During all of our travels over the last 20 years, we have always strived to do more than sightsee, and truly experience the culture of the places we are visiting. What better way to fully emersed in the local culture than by the food they eat? Today, was a day devoted to total emersion in the food of Mexico.
But first, alarms went off at 5:30, sounds early, but I had the best night of sleep since I cant remember when, so getting up was not so difficult. Besides I got to finish yesterdays blog have some coffee and watch the sun rise over the National Palace and Zocalo. They were also raising the flag for the day.
We started our food emersion with breakfast in the terrace restaurant. Breakfast is included in the room rate. As I have said many times, the term breakfast is a very broad term. In the US, it is pretty terrible most of the time. In Europe it totally varies by country and even city. But there have always been standouts, such as La Bua in Bangkok, the Intercontinental in Montreal or the Hilton Curio in Rome. Even the DoubleTree in Carcassonne
was exceptional. Today, the breakfast at the Gran Hotel Ciudad de Mexico joins that elite group. They had a made to order station, Omelets to tacos, then there was the buffet itself, almost every type of Mexican style meat you can imagine, the favorite was chilaquiles. They also had lots of fresh fruit and even a seafood station.
I am sure that you noticed that the blog entries stop abruptly. I am now writing this 2 month after the last entry. The short answer for the stop was that I was extremely ill for the next three days after out cooking class (which I will blog about shortly) It was not the cooking class that caused the illness, but a very bad batch of black mole from our Saturday night dinner. That being said, my one full day in the city was a very good one.
One of the highlights of any of our trips is of course the cooking class, if we can find one that is hands on and
includes a market visit. We really lucked out here in Mexico City, it was hands on, a market tour was included as well as a bit of street food and tortilla shops. We also have a very wonderful chef as an instructor, Pam (I am sure her true name is not Pam but made it simple for us gringos). The class consisted of a young woman from Texas, who was studying in Guadalajara, and a family from just north of Mexico City. They were a very interesting and lovely family, the son had studied in England so while he was 100% Mexican, when he spoke English, he had a British accent. His wife was from France, a truly international family. Then there was Jerry and me, the gay couple from Rhode Island. God, it feels good to say we live in Rhode Island and not New York.
The class started with a quick history of Mexican cuisine, including the love of grasshoppers. Evidently on grasshopper has more protein than a steak. I will stick with steak. Next, we were off for the tortilla shops, some street food, and the market. The first tortilla shop was very small, but they
pumped out thousands of tortillas a day. They were not 100% authentic as they did use some already processed corn flour in their masa. The process was still pretty amazing and labor intense. Even though a machine made and baked the tortilla, it still took several people to load the masa and assemble the bags of tortilla. If you have never had a tortilla right off the conveyor belt, you dont know what youre missing.
Next stop was the street quesadillas. These were handmade blue corn tortillas with vegetables and cheese All the ingredients were grown behind the home of the vendor. We asked if they had to be licensed or have a permit, Chef Pam laughed, no she said, just slip the federales a bit of cash and some quesadillas every day and your good to go. Ok, that was as bit nicer than how she put it, I think she used the word corruption.
The quesadillas were very good.
