Tres leches cake is having a big moment. We love the super-luscious version from Mely Martínez's new cookbook

Pastel de tres leches, or tres leches cake — Mexico’s star dessert — is enjoying a drenchy-sweet moment of glory.

The fluffy-creamy vanilla sponge cake, soaked in a mixture of creams (usually condensed milk, evaporated milk and heavy cream, and topped with whipped cream, has become an Instagram and Tik Tok star during the pandemic.

As G. Daniela Galarza wrote last week in an excellent story in The Washington Post:

“This past May, the month in which Trinity Sunday often falls, searches for “tres leches” were up 25 percent from May 2019. More than half a million posts are tagged #tresleches on Instagram, and on TikTok, nearly 25 million videos feature hands and pans whipping up batter for a tres leches cake.” 

Galarza’s story points to MM Pack’s illuminating 2004 story for the Austin Chronicle, “Got Milk?: On the trail of pastel de tres leches,” and then goes on to provide illuminating context and background.

The cake does not have a long history; it is probably only about a quarter-century old, according to Pack’s superb sleuthing. Nestlé, a major canned milk producer, introduced manufacturing plants around World War II in Mexico, and a recipe for pastel de tres leches was included. More investigation led Pack to find its antecedent: a dessert involving bread soaked in wine and layered with milk custard and fruit or nuts) came to Mexico in the 19th century.

All that is well and good, but The Great Confinement of 2020 continues to trigger cravings of comfort food and sweets. Fortunately, there are 9 and a half grillion versions to choose from.

The New York Times’ Melissa Clark, who may be some kind of dessert psychic — and who confesses to enjoying eating sweetened condensed milk straight out of the can — presciently published a recipe for a Seis Leches Cake (“A Milky Cake Where More is More”) in January.

We love the version Mely Martínez offers in her just-published cookbook The Mexican Home Kitchen, which we reviewed last month. Hers is not a sponge cake, but a somewhat denser vanilla cake with a lovely crumb; it takes longer (overnight) to soak up all those leches, but the result is outstanding.

About to attack my second slice of Martínez’s cake, on a whim I poured over it a splash of Plantation Pineapple Rum. Holy moly — it was insanely, wildly, wickedly good! Next time I’ll follow Martínez’s suggested variation and add a quarter cup of it to the milk mixture to soak in overnight.

RECIPE: Mely Martínez’s Tres Leches Cake

Cookbooks We Love: With ‘Amá,’ Josef Centeno takes us home to San Antonio, liberating Tex-Mex along the way

Amá: A Modern Tex-Mex Kitchen by Josef Centeno and Betty Hallock, Photographs by Ben Fuller, 2019, Chronicle Books, $29.95

Backgrounder: Just after his Japanese-and-Italian-inspired Los Angeles restaurant Orsa & Winston was named Restaurant of the Year by the Los Angeles Times in the summer of 2020, chef Josef Centeno had to close two other acclaimed restaurants, Bäco Mercat and Amacita, due to COVID-19. The San Antonio, Texas native — one of the most highly acclaimed chefs in the U.S. — continues to serve his modern Tex-Mex cooking at Bar Amá, from which this exuberant book gets its name. As forward-looking Tex-Mex is a rare thing indeed (most of what is served in Tex-Mex restaurants around the U.S., including in Texas, is hopelessly stuck in time), we were excited to discover and cook Centeno’s modern takes.

This is Centeno’s second book; his first, Bäco: Vivid Recipes from the Heart of Los Angeles, was published in 2017. Both were co-written with his partner Betty Hallock, a former deputy Food editor at the Los Angeles Times. (Full disclosure: Betty and I worked closely together when I was Food editor at the Times.)

Amá’s Broccolini Torrada with Aged Cheddar and Lime

Why we love it: The modern dishes, like Broccolini Torrada with Aged Cheddar and Lime, which has been on the menu at Bar Amá from the start (“and will always be on the menu”), are smartly delicious, bold and fabulous in flavor. And the soulful traditional dishes — such as Carne Guisada, eaten as breakfast tacos with Centeno’s Tía Carmen’s Flour Tortillas — are simply smashing. They are dishes we’ll come back to again and again.

Carne Guisada from ‘Amá: A Modern Tex-Mex Kitchen’

You’ve gotta try this: At Bar Amá, Centeno lightens his guacamole with an unusual ingredient — grated celery. Odd as it sounds, it’s wonderful (don’t tell the guacamole police!). Chopped red onion makes a snappy garnish.

Amá’s guacamole, garnished with chopped red onion, gets a lift from grated celery.

Tiny complaints: Closer editing would have been appreciated. The caraway seeds you toast for those albondigas never get incorporated; we had to guess what to do with the tepin or arbol chiles destined for the torrada and the serrano for the guac (we stemmed, seeded and chopped them).

Still wanna cook: Hoja Santa Vinaigrette (if we can get our hands on fresh hoja santa); Anchovy Butter-Roasted Red Onions; Charred Green Onion Crema; Migas; Mama Grande’s Chicken Soup (with brown rice, scallions and cilantro); Chile Shrimp Ceviche (with grapefruit and watercress); Lamb Birria; Puffed Tacos (if we can get our hands on fresh masa from nixtamal); Nachos Compuestas; Borracho Beans; La Piña (a cocktail made with mezcal, pineapple, cilantro and serrano chile).

RECIPE: Bar Amá’s Broccolini Torreada

RECIPE: Carne Guisada

RECIPE: Josef Centeno’s Tía Carmen’s Flour Tortillas

RECIPE: Amá’s Guacamole

You're invited to a virtual book party to celebrate Mely Martínez's 'The Mexican Home Kitchen'

Mely Martínez with epazote she grew in her garden in Frisco, Texas. Her debut cookbook, ‘The Mexican Home Kitchen’ was published Sept. 15, 2020. | Photo by David Castañeda

We are excited to announce that Cooks Without Borders and The Dallas Morning News will be co-hosting a virtual book party to celebrate the publication of The Mexican Home Kitchen, Mely Martínez’s debut cookbook.

Mely is the blogger behind Mexico in My Kitchen; we reviewed her book last week.

The party will be Thursday, Sept. 24 from 5 to 6 p.m. Central Time, as part of The Dallas Morning News DMN Download series. Please join Mely, Dallas Morning News Food Editor Erin Booke and me to talk about Mexican cooking and Mely’s book. We’ll leave plenty of time for a Q&A, so be sure to bring your questions!

RSVP here for a link.

Just before the event, be sure to make Mely’s Fresh Salsa Rosa and mix her favorite cocktail, a Tequila Sunrise, so we can party in style together and raise a glass to the author. Oh, and there will be prizes! We’ll be giving away two copies of the cookbook signed by Mely, as well as a molcajete and a cazuela from Ancient Cookware.

This traditional molcajete will be one of the giveways, care of Ancient Cookware, during the virtual book party for Mely Martínez and her new cookbook, ‘The Mexican Home Kitchen.’

Hope you had a fantastic Mexican Independence Day, and we look forward to hanging with you on the 24th!

10 delicious ways to celebrate Mexican Independence Day (¡Viva México!)

September 16 — the day Mexicans celebrate their independence — is the perfect occasion to cook up one of your favorite Mexican dishes, or try something new. Here are 10 of our favorite Mexican recipes published over the years at Cooks Without Borders.

Mely Martinez’s Pozole Rojo

Because pozole is one of the most popular dishes for the holiday in Mexico, Mely Martínez’s Pozole Rojo from her just-published The Mexican Home Kitchen leads off our hit parade. (Read our recent review of the book.) You’ll need to start a few hours before you want to serve the pozole, but there’s not much work involved. With all its pretty garnishes — radishes and avocado and onions and such — it is super festive.

Taquería Carrots (Zanahorias Escabeches)

Of course, before you get down to serious eating, you’ll want a few nibbles. May we interest you in some tangy, spicy, zingy Taquería-style carrots?

They’re much quicker and easier to make than you might think. Be careful: They’re quite addictive.

Guacamole, My Way

Guacamole always gets a party started in style. We start by grinding onions, serrano chiles and cilantro together in a molcajete for serious depth of flavor. Don’t forget to buy chips!

Classic Margarita

How could you not? Raise a glass and toast the revolution. Make ‘em one at a time or mix up a batch.

Aguachile, Colima-Style

Chef Olivia Lopez (chef de cuisine at Billy Can Can in Dallas) shared her recipe for shrimp aguachile with us back in June. It quickly became one of our favorites.

Killer Carnitas

Carnitas — crispy-edged morsels of pork that can be pulled apart and wrapped in a corn tortilla with salsa verde (also great with guacamole) — are hard to beat.

Roasted Salsa Verde

Here’s your Roasted Salsa Verde. Besides being great in a hundred kinds of tacos, you can also use it to sauce albondigas, enchiladas and a host of other things.

Corn Tortillas

Once you start making your own handmade corn tortillas, it’s hard to go back to store-bought. You’ll want these for the carnitas.

Frijoles de Olla (Pinto Beans)

Have we ever mentioned how munch we love beans? Super easy to cook, frijoles de olla — pintos cooked in a pot — are one of life’s great simple pleasures.

The Mexican-Chocolate “Situation”

Somewhere between a flourless chocolate cake and a brownie, these toothsome chocolately bars are made with almond flour and flavored with brandy, ancho chiles, cinnamon and vanilla, in order to channel champurrado — Mexican hot chocolate. They happen to be gluten-free.

Looking for more Mexican recipes? There are lots more where these came from — our Mexican recipes section. Do check it!

Happy Independence Day! ¡Viva la Revolución!

RECIPE: Mely Martínez’s Pozole Rojo

RECIPE: Taquería Carrots

RECIPE: Guacamole, My Way

RECIPE: Classic Margarita on the Rocks

RECIPE: Aguachile, Colima-Style

RECIPE: Killer Carnitas

RECIPE: Corn Tortillas

RECIPE: Roasted Salsa Verde

RECIPE: Frijoles de Olla

RECIPE: The Mexican-Chocolate Situation

With 'The Mexican Home Kitchen,' Mely Martínez is now everyone's abuelita

The more it goes, the more I cook, the more I’m interested in cookbooks that let you learn the basics of a cuisine by cooking dishes that real people cook at home. As inspiring as it is to pore over a tome by Enrique Olvera or René Redzepi or Pierre Gaignaire, there’s something about the very basic joy that comes from doing things the same way mamas and grandmas have done them for ages — whether those mamas are in China or Lebanon, Senegal or France, Italy or India or Uzbekistan.

And for me, since I have felt since I was about 10 years old that somewhere deep inside of me lives an old Mexican woman (seriously, I’ve always felt it as kind of a past-life thing), a book that speaks to how old Mexican women and young Mexican women cook every day at home is quite an exciting prospect.

I’ve learned to cook Mexican dishes mostly from books — starting with those from Diana Kennedy, the British expat who moved with her journalist husband to Puebla nearly 70 years ago and has been chronicling Mexican regional foodways ever since. But I’ve never had a Mexican mama or abuela to hold my hand. (Kennedy, as wonderful as her books are, is more the stern taskmaster than the hand-holder.)

Until now.

The Mexican Home Kitchen — the debut cookbook from the hugely popular food blogger Mely Martínez that has been 11 years in the making — is one of the titles I’ve been most looking forward to this very unusual fall publishing season.

Mely Martínez with epazote she grew in her backyard garden in Frisco, Texas | Photo by David Castañeda

I’ve been excited because I’m a fan of her blog, Mexico in My Kitchen, and of her Instagram posts, where she fluidly moves back and forth between English and Spanish to give background about a dish, showing us what she made for breakfast (black bean gorditas! red chilaquiles!); it’s all completely engaging and charming. No wonder she has 63K followers there.

Though I’m one of them, I had no idea until a couple weeks ago that she lives in Dallas (in Frisco, a northern suburb). We chatted at length on the phone, and she told me about her life, her cooking, how she came to write this book.

Born and raised in Tampico, a coastal city in the Gulf state of Tamaulipas, Martínez spent summers on her grandmother’s farm in Veracruz. There, she told me, “They cook what they have on hand. My uncles in the evening went out to hunt rabbits, and you knew the next day you’d have rabbit for lunch. If they went to fish in the river, we knew we’d have fish — and whatever my grandmother had planted in her garden.” Her grandmother’s big kitchen with its wood stove was where she loved being, and that’s where she learned to cook.

Eager to experience some of those flavors, I made her Pollo a la Veracruzana — Veracruz-style chicken.

Pollo a la Veracruzana from ‘The Mexican Home Kitchen’ by Mely Martínez.

It’s a simple dish — achieved by browning pieces of chicken (Martínez calls for thighs or breasts; I used both), then sautéing onions, garlic, carrots and potatoes. Add fresh tomato purée, herbs, sliced green pimento-stuffed olives, capers and raisins. Simmer the browned chicken in the sauce, and serve it with Arroz Blanco.

One bite, and I knew this would be a dish I’d make again and again. Never mind that we’re the same age; Martínez is now my very own abuela. This dish is easy, bright, deep, homey and soulful.

The idea of including raisins with the olives and capers together in a tomatoey sauce might sound odd, but the flavors meld beautifully, and the raisins add depth. I’d been unaware that raisins are used in Veracruzana dishes; that’s because on the coast, they’re not included; it’s more of an inland mountain style, as Edmund Tijerina explained in a 2011 Houston Chronicle story about Veracruz-style fish.

It’s not the kind of micro-background detail you find much of in The Mexican Home Kitchen, which keeps things more general (black beans are more common in Mexico’s Gulf states; flour tortillas are eaten more in the north) and on the way things are served and eaten.

Her main purpose in writing it was to share recipes from around Mexico with emigrants who missed the cooking — and their U.S.-born children, or non-Mexican spouses. “I realized there were no books written by Mexicans, or by Mexican-Americans,” she told me. She started writing “so people who are Mexican and have children who don’t speak Spanish can have the recipes in English.” She could be their surrogate kitchen-loving mama or abuela. Her own 25-year-old son, David Castañeda, did all the lovely photography. (And no, Martínez is not an actual abuela.)

As a young elementary school teacher, Martínez moved to the south, which gave her the opportunity to travel extensively in the Yucatán Peninsula, where she loved exploring the foods. Later, her husband’s work in human resources led them to live in states all over Mexico: Tamaulipas, Nuevo León, Veracruz, Puebla, Estado de México and Tabasco. Their regional cuisines are most strongly represented in the 550-ish recipes on her blog, and in the pages of her debut book.

And in the 85 recipes in the book. Dive in just about anywhere randomly, and delicious-looking-and-sounding things jump out that you’ll want to try posthaste.

Pozole Rojo could be a great place to start — especially if you’re reading this in time for Mexican Independence Day, September 16. Throughout Mexico, says Martínez, pozole is “one of the stars” of the holiday, for which people make a much bigger deal than they do for el Cinco de Mayo. (Flautas, tamales, tostadas, empanadas and buñuelos are also popular, she says.) The celebration starts around 11 p.m. on the 15th, as friends gather, eat and drink, and at midnight there are shouts of “¡Viva México!” and “¡Viva la Revolución!” and bells are rung.

Martínez’s recipe includes the traditional garnishes: shredded lettuce, sliced radishes, dried Mexican oregano, dried chiles, chopped onions, diced avocado and limes. Where I grew up, in Southern California, shredded cabbage was a familiar garnish. I always loved that, and asked Martínez about it. “That’s what they use in the northwest part of Mexico,” she said; in the rest of Mexico, lettuce is more prevalent.

If you’re after something sweet, try one of Martínez’s personal favorites: Pastel de Tres Leches (Tres Leches Cake).

It’s a denser version than most, not a sponge cake, and requires an overnight rest for the tres leches — condensed milk, evaporated milk and heavy cream or media crema — to soak in properly. The result, topped with vanilla whipped cream, is super luscious. Not realizing that in a footnote to her recipe, Martínez suggests a variation adding rum or brandy, I had a crazy idea and pour a tablespoon or two of pineapple rum on my slice. It was insanely good. (And it taught me the lesson that Martínez’s “notas” following many of the recipes can be extremely valuable and interesting.)

There’s still so much more I want to cook from this wonderful book. I enjoyed the Crema de Elote — a soup of fresh creamed corn that was even better served chilled the next day. And I still have my eye on Chiles Rellenos, Albondigas en Chipotle, Mole Poblano, Tamales de Salsa en Salsa Verde, Picadillo, fabulous-looking Tostadas de Pollo, and many others.

It’s an impressive debut cookbook — one that deserves a celebration. To that end, Cooks Without Borders and The Dallas Morning News will be co-hosting a virtual book party for Martínez on Thursday, Sept. 24, from 5 to 6 p.m. Central time. The party is free and you’re all invited to join. RSVP here for a link, and read more about the party here.

And here is a profile of Martínez I wrote for the Dallas Morning News.

Till then, help yourself to one or more of these delicious dishes, and treat yourself (or a friend) to a copy of the book.

RECIPE: Mely Martinez’s Pollo a la Veracruzano

RECIPE: Arroz Blanco

RECIPE: Mely Martínez’s Pozole Rojo

RECIPE: Mely Martínez’s Tres Leches Cake

The Mexican Home Kitchen: Traditional Home-Style Recipes that Capture the Flavors and Memories of Mexico, by Mely Martínez. Photographs by David Castañeda. Rock Point, $28.

Dreaming of a Mexican beach vacation? This vibrant aguachile from Colima will (almost!) take you there

You might have to squint real hard to pretend your patio — or a picnic table at your city park — is in fact a beach in Mexico. But take a bite of this gorgeous, suave shrimp aguachile and it’s not hard to feel thousands of miles away.

In the last few years in the United States, aguachiles have eclipsed ceviches as the raw seafood treat grabbing attention; in Mexico, they’ve been popular much longer. Unlike ceviches, which involve a relatively long soak in lime juice for the raw seafood, aguachiles get just a very brief bath in serrano-spiked citrus (aguachile means water infused with chiles).

The dish was born in Mexico’s Sinaloa state, as an excellent story published last year in Eater explains. And though you find aguachiles in restaurants from Mexico City to Houston to New York City to Los Angeles using just about every type of seafood, including scallops, tuna, snapper and yellowtail, on Mexico’s west coast where they were born, they are all about shrimp. (Not from the start, though, as Michael Snyder’s Eater story explains.)

Chef de Cuisine Olivia Lopez’s aguachile at Billy Can Can in Dallas

It was an aguachile that helped revive me after two and half months of confinement, when Thierry, Wylie and I ventured out to a restaurant a few weeks ago. We dined on the patio at Billy Can Can, our favorite modern Texan dining saloon (which I helped open in 2018 when I worked for the company that owns it.)

The dish was gorgeous and bright; I loved the way the dabs of avocado purée played with the lime and chile, and the shrimp had beautiful texture and flavor — unlike the rubbery, eraser-like creatures that over-soaked ceviche shrimp often become.

I asked Olivia Lopez, the restaurant’s chef de cuisine who created the dish, to tell me about it. She got a dreamy look in her eye as she started talking about making aguachile back home in Tecomán, her hometown in the state of Colima — which is about 700 miles south of the part of Sinaloa where aguachile was born. Her friend Nayely would make it, and they’d take it to the beach, where they’d enjoy it, with toastadas, along with coconut water or beers.

Billy Can Can Chef de Cuisine Olivia Lopez | Photo courtesy of Billy Can Can

Colima is one of the most important lime-growing states in Mexico, she told me (the other is Michoacán), and on the road from their home in Tecomán to Playa El Real, “all you see are lime trees and palm trees. And a lot of lizards.”

For Billy Can Can’s aguachile, Lopez blanches the shrimp before their lime-serrano soak, as her customers don’t love the idea of raw shrimp, she says. To compensate for that and prevent over “cooking” from lime, she adds olive oil to the sauce.

We were thrilled when she generously offered to share her recipe with Cooks Without Borders. But could we have it the raw shrimp way, just as Lopez makes it for herself at home — the way her friend Nayely did in Tecomán? Lopez was happy to oblige.

Happily, it’s very easy to do. And it’s so spectacularly delicious that we will be making it frequently — as frequently as we dream of a beach vacation in Mexico, which is to say constantly.

In our version, raw, butterflied shrimp get a quick 10-minute dunk in lime juice with a little salt and a splash of Worcestershire sauce. (“Yes, they use that in Mexico!” Lopez says.) The marinating juice then gets puréed with serrano chiles, cilantro and avocado, and the beautiful, emerald-green sauce that results gets tumbled with the shrimp. Transfer it to a platter, dress it up with sliced cucumber, avocado and red onion, and Playa El Real is yours. You can find tostadas in a Latin-American supermarket, and probably young coconuts for coconut water as well.

One small detail: The aguachile is meant to be eaten immediately, so the shrimp doesn’t get overcooked in the lime. It did take Lopez and her friends a few minutes to get to the beach with it, but that’s OK, she says; you just want to be sure to eat it within an hour.

Honestly, once you behold that gorgeous dish you’ve made in your own kitchen, I don’t think you could wait that long.

RECIPE: Aguachile, Colima-Style

Quintessential Tex-Mex in your own kitchen — from Margarita to rice and beans (plus a bonus dessert!)

Everyone’s craving comfort during The Great Confinement. We’re also starved for the kinds of foods we love to eat out. If you happen to live in Texas, the idea of Tex-Mex hits all those emotional notes like a gorgeous, plaintive minor-scale chord. And if you don’t live in Texas, a soulful plate of cheesy, tangy chicken enchiladas verdes with rice and beans — and an icy Margarita to go with it — probably sounds pretty good to you too. (Right?)

But hey — we don’t have to dream. It’s not difficult to make all those Tex-Mex specialties at home. And during this time of cooking three meals a day, seven days a week for most of us, the idea of the leftovers involved are pretty attractive too.

I must confess, though I cook a lot of Mexican dishes, I don’t usually mess with Tex-Mex — that’s because it’s so much easier to go out for good Tex-Mex in our neck of the woods than it is to make Mexican rice and refried beans. But the craving got to me, so I dove in — and wrote a story for The Dallas Morning News, because I know others in my city are craving these things too. (If you hit the paywall and live in Dallas, subscribe! If you hit the paywall and don’t live in Dallas, just keep reading — you’ll find all the recipes here as well.)

In case you’re not a Texan, I’ll tell you what you need to put together to experience Tex-Mex nirvana. Unless you abstain from alcohol, you’ll want to start with a round of Margaritas. In Texas restaurants, you’d have a whole list of them, often including frozen ones. Partly because I’m prone to brain freeze, I personally skip those and go for a classic one, on the rocks with salt.

I put Wylie in charge of crafting the perfect Margarita (only natural, as he used to work as a bartender). In restaurants, Margaritas tend to be super sweet (even “skinny” ones). We favor and old-school style that balances the sweetness of orange liqueur with enough tart lime juice. Wylie experimented (and we tasted and tasted and tasted) until he came up with the perfectly balanced Classic Margarita on the Rocks. Recipe below.

Queso is the second order of business for most Texans who find themselves in a Tex-Mex situation. Though I’ve lived here more than a decade, I’m still more of a Californian, so I go for guacamole. If you want to make queso, Lisa Fain, a.k.a. The Homesick Texan, author of Queso!, has you covered recipe-wise.

If it’s guac you’re after, we’ve got your back. Ginding ingredients like cilantro, serrano chiles and onion in a molcajete before adding the avocados results in something much more compelling that what you get in most restaurants. And even if you don’t have a molcajete, you’ll be able to knock it out of the park.

Now to the main course: enchiladas, rice and beans. Who could argue, right? There is always at least one person at every Tex-Mex table who goes for some kind of enchiladas, which always come with that fantastic Mexican rice and sumptuous refried beans; chicken enchiladas verdes are pretty universally adored.

They’re a snap to put together using leftover chicken or a supermarket roast chicken and salsa verde from a jar, but SO much better if you roast your own bird and make your own roasted salsa verde: The deeper flavor and juicier meat take the enchiladas to another level.

Chicken enchiladas verdes are a crowd-pleaser.

Tortillas are another story entirely: Store-bought corn tortillas work better for this than hand-made ones. Dip each one in hot oil to make them pliable and help them soak up flavor. That’s a worthwhile upgrade from the easy alternative, zapping them in the microwave to soften them.

Here’s our recipe, which also gives basic chicken-roasting instructions. Alternatively, you could roast some chicken thighs — just season with salt and pepper, and roast at 425 for about 25 minutes.

To go with those luscious enchiladas, you’ll want rice and beans. Hopefully, you can get your hands on dried pinto beans. If so, cook up a pot of frijoles de olla the day before your Tex-Mex feast. No soaking necessary; just pour 10 cups of boiling water over a pound of beans, add a sliced onion and a few cloves of garlic, simmer till tender then add salt. It’s weird how insanely delicious they are just like that; and you’ll have some extra to enjoy as the refried beans (frijoles refritos) recipe doesn’t use the entire amount. Let them cool overnight in their liquid and they’ll be waiting for you. You’ll need lard or bacon fat to fry them, along with a little more white onion.

Meanwhile, there’s something deeply satisfying about making this Mexican Rice. It feels like a weird and silly recipe while you’re executing it (it is adapted from Diana Kennedy’s out-of-print classic The Cuisines of Mexico). But the result is wonderful. We added more tomato and simplified the recipe a bit.

That’s our basic package for the quintessential Tex-Mex experience.

Strawberry-Mezcal Ice Cream

Hopefully we can get a flan recipe together soon; that would be a fitting ending. In its stead, consider Strawberry-Mezcal Ice Cream. It’s one of my favorite dessert recipes we’ve done here at CWB, and I’ve been thinking about it every time I open the fridge and see strawberries. I thought the likelihood of scraping together the rest of the necessary ingredients was slim, but then I realized if I made half a batch I could do it: with 3/4 pint strawberries, 3/4 cup cream, 1 1/2 egg yolks and a tablespoon of Mezcal (someone was being polite as we drink ourselves out of house and home — there were two tablespoons left!). Maybe you’ve got access to those things too.

Want to add other Mexican touches to your Tex-Mex party? Our Mexican Cuisine page has much more — including a recipe for tangy Taquería Carrots that would be great with the Margarita and guac.

Let us know how your feast turns out. Send pics! Leave comments! Until then, be safe and healthy.

When life gives you masa harina, make tortillas — and tacos, and tortilla chips

You’re craving pasta — but whoosh! All the boxes have flown off the shelves. Next you crave chocolate treats, so you bake — chocolate chip cookies, brownies, Brazilian chocolate cake. You run out of flour, and there’s no more to be had at the store (whoosh!). Eggs are nowhere to be found (whoosh!).

But there’s one fabulous comfort ingredient that doesn’t seem to be out of reach — yet, anyway: masa harina, the corn flour made from limewater-soaked dried corn kernels that is also known as maseca. Just mix it with warm water, give it a stir, and it instantly becomes a dough that you can turn into tortillas. Or sopes.

For me, it has come in handy half a dozen times in the last couple of weeks.

We craved huevos rancheros, but lacked corn tortillas. Out came the tortilla press; in ten minutes we had tortillas — which I fried, topped with fried egg, smothered in salsa ranchera. Craving satisfied.

Leftover roast chicken, chopped onion, cilantro and salsa verde suggested a taco lunch; masa harina to the rescue.

And at our sheltering-in-place happy hour a few evenings ago, three perfectly ripe avocados begged to become guacamole. We thought we had everything we needed: cilantro, white onion, half a tomato, two limes, salt and a single, solitary serrano chile. However — and this could have been a deal-breaker — no tortilla chips for dipping.

Maseca saved us once again! We mixed up some masa, flattened it in the press, laid the discs on the griddle, then into the tortilla basket those golden babies went. I cut them into sixths, heated a pan of oil and started deep-frying: something I hadn’t done in ages. Sea salt ground to super-fine in a mortar was the finishing touch, and wow — our happiest happy hour to date.

I’ve used every supermarket brand of masa harina, and all have worked fine. But recently I fell in love with the organic masa harina produced by Bob’s Red Mill. A wee bit coarser than the supermarket brands, it produces tortillas with a little more texture, and lovely deep corn flavor.

Whatever masa harina you use, you’re going to be happy. Make chips. Make tortillas. Make tacos.

When I’m feeling a little more ambitious, I’ll try making tortillas without using the press (to aid those of you who don’t have one). And soon we’ll do a sopes story. Meanwhile, tortilla presses, which during normal times you can pick up at your local Mexican supermarket, are easy to buy online.

There’s never been a time when handmade tortillas are more appealing or useful. Wrap any kind of stewy-saucy leftover in one, or serve them with a batch of chicken chile verde. Boil up a pot of pinto beans. (or open a can), add some grated jack and cilantro and you’ve got vegetarian taco event. Put out salsa, cilantro and diced onion, along with leftover chicken, beef, pork or lamb, and you’ve got a taco party.

Oh, and don’t forget the Taquería Carrots.

Need a lift? Throw together a batch of these spicy, zingy (addictive!) taquería carrots

UPDATED: August 2, 2020

First came the cravings for comfort carbs: mac and cheese (or any pasta smothered in sauce); warm chocolate chip cookies; sourdough bread. There’s a reason the boxes of pasta were the first edible things to disappear off the shelves in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic.

After a week or two of that, I started craving anything tangy: the lemons and limes that were so hard to get our hands on, som tum (Thai green papaya salad); dill pickles.

I also kept thinking about the zingy, hot, crunchy pickled carrots we used to love munching in L.A. taquerías. Known in Mexico as zanahorias escabeches, they are super easy to achieve with very limited resources. And four and a half long months later, they still keep hitting the spot.

If you have any carrots in your fridge — and any kind of chile peppers — you can make these in just a few minutes. The carrot slices are cooked very briefly in a half-vinegar, half-water solution with salt and aromatics; chiles and onion are added off-heat to keep the flavors fresh.

They are just the thing to make a video-chat happy hour with friends even brighter. Mix a margarita, open a beer, show off your glorious carrots, crunch away, and dream together of a bright and pickly future.

RECIPE: Taquería Carrots

Outrageously luscious comfort from your pantry: Hello, huevos rancheros!

Huevos rancheros is the opposite of a salad. It’s warm, and saucy. It’s rich and spicy and comforting. With everything we’re all going through these days, you deserve to have it for lunch — even in the middle of the week.

Does the steaming, rich, gooey extravaganza seem like something that can only be had in a restaurant? It’s not! It’s actually super easy to make at home.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you had everything you need to make it already in your kitchen:

• Corn tortilla

• Eggs — or even a single egg

• A can of diced tomatoes

• One of those tiny cans of diced green chiles

• Half an onion

• Two or three garlic cloves

Maybe you don’t have garlic cloves, but you have some garlic powder. Maybe you don’t have that little can of green chiles, but you have some red pepper flakes or Tabasco. Maybe you don’t have corn tortillas, but you have masa harina and you know your way around a tortilla press. You’ll manage. I’ll walk you through it.

Probably you do have salt and cooking oil of some sort. Queso fresco or cotija — or even feta or goat cheese or one of those bags of pre-grated fiesta mix? I’m sure you’ve got one the above. Cilantro? Yes! Totally not essential, but lovely if you have it.

If you have a can of pinto beans (or some dried ones and you put up a pot first thing in the morning), you can have dreamy side dish, too. Or maybe you have black beans. But don’t even worry if you don’t: Your belly and your soul will be in a very happy place when the noon-time whistle blows.

We made this indulgent lunch from stuff we happened to have lying around.

Here’s how to achieve the lunch that we all absolutely deserve.

First, toss together a ranchera sauce: blitz a can of diced tomatoes with some diced green chiles from a can and two or three garlic cloves. Set it aside. In a saucepan, sweat half an onion, then add the purée and salt. Simmer five minutes. Taste it: Wow. Sauce whipped up from cans has no right to be that good!

Lightly fry a tortilla or two. Blot and put ‘em on a plate. Fry an egg or two in your tortilla oil, any way you like ‘em — over-easy, sunny-side-up. Slide the egg onto the tortilla, spoon ranchera sauce over. Garnish with whatever you’ve got — crumbled cotija or cheese from a bag, a fresh sprig of cilantro or two.

Don’t you wish you had a ripe avocado? Man, I actually had one and forgot I did. A few slices on the side would have been awesome. (Still kicking myself!)

You’ve already heated up that can of pinto beans or refried beans. Spoon that next to the eggs.

Got it? Here’s the recipe:

If you want to make pinto beans, wash a pound of dried pinto beans, place them in a large pot, add 10 cups of hot water and half an onion, sliced, and bring it to a boil over high heat. Reduce heat to very low, cover the pot, and cook — stirring occasionally — till the beans are tender. It might take anywhere from 90 minutes to 2 1/2 hours, depending on the beans. Add more hot water as you go along if they need it toward the end (you want it very liquidy). 10 minutes before you want to eat them, stir in salt to taste. That’s the basic recipe; throwing in some garlic and herbs (thyme, bay leaf) in the beginning is lovely too.

If it’s only huevos rancheros that you’re after, you can put that together in twenty minutes. Is it a date?

Meanwhile, tonight, if you can’t sleep, think about all the ingredients in your pantry and fridge that you’d love to find a delicious use for. Give me a list in the comments below. I’ll dream up something enticing for you to make.

Stodgy boomer, plucky Gen-Z-er share in unlikely Instant Pot epiphany; miraculous chicken chile verde results

A few weeks ago, Wylie chicken-shamed me. 

Maybe you know the drill: following a long day at the office, you stop at the supermarket on your way home and pick up a roast chicken. I was about to do just that, and texted home to see if I should pick up anything else. 

“Just buy a raw chicken,” said Wylie, who is temporarily living with us post-college-graduation in a figuring-things-out moment. “I’ll roast it. It’ll be so much better, and it’s so easy.” Who could argue?

While the hunt for a job in his field has not been thus far fruitful, he has taken full advantage of the parental larder — and our delight at being cooked for  — in order to develop his kitchencraft. 

Wylie making pasta dough from Evan Funke’s ‘American Sfloglio’

Like many fledgling cooks of his generation, Wylie really gets into cooking projects — the more elaborate the better. The most gleeful I’ve seen him since graduation was when we spent two days making tagliatelle al ragù della vecchia scuola from Evan Funke’s American Sfoglino cookbook — a process which started with putting various meats through a manual meat grinder for the ragù, and passing simmered tomatoes through a food mill. (My favorite line in the recipe: “Begin tasting for tenderness and seasoning after 5 hours.”) We used a rolling pin to roll the pasta dough, and a knife to cut it; Funke’s philosophy is summed up in his hashtag #fuckyourpastamachine. 

And so, when through a curious set of circumstances I brought a shiny new Instant Pot — one of those countertop pressure cookers — into the house, he regarded the thing with contempt.

Not that I blame him; it’s the way he was raised. But for reasons having to do with my consulting business, I wanted to explore the possibilities. And if by some miracle I took to the thing, well, maybe it would lead to fewer supermarket roast chicken situations post work-days.

Because precise timing is involved, and the thing was utterly foreign to me, I couldn’t just dive in and start improvising; I had to learn the basics first. I went to a couple of admired and reliable sources: New York Times Cooking and Serious Eats. 

It was at the latter that I turned up a recipe that looked so implausible I couldn’t wait to try it: J. Kenji López-Alt’s Easy Pressure Cooker Green Chili with Chicken. In other words, chicken chile verde. 

I couldn’t wait to show Wylie, who naturally scoffed. The recipe would have us believe that you could throw raw chicken thighs, onion, garlic, tomatillos, spices and chiles into the vessel, push a button and (once the machine came to pressure) 15 minutes later you’d have something gorgeous and profoundly delicious. 

First time around Wylie insisted on browning the chicken thighs on top of the stove first. So we tried it like that. Then we tried it exactly as written. Then we tried it giving the poblano, Anaheim and serrano chiles, along with the onion, garlic and tomatillos, a quick char on a comal, as you would in a traditional chile verde recipe. 

I’m here to tell you it was very good each and every time. We served it once with home-made corn tortillas (fantastic!), with handmade tortillas picked up from a nearby Mexican restaurant when we were out of masa harina and couldn’t find any nearby (also fantastic) and with corn tortillas we bought at Trader Joe’s and reheated in the microwave (even that was pretty good).

• We stirred a couple tablespoonfuls of masa harina (a traditional thickener for these types of braises) into the finished dish: perfect! 

• We also added an optional garnish of crumbled queso blanco, which rounds out the flavors beautifully; if you’re wrapping the chile verde into tacos, some crumbled queso blanco added in each one is lovely.

What of our various other attempts at improvements? 

• Because the Instant Pot is all about ease, our recipe uses boneless, skinless chicken thighs instead of using skin-on, bone-in thighs and then removing skin and bones (if the dish lost any depth of flavor as a result of not cooking with the bones, I couldn’t detect it). 

• Browning the chicken, however, did not noticeably improve the dish, so we jettisoned that step. 

• Charring the chiles and garlic cloves (in their skins) adds slight value — a subtle charry, roasty flavor — do that only if you feel like it and have an extra few minutes (meanwhile, it’s easier to seed charred chiles than raw). 

• Don’t bother charring the onion or tomatillos because the charry payoff is less, and it’s a little messier.

Though our version of the recipe — which we call Chicken Chile Verde (Quick and Easy Pressure-Cooking Version) — calls for boneless, skinless thighs, of course you can also use bone-in, skin-on thighs as the original recipe suggests, simply removing the bones and skin before shredding the chicken. Also, for whatever it’s worth, one time I forgot to buy Anaheim chiles, and so just made it with poblanos — and there wasn’t much of a difference in flavor.

OK, then — a quick walk through. The only active time it takes to speak of is prepping the onion, chiles and tomatillos, which get husked and quartered; the chiles are seeded then roughly chopped, like the onion. (If you’re going to char the chiles, you’d do that before seeding and chopping, and you can toss the garlic cloves in their skins on the skillet, comal or griddle to char as well.) Toast a tablespoon of cumin seeds in a small pan till fragrant. Set the pressure cooker to SAUTE, and toss in all of those things, along with three pounds of boneless, skinless chicken thighs and a pinch of salt. Once it sizzles a bit, seal the pressure cooker and cook on HIGH PRESSURE for 15 minutes. Release the steam, remove the chicken and shred it. Add López-Alt’s brilliant secret ingredient (Asian fish sauce!), along with salt to taste and a handful of cilantro, blitz the sauce — either with an immersion blender or in a regular blender or food processor — then stir in a couple tablespoons of masa harina. Shred the chicken and return it to the sauce. Garnish with more cilantro, and (if you like) some crumbled queso blanco. Serve it with warm corn tortillas and maybe some limes and more crumbled queso blanco.

Here’s the recipe. Please (please!) let us know how you like it.

Or, if you’d prefer an old-fashioned, long, lazy and aromatic braised-the-on-the-stove experience, let us know that as well, and we’ll hurry up with Chile Verde (Stovetop Version).

[RECIPE: Chicken Chile Verde]

Serve up irresistible classics on Super Bowl Sunday: glorious Texas chili and killer guac

When it comes to football munchies, I seem to be desperately out of touch!

A big chunk of America, it seems, is head-over-heels in love with an appetizer I’d never even heard of until today: Buffalo chicken dip. According to a story in The Huffington Post, the gooey, cheesy, spicy, chicken-y concoction is the most Googled Super Bowl snack in six states — California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Hawaii and Florida.

Really? OK, BCD fans — dip away! But if you prefer to make something more irresistibly classic on Super Bowl Sunday, perhaps a simmering pot of classic Texas chili — flanked by a molcajete-ful of killer guacamole — would hit the spot. And if you’re (like me) happier in the kitchen than glued to a football game, you could even round out the festivities with hot-off-the-comal handmade corn tortillas.

All sounds super delicious to me, especially on a chill February afternoon. Plus it’ll fill your living space with enchanting aromas.

On top of it, a legit Texas chili, built from a slab of generously marbled chuck, is fun and satisfying to make — and super interesting if you’ve never done it before. You could ask your friendly butcher for a coarse chili grind, but I think it’s even nicer to hand-cut it into half-inch dice.

Hand-cut beef chuck gives Texas chili incredible flavor and texture.

Brown the meat, then add to it toasted, then soaked and puréed ancho chiles, stir in some chile soaking water, charred onion, garlic and spices and let the whole thing simmer for a couple of hours. Then your job is just to sit back and enjoy the wafting aromas.

Wanna take a peek at the recipe? Here you go:

Then, shortly before the gang is set to arrive, whip up some guacamole. I’ve evolved this one — our family’s default guac — over the years. My guacamole insurance policy is shopping for avocados two or three days before I’m going to make it, in case I don’t find ripe avocados. Buy almost-ripe ones, and put them on the counter in a brown paper bag to let them ripen. If you find already ripe ones, they should hold fine in the fridge. Make the guac just before kick-off, for the best flavor.

A couple bags of tortilla chips, maybe some salsa fresca or salsa verde (pick ‘em up, or make one yourself), beers and Topo Chicos and whatnot, and you’ll be all set!

Here’s your ticket to guacamole:

And here are a few other recipes you might want close-at-hand: corn tortillas, salsa borracha and roasted salsa verde. In case this all just puts you in a Mexican mood, you can peruse our Mexican recipes section to see if something else catches your fancy.

That should do it for now. Happy cooking, happy eating — and may your favorite team win!

Luxuriously rich, easy-to-make, flourless Mexican-chocolate cake is blow-them-away fabulous

It all started with a recipe in Michael Solomonov's Zahav: A World of Israeli Cooking. The recipe, for a flourless chocolate cake – in which Solomonov and co-author Steven Cook use almond flour in place of wheat flour – is called "Chocolate-Almond Situation." I was drawn to the recipe because of its unusual name. Why "situation"?

Also, it looked so easy and good I couldn't resist. I melted chocolate, heated the oven, and went for it. 

Rich, luxurious and profoundly chocolatey, with a wonderfully moist, velvet-cream texture, the dessert was a big hit. And it was as easy to make as brownies. Another bonus: It's gluten-free. I posted a snap of it, with a description, on Instagram, tagged Solomonov and Zahav and added, "But still dying to know, Chef, why it's called a 'situation.'" 

"Gorgeous!" came the comment from Zahav. 

"Thank you!" I wrote. "Now why is it called a 'situation'?"

No answer. 

Meanwhile, I had an idea I couldn't get out of my head: Mexican chocolate. Wouldn't it be cool to make this cake using Mexican chocolate instead of regular dark chocolate? 

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Last winter, my friend Michalene and I had enjoyed the most amazing Mexican hot chocolate at El Cardenal, a Mexico City restaurant known for its epic breakfasts. The drink, silky and incredibly rich, was prepared at the table by a waiter who used a molinillo, a traditional wooden chocolate whisk. I had to rush off early to catch my flight home, but Michalene surprised me by sending me a box of Doña Oliva chocolate tablets, which they use and sell at the restaurant. I was stunned to find that I could use a tablet to make a cup of chocolate almost as delicious as El Cardenal's; I've been rationing them ever since.

Since I'm always craving a cup, Mexican chocolate has been on my mind for months – especially since the start of winter. 

Could I maybe use the tablets to make a Mexican-Chocolate Situation? 

Nah...those tablets are too precious.

Meanwhile, I'd seen really cool-looking Taza organic Mexican-style stone-ground chocolate tablets at the supermarket. Maybe I could use those! But when I saw the price – they're $5 per 2.7-ounce tablet on the Taza website – I realized they'd be way too expensive, as we'd need four or five tablets for one cake.

Instead, I tried hunting down the Ibarra Mexican chocolate I grew up with. I didn't find it at my local supermarket, but found and purchased a box of Abuelita, another industrial brand.

What a disappointment: I brought it home and tasted it. It tasted nothing like chocolate. Just like sugar and chemicals. No way was this going into my cake (or yours). 

I was back to the drawing board.

Then, as she often does, Michalene came to the rescue. She suggested using the same high-quality 72% cacao chocolate I first used for the Situation and adding spices and other flavorings you'd find in Mexican chocolate. After all, I already had almonds in the almond flour. She suggested not just cinnamon and vanilla, which is what I'd naturally reach for, but also ancho chile powder and brandy. 

I made a couple other little tweaks to the recipe, for instance, changing the amount of chocolate to equal three 3.5 bars (10.5 ounces) rather than the 11 ounces the original called for. 

I whipped up the chocolate batter, added the ancho chile (just a touch), the cinnamon, the vanilla and brandy, mixed in the almond flour, spread it in a pan and baked.

Eureka! Same wonderful texture and richness, and now it had that dreamy Mexican chocolate flavor.

It was such a hit at dinner that one of my guests would not leave until I wrapped up two slices for him to take home.

You can bake it in a round pan and slice it into wedges, but be sure to make them small, as it is very, very rich. I'd say one 9-inch cake serves 10-12, rather than the 8 you'd expect. For an elegant dinner party, you might want to garnish it with a dollop of whipped cream, or whipped cream mixed with crème fraîche. You know what would be wonderful? Nata, the Mexican-style clotted cream El Cardenal serves at breakfast with the pan dulce known as a concha.

Or you can bake it in a square or pan and cut it into brownie-like bars. Dust them with powdered sugar or not, as you like. Honestly, they were so creamy, chocolatey and rich, they didn't need any adornment. 

Here's the recipe:

As for why it's called a "situation," well, that remains a mystery. Chef Solomonov, care to comment?

Luscious, crispy-edged, flavorful carnitas are (guess what!) super-easy to make

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I have one word for you: carnitas. Think about it: those super-flavorful, crispy-edged morsels of tender pork would be absolutely heavenly wrapped in a warm, handmade corn tortilla with a good dose of salsa verde. 

Here's the easy way to make those tortillas. And you have the recipe for zippy, deep-flavored roasted salsa verde. Just one thing missing. Where's the meat?

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It probably seems as though great carnitas would be tricky or complicated to make, but it's actually a snap: You can make killer carnitas with very little effort – or expense. 

For years I was married to Diana Kennedy's recipe, the one in her classic cookbook The Cuisines of Mexico. It's easy, and I love the technique: Cut up a fatty piece of pork (I use pork shoulder) into smallish strips, cover it with salted cold water, simmer it till the water evaporates and the pork starts to brown in its own fat, brown the pieces all over, and that's it. Beautifully simple: just three ingredients, about an hour and ten minutes and very little work.

The thing is, done that way, the carnitas are very good – I've made them a million times. And they're definitely easy. 

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Carnitas from Diana Kennedy's The Cuisines of Mexico

But they're not crazy-good. The smallish morsels do have that nice crispness, but last time I made them I found myself wanting more lushness, more tenderness.

What to do? Lots of carnitas recipes, especially cheffy ones, call for one large cut of pork that you roast for hours in a Dutch oven, then pull apart with forks to serve. Nice, but a giant commitment, and you don't get so many crispy edges. Also, I'd rather not turn on the oven for three or four hours on a hot summer day. 

I wondered if maybe I could split the difference. If we started with medium-sized pieces of pork rather than smallish strips, we should get more textural contrast – caramelized crispness on the outside, and the kind of tender meat you can pull apart with a fork on the inside.

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So that's what I did. I cut a pork shoulder into three-inch chunks, covered them in water and simmered them on the stove, then fried them in their own fat. 

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Carnitas heaven!

The compromise works brilliantly. The carnitas, which cook about 15 or 20 minutes longer than the Kennedy way, get lots of crispy edges and caramelized flavor, but they're tender and luscious inside. Adding a few sprigs of thyme, bay leaves and pieces of orange zest to the water doesn't add much work, but it definitely add complexity.

Here's the recipe:

And of course you'll want to make some corn tortillas.

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And some roasted salsa verde:

I know what you're thinking: guacamole would be great in those tacos, too. You're right. It's not necessary, but it does send them over the top.

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OK! Definitely let us know how this one goes. 

Fall in love with the most versatile warm summer salad in the universe

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Are you a friend of okra? If so, you'll love this warm summer salad or summer squash, sweet cherry tomatoes, grilled corn and grilled okra. 

Are you anti-okra? You, too, will love this warm summer salad: That's because you can leave simply leave it out. Add grilled eggplant. Or some cooked black beans. Or fresh green garbanzos, if you score them at the market and you're wondering what to do with them.

I'm calling it a warm summer salad because I conceived it to be eaten warm. But it's also great at room temp. Or even straight out of the fridge the next day. 

It may be the most versatile warm salad in the universe.

It's great with cheese crumbled on – queso fresco or cotija, for a Mexican or modern Tex-Mex feel. Feta gives it a Greek accent. Shaved ricotta salata spins it Italian, especially if you make it with basil. Try cilantro, if you want to be more Mexican, or parsley for more Greek. Or mint. It's a salad without borders.

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Leaving off the cheese sacrifices nothing – and makes it vegan.

It's fabulous as a starter or main course salad on its own. Serve it next to or under some grilled fish or chicken or lamb (or beef or pork or tofu . . . ) and you've got a gorgeous, cheffy main course. 

See what I mean? It's versatile. 

Don't feel like grilling the corn? Don't worry – just cut it raw off the cob and toss it in with the squash. Want to use more of one vegetable and less of another? Go ahead – it's a free country. Use balsamic or red wine vinegar in place of the sherry vinegar if you like. Throw in a handful of toasted pine nuts, or a spoonful of leftover basil. Serve it on a bed of quinoa or lentils or arugula. Or toss some arugula or microgreens on top. 

It's your salad. Now go for it.

Celebrated Dallas restaurateur Monica Greene shares a favorite dish from her Mexico City childhood: ropa vieja

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Monica Greene in the Cooks Without Borders kitchen 

Most Texans see a brisket and think: barbecue. Monica Greene, the legendary Dallas restaurateur, sees a brisket and thinks: ropa vieja.

Everyone in town knows Monica, who visited Cooks Without Borders headquarters (my kitchen!) recently as an honored guest cook. She's no longer in the business; her last (and short-lived) restaurant – Monica's Nueva Cocina – closed in 2012.  Nevertheless, her impact on Dallas' vibrant modern Mexican cooking culture is undeniable and indelible. A pioneer of the movement, she and chef Joanne Bondy introduced the city to dishes like cabrito tacos with apple-plum butter and veal shortribs braised in mole rojo when they opened their ground-breaking restaurant Ciudad in 2000. Her long-running Deep Ellum place Monica's Aca y Alla introduced a generation of Dallasites to the joys of Mexican eating.

What her fans might not know is that Monica, who grew up in Mexico City, also loves to cook.

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"Cooking is my favorite thing in the world," she tells me as she slices onions, chops carrots and celery, fills my giant stockpot with water. She's here to make ropa vieja, a shredded cold beef salad that evokes her Mexico City childhood. 

Warm and gregarious as she is, she established her reputation as the face of her restaurants, running dining rooms. "From the very beginning, people told me 'you stay up front.' So when I opened my restaurant, I was a door person. But whenever I had a chance, I'd go work in the kitchen."

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The first order of business is getting the brisket trimmed and simmering: It will need nearly three hours to cook to tenderness. Once Monica cuts it in half and drops it into the stockpot of simmering onions, carrots, celery, garlic, herbs and cumin seeds, we take our time and put together all the components of the salad. And yes, we talk – and talk and talk.

She tells me about her childhood in Mexico City, where she was the seventh of eight children: four boys and four girls. Their mother died when she was three, but she has fond memories of gathering with her siblings every evening around the big butcher block in the center of the family kitchen, where their cook would prepare dinner. All eight kids, and inevitably their friends as well.

"Every once in a while," she says, "you got to choose what we had. I wanted to eat two dishes. One was a chicken breast wrapped in an apple. I've never seen it anywhere else in my entire life. You boil the apple to take off the skin, wrap a pounded chicken breast around it and roast it. The other was ropa vieja." 

The dish, which translates as "old clothes,"takes a different form than the well-known Cuban version, in which the braised shredded beef is served warm, like a stew. Monica's Mexico City iteration is a cold salad.  "In the north, they pan-sear and brown and seal the meat, then put it in the oven." In the south, you boil it; the beef serves as a vehicle to the other flavors: pickled onions and tomatoes and avocado and cilantro. "It’s more of a symphony."

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Monica slices nopal – a cactus paddle – before boiling it.

She talks, too, over the course of an afternoon – the kind of lazy, cooking afternoon I love – about some of the challenges she has faced in her life. How hard it was to find a job after making the transition from Eduardo Greene more than 20 years ago to Monica Greene, at a time when people didn't know what to make of such an evolution. At that point she had become a beautiful woman (she shows me photos on her phone) and she felt like a woman, but the way she looked and felt didn't match the name on her drivers' license or social security card. 

Now she's reinventing herself once again, taking time off to travel – she has just returned from Mexico (where she reconnected with one of her brothers) and then Bali. She's in Dallas for a week, spending as much time as possible with her grandchildren, and then she's off to her second home, in Aspen, Colorado for a month – or five.  "I realized I'd been working 41 years," she says, "and I wanted to take a sabbatical and pursue my passions. I have to travel – before there's a time I cannot walk up the pyramid." 

She's also writing. "I took a couple of classes at the Aspen Writers Foundation," she tells me. "They were workshops, basically. And I found I have a lot of passion for it." One project is a Mexican cookbook. "I've been working on it for two years." She's also working on a children's book ("I'm an illustrator also") and a book of fiction. "It's partly the story of my life," she says. "I think when most writers write fiction, they're writing about themselves."

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Between anecdotes and bons mots, memories of her aging father succumbing to Alzheimer's and a fabulous reunion with a cherished brother, everything starts to come together for the salad. Rounds of purple-edged Bermuda onions turn to tangy pickles, perfumed with allspice and kicked with habanero chile.  A cactus paddle is declawed, sliced, boiled till it taste like desert green beans. Eggs are boiled ("We're going to overcook them a little," she says, "because we're going to do the yolks in powder and the whites in strips.") Lime juice, jalapeño, vinegar, oil and a whole lot of cilantro get whirred up into a dressing that will pull all the flavors together. Rosé is poured, with predictions of tequila flowing in the near future.

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"I don't use technique," she says; "I use tradition." Still, it's fun watching her slice Roma tomatoes, using her knife to liberate their hearts full of sees and coax them into flat obedience on the cutting board, ready to be sliced into even strips. "Yes, I can cut fast, but that's like making love too fast."

 Monica pushes the egg yolks through a strainer, crumbles queso fresco, as I slice avocados to her specs. Neighbors show up, hungry and excited. Monica tosses the ropa vieja, then arranges it on a platter. 

It's got everything: richness, depth, wonderful tang, the prodigious perfume of cilantro. You can serve it just like that, Monica says, or spoon some onto round, fried tostadas for some crunch. 

Dinner is just as relaxed as the cooking was. "It's even better with tequila," Monica suggests, and wow! She has brought a bottle of Casa Dragones. Out come the shot glasses, but this is special, for sipping.

She's right. Tequila and ropa vieja is a match made in heaven. 

Her gift to you: This recipe. Hope for leftovers, but don't expect them.

Taco party! Quick and snazzy ways to dress up freshly made corn tortillas

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Now that you know how to make wonderful hand-made corn tortillas (just mix masa harina with water, and you're nearly there!), you'll want to wrap them around everything in sight. 

If you feel like really stretching out and cooking, you might prepare a special taco centerpiece, like lamb barbacoa or carnitas.

But maybe you want to go super-easy. Have a stress-free taco party! Here are some ideas for fillings:

•Pick up a rotisserie chicken at the supermarket 

•Stop by your favorite barbecue joint and buy some sliced brisket or pulled pork 

•Use that leftover steak in the fridge: Toss it in a hot skillet or grill pan, then slice it in medium-rare strips, for bifstek tacos. They're great dressed with chopped onion, cilantro and any kind of salsa.

•Boil up some pinto beans for vegetarian tacos. Just soak beans overnight, drain, cover with water, toss in half a peeled onion (or a whole one), a couple cloves of unpeeled garlic, fresh thyme or oregano (optional), dried or fresh bay leaves (optional). Bring to a boil, lower heat then simmer till they're tender. Add salt to taste when they're done.

•Pick up some shelled and deveined shrimp from the supermarket and toss them on the grill or grill-pan. Or grill fish fillets.

•Have some leftover confit duck legs burning a hole in your fridge? (Ha!) They make great tacos. I haven't tried them with salsa verde, but I'm thinking it would be great. Or you could go sweet and add a dab of chutney and some chopped cilantro.

•When Thanksgiving rolls around, consider leftover turkey tacos

•Leftover braised short ribs make great tacos,, too. So do leftover stews (beef, pork, lamb, veal, chicken), pot roast, chops, leg of lamb

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Really, your imagination is the limit. In their book Tacos: Recipes and Provocations, Alex Stupak and Jordana Rothman have recipes for smoked salmon tacos (with cucumbers, cream cheese and lime) and pastrami tacos (with pickled mustard seeds and pickled cabbage).

More tips:

•Have a couple of good salsas on hand, like a roasted salsa verde (easy to make), a store-bought salsa roja or homemade pico de gallo (diced onion and tomato, chopped cilantro, minced serrano or jalapeño chile, a little salt, a big squeeze or three of lime). If you're feeling more ambitious, try Stupak's amazing salsa borracha. 

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•Set out bowls of any or all of the following: lime wedges, guacamole, crumbled queso fresco, sliced avocado, cilantro leaves, sliced radishes, chopped olives, chopped white onion, sliced scallions, sliced or diced cucumber

Oh, one more thing: Do yourself a favor and hand your hands on one of these inexpensive ($8 to $12) insulated fabric taco warmers. Stupak and Rothman tested every type out there, and concluded these work the best. I have to agree: Mine kept our tortillas warm for at least an hour. Maybe they would have stayed warm longer; I don't know – we ate them all too fast. They're easy to find online; I lucked out when my generous friends Keven and Georges gave me one as a gift last weekend.

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OK, then – let's invite some friends and get that tortilla press going! 

Crash course in Mexican cooking: lamb barbacoa tacos

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Here's a project to attempt if you're in the mood for a major cooking endeavor. It involves some advance planning – scouting ingredients, a day or so of advance prep, a long, slow roast (three hours) and an hour letting the meat rest. You'll make a serious salsa, for which you'll roast dried chiles, spiked with mezcal, and create adobo, the brilliant paste that serves as a marinade for the lamb. You'll learn how to simulate pit-roasting in your oven. You'll make handmade corn tortillas. 

A lot of work – and time – to be sure. But it's really fun (if you're the type of person who loves to spend quality time in the kitchen), and when you're done, if you're not already adept at Mexican cooking techniques, when the project is done, you will be. 

And you will have something incredibly delicious to show for it. Invite your more gastronomically inclined friends, people who will truly appreciate it. It's the moment to break out that bottle of great mezcal you're been hoarding.

Lamb barbacoa – pit-roasted lamb – is a specialty of Oaxaca. I had a wonderful rendition recently in Mexico City, at El Cardenal in the historic district. So when I found a version in Alex Stupak and Jordana Rothman's new cookbook Tacos: Recipes and Provocations, I had to try it. Even if it meant chasing down ingredients in no less than four stores, two of them huge Mexican supermarkets. 

The most challenging was probably dried avocado leaves, which I found at one of the Mexican supermarkets (La Michoacana Meat Market in Richardson, Texas). I'm glad I bought three times the amount I needed, so I won't go through that next time. 

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The two other challenges were fresh banana leaves, which I found easily at a Fiesta supermarket, and a boneless lamb shoulder. My local Whole Foods didn't have any kind of lamb shoulder; so I called Central Market (another well-stocked Dallas area supermarket) and the butcher was happy to bone one for me. I couldn't help but wonder, after making the dish, why it called for boneless. Maybe because it only called for two pounds? Still, my Dutch oven could have accommodated a larger piece of meat, and I would have been thrilled to have more barbacoa, so I think next time I'll try using a bone-in shoulder – or a piece of one.

So here's how the thing goes. The day before you're going to serve the tacos, make adobo. It's included in the main recipe. Five and a half hours or so before you want to make the tacos, take the lamb shoulder out of the fridge and let it come up to room temperature. Coat the roast in the adobo (very messy!).

Line a Dutch oven with banana leaves (this is explained more precisely in the recipe), then add a layer of avocado leaves:

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Place the adobo-coated lamb shoulder on top . . . 

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Cover it with more avocado leaves, then fold the ends of the banana leaves over it all and tuck them in.

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Pour in a cup of water, cover the Dutch oven, and roast it slowly for three hours. After letting it rest at room temperature for an hour, unwrap the lamb, discard the banana and avocado leaves, skim the fat off the sauce and strain it, clean the Dutch oven, shred the meat and add it to the sauce. 

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This is the moment when you know it was all worth it! The complex flavors go very deep. It's delicious.

Up for it? Here's the recipe:

You can eat the lamb barbacoa wrapped in freshly made corn tortillas, maybe dressed with guacamole (that's how I had it in Mexico City). Or you can go all the way and make Alex Stupak's lamb barbaco tacos. If you do that, you'll want to make salsa borracha sometime during the roasting process, or the day before. This is the part where you get to toast dried chiles and reconstitute them, grinding them up with other ingredients.

Aquí lo tiene:

You'll also need to prep the other stuff that goes in the tacos with the lamb: mince some white onion, chop green olives, slice some limes and cucumbers. 

Here's what you have to look forward to:

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Awesome, right? Here's the recipe:

Let us know, in a comment, how it all goes! 

How I learned to stop worrying about nixtamal and make fresh tortillas from masa harina

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You can wrap just about anything in a freshly made corn tortilla, hot off the comal or griddle, and it'll be wonderful.

Well, that's a little bit of an exaggeration, but not much. 

In another lifetime, a hundred years ago when I was in my twenties and living in L.A., I made fresh tortillas all the time. I had a cheap aluminum tortilla press and a cheap aluminum comal (tortilla griddle); I'd picked up both in a Mexican grocery. You could buy a bag of masa harina (dried powdered masa) just about anywhere. I was in a serious carnitas phase: I'd fallen in love with Diana Kennedy's version in The Cuisines of Mexico, and I'd make that with salsa verde cruda and guacamole and a big pot of pinto beans to serve on the side. 

When I moved to New York to go to graduate school a few years later, I brought my comal and tortilla press and even my molcajete – though masa harina was not so easy to find.

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The tortilla press I've had forever

A few years after that, some time in the early 90's, I lucked into an opportunity to meet Kennedy, and even spent a long weekend cooking with her and the late, wonderful Peter Kump, founder of Peter Kump's Cooking School in New York. My friend Danièle Mazet-Delpeuch (I wrote about her in my post about pissaladière) had invited Kennedy and Kump to her 500 year-old stone farmhouse in Dordogne to spend some days cooking and soaking up the delicious and gorgeous region. Danièle knew I was a huge Kennedy fan, and was wonderfully generous to invite me along.

At some point during a weekend spent making pommes sarladaise in a big pot suspended from the hearth in the center of Danièle's living room, and confit de carnard and chou farci and I can't remember what all else, Diana and I got into a discussion about corn tortillas. I'll never forget her expression when I told her I was in the habit of using masa harina to make mine: I might as well have told her I was a regular at Taco Bell. She was positively scandalized.  She insisted that masa made from nixtamal – corn kernels cooked in a solution of lime (calcium oxide) and water – was the only legitimate masa. I knew all about it from her book, but when I'd gotten to the part of the two-page process that said, "Meantime, crush the lime if it is in a lump, taking care that the dust does not get into your eyes," I stopped reading. 

With Diana, I tried to defend my position, arguing that tortillas freshly made from masa harina are way better than anything you can buy at the store. "Better to buy masa at a tortilleria in your neighborhood," she countered. But there were no tortillerias anywhere near my hood – the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It wasn't even easy to find masa harina there.  The conversation seriously deflated me (this was my Mexican cooking hero!) and I think I lost some of my joy for tortilla-making.

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That's why last summer when a review copy of Alex Stupak and Jordana Rothman's cookbook Tacos: Recipes and Provocations landed on my desk at work, I was delighted when the book fell open to the following: "In Defense of Masa Harina." "A warm tortilla prepared with harina may not hit the same celestial notes as one made with fresh masa," it said, "but it is still an absolute revelation if all you've ever tasted is reheated, store-bought tortillas. There's irrefutable value in that, so I stand by it." 

Well, of course I've tasted many a fabulous tortilla made from fresh masa, but I still think the ones you make from masa harina (all you need to add is water!) are pretty darn good. And once you get the hang of it, making them is easy – easier than making pancakes, in fact, because the dough is just harina and water.

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Though I'd already made tortillas a hundred times, I followed Stupak's instructions and found they worked perfectly, though I prefer the proportions of water to masa found on harina packages (1 1/8 cup warm water to 1 cup harina). You knead the water into the flour, roll it into a ball, and keep it moist under a damp towel while you work. "You want the texture to be as soft and moist as possible without sticking to your hands," is the way Stupak describes the right texture. 

 Set up a double griddle or two cast-iron pans and heat them so you have one side or pan hotter than the other. Line your tortilla press with plastic (so the dough doesn't stick). Roll some dough into a golf-ball-size ball. Open the press, plop in the ball, push down on the lever. Open the press, flip the tortilla onto your palm, peel off the plastic. (The thinner the plastic, the easier it is to peel off. I cut up thin, crinkly plastic bags like the ones you get at CVS if you forget to bring your own.) Drop the tortilla onto the cooler side of the griddle, cook for 15 seconds, then flip it over onto the hotter side and cook for 30 seconds. Flip it again (still on the hotter side) and leave it for 10 seconds, then flip a final time and cook 10 more seconds. At that point it may puff up a bit. Transfer it to an tortilla basket – or an insulated tortilla container (Stupak has a good section about which type is best – a "thick fabric tortilla warmer covered with culturally insensitive dancing chili peppers" was his favorite. He also explains why it doesn't work to reheat corn tortillas that have cooled completely.)

So, what shall we wrap these tender warm beauties around? That's a subject for my next post. Meanwhile, I can tell you what I put on the ones I whipped up tonight: Shredded store-bought roast chicken, diced avocado, white onion, cilantro, some leftover pinto beans, a squeeze of lime and a drizzle of leftover salsa borracha, also from Stupak's book. The salsa borracha – spiked with mezcal – was a revelation. That recipe's coming soon, too.

Meanwhile, in case you want to get some practice – or just have a fabulous vehicle in which to wrap leftovers (barbecue brisket is dreamy!) or do some creative taco improvisation – here's the corn tortilla recipe. Same thing I just gave you, but in a little more detail.

Nothing says spring like strawberry-mezcal ice cream

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I don't know what inspired this exactly. Except it's spring, so I'm jonesing for strawberries. And it's spring, so I'm jonesing for mezcal. A friend was coming to lunch last weekend, and I wanted to cook Mexican. But dessert . . . strawberry shortcake? Nah. A big ol' Pavlova smothered in strawberries and cream? Nah. Almond cake with strawberries? Nah. None of it felt right to follow the lamb barbacoa tacos I'd planned. 

But ice cream! Who makes strawberry ice cream, anyway? I would! 

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I figured I'd roast my strawberries, as they weren't exactly peak-season Harry's Berries (the fabulous ones I'd buy at the farmers market if I happened to be in Santa Monica). Roasting the supermarket berries would concentrate their flavor a bit. For some reason, when I thought about roasting them, I thought of hitting them with a little mezcal. In the back of my mind, I was remembering a wonderful nieve de naranja (orange ice) con mezcal my friend Michalene and I had when we were in Mexico City in February, at a restaurant called Fonda Fina. "Aha" moment! I thought mezcal might work well with the brightness of the berries. 

And so it did! Making the custard base is always easier than it sounds; just take it slow. Best to do this the day before you want to serve it, so the ice cream can set up in the freezer overnight – or at least for a few hours. In any case, you want to have time to chill the custard before it goes into the ice cream maker.

Want to leave out the mezcal? Just substitute half a teaspoon of vanilla. Or a teaspoon of aged balsamic vinegar. I served the ice cream with a couple of (store-bought) almond crisps.

Want the recipe? Here you go . . .