Mex Without the Tex

At the end of a tiny strip mall in Memphis’ Wolf River basin is Las Tortugas Deli Mexicana, where the Magallanes family brings authentic Mexican food to a city in which most so-called Mexican restaurants serve up things a citizen of that country would never recognize as his homeland’s cuisine.

Forget the Tex-Mex, the nachos and the cheese dip. Forget the mediocre entrée flanked by too much rice and flavorless refried beans that most likely came from a can. This is the real stuff, prepared by a personable family who love sharing not only their native food but the back-story of the food as well.

Small but clean and bright (and with a lunchtime line that trails out the door), this eatery serves up freshly-made specialties that anyone from Mexico City would recognize.

Pepe, the patriarch, explains that the twice-cooked pork ribs are made from his grandmother’s recipe. How can I not try them?! and have them on the second visit? and on the third? They’re superb, the meat falling off the bone so cleanly I can accomplish my post-meal lipstick reapplication in my reflection. Superb mole in homemade mini tortillas, fresh, wonderful tamales, both chicken and pork. And corn on the cob that you wouldn’t believe, beginning with fresh—not frozen—corn, that’s perfectly cooked, then coated with a thin layer of mayonnaise and sprinkled with grated cotija, an aged cow’s milk cheese, and red pepper.

Pepe and his son Jonathan are warm, friendly and hospitable hosts. As I trot to the pick up area when my number is called, Jonathan reaches across a case filled with cheeses, chili peppers and long curls of cassia bark to explain each item I’ve ordered.

Of course, you need a real Mexican beverage to go with your feast. Their agua fresca, fresh fruit drinks, will make you forget all about your favorite soda. Horchata, jamaica, mango, watermelon, limonata and tamarino are just a few, all made fresh and all made really, really good (hey, I’ll shove a clean straw into the glass of anyone who will allow me a taste!).

Tomorrow Andy and I venture to Mexico City to spend a week visiting friends, seeing the sights and enjoying the local cuisine. We look forward to learning more about authentic Mexican food. Of course, just as Italy’s food is regional, so is Mexico’s. But as happens everywhere, folks from the country venture to the city, and some of them open restaurants where their fellow transplants can go for a taste of home. So we anticipate finding at least a smattering of the country’s regional dishes to enjoy while we’re in its capital.

So until our return, hasta luego!

New Orleans Redux

As I digest the experiences of my recent week in New Orleans at the annual conference of the International Association of Culinary Professionals, many great moments come to mind. Here are a few:

Just being back on the streets of that lovely, exotic and historic city for the first time in 11 years. New Orleans is a place like no other, with its unique blend of cultures--European, Caribbean and African--and its history, customs, architecture, music and food.

Enjoying beignets and chicory coffee in Café du Monde. The place was packed like there was no tomorrow--or as if everyone thought beignets would be outlawed by midnight. So what if it looked like we’d been dusted for fingerprints? What’s a little powdered sugar when you get to enjoy freshly-made beignets, along with an attitudinous dark-as-sin coffee that’s stout enough to power a jet engine?!

Surely they must serve beignets in Heaven!

Hearing, “’scuse me, darlin’!” and “Sorry, Sweetheart!” countless times as I navigated crowded sidewalks and slipped past local men going about their business of setting up for the day’s activities. In most cities, there would have been (1) no apology for having bumped into me and (2) no term of endearment go to with it. There was nothing weird or predatory behind it--just good manners.

The kick of having Chef Paul Prudhomme himself serve me a bowl of amazingly tasty gumbo and give me the cheffly knuckle tap. Chef Paul is one-in-a-million, the real deal, an ultra-fine cook who never sought out fame and who wears his celebrity lightly and modestly. (And out of respect for this, I refrained from shoving a camera in his face.)

Most importantly—and Chef Paul is a part of this—the warmth and gratitude of those I bought from during my stay. New Orleans is one of the great welcoming cities in this country. Its citizens know how to have a roarin’ good time, and they love showing visitors a good time, too. No one’s a stranger there for long. And the food, as always, is top notch and memorable.



The Creole rabbit at Olivier's is succulent and flavorful.








Central Grocery on Decatur Street, birthplace of the muffuletta, still serves up its famous party-sized sandwich. This giant round of Italian bread filled with cured meats and cheese and zazzed up with garlic-and-olive relish is great to pick up on your way out of town—you can eat some now, and still have plenty to enjoy on the trip home.


New Orleans is a long, long way from being completely repaired and restored. There are people still living without electricity and phone service. There are people still living in tents. And many who have yet to return. The city is bloodied, by both the storm and by the federal government’s indifference to its plight, but New Orleanians are fighting to regain some sense of normalcy, to rebuild their homes and their lives.


You never know what--or who--you'll find in your wanderings about the city. Looks like double good fortune to me!



Some people seem to think the city is still under water. The water receded within a couple of days of Hurricane Katrina 2½ years ago, but the damage—both physical and psychological—left in its wake is taking a long time to erase. And perhaps it never completely will be.

This is where the water lives--

in the Mississippi River, not on top of the city!

It's impossible to stand still when the music cranks up. It's as vital a part of life in New Orleans as eating, drinking or even breathing . . .



But New Orleans is open for business, with its warmth and hospitality intact. To those who crave to travel abroad but who don’t have the money, I’ve always said, “Go to New Orleans—it’s the most foreign and exotic place you'll find on the North American continent.” With the dollar taking a clobbering against the euro and the English pound, why not visit—or revisit—this amazing city? Beauty, history, great food and a warm welcome await you. As the locals say, Y'all come, and

Laisse le bon temp rouler!

. . . and gumbo for all

During my recent visit to New Orleans, one thing that impressed me most as I learned about the city’s cultural and culinary evolution was the way in which a key element was introduced into the mix.
When the slave traders arrived in west Africa and rounded up the locals for “import” to the New World, they refused to allow the enslaved to carry anything with them. Because okra held a sacred place in African culture as both a food and a healing agent, the women being pressed into slavery hastily wove the dried vegetable pods into their hair in order to bring it to their new home. This is how we came to have okra in North America.

Ever since people began leaving home for points unknown (whether their journeys were voluntary or forced), they’ve brought their treasured comfort foods with them. There’s nothing that can take the edge off of illness or loneliness or anxiety quite like having a meal of what soothed us when we were young. Even now, when I return to Los Angeles from a trip home to Tennessee, my suitcase is tight with packages of country ham and bacon and, until they started being shipped to the West Coast, good ol' Goo Goo Clusters. If I could manage it, I’d include fried catfish in the trove. None of these foods are haute cuisine, but that’s not the point. This is why chefs sharing with each other what their last meal would be, were they ever to end up on death row, invariably list their favorite comfort foods.

The Bantu word for okra, “kigombo,” gave us the name of that quintessential New Orleans food, gumbo. As okra was a special food to the west Africans, so gumbo is to New Orleanians. We all have our own “gumbo,” even if we don’t eat it with a spoon.

You say paella . . . I say jambalaya . . . let’s call the whole thing yummy!

In New Orleans last week, I took a course in Creole and Cajun cooking, and I appreciate the point our instructor, Saundra, made about what happens when populations migrate to new areas with their old recipes in tow. Essentially, they must use what they have at hand in their new environment and adapt their recipes as best they can.

For example, European settlers to the Louisiana lowcountry brought their recipe for paella, and it metamorphosed into jambalaya, as they had to substitute tomatoes for the saffron and oysters for the mussels. In the process, a wonderful new cuisine was born.

Corinne puts the finishing touches on the jambalaya. With a dish this varied and flavorful, you’ll never miss the saffron and mussels!

As she handed everyone a packet of recipes, she encouraged us to make gumbo at home. “But,” she said, “if you live where there’s no andouille, use what you have—kielbasa or chorizo or whatever is native to where you come from.”

This is the way it has always been done. We cling to our customs and recipes, but as we settle in new places, we have to make adjustments. With humankind's propensity to roam the earth, who’s to say how authentic any recipe--or any custom--is?

Fig Lust

I'm in trouble.

Edible Memphis assigned me to write a story on figs, which are the most voluptuous, sensual fruit on the planet. It’s easy to go on about them endlessly, and in terms that aren’t entirely appropriate for that venue. I’ve decided to start my fig ponderings right here, so I can purge the questionable stuff from my system. Otherwise I’ll never get my article written—or at least I won’t be writing one they can publish.

In Animal House, the film classic that exemplifies college life at its most scholastically rich and enlightening (har har), frat boy Otter encounters the dean’s wife in the fruit & veg section at the grocery, and the two begin a discussion on the sensual merits of particular produce. They never get around to talking about figs, which is a good thing, for the movie's rating could have easily have plunged from R to X—or NC-17, if they’d had that rating then.

I suffer from fig lust. I think the fig is the sexiest fruit of all. Because it looks so . . . uh, it tastes so . . . um, it feels so . . . hmm, maybe this isn't the appropriate venue either. Figs inspire all sorts of scandalous prose and salacious imagery, and I don't want to veer into the pornographic here.

But if your only exposure to figs is the dried ones or those abominable cookies, you really don't know what you're missing. And you'll be gobsmacked with delight when you find your first real one, especially if you can pull it off the tree yourself and chomp right into it on the spot, supremely fresh and unmolested by a refrigerator stay. You'll remember it with the fondness you hold for the memory of your first kiss or your first flesh-to-flesh engagement of whatever kind. Even when you find fresh figs in the grocery, they're most likely bruised and sad. They're just too fragile to ship very well. You HAVE to have your own fig tree. In fact, Andy and I planted one in our backyard a couple of weeks ago. We're wishing we had planted one as soon as we bought our house, since we were moving from a rental house with an incredibly prolific fig tree in the yard, and we yearned to have that generous supply of sweet, slurpy goodness right there at our disposal. We were spoiled, too spoiled ever to settle for dried figs again. Until this one begins to produce, we'll continue to haunt the yards of our friends who have mature fig trees.

Figs are so luscious and sweet, so succulent and sinfully tasty, you want to fall face down into them, wallowing, slurping and writhing in total depravity (see why I have to get this out of my system!?), luxuriating in their sweetness and textural wickedness. At least that's MY reaction to them.

I don't think this is working. If anyone ever publishes a magazine called Fig Lust, I'll be a contributing editor. And now I have to get busy writing a g-rated article on figs. This isn't going to be easy.

Hog Wild

At Sunday night’s Epiphany party our group convened to cap off the Christmas season with a potluck and to catch up on everyone else’s holidays. My good pal, Chuck Taggart of Gumbo Pages fame, brought his amazing Pork & Pork & Pork & Beans to share. Have this even once, and you’ll never settle for mere pork and beans again. In fact, if I ever find myself on death row, that dish will be one of the components of my final meal.

As Chuck and I compared notes on the contents of our luggage when we returned to Los Angeles after Christmas, he from New Orleans and I from Memphis, we concurred that an awful lot of pork was involved. My suitcase was stuffed with packages of country ham and bacon and a big ol' hamhock. His haul was similar, but included tasso, the secret ingredient in many fine Cajun and Creole dishes, along with Zapps potato chips and lots of booze.

In case you’re wondering, yes, you can buy pork in Los Angeles, but those mass-produced packages of Uncle Tater’s or Little Willie’s bacon will be essentially flavorless and injected with water, which is why it shrinks to nothing when you cook it and tastes like nothing when you eat it.

As we cooed over our devotion to pork, I said, “There’s only one thing better than bacon.” Chuck looked at me as if I'd lost my marbles. I paused for effect, then said, “Bacon topped with bacon.” He sighed and said, “Thank God! I was about to ask, ‘Who are you and what have you done with my friend, Carol?’”

The challenge is in reconciling a love of pork with the need to eat more healthfully, and this is where the good stuff comes in. Andy and I refuse to cast out pork like some demon bent on our destruction. Instead, we hold to the wisdom of Pete Wells, who contends in the pages of Food and Wine magazine that bacon isn’t a meat but rather a condiment.

He certainly has a point, especially as it relates to good quality bacon. The flavor is distilled smoky, salty, sweet porkiness, which we savor as we would any fine wine or food: a tiny bit at a time, over a long period of time. In fact, since Christmas we've been sharing one strip of bacon about every other morning.

Half a strip?! That sounds rather spartan, but when you eat the really good stuff—like what Chuck and I packed back to Los Angeles from home—and enjoy it over the course of a meal, it's amazing how satisfying a mere half strip of bacon can be, how the flavor lingers and how the aroma and the memory goes with you. Truth be told, I enjoy a smaller portion much more, because I don’t mindlessly wolf it down.

According to Aesop, “Better beans and bacon in peace than cakes and ale in fear.” He must have been buying his bacon at a chain grocery.

There’s a fable in there somewhere, I’m sure.

Home Grown

As I prepare to head home to rural Tennessee for Christmas, my thoughts turn to our family farm and the food traditions with which I grew up. Because as a farm girl I was well acquainted with the cycle of birth, life and death so early and so intimately, I’d say it has made me less squeamish than most when it comes to such matters, and it has taught me that it’s possible to develop respect and regard for an animal I know will end up on my plate.

This is the time of year when we’d select one fattened hog and one fattened steer to be butchered, packaged and labeled, then divvied up among the deep freezers of my grandparents, my uncle’s family and my family. This represented the bulk of the meat upon which we’d feed until the next winter.

After all the tidier pieces of meat had been put away, on a cold, cold night, we’d all convene in the smokehouse to make sausage. My mother would sew casings out of old flour sack dishrags (recycling on top of recycling!) and bring them out to the smokehouse, where my father and brother were grinding the hog trimmings with fat and seasonings. Then I, with my tiny hands, would take the squishy ground mixture, redolent of fresh pork, pepper and fennel, and stuff it into the newly-stitched casings. And my uncle would bind the ends with twine and hang the brand-new sausage with the hams to while away the months until it was needed.

I was an adult before I ever bought prepackaged meat in a grocery, or for that matter, cans of tomatoes, green beans, black-eyed peas or relish. Those things had always come out of the deep freezer and the stash in the hall cabinet. And when I finally did start bringing these items home from the grocery, they were never as satisfying as those I’d had a hand in putting up as a child.

This represents a vanishing way of life that organizations like SlowFood are working hard to reacquaint people with. Perhaps it isn’t practical for everyone to raise all their own food, but to the extent that we can, we should try. Even if it’s just a couple of pots of herbs on the kitchen windowsill, every little bit we grow for ourselves reconnects us with our initial bond with the earth from which we came.

Yodeling pickle anyone?

As I troll the offerings at one of my favorite websites, Archie McPhee, I’m astonished by the number of bizarre food-related gifts that are available. Can you imagine receiving any of these things for Christmas: gummy haggis, a yodeling pickle, a t-bone air freshener, or a sushi shower curtain? The bacon products alone boggle the mind: bacon-flavored toothpicks, a bacon wallet, bacon bandaids—that’s bandaids that look like strips of bacon, not bandaids for your bacon—and bacon air freshener for your car. (As if the yodeling pickle wasn’t strange enough, there’s also a remote-controlled, hopping AND yodeling lederhosen. Can you imagine? Surely, everyone needs one of these!)

Why is it that these things have such appeal? What urge is it that causes us want to inflict them on our friends and family? And what do those poor—and probably hungry—workers in third world countries think of these oddities they’re creating for those unfathomable Americans? (And how is it that I can use the word “unfathomable” twice in about week in this blog? It’s unfathomable.)

I’m not going to try to make sense of this right now. Perhaps there’s just no sense to be made. But if you’re intrigued by the idea of having your very own yodeling pickle or gifting someone with a gummy tapeworm or a corndog air freshener, check out www.archiemcphee.com. Don’t you think sushi pencil toppers would make great stocking stuffers?

Nectar of the porcine gods

One of the most prized possessions in my kitchen, right up there with my grandmother’s bowls, my well-seasoned iron skillets and my red, outboard motor-sized KitchenAid mixer, is my coffee can filled with bacon drippings. Both a food AND a condiment, bacon makes everything taste better—even more bacon! And the drippings perform double duty as both a cooking fat and a seasoning. What a way to multitask!

Each time I dig into that can, I reflect on the layers of hardened drippings like I would the rings of a tree. With each layer I scratch through I wonder, what was going on the day I poured in this layer? and this layer? and this layer?

I may not live in the rural South anymore, and I may be a big city girl, hobnobbing with the occasional high-profile chef and food celebrity, but I cling to my can of bacon drippings as an anchor to my cultural and culinary past—and as a way to enjoy a darned fine meal. None of that tofu-based faux bacon stuff. You’ve got to have your standards, right?

Angry tummy, grateful heart

This past week’s Thanksgiving festivities were a bit out of the ordinary for me. I came down with a stomach virus. Whether it was through food poisoning or a random bug floating on the air or perched on the shopping cart handles and ATM buttons, it changed my focus from food to oh-my-god-anything-BUT-food.

So much emphasis is placed on holiday meals, particularly at Thanksgiving, because of that historic first feast we persist in trying to duplicate in our own unique ways. Take away that focus, and what do we have? Plenty of fun, but we have to shift gears. I enjoyed time with my family that was spent doing things other than devoting all our efforts to food-related activities.

Don’t get me wrong—I LOVE heading into the kitchen to “put the big pot in the little one and stew the dishrag,” to quote my grandmother’s peculiar—and unfathomable— expression for cooking for a special occasion. But this time around I realized even more acutely that the people you want to be with most on a holiday are the ones who will take care of you when just don’t feel like celebrating it.

Finger-lickin’ extraordinary

It may sound funny, but sometimes it’s easy when you use a fork not to actually notice what you’re eating. Especially when you’re in a hurry—and when the food’s not all that outstanding—it’s easy to employ the shoveling action that ensures you’ll finish your meal quickly and get back to your desk on time. And you may not taste a thing!

But try eating with your fingers, and you experience food quite differently. I don’t mean food like pizza and fried chicken, but cooked food that you’d typically eat with a fork.

Case in point: When you visit an Ethiopian or Eritrean restaurant, you’ll find no utensils at your disposal. Rather, your food will be served atop a large, round piece of injera, a crepe-textured flatbread with a taste reminiscent of sourdough. Made of a grain called teff, injera is a sort of edible utensil. You tear off a piece, drop it onto your food, pick up a bite with the injera and eat the food wrapped in the bread, all in one bite.

A meal consumed in this way is a revelation. There’s something about the absence of familiar table tools that makes you slow down and get closer to your food. The experience is transformed, a much more textural and immediate sensation. You feel, smell and taste it more intimately, and I believe, come away from the meal with a heightened sense of what you've just had.

Looking at this from the reverse, would an Ethiopian who ate using a fork for the first time suddenly be awakened to attributes of the meal never before discerned? Possibly, since there would be only lentils or lamb stew on the fork, with no injera to flavor every bite.

However, for the person who eats injera daily, the fork would be a real setback, for injera is three things: plate, utensil and food. All the fork enables us to do is to be tidy eaters.

Pure, stinky bliss . . .

Lately I’ve been pondering the magic of how obnoxious ingredients help produce glorious dishes. Take fish sauce, for instance. It’s made of salted, fermented fish—pretty basic stuff—and it has one of the most potent smells I’ve ever encountered. If you spilled even a bit of it into your carpet you’d probably be forced to either replace the carpet or sell the house!

Some people claim to like the smell of fish sauce. That’s possible, I suppose, since such likes and dislikes are purely subjective. I personally love inhaling deeply in cheese shops, while others will hold their breaths as they dash past the door.

So why would we want a bottle of something so odiferous in our kitchen? Because what it does to a Thai or Vietnamese dish is pure poetry. The effect is similar to what happens when you add a small amount of minced anchovies to a dish: You can’t taste the anchovies, but they give the food a more luscious, well-rounded flavor.

The Italian version of fish sauce is called garum or colatura. Made from anchovies, adding garum rather than minced anchovies to a dish is rather like using vanilla extract when you don’t have a fresh vanilla bean on hand. You get convenience without sacrificing too much flavor.

The genius of fish sauce is its flavor-enhancing potential. You can sneak a few drops into a pasta dish or stir-fry, regardless of whether you’re cooking seafood. It’s not the dominant flavor but rather a supporting note the fish sauce provides. No one will guess that you’ve essentially laced their dinner with essence of fermented fish, but, if you use it judiciously, they’ll just know that magic seems to flow out of your fingers and into their food.

Bienvenido & howdy!

“As difficult as herding cats.” That’s the way my husband, Andy, is likely to describe his attempts to nudge me into starting my own blog. As a professional writer and editor, I try to select each word carefully and craft each sentence to flow with a sense of inevitability. So the idea of cranking out daily blog entries is at serious odds with my writerly sensibilities.

I know he’s right, that as a food writer and culinary tour guide—not to mention a citizen of the 21^st century—I must have a bigger presence on the web. I need fresh content to keep the search engines seeking me out with the persistence of skeeters at a bikini waxers’ convention. But this blog business runs counter to my nature. So give me time. I promise to make it entertaining and educational for you. Or at least amusing.

For my inaugural blog entry, I want to share my new favorite cam: Hen Cam! As a Tennessee farm girl living in the maddening sprawl of Los Angeles, it gladdens my heart to be able to visit this site at least once a day (okay, I confess, it’s several times a day) and see how those fine gals are doing in rural Massachusetts. Their pecking and canoodling are brought to us courtesy of food writer and chef Terry Golson. Thanks, Terry!