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August 29, 2007
El Cachorro: Tacos al Vapor
El Cachorro at Work
El Cachorro
Tacos al Vapor
Mercado de Abastos
Calle Trigo esq. Nopal
View in Google Earth
I have not gone into detail about the various types of tacos that exist here in Mexico; it's worth a dedicated entry, because they are numerous and diverse. It's not just hard vs. soft like you usually find on el otro lado, where the difference is usually the kind of tortilla (flour or corn). In Mexico, the type of taco is usually determined by the method of preparation.
One of my favorites is al vapor, which more or less means "steamed." This denotes that the person making the tacos has made a bunch of tacos with pre-cooked fillings in corn tortillas the night before, loaded them up in an enormous steamer pot, and is selling them directly from the hot, steaming pot. It should be noted that the stuff inside the tacos is not cooked by the steaming process; the steaming process keeps them hot for serving. An additional aspect of this process is that they come out nice and moist.
I learned about El Chachorro one day because I was talking with Charles about potato tacos. He told me that some of the best were to be found at a particular al vapor taco stand in the Abastos Market, the market where people go to buy stuff in large quantities. (abastos means "supplies," and this is where corner store owners go to buy cases of soda and kitchen managers go to buy 40-pound boxes of tomatoes) The problem was that tacos al vapor are a morning-to-noon thing, and I often do not even wake up until then. Yet the Abastos Market is a great place to buy top-notch produce at very cheap prices, and if you want to get the good stuff, you have to get there pretty early. Not like crack-o-dawn early, but like 10:00 early. Even I can manage that. So as these things eventually work out, I ended up at the Abastos Market one day at just the perfect time for tacos al vapor, so we made a preliminary stop at El Cachorro.
I've been a fan ever since.
El Cachorro Tacos al Vapor
Like a lot of food that fuels the machinery of the working class, El Cachorro is street food. Opinions vary widely on whether or not it is safe to eat street food; some people that will not touch it, yet many know it as their primary source of sustenance. There are a handful of things that validate a street food source for me, like the food being served hot, a considerable number of people at the stand, or the recommendation of a friend. This place had all three.
You can see the different varieties they offer in the top photo: cicharron, lengua, frijol, papa and huevo con chorizo (pig skin, tongue, bean, potato and egg with sausage). You can get a soda, or an agua fresca for MXN $7, which is just under USD $0.70 to go along with it. It says "agua," but this means agua fresca, and at El Cachorro, that means de piña (pineapple), always.
The family makes up a huge number of these tacos every day, in the wee hours of the morning, and then loads them into the steamer pot to keep them warm all through the morning as they're being sold. They keep the different types in different areas of the pot, but they are all mixed in together so the grease from one kind drips down over the others. I suspect that I've ingested pig skin or tounge grease that has dripped onto my potato tacos, and I don't even want to know if the frijol version has some kind of animal fat in it. For an El Cachorro taco, I'll deal with it. (I don't make such blanket exceptions often. The last time was with miso ginger soup at Taki's on Colfax.)
El Cachorro Serves it Up Piping Hot
The thing that really sets apart the El Cachorro taco al vapor is the double tortilla. Everywhere else I've had them, they come as a single tortilla encasing the filling. At El Cachorro, you get two fine quality corn tortillas wrapped around your tongue or potato, and it makes it not only a lot more filling, but easier to eat. The taco al vapor is by nature a very soft, mushy taco, given to splitting and losing its filling. This never happens with an El Cachorro taco because if the inner layer comes apart, the outer layer still holds it all together.
This also lets the lucky consumer of the El Cachorro taco load on more of the delicious salsas that they have at the taco stand. They have three different kinds, which they distinguish as mild, medium and hot, but they are three entirely different types of salsa. The hottest kind is made with tomatillos and habañero chiles, but I usually go for the mild kind just because I like the flavor the most. They also have the ever-present minced cabbage and the carrot-jalapeño-onion in escabeche. That's one of the great things about taco stands in Mexico - they inevitably have all kinds of delicious things you can add to the tacos or eat on the side. I have yet to see the range of condiments you find at taco stands here in Mexico equaled in the United States. It's not a selection of five or so hot sauces. It's pickled red onions, escabeche, avocado salsa, various chile salsas, cole slaw, chipotles en adobado, grilled serrano chiles, diced fresh tomato-cilantro-onion-chile (known often as pico de gallo in the US, but more often called salsa mexicana here), jicama, limes...the list goes on and on.
Oh, and note how, in the above picture, they serve you on a plastic plate, but it's covered by a plastic bag. This is done at nearly all street food vendors though; it is not limited to El Cachorro. This lets them reuse the plastic plates without their ever getting dirty. When you're done with your food, you (or the stand attendant) strips off the dirty plastic bag from the plate, throws it in the trash and slides a new bag over the plate. Voila! It's a fresh clean plate for the next customer.
Some of El Cachorro's Salsas and Condiments
El Cachorro is so popular that he has expanded this year. He now has a couple of other stands located in the Abastos Market, and this original stand has a self-contained lavamanos, a little sink where you can wash your hands before eating. You can see a corner of it in the left side of the photo below. For a street food stand, that's getting really fancy.
El Cachorro Draws a Crowd
Oh and for those of you interested in the language, cachorro means "puppy," and that's the owner's nickname. I do not know his real name. Charles always refers to him simply as el cachorro, and I always know exactly who he's talking about.
Posted by crispy at 11:53 AM | Comments (1)
August 22, 2007
The Trees of Guadalajara
Pruned Tree, Chapalita Sur
It seems like in Mexico, trees are the enemy, as if they are to be feared, avoided, and whenever possible, hacked apart until they are barely alive. This might not be the philosophy throughout the entire country - Mexico City does not seem to share the maniacal tendency to slice and dice their trees - but in our neck of the woods, any time any part of any tree gets within a meter of power lines, phone lines, fences or buildings, out come the men with chainsaws to remove not only the limb that threatens to offend, but all the main limbs. It is as if the whole tree is being punished for its impertinence in trying to grow.
Pruned Tree, Chapalita Sur
Although the cutters seem ready at a moment's notice to lob off all the limbs of a tree, conversely they seem hesitant in their slaughter once they have set to it. One rarely sees a tree cut off at the bottom of the trunk. Instead, they leave the center of the tree standing, stripped of all branches and foliage, leaving only segments of the limbs, like a deciduous Venus de Milo.
Pruned Tree, Chapalita Sur
This poor specimen below stands across from our apartment building. It provided nice shade for the woman that sells tacos every weekday on the corner, but the branch on the far right began to grow too near the power lines that you can see in the shot. Even though it was the only branch that threatened to come anywhere near the wires, all the limbs of the tree were cut off.
I walked outside one day to wait for my cab, and I saw the crew of three men starting to dismantle the whole thing. By the time I returned from my errands, this is all that was left.
Pruned Tree, Chapalita Sur
Nobody seems to know why they cut trees like this in Guadalajara. Nobody seems to find it attractive. Everyone I have talked to finds it ugly, and none can explain the logic behind stripping trees down so severely but not removing them entirely.
Pruned Tree, Chapalita Sur
There are many neighborhoods in Guadalajara that have no trees whatsoever. Apart from little ornamental tokens here and there and a couple in Plaza San Francisco, the centro histórico and surrounding neighborhoods have no trees. Starting around Avenida Federalismo as you head west from the downtown along Avenida Vallarta, you start to see a few more here and there. Parque de los Colomos has a lot of trees, but it is clearly set apart from the ritzy, tree-free residential areas that surround it. It is as if it were a tree ghetto where trees are tolerated and not as viewed as threatening as long as they are kept isolated in a self-contained area.
Pruned Tree, Chapalita Sur
A shopping complex for Wal-Mart and Sam's Club near Plaza Galerías has a few ficuses littered about throughout the enormous parking lot. On the hot days before the rainy season comes, when the sun blazes in the sky and there is little breeze to cool things down, customers treasure the little islands of shade created by those trees in that sea of baking asphalt. All the spots in the shade fill up before any others. Even if people have to walk from the far edge of the parking lot where there are no other cars, they will take park in the shady spots to keep their cars cool.
So why do tapatios not plant more trees, and why do they do this to the trees that already exist?
Pruned Tree, Chapalita Sur
I have heard it argued that after the trees are savaged like this, that new growth will start again and the tree will soon be just as leafy as it was before. This is a load of hogwash.
To the extent that the leaves do come back, they come back as shown in the photo below. A few twigs grow out of the side of the hacked off branches and start to put out leaves. This is hardly as leafy as the tree was before, and it results in a weird combination of poofy/gangly, like a recently trimmed French poodle.
Pruned Tree, Chapalita Sur
After a few years of struggling back, it might get to where it looks like this.
Pruned Tree, Chapalita Sur
This is an example of a tree that survived pruning and managed to slip under the radar thus far. It's safe, but for how long?
Pruned Tree, Chapalita Sur
Others are not so lucky.
Pruned Tree, Chapalita Sur
The ones that do not make it are left to stand like this for years on end. This one, across the street diagonally from our apartment, has been like this since we moved in, coming up on two years now. Who knows how long it stood like this before we got here?
Pruned Tree, Chapalita Sur
Posted by crispy at 03:32 PM | Comments (5)
August 07, 2007
DOH! No More
UPDATE!
With a little help from a chilango, Shawn and I found a theater in Mexico City showing The Simpsons Movie in English with subtitles. It's showing (currently) at the Cinemex in Santa Fe, a huge, burgeoning area of the city where a lot of multi-national corporation headquarters are. People fly in and out from all over the world to go there, so it's one of the most multi-cultural parts of the city. In fact, our favorite Indian restaurant in the city, Kohinoor, is there.
Maybe they figure enough gringos go there that it is worth it to show an animated film in English. Maybe they're actually hip enough to realize (unlike the rest of the cinema industry in this country) that some animated features are not intended for kids. Or maybe that's a pipe dream and it just turns out that enough gringos traveling on business to Santa Fe take their kids along.
One thing I have learned living here in Mexico is that you shouldn't waste your time questioning why something good happens. You should just kick back and enjoy it. With The Simpsons Movie, we certainly did.
Thanks Cinemex!!
Posted by crispy at 06:26 AM | Comments (1)
August 06, 2007
There's No Place Like Home
Sign at Immigration, Mexico City Airport
(...unless it's Mexico City, and then it's like home but much, much more hardcore.)
We have returned to Mexico after having been in Buenos Aires for a month.
I must say we had a lovely time. Buenos Aires is beautiful, elegant and enormous in scale. The food is delicious. (Curse them! It's going to take months to drop the pounds that we gained there from all that pasta and pizza!) There are very beautiful people there. They take coffee seriously. All in all, depite a few inconveniences with our rented apartment and the freak snowstorm we were apparently so lucky to witness, I really dug the experience. We'd like to go back again for a visit. Only the next time, we'll go when it's not so cold.
Yet it's very nice to be back in Mexico. It's easier to understand that Spanish here, the people know how to relax and have fun, and it's hard to beat the weather. Buenos Aires was fun to visit, but Mexico is our home. People warned us that we might not want to leave once we were there, but luckily, we're quite happy where we are, at least for the time being.
Posted by crispy at 06:51 AM | Comments (1)
August 02, 2007
My New Fears in Flying
People were always shocked to learn that I didn't fly on planes, back when I didn't fly on planes. Then I started flying on planes and I was shocked that other people didn't avoid flying either, although not for the same reasons as I had. I couldn't believe that people actually tolerate the treatment that they receive from airlines! The video above, shot by Robert McKee and originally posted on Überzine, illustrates just how lousy an airline experience can be.
The flight (flight 6499, JFK -> DFW) of a Delta subcontractor, Shuttle America, was held on the tarmac at JFK for seven hours, while the passengers were lied to and denied food. The latter was attributed to 'company policy,' which reasoned that they should not be served food while stuck on the ground for seven hours since the flight was not scheduled to provide food during the three-hour flight. Before you chalk this up to being just one bad, isolated experience, note that this comes after the Jet Blue incident in January, and another Delta issue (Comair Flight 5637) where a passenger was so annoyed that he stormed the cockpit seeking answers from the pilots after being held on the tarmac for over four hours. Recently, Northwest Airlines has had an epidemic of cancelled flights.
Shawn and I lived through our own similar situation earlier this year when we were at DFW and a tornado passed through the area, requiring evacuation of the terminal and delay of all flights. Luckily for us, we had not yet boarded the plane, so at least we could move around, use the bathrooms, get things to eat. I'll have to write up a blog entry about our experience with that sometime. Maybe I'll get the chance when we fly back to Mexico on Sunday morning. I just might get lucky and our flight might be delayed.
Posted by crispy at 06:54 AM | Comments (1)