Volume I Episode III

Photos soon to follow. My camera is kind of out of batteries and I forgot my charger, but Ill post some as soon as I scrounge them up.

Wednesday, Feb 6th, 7:54:32pm

One of the cool things about this part of Mexico is that apparently there are a lot of underground hot springs. Within 20 miles of San Miguel there are at least 4 or 5 public venues for kicking it in some naturally hot water. Some are dug out into huge Olympic size swimming pools. Some are converted into water parks for kids (or adults) with water slides and shallow areas and whatever else a water park makes. Apparently, one of the hot springs is available for rent for the night and you can throw a big rave style party there with djs and candles and cocktails. Don't even think thats not happening some time in the next 2 months. The one we went to on Sunday morning, known as Escondido, is inside a series of brick domes with an outdoor pool on one end. IT kind of looks like that house on 280 near the Junnipero Serra statue for all of you old-school Bay Area vets Anyway, its kind of sauna like inside with a huge pipe gushing a heavy flow of 100 degree water. You can stand under the waterfall and let it massage your back, neck, chest or shoulders, as one massage hog lady did, or you can just hang out in the hot water and let it sooth and relax you and try not to think about how greedy and selfish some people are..
After a long nap (the hot springs really takes it out of you), I went to a bar to watch the Super Bowl. The gringo bar was all full up, so we watched at one of the other bars where it was being shown in Spanish to an all Mexican audience. Its kind of strange to watch the SuperBowl with commercials for local insurance offices and the announcer telling you that Los Gigantes tienen un gran defensa, which apparently they do. Is it just me or was I saying all year that Eli Manning is not that bad of a quarterback and if his receivers stopped dropping so damn many passes (see Drew Brees) he actually might not suck (I'm not implying that Drew Brees sucks, just that he would be even better if his receivers could hold onto anything)?.
This week has involved a lot of data entry by day, and a lot of crazy equipment arrival and organization and counting and moving by night. Seems kind of backwards to me, but as previously explained, with the tiny streets and the large trucks, its easier to unload at night. Easier for them that is. Monday, was the arrival of the bar. Super cool to have your bar custom made, to fit inside the patio of your funky 300 year old house/restaurant. The only problem is that absolutely nothing is flat, least of all the cobblestone patio. So, even though the measurements were fairly precise, the bar still needs some shims and some lifts and some filing to get it remotely flat and square to the wall. And of course, you want it to look good, being that its custom made and brand new and all. So, by the time that is all worked out, its fairly late, but we still decide to go to the Candelaria, the open air plant market in one of the neighborhood parks, which happens 2 weeks a year. People drive in from all over the state of Guanajuato to sell their plants (rumor has it that they are force bloomed), and since there are too many plants to store, and they might lose money on the whole project if they rented a room or a house here in San Miguel, they just sleep for 2 weeks in the park with their plants. So, basically, its always open. We stocked up on herbs for our herb garden which we planted the next day in a sweet little built-in planter along the side of our back stairs (Mat P, Jan Swan and Kimmy would all be proud of my care and techniques)....Basil ( a funky local basil thats not quite as sweet or anisey as the sweet Italian stuff), Oregano, Marjoram, Thyme, Rosemary, Mint, Epazote (a perfumey local herb with purple leaves dating back to the Aztecs ), Dill, some sort of Lemon Geranium thing and a bunch of edible Pansies.
Tuesday night was a glorious doubleheader of refrigeration installation and the arrival of china, glass and silver. Most everything here is cheaper to have custom built then buying new, and that goes double for walk-ins. The problem is that once you have the four walls, floor and ceiling built, you need some pretty heavy insulation. Well, the polyurethane guy, comes from Mexico City in his big truck that stores this nasty toxic chemical that he then pumps through the longest scummiest, most duct taped pipe you have ever seen. The best part is, the guy who is holding the end of the pipe, which is basically spraying a fine mist of agent orange, is protecting himself with a sweatshirt tied around his face and a baseball cap. My eyes were burning and my head was spinning standing 20 feet outside the building while this guy is in a 6 ft by 12 ft room spraying this stuff for an hour protected like hes trying to avoid a sun tan. What makes the whole situation even more surreal is that meanwhile this elegant well-dressed girl (some sort of refrigeration middle-woman) is standing around with a clipboard and a calculator arguing with the big fat truck driver over who has to pay off the cops because they didnt get the proper permit to block the street off for an hour (maybe because they arrived like 3 days and 4 hours late?). Neither of them seemed too concerned about the dude burning off more brain cells than a 16 year old hippy in a nitrous factory. When he finished, our walk-in looked like a yellow cave with funky foam oozing out the totally crooked door. Now the only decision is whether we go with ancient hieroglyphics and stick figures on the walls or just straight graffiti.
Finally at almost midnight, after we had celebrated the glory of refrigeration with a Mardi Gras cocktail at Harrys, San Miguel's finest and only New Orleans themed bar and restaurant (the pain of the menu is too hard for me to describe in words), came the other truck from Mexico City
with all of our china, glass and silverware. Sounds like no big deal, right. Thats where you are wrong. A mountain does not even describe. Imagine all of the plates you own, than multiply by 100, then stack them in boxes and them ship them here from Korea and Indonesia. Do the same with your glasses and silverware. Then add cognac snifters, dip bowls and butter knives. Then carry them from point a to b. Then to c. Then count them, all. Then up some stairs to d. Then restack them. Fun!
Another trip to Queretaro was now in order to pick up our slicer and grinder (you would think these restaurant equipment dealers would deliver given the size and price of their inventory, but no, not even close. Not only would they not deliver, they only will sell you items straight off the showroom floor, and they accept nothing but cold hard green cash. Our bill for the four items we bought was over 20,000 pesos, all of which had to be paid the old fashion way. Hello tax evasion!).
As I said before, Queretaro is not too glorious a place, mostly a big industrial city with lots of American international stores (Walmart, CostCo, Sam's, Home Depot etc), but it does have one thing going for it....Some badass Gorditas. I guess gorditas are one of the regional specialties of this part of Mexico and Guero and Lupita's Gorditas in the artisan market of Queretaro are the best Ive had by far. They are a little like a cross between a pita and a tortilla with a much more integral flour used for the dough. Another words, you take the corn that is used for tortillas (which has been treated with some sort of lye in order to dry it out completely and make it grindable - same stuff as they use to make tortillas) and only partially smash it rather than grinding fine. You then mix it with just enough water to bind and fry it(probably with a little lard) on a hot comal (essentially a large flat cast iron pan that kind of looks like an upside down tractor hub cap). It is then opened up like a pita and stuffed with whole pinto beans, meat (in this case, and the most traditional, is called migajas which means crumbs and is essentially the meat that is left over from cooking chicharonnes which are fried pig skins) and if you like cheese (queso ranchero) and/or lettuce. The point being that there are only a few ingredients, so they all have to be perfect. And that is how Guero and Lupita do it. The dough is crispy, like a good pizza crust, full of texture and corn chunks, not soggy with oil or heavy with too much water like most places. The migajas are not too greasy, which is an impressive feat given where they come from. The salsa, which they grind in a mocajete (lava rock mortar and pestle) is still slightly chunky, and balanced with not too much acid nor sugar.
Our next adventure was a trip to San Miguel mushrooms also known as Monterey Mushrooms....One would think that going to a local farm, even if it looks more like a factory than a farm, with four or five airplane hanger size greenhouses and mountains of hay on all sides, would offer one the opportunity to serve a locally made product. I guess, my first hint should have been when we needed an appointment with the head of sales, in order to take a look at the facility and hopefully taste some of their products. Anyway, once we arrive, and were given our official Visitor badges, also known as lammies (laminates), we headed to the main office to meet Anna, our emissary. She ushers us into a large conference room and proceeds to question us about why we have come, how many mushrooms we are looking to buy,and why cant we buy our mushrooms at the supermarket like anyone else. It feels more like a corporate meeting than a visit with Farmer john. The trip turns out to be a monumental failure, although maybe one with a lesson. No, we can not buy mushrooms direct from the factory. They have a 100 Kilo a week minimum (at least 10 times what we are looking to buy). They supply mushrooms to the likes of CostCo, Sam's Club and the gigantic Mexican supermarket chain Mega. No, we can not tour the factory. I couldn't totally grasp the reason, but it sounded like people were busy and why would we want to take a tour anyway. The place was almost as secretive, elusive and well guarded, as Dick Cheney's office. And no, we couldn't even buy some mushroom compost, the residual from the mushroom growing and harvesting process.
So, on our way back to town, forlorn and empty handed, we decided to make a little pit stop at the huge piles of brown dirt along the side of the road that just happened to smell like a well made duxelle (a fine chop of sauteed mushrooms that the Frenchies have a fancy name for). Crafty as we are, we not only procured a sack of sweet sweet mushroom compost for the low price of 25 pesos, we also made a deal with one of the compost ladies (hard to describe exactly what her job was), to come once a week and buy 10 kilos of mushrooms from the 100s of kilos she and her team pulled out of the dirt. Seems like somebody would have caught on to this before us, but she seemed completely baffled by the fact that we would approached her to buy what she normally would just lug back to the factory and return.
We proceeded in our quest for local purveyors, visiting the ranch of Hectore, the Italian, as they call him around here. We wound our way up a long bumpy dirt road, amidst the cactuses, mesquite trees and scrub brush that dominates the landscape of these parts (although I have learned subsequently, that this part of Mexico was all forest less than a hundred years ago. In 30 years loggers cleared the entire region leaving nothing but arid desert) until we came upon a huge brick farmhouse. In the front yard were lamb and cows, with pigs along the side and dormant wine grape vines as far as the eye could see. it would remind me of Tuscany or Umbria, if I had ever been there. Anyway, at his farm, once again in the dream fulfilling tradition of San Miguel, Hectore makes proscuittos, salamis, cotechinos (a gigantic Italian sausage), several types of fresh and aged cheeses, red and white wines, grappa and occasionally has a few baby (lechon) pigs for sale. Everything is processed by hand in the most old school traditional way possible. The milk he uses from his herd of about 20 Jersey milking cows is unpasteurized, although they do use a centrifuge type machine (the one and only machine they use for cheesemaking) to help rid it of harmful bacteria. The milk curd is hung in cheesecloth with a little rennet and then molded in straw baskets for as little as five days (for the fresh cheeses which taste incredibly of hay and alfalfa which are the composition of their cows' diet). The aged cheeses are left to dry in a cellar and age naturally over the course of 1 to 18 months depending on their types. Grapes are crushed by hand (using a giant rolling pin type thing) in another large custom made cellar with a drain in the floor that leads directly to the huge wooden fermentation barrel. He makes mostly Cabernet Sauvignon, although it seems to have almost no tanin to it and he claims to use no sulfites, which he sells really young as a table wine, , as well as some super fuity Fruili white wine. Unfortunately, Hectore, himself, has been sick for a while, and so production is currently way down. His wife, Estelle, is doing an admirable job of filling in, but it is not her passion like it is his. She also told us that their daughter, when she went off to school, accidentally erased all of the recipes on their hard drive, so Hectore has had to go back to the scraps of paper handed down through his family for generations.
Saturday morning I took the Dude for a long walk around the outskirts off San Miguel. Lots of cool houses up in the hills as well as some still, as of yet, undisturbed lands where hundreds of birds were nesting until Dude came around. We didnt make it into the botanical gardens (no dogs allowed) but we did manage to circumnavigate the top half of the city and make it back home without getting incredibly lost or back tracking.
In the afternoon we headed again out to the rural suburbs where Alligator Dave was going to make a demo of his 15 newest tracks to send off to LA where he is hoping to have a reality series made about his life on the road. a guy named Paul Voudouris has a studio called Hit records that he runs out of the bottom floor of his home. Paul, apparently by all the pictures of him in t-shirts with the neck and sleeves cut out and/or an open leather vest with no shirt underneath, was a platinum selling jazz/new age/pop singer and keyboardist somewhere in the late seventies early eighties. He moved out to San Miguel several years ago and built this studio along with a beautiful house, and apparently at one point a side of the road hamburger stand, which didn't quite succeed. Anyway, he has a few burros, chickens, sheep and dogs running around mostly for the entertainment and amusement of his young daughter (better than Nintendo if you ask me). Dave busted out 15 hilarious tracks in under 2 hours moving from one to the next like a true pro.It is hard for me to describe the "awesomeness" as Dave likes to say other than it ranged from Irish drinking jigs, to an ode to Burt Reynolds in his Smokey and the Bandit days, to a version of supercalifradgilisticexpalidocious where he replaces the key word with humboldtcountykindbudsmokesmelikesomedoja or something like that. He also sang a couple of Mexican style party songs along with Joe, the German tri-lingual rapper. Cool stuff. meanwhile, I sat around and drank Rum and Cokes and enjoyed the view of the desert.