making your own Flour Tortillas!

Mexican cooking diva Zarela has a great writeup on how you can make your own flour tortillas, here.  Mexican cuisine is known to be chalk full of tortillas, and it's more than just a cheap stereotype: having lived with Mexicans for the past three years, I solemnly swear to tell you the whole truth, nothing but the truth--so help me Santa Maria--when I tell you that Mexicans do eat tortillas with everything.  If there's food being served, you can almost be certain that tortillas are involved.  It's just a given.

With that out of the way, why then would you wish to make your own tortillas?  If they're everywhere, why bother?  It's simple: freshly handmade tortillas taste better than older, packed and shipped ones that you pick up at the store.  So if you're serving an authentic Mexican recipe that features tortillas in some prominent way, I recommend making (or having someone make) tortillas from scratch for the recipe.  It will taste so much better!  

You may want to experiment with flours from small mills in this country that supply amateur bread bakers. For tortillas, however, you want all-purpose flour rather than the hard-wheat flours usually sold for bread-making. I get good results with Hecker’s or Pillsbury all-purpose unbleached flour.

Zarela's full recipe for making your own flour tortillas is here. 

I'll speak to you again soon. -Carlos Lima

 

Pescado Frito recipe - The Authentic Mexican version

I found a good pescado frito recipe from authentic Mexican cuisine on the coast over here and I've written it up to share with you.  Here's a little video to wet your appetite, first:

You can find the full authentic Mexican pescado frito recipe here.  I hope you enjoy the dish as I did.  I'm not the best a photographing food so please excuse the few photos I've taken--I know they're not the best, but don't let my lack of culinary photography prowess deter you from trying this great dish if you have some fish you want to cook and you're enjoy authentic Mexican food!

Until next time, keep experimenting in the kitchen! -Carlos L

Easter Sunday in Roman Catholic Mexico

The end to Semana Santa is here, and some families will be enjoying this day together.  I figure what better way to bond with your family than to work together in the kitchen and whip up a delicious authentic Mexican dessert recipe for one of the most delicious things you will ever taste in your life: flan!

The End of Semana Santa (Holy Week) Tomorrow: Thank God

Domingo de Gloria (Easter Sunday) is upon us tomorrow and will mark the end of Semana Santa (Holy week), by far the biggest holiday in Mexico.

"It should come as no surprise that in Mexico, a predominantly Roman Catholic country, Easter — Pascua — is the most widely celebrated and important religious holiday of the year."

I highly recommend reading the above article if you're interested in Mexican stories.  If you're interested what Mexico is actually like, I suggest reading this post.

I was going to post an authentic Mexican recipe for holy week, but it would be a hypocritical farce--a complete joke.  The official "recipe" of Semana Santa in modern Mexico is cheap beer, chips, and more cheap beer.  

Let me be fair: for some, holy week is a time of reflection.  Some of these souls do exist.  

But for many others, this holiday a time to party, get wasted, and act like an obnoxious dipshit.  I'm not angry or bitter here: I'm just being honest.  I'm not religious, I couldn't care about what Jesus may or may not have done, but I'm a person with eyes and ears who observes what goes on around him.

Right now, I live on the coast in Mexico and I have never seen so many ill behaved people crowding the beaches and treating each other so poorly in my life.  The significance of this holiday is lost on these people.  I understand that, living on the coast, I'm living in a place where the party people are going to pour out to when the holiday gates open and it's time to take a break and go to the beach!  But there are a lot of these people everywhere, and they're polluting, thieving, and getting in fights left, right, and center, here.  It's a fu*#ing mess.

I'll have a Mexican recipe for you next time: I'm a little too exhausted to post one at the moment.  I hope you enjoy a more peaceful Easter Sunday than it seems I will. ;)

Mexican Breakfast recipe for Huevos Rancheros

Authentic Huevos Rancheros can be hard to come by if you live outside Mexico and you're mostly confined to a selection of Tex-Mex restaurants, so I've written down a good recipe for them so you can make your own at home.  It's a very easy Mexican recipe that takes 20 minutes to whip up, so even cooking newbies can pull this one off I think:

The full recipe for huevos rancheros is here.

I'll be back here again with some new authentic Mexican food recipes in the coming days and weeks, and it looks like I'm going to be delivering them to you more frequently from now on. I'm living with a few Mexicanas right now who really know their food, and I feel like a kid in a candy store, or a man in king Midas' castle in my case! haha!  Anyway, I'll be sure to share the recipes I gleam from these authentic Mexican master chefs in the coming weeks!  Stay tuned!..

Baja style shrimp tacos recipe

Have you ever tried these?  I've been living in Mexico for over three years now and I have eaten a LOT of tacos.  Among all of those different taco recipes, Baja's recipe for shrimp tacos stands up there with the best in my and many others' opinion.  If you're looking for something different to cook for dinner that is downright delicious and taken straight out of authentic Mexican cuisine, then look no further and try these out!  Your taste buds will thank you.

Cancun's Regional Mexican Cuisine

If you've ever been to Cancun, you can't help but notice that it is very touristy: the beaches are beautiful, they're lined with huge hotels and party people, and it's a fun place to crash for a weekend.  It can be hard to find anything authentically Mexican in this place, but if you look, you can find some great dishes endemic to to the Cancun area.  I like this article by KC Kudra that touches on this:

...tacos filled with pork skin in green sauce, beef, potato or Mexican sausage, cheese and potato quesadillas served with salsa or Tik-in-xic fish which is fish marinated in a sour orange juice and achiote marinade and baked in banana leaves. Tamales in Cancun are great and these are steamed cornmeal stuffed with pork, chicken, or beef.

You can read the full article here. 

Speak soon,

-Carlos Lima

Carne Asada Tacos - A Super Popular Taco Inside Mexico

Carne asada (grilled beef) tacos are very popular in Mexico at many of the street stall vendors and restaurants that line the streets in this country, and I just found this simple recipe for them that About.com recently published.  I would definitely try these tacos out if you have a craving for either meat or tacos AND you're interested in learning more about authentic Mexican food!

Here's what someone commented about this recipe:

These are delicious, easy, and taste like the ones in good mexican restaurants!

 

Try this taco recipe out and let me know how it goes--I've got my hands full with some other taco recipes I'm working on right now, but I may have to make these in the near future if they're as good as they sound!  Talk soon, -Carlos

Tex-Mex food vs Authentic Mexican Cuisine: A Classic Battle

I hear this asked all the time: why is there such a difference between what many call "Tex-Mex" cuisine and authentic Mexican food?  While I'm sure the reasons are many, my opinion is that, aside from cost reasons, restaurant owners abroad find it more marketable to latch onto the bright, colorful and flashing cultural stereotypes that people identify Mexico with than it is profitable to invest promoting the real Mexican cuisine and having to educate the public to a large extent on what that even means and why they should get excited about trying it. I wrote a good article about it here your can check out:   Tex-Mex cuisine vs Authentic Mexican food - why the difference?

I'll speak to you again soon! -Carlos Lima

Mexican Lent Recipes: I Found Some Popular Ones For You Guys

As it happens, we're currently in the middle of Mexican lent.  Lent of course is the period following the lustful, primal, animal, and favorite-time-of-year-for-many carnival, and is seen as a period of repentance: a period of time where we're supposed to reflect on all the bad shit we've done over the past while and feel bad and make cheap resolves to be "better" en el futuro.  My mockery aside, there are certain changes some people make to their diet during lent: in Mexico, a Catholic country (at least on its face), you are supposed to go without eating meat on each of Friday during lent.  For those wondering why, this is to pay homage to all the time Jesus spent in the wilderness, without the comforts or spoils of the city life in Jerusalem.  Whether it does him justice, I'll leave that to you to decide, but in all seriousness I recently came across an article by the venerated about.com, that details some popular dishes for Mexican lent, where non-meat dishes like the famous chilaquiles (picture below) enjoy their moment (or Fridays) of fame...

 

Some foods are traditionally associated with Lent in Mexico. It is very common to eat seafood on Fridays - fish and shrimp are both very popular. Another food commonly eaten during Lent isempanadas de vigilia. These empanadas are made with a flour pastry shell and stuffed with vegetables or seafood.

 

Read the full article here:  http://mexicanfood.about.com/od/toppicks/tp/Mexican-Recipes-For-Lent.htm