Volume 1 Episode IV

Friday, February 15, 2008, 1:51:33

First I'd like to send an RIP out to Moochie, the Boston Terrier, who was the victim of an unprovoked mauling this week. This dog-on-dog violence has got to stop.

Ok, there’s been a lot of uproar about the lack of formatting in this blog. So, I’m going to do my best to be a little more clear with my dates and paragraphs and captions.

I left off last time after a Saturday afternoon recording session with the Alligator. Saturday night we went to a gallery opening/anniversary party at the Aurora, which is an old cotton mill in San Miguel that has become home to a lot of upscale art and a couple of attempts at fine dining (not too successful as far as I can tell). Anyway, these gallery openings are always a little depressing to me as I watch all of the artists have to suck up to, and sell out to, the art patron community which tend to be of a completely different sort than the artists themselves. I guess we all gotta do what we gotta do. Especially when that which you are selling does not have much tangible, objective, or intrinsic value (food, of course, is somewhat, although not completely, included in the list of subjectively valuable).

Anyway, there was some cool art but the feeling of being trapped in a Disneyland for 60 year old Texans was a little overwhelming. We went to dinner at Tacos Don Felix, a local landmark, at least as far as side-of-the-road, white tent, taco stands go. More gringos…. wearing deer skin Daniel Boone jackets, hollering at each other across the tent. I mean really, can’t a man eat his 7 assorted tacos in peace?

Sunday we spent a full day out at Fernando’s little house and bakery in the campo (country) outside of San Miguel. He has a brick wood-fired oven as well as a 2 deck bread oven that he uses to produce organic breads that he then sells to stores and restaurants throughout San Miguel. On Sunday we went out to “play” with the wood-fired oven, making a leg of pork wrapped in bacon (I believe that’s not kosher), pingas - which I think means penis in Spanish-(large, mature cactus leaves) stuffed with nopales (young cactus leaves), chorizo, tomato, poblano peppers, garlic and onion, and then sewn shut and roasted in the wood ashes (only the stuffing is eaten, the outside leaves turn black and sooty and are inedible) and a whole slew of pizzas including shrimp and fresh oregano, tomatoes and local manchego and jamon, peppers and caramelized onions. A good group of people trickled through, including a sculptor from Queretaro who made some of the best stuff on display the night before at the Aurora, an architect who spent half the party reading a book on escaleras (stairways) , a local kindergarten teacher, and Fernando’s mom and aunt who got fairly plastered and sat outside on chairs ragging on everything and everyone like a couple of Saturday Night Live characters. Always nice when a party is half gringos and half Mexicans, at least for me, because I can practice my Spanish with plenty of back-up in case I can’t find a word or understand a sentence.

Things have really slowed down to a crawl at the Restaurant. Really hard to get much done when every contractor only finishes half their job leaving leaky sinks, dangling wires, unlevel surfaces and non-functional internet (I am currently typing this as a word document since for the second or third day this week the internet is not happening. Can you imagine trying to start a business in San Francisco with internet access that functions half the time?) It’s also a little challenging when purveyors come without any sort of price or product lists, and the lists that they do have, often include mostly items that they need to truck in from Mexico City so they need 4 days of advanced warning (not usually how life works in a restaurant).

I'm beginning to feel like the optimal solution would be to figure out what products are the freshest and most consistently available, and base our menu completely around that list, instead of the other way around. Its kind of hard, because of course, every other restaurant in town does the same thing without even thinking about it….There is beef, tomatoes, onions, cilantro, corn and chiles around….what are we going to make? Tacos!!! I guess it just adds to the challenge as far as having to create new dishes, rather than working off of already developed recipes. Of course, many restaurants call themselves local and seasonal, which would imply that they are buying exactly what's freshest and most available at any given moment, but at least in the Bay Area, they have access to anything else that they might want or need to finish a dish with less than 12 hours notice. Not to mention an incredible group of farmers always trying to expand the quality and variety of products available at any given time. A crutch we don’t seem to have (farmers - yes, expansion - not so much).

Tuesday night we had a feast celebrating the almost completion of our kitchen. We at least have 2 working stove tops and ovens as well as some running water (not hot) and a working household refrigerator. Anyway, we roasted the lechon pig (about 10lbs) that Donnie had bought last week at the Italian farmhouse. Marinated overnight in soy, tangerine, ginger, garlic, and rice wine, we cooked the pig on a bed of red cabbage and onions until the meat was falling from the bone and the skin began to crack. On the side we made some vegetable fried rice with little duck egg omelet slivers (from Donnie’s ducks that live behind his house), egg rolls stuffed with carrots, zucchini, mushrooms and crab (from a can, but a good can, of pasteurized lump crab meat) and green beans a la plancha (the plancha seemed to get hotter than our wok) with ginger, garlic and scallions.

We also tried out a dish that we’re thinking of putting on the menu ….Marinated sea scallops with manzano peppers (a local pepper that looks like an over-size habanero – orange and kind of diamond shaped- and is sometimes hot, but usually not), mandarin oranges and cilantro. Unfortunately, we have yet to find a local purveyor for fresh scallops, and the frozen ones we tried were slightly rubbery in texture and much less sweet than we had hoped.

We ate dinner up on the roof, candlelit because there isn’t any lighting up there yet, with Donnie, Cynthia, their kids, the three of us from 20 de Enero (Alejandra, Andrew and I), Fernando and 3 of the workers from the store who have been painting our dining room. It’s definitely a family affair around here.

Of course, the next night I made a hogs' head soup with the leftovers from our pig roast, some vegetables, rice and seasoning. For some reason, it reminded me of Louis (my uncle, from Louisiana, who was an amazing cook and introduced me to the glories of hogs head anything).

Meredith is coming in tonight. Hopefully she will write the next posting. If and when we have internet, that is.