 7); a Cementos Cruz Azul swatch-style watch for Greg that may or may not work (Cementos Cruz Azul is a huge cement company and sponsors the most popular soccer team - kinda like the Lakers, you see their logo everywhere); and a very sturdy market bag made of an empty polyester seed bag, for 3 1/2 pesos -- 35 cents).
Susana's House
We drove out to Susana's ranch, which is far out of Etla in the countryside. The car had to drive through a river to get there, and there were people out washing clothes in the river on the stones.
It is a beautiful place on top of a hill, with a big patio, a huge dining room with a domed roof, and a large, professional kitchen. Susana built it for having cooking classes at.
The kitchen
The dome is above the dining room area, which has the dishwashing area on one side. Because of the dome, there are amazing acoustics - if you stand exactly opposite someone on the other side of the dome, you can speak very quietly and hear them perfectly - the sound is amplified. It was so odd to sit there and have it sound like someone was washing dishes right next to me when they were 40 feet away.
We learn to cook Oaxacan-style
Susana explained the 5 recipes we were going to make, then we and her 3 helpers went to work chopping and slicing, and she pretty much disappeared.
I helped make tamales. Another woman and I made a very complex mole, with chiles, chocolate, banana and potato, and we shredded pre-cooked chicken and chopped eggs and green olives for the filling.
We spent forever mixing masa and lard - yes, I got my hands covered in pig fat - and the whole class learned to wrap the tamales in banana leaves to steam them.
Making tamales in banana leaves - that's Susana on right in pink
The other dishes we made were avocado-jicama-pineapple salad, a stew of chicken in red mole with green olives, a tortilla soup with chunks of cheese and avocado, and a "Pay" (the Mexican spelling of pie, because pie means foot and is pronounced pee-ay) de queso - a kind of soft cheesecake with raisins soaked in mezcal and guavas.
Somehow, miraculously, it all got done. It was really nice to have helpers cleaning up after us.
Then we sat down at the table together and stuffed ourselves like pigs. At the end, Susana gave us a going-away present of tools to make atole or hot chocolate, and we were back on the road again about 6:45 p.m.
Sitting down to chow
One of the women tried to talk me into going out dancing with her.
But I said no and she kept insisting and insisting. So I did the passive-aggressive thing. I took her number and told her I would call her, knowing I wouldn't. Bad of me, I know. But otherwise I knew she would never shut up!
I was finally able to talk to Greg tonight. The phone came back on this afternoon. What a relief to hear his voice and just be able to chat.
It was an all-day adventure in shopping and cooking Mexican food with Susana Trilling, a cookbook author and teacher. I had heard a lot about her from the people on www.chowhound.com.
The morning began rather inauspiciously. I was getting ready and looked out the window because the roof dogs across the way were whining and barking a lot.
The puppy on the roof had gotten his head stuck between a piece of fence and the wall, and the other dog, a big rottweiler, was barking to try and bring attention to his friend's plight.
I was so horrified but also freaked out that I would be late to the class. I ran over there and rang the bell a bunch of times, but there was no answer. I came back and wrote a note for Gloria, hoping that she would understand my Spanish. I felt helpless and jangled by the whole thing, and I could still hear the dog whining when I left.
I ended up taking a taxi downtown so I wouldn't be late. Of course I wasn’t late. I was still in Mexico, after all.
I was the first one there. The driver was 35 minutes late, so I had plenty of time to wait and get to know my fellow classmates.
My Classmates
There were about 8 of us total. 3 ladies who had either retired or were going to retire to Oaxaca. Crazy old artist types. A younger woman who had visited Oaxaca 8 times, alone, and who considered it her second home.
A cute old Jewish couple from New York who were joining some family on vacation. They had just arrived the night before and were pretty shell-shocked still.
And a midwestern couple of cooks - one cook and one pastry chef, very young and enthusiastic and knowledgeable about food.
The Etla Mercado
We took a van out to Etla, a little village about 12 miles out of town. It was market day there, and Susana met up with us at the market.
She does the same class every Wednesday, so she has a bunch of market vendors she visits regularly. They all know she is coming and prepare little tastes of local delicacies for the touring gringos.
We tried chapulines (of course. I didn’t, citing my vegetarian diet), pumpkin seeds, roasted water yams (yuca) with honey, sweet potatoes, a type of cornstarch pudding, queso, quesillo, and requeson, which is a type of soft curds like ricotta cooked over a wood fire.
We also tried whole-wheat bread, white bread, pan de conejo (bread shaped like a bunny and glazed with honey), gelatina (gelatin parfaits - I skipped that too), atole de chocolate (chocolate cornstarch drink), and tejate, a very exotic tasting drink made of corn, cacao, mamey seeds and cacao flowers.
It looked like it had the texture of wet cement - it is sort of foamy and grey - but it was delicious and people were lining up for it.
We also got the opportunity to taste nieves, which of course I had had before. I chose something new for me - rompope, which is made with a local eggnog-flavored liqueur manufactured by nuns.
Inside the Etla market, women selling tejate, a drink
It was a real old fashioned market with pans of yellow chicken feet, whole chickens, pig’s trotters, huge ropes of ugly black blood sausage, big wavy sheets of crispy chicharon (pork skin), thin strips of meat hung like rags over wooden dowels, as well as all the usual fruits and veggies and women selling chapulines from trays.
Chapulines (teeny tiny grasshopers) have a very particular, distinctive, and powerful odor that has started to get to me. The market had at least a dozen women circulating with those damn chapulines! I don't know what made it start turning my stomach. Now I try to stay as far away as possible from them, but they sneak up on you when you least expect it.
There were also some kids selling a pan of very fresh, fat red wriggling maguey worms, like you find in the bottom of mezcal bottles.
Apparently you can just toast them and eat them as crunchy snacks.
I bought a few things at market. Yet another embroidered blouse, this one with marguerite daisies on it (I think this makes 7); a Cementos Cruz Azul swatch-style watch for Greg that may or may not work (Cementos Cruz Azul is a huge cement company and sponsors the most popular soccer team - kinda like the Lakers, you see their logo everywhere); and a very sturdy market bag made of an empty polyester seed bag, for 3 1/2 pesos -- 35 cents).
Susana's House
We drove out to Susana's ranch, which is far out of Etla in the countryside. The car had to drive through a river to get there, and there were people out washing clothes in the river on the stones.
It is a beautiful place on top of a hill, with a big patio, a huge dining room with a domed roof, and a large, professional kitchen. Susana built it for having cooking classes at.
The kitchen
The dome is above the dining room area, which has the dishwashing area on one side. Because of the dome, there are amazing acoustics - if you stand exactly opposite someone on the other side of the dome, you can speak very quietly and hear them perfectly - the sound is amplified. It was so odd to sit there and have it sound like someone was washing dishes right next to me when they were 40 feet away.
We learn to cook Oaxacan-style
Susana explained the 5 recipes we were going to make, then we and her 3 helpers went to work chopping and slicing, and she pretty much disappeared.
I helped make tamales. Another woman and I made a very complex mole, with chiles, chocolate, banana and potato, and we shredded pre-cooked chicken and chopped eggs and green olives for the filling.
We spent forever mixing masa and lard - yes, I got my hands covered in pig fat - and the whole class learned to wrap the tamales in banana leaves to steam them.
Making tamales in banana leaves - that's Susana on right in pink
The other dishes we made were avocado-jicama-pineapple salad, a stew of chicken in red mole with green olives, a tortilla soup with chunks of cheese and avocado, and a "Pay" (the Mexican spelling of pie, because pie means foot and is pronounced pee-ay) de queso - a kind of soft cheesecake with raisins soaked in mezcal and guavas.
Somehow, miraculously, it all got done. It was really nice to have helpers cleaning up after us.
Then we sat down at the table together and stuffed ourselves like pigs. At the end, Susana gave us a going-away present of tools to make atole or hot chocolate, and we were back on the road again about 6:45 p.m.
Sitting down to chow
One of the women tried to talk me into going out dancing with her.
But I said no and she kept insisting and insisting. So I did the passive-aggressive thing. I took her number and told her I would call her, knowing I wouldn't. Bad of me, I know. But otherwise I knew she would never shut up!
I was finally able to talk to Greg tonight. The phone came back on this afternoon. What a relief to hear his voice and just be able to chat.
posted by Suebob at 4:03 PM
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