26 Nov 2016
by scolgin
in Food, Humor, Recipes
Tags: Anthony Bourdain, chapulines, Del Maguey, grasshoppers, Mexican cuisine, mole, Nicolas Cage, Oaxaca, Thanksgiving
I had just finished my last post about my pal Mike and his wife Bridget harassing me from Oaxaca with their photos and videos of delicious meals, when they returned — bearing gifts!
There was a lovely and colorful dishtowel, a jar of black mole paste which to this cook is as good as its weight in gold, and there was a small jar of chapulines — roasted grasshoppers.
Chapulines
On the adventurous eater scale of 1 to 10, I consider myself about a 7. I’m no Anthony Bourdain. But I’ve recently been venturing more deeply into the euphemistically named world of “variety” meats, have sampled the slimiest offerings the world’s oceans put forth, and am a fan of such culinary curiosities as Japanese fermented natto and the stinking durian. There’s not a lot I won’t try, at least once. But one taxonomic class I have steadfastly resisted ingesting is that of the insect. More
18 Nov 2016
by scolgin
in Recipes, Video
Tags: Del Maguey, Enrique Olvera, Mexican cuisine, Mexico, mezcal, mole, Oaxaca, Rick Bayless, Zapotec indians
My pal Mike likes to taunt me with photos and videos of his business trips to Mexico, which are frequent. See, if you haven’t been paying attention to previous posts, his business is Mexico — mezcal, that is: Del Maguey, the best in the world.
Mike in Mexico
His provocations are most often in the form of eyewitness video accounts of parades in Oaxaca, where there seems to always be a parade in progress, or photos of voluptuous window mannequins with whom he is certain I am a perfect romantic match. More
13 Nov 2015
by scolgin
in Beverages, Food, Video
Tags: cocktails, Del Maguey, Mexican cuisine, Mexico, mezcal, Modelo, mole, Negroni, Oaxaca, Ron Cooper
“We want to have you guys over when we get the place cleaned up a bit,” my pal Gordon had been telling me for five or six years, over the course of two different “places”.
The time had finally come. Gordon and spouse Lori, who had moved into their “new” house a year or so before, were far enough along in their renovations that they now felt comfortable hosting. But nothing ever being simple, we had been trying to schedule this particular dinner party for a matter of months.
The mezcals of Del Maguey
The theme would loosely be “Mezcal & Mole” — or, at least, that was the subject line of the group texts bouncing around during the protracted planning phase. More
04 Nov 2014
by scolgin
in Pork, Recipes, Video
Tags: Dia de los Muertos, holidays, James Joyce, Loteria, Mexican cooking, Mexico, mole, Oaxaca, Pork, The Dead
“His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” —James Joyce, “The Dead”
As I’ve confessed to in the past, I like holidays — particularly other people’s holidays. Our neighbors to the south, Mexico, for example.
More
04 Mar 2014
by scolgin
in Pork, Recipes, Video
Tags: food, Mexican cooking, Mexican pizzas, Mexico, Oaxaca, recipes, Rick Bayless, street food, Tlayuda
It was a Saturday afternoon, I had a bit of a cold. So I settled into my bed to watch cooking shows on PBS. One of my favorites is “Mexico One Plate at a Time,” with Rick Bayless spotlighting a different region of Mexican cooking each season. This season, he’s in Oaxaca, which is a part of Mexico I’ve never had the privilege to visit.
I often get inspired to cook by things I see Rick talking about on his show — last season he was in Baja, and I found myself trying out air-dried machaca beef, shrimp tacos folded in fried cheese and even an avante garde foamy sea urchin ceviche. And now, lying in bed, I watched as Rick, visiting a sustainable farm in the Oaxacan mountains, dug into something called a tlayuda. More
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