Sunday, February 19, 2006

Floors and Comfort Food

My friends J & R are having a baby right now, as I write these very words, up north in Baltimore. Since I'm not exactly close by, I'm going to cheer them on from here by talking about good cookin'.

But first, a bit about floors in Merida... (but of course!)

This being a tropical city, you don't find carpets or rugs in Merida, since they'd just biodegrade within a matter of months. Instead, floors are almost always tile, and here in the the historical part of Merida, you find beautiful and durable pasta tiles that withtand merciless washing.

Yes, I digress... and yes, I'm here today to talk about comfort food. The point is that the floors get dirty and need to be cleaned. And while I'm hardly fearful of cleaning, the task of floor cleaning is just not something I wanted to tackle on my own-- the fact that it involves a spigot that is located in the living room suggests that the process is oh-so-different from what I know with respect to hard-wood floors in Washington DC (and even that is limited, I'll admit). Here, there is a lot of water involved, and a floor squeegy, and... so I hired someone to, um, show me, er... how to do it. Again and again. Okay, so the upshot is that Gloria now comes every other week to clean the house and wash my floors.

Gloria is lovely. Gloria sings songs to me, loves "los bijis" (the Bee-Gees) and generally fusses over me. It seemed only natural that I ask her to teach me how to cook la comida yucateca. First lesson: frijol con puerco, a standard Yucatecan dish often served on Mondays.

We agreed that my lesson would start with a trip to the market. We walked down to Santiago, one of Merida's older markets, to made our first stop at the carnicerĂ­a, where the butcher, framed here by chorizo and choice cuts of beef, cut for us a nice, lean piece of pork, along with una oreja (an ear) y un rabo (a pig's tail) for taste. That ear was as big as a pot holder, I tell you! I decided to think of the ear and the tail as the the Yucatecan equivalent of a bay leaf in gringo cooking.

It was nice having Gloria there to show me the ropes; in the lingo of language teaching, this was pure schema building with more than a touch of scaffolding involved. In other words: having gone through the motions with Gloria, I now know what to expect when I next visit the carnicero, and for that, I feel a bit braver than I was before.

Once laden with plenty of pork and port parts, we visited the fruit and vegetable stand. We picked up some black beans, rice, red onion, garlic, cilantro, and epazote-- a leafy herb that is, well, let's just say "helpful" to those who will later eat the black beans. (Note to self: look for epazote upon returning to Maryland... I'll turn our local vegetarians on to something better than Beano!) After making a final stop at the tortillerĂ­a we made our way home.

Here, you're looking at the basic components of frijol con puerco: a bot of black beans boiling away on the back burner, the pork on the left front burner, and tomatoes that, once roasted and crushed, will make up the salsa. In the end, it's all pretty sencillo: brown the pork, stick it the pot to stew with the beans, and make some rice. Spoon the beans over the rice and serve it with radish, chopped onion, cilantro and the roasted tomato salsa, don't forget the tortillas, and buen provecho. In all, it took about 2 hours to prepare. But of course, the leftovers are the best part: after sitting another day in the fridge, it will be at it's best on Monday, the traditional day for this dish to be served.


Welcome to the world, Deacon! When you've grown some teeth, I'll make some frijol con puerco for you and your proud, loving parents.

1 Comments:

At 7:22 AM, Blogger Nina Liakos said...

Yum (sin puerco para mi). Get some epazote for me!

 

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