La Fiesta de la Cocina Mexicana

Pico de gallo, salsa verde, salsa chipotle

Baccalao

Like most non Mexicans, I grew up imagining that Mexican food was tacos, tacos, tortillas, tacos, beans and rice, tacos... And a little later tacos, tortillas, guacamole, tacos, refried beans, grated tasty cheese, tacos...Then there was something called chocolate mole chicken but that was just a passing plate in the night.

Guacamole

I stopped over in Mexico for a couple of days when I went as a brigadista picking coffee in Nicaragua in the mid 1980s. I spent half of that time in a dark hotel room being feverish and vomiting from something I ate on the street - probably a tortilla. But I did get to add quesadillas to my Mexican repertoire, and I remember still the extraordinary cafe con leche I had - the cafe came in a tall glass, black and strong; the leche came in a small tumbler, hot; the idea was to drop the glass of leche into the cafe and let the milk gently swirl up and mix with the coffee. In Nicaragua itself we brigadistas lived on a diet of gallo pinto - red beans and rice, and Chicha de Maiz (with brown cane sugar and maize in a thick soup which was brought to us in the coffee groves at mid-morning), and white rum bought in plastic bags, with chicken as a celebratory dinner on our last night on the finca.That was when I was involved in solidarity work with Latin American refugee groups in Australia, particularly as a member of an acoustic quartet Canto y Lucha (sorry, no YouTube . This led me to empanadas (not Mexican, I know) and cebiche.


I did also come back with a copy of The Cuisines of Mexico by Diana Kennedy, and it became the source of my guacamole, well-fried beans (not refried, as Kennedy pointed out, this being a mis-translation of the word refritos, though they continue to be called refried) and a chicken in red sesame seed sauce.

Strangely, it was not until years later I came across corn chips, and I will confess it was the packet kind, and I will confess also that I have devoured many in the time since. I also confess that I have rarely downed a tequila sunrise, let alone lick, sip, sucked, sipped salt, tequila and lime. (Apropos of nothing, except being cursed with a memory for trivia, one of my favourite bit characters in a Looney Tunes cartoon was named Tequila Mockingbird, now the name of a cocktail (with two distinct flavours), restaurants, blog and music group).

My appreciation of Mexican food took a big leap when my daughter Mary and her then boyf now husb Chris worked at Riders, a small restaurant above the Hopetoun Hotel in Surry Hills, run buy Mark and Anna who now run Rider Food. That was my first meeting with nopal salad (a fantastic use to which prickly pear cactus (Opuntia species) has not been put in Australia but could take over from the Cactoblastis cactorum if neo urban foragers and cash-strapped farmers put their minds and gloved hands to it) and also with fajitas.

Next stage of this journey to the Fiesta of the title of this blog, was Chris becoming manager of Beach Burrito cafes in Bondi and Newtown (and Chris and Mary spending time on Mexico on a pre-proposal gap year trip) and discovering the pleasures of frozen margaritas (and as another aside, I did once have down pat all the words to Jimmy Buffet's Wasting Away in Margaritaville) and Coronas with that jaunty slice of lemon stuffed down the neck on a hot summer night in Newtown.

You still with me, we're getting close to the meal reveal!

Then my niece Casey, living with Marilyn and me for a couple of years now, met up with Helen Garcia Garza, chef/proprietor at Fuego de la Tierra, bringing home Mexican sweets Helena made for her stall at the Bondi Farmers Market  - guayabate,thinly rolled guava paste with sweet caramel-like cajeta, sprinkled with lightly toasted crumbled pecans; alegrias, a puffed amaranth bar bound together with honey and brown cane sugar and pressed with nuts and raisins; mazapan de cacahuate, soft, creamy and crumbly peanut marzipan; jamoncillo, crumbly fudge made with ground pumpkin seed, ciruelas rellenas de almendras, prunes stuffed with a sweet vanilla and almond crumble, and pellizcos de tamarindo,sweet and sour tamarind blended with guajillo chili. It was fascinating to recognise the last two as sweets I ate as a child in Sri Lanka. I also had the pleasure of dipping into Helena's salsas.  



Critical mass was now reached and a dinner to which we all contributed was inevitable. So in January 2013 we came together for La Fiesta de la Cocina Mexican, a celebration of origins, regions, tastes, ingredients, traditions and tweaks.  The dishes on the night and their makers were:

Helena:
Ensalada de nopales (pickled cactus salad)

Ejotes guisados (sauteéd green beans with orange and lime juice)

Bacalao  (salted dried cod with almonds, raisins, olives, potatoes, garlic, onion and tomatoes)

Tamales Oaxaqueños (masa steamed in banana leaves and filled with chicken and mole poblano)

The table

Tortillas
Salsa chipotle

Salsa ranchera with habanero

Paul:

Frijoles refritos (well-fried beans)

Pollo en pipian rojo (chicken in red sesame seed sauce)

Arroz (plain white rice)

Chris and Mary:
Braised goat (cooked in Corona beer, crushed tomatoes and roasted spices)

Pico de gallo  (tomato onion and coriander salsa

Home-baked corn chips

Guacamole

Marilyn:

Atole de Fresa (a cold strawberry, corn flour and mint soup as dessert)

The extravagance of the meal was balanced by a simpler selection of beverages - red and white wines, Coronas and water. Helena also made horchata (an almond milk drink) which we didn't have on the night but I polished off over the course of the next day.

Casey's place setting

Casey decorated the table equally simply; a single orange bauhinia (from the much loved tree on our side terrace which never fails to produce a mass of blossom no matter how severely I prune it) offsetting  plain Indian cotton napkins (thanks Marg!) on a white plate.  

Chris was official papparazzo and its his images that grace this blog.

Some slight headaches and sleep ins were reported the following morning.

Muchas gracias todos!

Helena finishes off the tortillas

Fishy business

Jimbaran beachside fish market, Bali

Was it every Sunday that we went from mass to the Colombo fish market in Pettah to buy mud crabs for lunch, their massive front claws immobilised by small wooden peg inserted just where they emerged from the shell, their bodies tied in string for ease of carrying, string which we eagerly awaited the cutting of on the kitchen floor back home, the preliminary to us chasing the crab around the polished concrete till Rosalind our cook grew tired of our game, grabbed the crab up expertly avoiding the flailing claws and tossed them into the chatty of boiling water.

Negombo wharfside fish market, Sri Lanka

Probably not every Sunday, but often enough for it to be one of my strongest childhood food memories. The crabs and the dizzyingly attractive pungent stench of the market. All produce markets are pleasure gardens to me, but fish markets more so. The pulpy glassy eyes that look horrified and accusatory at the same time; the line of open mouths like so many choristers; the stall holders scale covered hands slashing off hunks of pink/white/red flesh, fanning away the flies, splashing water onto flesh well past resuscitation ; the blues, silvers, reds, browns, spotted, striped, ringed, yellow-finned, spine-finned, whiskered, shelled, pod-footed, segmented, fan-tailed, tentacled, bounty of it all.

The crab would inevitably end up as Sri Lankan crab curry, than which I reckon there is no finer. Hunks of tuna would be washed in lime, coated with ground goroka and emerge from the pan as sour sweet ambul thiyal. Halmassa, dried sprats, would be fried up, mixed with fresh sliced onion and green chilli for a sambol. Swordfish would be the base for a fiery miris malu.

Vendor buying fish from recently arrived angler, Jimbaran

I am no angler so I have a lot of respect for those who are, be they fishing off a breakwater like that which ran out to the lighthouse at the seaward arm of the Colombo Harbour, or the seine net fishermen in Cochin harbour walking the length of the arm of the net to drop it into the bay, or the outrigger boatsmen in the waters of the southern Balinese coast ( I name these because I have direct experience of them as I do not of the North Sea fishers or others off coasts and in oceans I haven't travelled).

Seller, Jimbaran beachside

So, to celebrate those who have brought me so much sensory pleasure over the years here are images from fish markets in Sri Lanka (Colombo, Negombo and village stalls) and Bali (Jimbaran).

The scales used at JImbaran

Vendor at Jimbaran covered fish market

Gutting and preparing fish for sale, Negombo

Vendor, Negombo fish market

Vendors, Negombo fish market

Interior, Jimbaran covered fish market

Exterior Jimbaran covered market, on-sellers round up

Village vendor, Sri Lanka

Seaside fish market, South Coast, Sri Lanka

Indonesian foodslutting

I first tasted Indonesian food in my early teens. A nasi goreng cooked up by mum or dad in Singleton, in the Hunter Valley of Australia, it would have been from a recipe in Women's Day or Women's Weekly or may have been one of those packet mixes of dehydrated stock/vegetables and flavourings that were then and distressingly still are added to rice in home kitchens, it may even have been a Rice a Riso packet flavouring. I don't recall what meat we had with it, probably beef, and I recall we did have strips of omelette mixed through.

I think my next taste would have been a satay in my Uni days from one of the many cheap Asian restaurants that were opening up in Chinatown in Sydney and later at Kensington as Asian students began to live there while attending the University of New South Wales. It may well not have been at an Indonesian restaurant but at some place like the Malaya, which used to be on George Street and was a haunt of a coterie of Malaysian students with whom close friends of mine socialised. At the same time I would have had my first taste of gado gado and blachan.

Since then I've eaten at several Indonesian restaurants in Sydney and a few in Bali when I holidayed there briefly with my daughter, Mary when she was just pre-teen, though I think we mainly ate in the hotel that time and probably stuck with what I was used to and I thought Mary would handle. That I can't remember is probably a good measure of the quality.

It's never ranked especially high on my South East Asian cuisines list, but when I went in search of Komodo dragons on my 60th birthday, with days spent idling in Bali either side of a two-day boat trip in the Komodo National Park off the coast of the island of Flores, I was determined to explore the cuisine further, particularly its warung (the small family-business cafes where most eating out of home happens) and street food. Hereunder a few of my finds.

A rice packet in Ubud: white steamed rice, sambal, tempeh, chicken, mee, with the traditional wrapping of banana leaf reduced to a small plate size, the whole then wrapped in a waxed brown paper into a conical packet. The bugger of Ubud is that there is no place to sit and relax outside of the Monkey Temple grounds or a cage/restaurant, or, as I did, on the low parapet running around the very sad park in the middle of town.

A meal at Saleko, a warung at Jalan Nakula 4, just down from the corner with Jalan Legian, Legian:, specialising in Sumatran dishes:fish curry (turmeric and coconut gravy), steamed kankun, a piece of fried tuna dredged through a fresh red chili sambol, and a fresh green chili sambol.  

This was perhaps the find of the trip for me. I went walkabout  at the  Jimbaran market post a visit to the Jimbaran fish market. On the corner outside was Ms Bukadeh at her street stall mixing up coconut and seaweed salad to order. This one has two types of green seaweed, coconut, galangal, whole kaffir lime and a red chili all grated separately them mixed with a vinegar and chili souse and bagged up for take-away. A terrific combo of salty, sharp flavours.

I had a lot of meals at the Warung Padma behind my hotel, only frequented by  locals, the Aussie tourists thronging the streets being too busy heading for the cafes and restaurants with modified Indonesian/ pizza/ burgers/ beer crowd pullers. Me, I liked the simplicity of Padma's: this is steamed rice topped with some fried onions, one slice of tomato, one of cucumber, fresh blachan, and ayam battetu (chicken in a light curry).

Avocado in Sri Lanka when I was growing up there was never a salad option, It was served either as a sweet dessert (mashed and mixed with jaggery (palm sugar) or condensed milk) or a drink. I had missed this before in both Malaysia and Indonesia but was thrilled when I boarded my dragon cruise boat to see a glass of avocado shake waiting for me: avocado mushed up, mixed with a little milk, sugar syrup and in this case poured into a glass that has a light coating of chocolate syrup.

On my last night as I strolled home there was a street vendor serving up something to security guards outside a cafe. Turned out to be an excellent chicken ball soup with bean sprouts and glass noodles. I took it back to the hotel and for want of anything else poured it into a cup and used a teaspoon to sup.

Green Mango Pickling

My mango tree has for no reason I can fathom chosen this year out of the 20 odd for which it has stood in my front garden to produce lots of fruit. The tree is tall and wide and the fruit is damnably thronged at the very crown. It having been and  continuing to be quite dry here in Sydney this summer I figured it likely the fruit would fall before they ripened and have been keeping a watch out daily for them to get to a size that was     suitable for green mango pickling - fat enough to have a good amount of flesh, but still have the soft white early seed and be green enough for the sharpness the pickle needs.

I was planning  on going harvesting with the extended clan, well, the tall ones among them anyway, post Christmas lunch. Of course, it rained and blew a gale all Christmas day so that put paid to that. However, being a determined urban hunter gatherer I went out next day and as I had hoped there had been some windfall which I gathered and put up  - a small quantity.

I have been checking everyday now for more windfall, grateful for not having to climb into the tree or up a step ladder of dubious stability to pick the rest. I have no hope that any will stay atop the tree long enough to ripen before the local bird population, already somewhat alerted, descends in its usual screeching flocks bent on their own foraging.

I now have enough for a small amount of pickle. Here's what I will do with them.

I will dice them up, skin and all, removing the white flesh of the seed which at this stage will easily slip out of it's fleshy cup. I will then liberally sprinkle the cut pieces with rock or sea salt and leave them to desiccate for a few days, draining of the water and re-salting each day.

Then I will take the fruit and wash them, mix it up with some chili powder, a little sugar, a coating of sesame (gingelly) oil, and pack them into jars. I will then top up the jars with vinegar and let the pickle pickle for three or four months away from direct sunlight. At that time I will test the pickle for softness of the skin and intensity of the flavour of the flesh.

When done, it will be consumed avidly either as an accompaniment with a rice and curry meal, or as a snack on bread or dry biscuits.

50 years of van Reyk dining and drinking in Australia

50 years ago, on November 10th 1962, my parents, Gerry and Celia, brought their three children, Chris, Geoff and Paul, to Australia. To commemorate the event, we turned our annual Christmas get together into a celebration of 50 years of family and friends dining and drinking (we held it earlier than usual hence this early posting).

The brief was for all those contributing to bring a dish and or beverage that signified a decade in that 50 year period. It was excessive, but then that's us. Here's the menu for the curious.

The Great Big van Reyk Extended Family 2012 Boxing Day Do

Celebrating 50 Years of van Reyk Drinking and Dining in Oz

Christmas Trees - Jatz, Cheese, Cocktail Onions

Corn Chips, Salsa and Guacamole

Prawn Cocktails

Beetroot Salad

Goats Cheese, Beetroot and Caramelised Onion Tart

Ice Berg Lettuce and Cucumber Salad

Tabbouleh

The Mothership Somato Salad

Tomato and Mustard Tart

Sweet Potatoes with Cumin, Lime and Chilli

Wasabi Potato Salad

  

Coconut Prawns

Curried Sausages

Lucknow Leg of Lamb

Spam Sushi Hawaiian

Tandoori Chicken & Pita

Thai Beef Salad

Sri Lankan Festive Rice

Cherries

Christmas Pudding

Coconut Ice

Salted Caramel Fudge

Shortbread Christmas Tree

Sri Lankan Christmas Cake

Watermelon

  

Beer

Coca Cola, Fanta, Sprite

Espresso Coffee Martinis

Hibiscus Tea

Lemon Cordial

Mateus Rose

Mineral Water

Passion Pop

Wines