Real Mexican Cooking

Chiara and Jeff with Chiara's baby nephew

Friday, February 24

This morning we biked to Casa Tuscany where Bonney and Jeff, our Seattle friends are staying. Our destination, by car! (theirs, rented) was Sabores de Mexico, a newly opened tienda featuring many mysterious culinary enticements. Chiara Bende, the owner, and a chef of New World heritage, had offered to talk with me about using her creations when Karen and I stopped by her shop in early February. The little bottles of mole and salsa, packages of sea salt and dried peppers beckoned. But how to use these treasures?

It came to me that the Lemkins' visit would provide the perfect opportunity to return. Jeff has a food blog and I knew he’d go nuts learning from Chiara. Plus more Seattle gringos would benefit, recall and practice with the new ingredients.

When we arrived, me with computer in hand, Jeff with camera, Chiara welcomed us into her outdoor seating area where she’d set out chopped ingredients and several bags of chiles next to her electric wok and a molcajete, the local term for a stone metate.

Although she’d only promised us a talk, she couldn’t hold herself back from turning our visit into a full on cooking lesson! She started with a lecture on chiles which was full of eye openers for us. She tore into a package of dry criollo chiles and the fun began.

The first recipe was for any salsa, starting with the dry criollo, rehydrating it in hot water and pounding it into a red sauce to add to the salsa. The rest of the recipe is (or will be shortly) on Jeff’s food blog (www.caloriefactory.com). Next, her friend Lupita who had been quietly drinking coffee in the background with Chiara’s husband appeared to give us a demonstration of making a tortilla. Lupita, dressed like a model in fashionable jeans and 5” heels, made us feel like beach bums. (Wait that’s pretty much who the Stillmans are!) Chiara noted that if you just open a bottle of her intensely chocolate sauce you can work some of that into the masa dough to make a better flavored tortilla. Pretty soon she was getting Jeff to mash avocado into guacomole while she stirred tortilla strips in hot oil for chilaquiles, a recent and favorite discovery of ours. Finally, making my day, she pulled out a package of machaca de res, dried shredded beef, from Aramburo, a local grocery, and stirred it into fried bell peppers, tomato and onion, showing us  how to make machaca burritos, the very elevenses we’d slavered over on our way to Mag Bay.

Oh what a joy! Still reeling from the smells and bright colors of her delicious dishes, and laden with new ingredients for boat cooking, we swung by the Mercado Municipal for yellowfin tuna and  licuados before siesta time! Thank you, thank you Chiara and buen provecho!