Remarkable Food

 

This morning we met Coco for a guided tour of the markets.  We have had some exceptional food in Oaxaca, but felt we could learn a lot more in a tour.  We walked down to the largest market, Abastos, first.  This is the less touristy market where locals tend to shop.  You can get pretty much anything there from socks to meat and vegetables, to furniture.  We admired the flower stalls, learned about the different cuts of meat and sausages and ate at breakfast at two food stalls.  At the first we had a bowl of delicious hot chocolate made with water, a sweet bread, and Jake and I split a memela, a large tortilla with black beans and fried eggs on which you can put a spicy tomato salsa.  At the second place we split two tacos, one with grilled, shredded lamb and the other with grilled, shredded goat.  One the table are many toppings you can add including 3 types of salsas, grated cabbage, and sliced radishes.  I washed my tacos down with a juice made from hibiscus flowers.  According to our guide, the market stalls are all pretty safe to eat at as purified water is now used for everything from washing dishes to making ice.  The tables were regularly wiped down with disinfectant. 

Dried peppers at the Abastos market

Lots of mole ingredients

Many stalls had huge burlap bags full of dried peppers.  We tried a pasilla pepper paste at one stall with a very rich, salty flavor.  Fresh chiles de agua, the pepper most local to the Oaxaca central valley, were also available.  Our guide also recommended the small criollo avocados, much sought after by high end restauranteurs. 

Back towards the center of town we went to the Benito Jaurez market.  Just outside the market a vendor gave us a free sample of chapulines, roasted crickets.  We got the garlic flavored ones, and they were remarkably good.  Not at all leggy as I had feared. I asked about the gusanos, worms that are used for flavoring things, and learned that most are collected either from agaves or from a cecropia tree.   We tried two types of cookies from a sweets vendor.  Little round ones that come in a stack tasted a bit like baked donuts.  The other was a toasted coconut cookie a little like a crispy macaroon.  And finally a sample of string cheese that had a much more interesting, slightly sour, flavor, compared to the kind you feed little kids.  I had tried tejate yesterday, a beverage made from roasted corn, chocolate beans, rosita de cacao flowers, and roasted seeds of mamey (sapote), a fruit.  It is made in a big ceramic tub and a soft layer of what looks like curds floats to the top.  It has a faint chocolate flavor with roasted and floral notes.  Served cold. 

Roast chapulines

Grasshoppers

Meat stall at the Benito Juarez market

Finally a stop at one of the Mayordomo chocolate shops in town to purchase the makings for chocolate drinks.  He also recommended buying mole at Los Pacos, a restaurant, because they seal their mole in bags suitable for getting through customs and the mole is pretty good.  Most market stalls selling mole sell the paste in unsealed bags.

I also learned that the student encampment are students from the public teaching college.  Our guide felt that the teacher’s union was using them to gain concessions from the government with elections coming up in early April.  The worms on the hooks, bait, without having to make the teachers go out on strike.  So far we haven’t talked to anyone who likes the government or any particular political party, and everyone has mentioned significant corruption as being the major problem.

RESTAURANTS

Black IPA

Chocolate cake with red fruits

Pork with mole and grilled fruits

Tierra del Sol – Beautiful rooftop terrace and excellent service.  Complimentary cocktail of coconut milk, pineapple juice and mescal as well as salsa made to your liking at the table (with the option of adding in chapulines (grasshoppers), which we did.  Jake’s chile relleno duo was particularly good.

El Olivo tapas restaurant – Rooftop with very hip vibe.  Lots of choices and they make their own small batch beer and non-alcoholic ginger beer.  The black IPA and ginger beer were excellent! They also make their own sausages and mustards.  We had a lamb sausage, oyster pate, and tempura vegetables.

La Olla – Excellent mole negro over chicken.  The coloradito mole on an enchilada was also very flavorful.  The house cocktail is made with mezcal and lime juice with a mole salt flavored rim.

La Rambla and other places in a food hall - Excellent ceviche, tuna burger, also sushi, frappucinos, strawberry water drink.  

La Brujula - coffee, cookies, muffins

Oaxaca en Una Taza - coffee, hot chocolate, pastries

Los Pacos - We didn't eat there, but we did buy mole on the recommendation of 2 guides.

Monte Alban

 

Looking across the main plaza

Thursday’s outing was to Monte Alban, a large ruin about a 30 minute drive east of the city.  We opted to take a taxi and ended up with a very nice driver named Francisco.  He offered to come back for us in two hours for a reasonable price as there aren’t a lot of unclaimed taxis waiting for customers there.  It’s a lovely spot high on a hilltop.  We opted to go it alone rather than on a guided tour.  There are signs in English, Spanish and Zapotec but I’m sure a guide would have pointed out more than the signs did.  Still, I was quite impressed with the size and layout of all the buildings.  It is a very open site and quite warm during the day.  The visitor’s center museum was inexplicably closed.

One of several stelae recording important events

Perhaps showing male captives who were castrated

Francisco arrived to pick us up at noon, right on time.  We had asked him to take us to Arrazola, a little town that specializes in carved animal figurines and the famous fantastical alebrijes.  He had a long conversation with someone on the phone about road conditions and directions and we set off down the hill and onto dirt roads.  After asking directions multiple times, he successfully found the back route to the town and we were quite entertained with traveling through the little villages on the short trip.  Francisco knew people at a few workshops and took us to two, very high quality ones that were quite pleased with.  I got a hummingbird at the first one and Jake got a turtle/eagle alebrije at the second.  By then it was about 2pm and we were ready to head back to our hotel.  The cost for the whole trip was 900 pesos, about $45.

I found Francisco’s observation that Americans are often more solitary than Mexicans quite interesting.  Most of the weaving and wood carving workshops are family operations where everyone in the family helps out and lives together.  And in general Mexican families tend to have multiple generations living together or in close proximity.  My family in contrast live in many different states and we see each other relatively infrequently.  At least two of Francisco’s children now live in the US and I didn’t think to ask if he had children living in Oaxaca still, but he has siblings and parents in the area.  One of his brothers and his father died of Covid unfortunately, his brother before a vaccine was available and his father because he refused to be vaccinated.

The Ethnobotanical Garden

 

Wednesday morning I reserved for the all important visit to Oaxaca’s ethnobotanical garden, right in the heart of the historic downtown area.  Originally a Dominican monastery and then a military base after President Benito Juarez separated the powers of church and state, it became the ethnobotanical garden in 1998, narrowly escaping becoming a convention center and parking lot.  Currently the garden is only open for guided tours.  I got there before 10:30 for the 11am tour in English.  The tour in English is for some reason twice as long (2 hours) as the tour in Spanish and only once a day, and it often reaches capacity. 

Oaxaca has some of the highest plant diversity in Mexico and the garden hopes to eventually represent 10% of that diversity, or about 1300 species.  It is divided into geographical sections including the Central Valley where the city is located, the dry forest, and the tropical moist forest.  There is also a section for plants with an affinity for alkaline soils, an agricultural section, and an Arts section with amazing displays of cacti.  Our guide quite capably kept the 30 of us in line and had a strong voice.  She was trained as an architect but had a good knowledge of the plants.  None of the plants have signs and she only referred to them by their common names for the most part.  The garden does eventually plan to have a self-guided tour.

I was very excited to see teosinte, the ancient ancestor of modern corn, growing in the agricultural area.  It even had little ears!  We were also introduced to a relative of cacao, rosita de cacao, whose flower is used to make a beverage called tejate.  Also of interest were the quelites, wild herbs used in cooking like hierba de conejo, Tridax coronopifolia, in the Aster family.  This herb happened to reappear as a garnish on Jake’s lunch today and it has a refreshing flavor with a hint of anise.

Rosita de cacao flower

Teosinte

an ear of teosinte

The tropical forest area has a new greenhouse specially designed with geothermal energy to keep it cool on hot days.  The garden uses only water collected from roof runoff for the tropical section of the garden.  The other areas have plants that should be able to survive with the city’s natural rainfall.

The tropical dry forest had several species of trees in the pea family and the cotton family, including the shaving brush tree, Pseudobombax ellipticum.

 

The Dominicans had built a lime kiln to make cement, so the garden features a few palms, agaves and other plants particularly well adapted to alkaline soils in this area.  Another large section of the garden has huge organ and Opuntia cactuses as well as several rare barrel cactuses rescued from the biosphere reserve when the Panamerican Highway was widened. 

Plants adapted to alkaline soils

Our guide ended with describing how we probably wouldn’t be visiting Oaxaca if it weren’t for the cochineal industry.  The Spanish were unsuccessful at getting slaves to produce high quality cochineal in great demand for the red dye the scale insects produce, so they gave land back to the indigenous people in return for having them produce cochineal.  Some people I’ve talked to have said that the strong indigenous land rights in this part of Mexico are partly responsible for the low crime rates.  The importance of tourism and distance from any international borders have also been listed as reasons why the drug cartels have been kept out.

Oaxacan Culture

We arranged an outing today to visit a few places along the valley east of the city. Our driver, Luis Luis Ruiz (apparently named in part after a Mexican film star his mother liked) informed us that one of our destinations, the Zapotec ruins near Mitla, were closed today, but instead we were able to visit the caves at Mitla dating back to an older civilization, perhaps the Olmecs. A local group bought 5000 ha that include the cave area about 5 years ago and it opened for tourism about 3 years ago. You have to have an official tour guide to visit and the loop along rocky paths takes about an hour. Some of the plants have signs in Zapotec and Spanish (but no Latin names). The guide was quite knowledgeable about local uses of plants. We visited 5 caves that apparently had different uses. Two had pictographs of a red ochre color, probably made with animal blood, iron oxide, and plant dyes. One also had pictographs made with a black coloration and one with white. The pictographs date back to 10,000 years or so. I was excited to learn that one in one of the caves were found some of the oldest bean and corn seeds ever discovered. Other caves had stone tools including metates for grinding and mixing. A few bats flew by in one cave and some caves had interesting mineral coatings on the rocks, our guide wasn’t sure what the minerals were. One cave had apparently been used for spiritual rituals and the guide pointed out a cave on the other side of the road that is still frequently used by the local people for offerings, purifications, and other rites.

Locally known as the mad woman plant because of its spinyness

A type of Plumeria

Coyote agave

Copal tree, the fragrant resin is used as incense and the wood is used to make alebrijes (wood carvings)

Accompanied by a local dog

Our guide pointing out a metate

Maybe a sun or a calendar?

Our second stop was in Teotitlan del Valle, a village known for its weavings. We stopped at the home and weaving studio of Nelson Perez and he gave us a wonderful demonstration of the whole process from cleaning and spinning wool to dying, to weaving. 

Nelson at his huge loom!

Items used to make dyes

 Finally we stopped in El Tule. We got a quick lunch at a local stand. I had a quesadilla with squash blossoms and the local quesilla (cheese like string cheese). Jake got a tlayuda, a large tortilla covered with refried black beans, meat and usually cheese (Jake omitted the cheese). The agua frescas of the day were hibiscus or guanabana (custard apple), and we went with the guanabana. After lunch we walked through a little park to see the giant tule tree, Taxodium mucronatum, apparently the tree with the biggest circumference in the world. It has survived over 2000 years. To be in its presence, our shoes and lower legs were sprayed with disinfectant despite that fact that there is a paved path around the entire tree. Masks were also required although I doubt they were worried about covid infecting the tree!

 Some possible corrections to yesterday’s post: the red flags may have been from a community about three hours away whose residents like to protest, and the students protesting are public university, not high school students. We’ll see what I learn tomorrow as to whether these stories hold up!

Bienvenidos a Oaxaca!

 

Over eastern NM

Oil well pattern

farming in TX

Our first trip abroad since Colombia in January 2020!  We decided on Oaxaca because you can get here from Albuquerque in 7-8 hours and we’ve heard so many good things about it.  It was an easy trip through Houston to the small but well kept Oaxaca airport.  On the flight to Texas I listened to an Ologies podcast on indigenous cooking (cuisinology) while looking at natural versus manmade shapes on the landscape out the plane window.  The flight from Houston over Mexico was cloudy so not until we were descending could I see the mountainous, hazy landscape surrounding the City of Oaxaca.  Hazy due to burning of some fields and possibly some wildfires. 

The main square Sunday night

Our driver had to stop a half block from the hotel because student (high school) protestors are camped out (literally, in tents) on the street in front of the hotel.  There seem to be many current protests and I haven’t figured out what all of them are about. I think the students are protesting to get more teachers in schools and for better opportunities after graduation. The political parties are choosing their state gubernatorial candidates so a rally today with lots of people carrying red flags may have been for the Mexican communist party.  There is a lot of graffiti around town like Eat the Rich People, Not Animals and end violence against women, support for gay rights, free incarcerated journalists.  The protestors seem to be an accepted part of the scene downtown.

Our first night out was really enjoyable.  We just strolled around the Zocalo, the main square, and had dinner at an outdoor café.  Hundreds of people were out dancing in one area, watching a clown in another area, kids running around throwing 4 foot long balloons up in the air and blowing soap bubbles.

Amazingly, people here follow stricter covid standards than we do in the US at this point.  Most people were wearing masks even outdoors and masks are required in shops.  You spritz your hands with disinfectant before entering a restaurant or the markets.  No covid test was required to get in to the country though or proof of vaccination.  On our way back to the US we are required to get a covid test before we can board the plane. 

Agua chile verde ceviche

relaxing at the hotel pool

Following a good night’s sleep and breakfast in the hotel courtyard, we set out to explore downtown further.  The stucco covered buildings are painted bright colors and larger walled buildings are made of a light green volcanic rock.  This seems to be the dry season and many trees are flowering but have no leaves.  Huge agaves and their relatives punctuate local parks (once I get to the botanical garden I hope to be able to say what those relatives are!).  We wandered through two of the markets closer to downtown where you can buy pretty much anything.  Oaxaca is known for moles of course but also for grilled meats served with corn tortillas and your choice of toppings, crispy grasshoppers (chapulines) and many other dishes we are still discovering.  Today’s food highlight was lunch at La Rambla in sort of a small food court.  I had a delicious shrimp ceviche with pureed chiles de agua (the local milder chile somewhat like a poblano) and Jake got a tuna burger with a fried onion ring and buttery roll.  Afterwards we found an ice cream shop (Pandiu) that served rolled ice cream where you could choose your combination of flavors to be made into a soy-based ice cream.  The ice cream helped tame the heat from the ceviche!