Inspiring women: my Mom and Julia

(Note: Chef Tony Marano assigned students in his Culinary Foundations I class at the California Culinary Academy to write a short essay on our reactions to a book about food and cooking. This is my essay.)

    Food is culture.

   Julia Child’s “My Life in France” bears witness to that, revealing her embrace of the fullness of French cuisine and the way of life it represents.

   She fell in love with French food and cooking and inevitably with the French people and everything about them. She learned their language, allowing her to encounter and befriend them and adopt French life in every sense.

   She appreciated from literally her first meal in France that good food well prepared by long-established and refined custom was the common denominator in French culture.

   Her recounting of those experiences led me to recognize more clearly than ever that what I learned in my Mexican mother’s kitchen wasn’t cooking; it was culture. And when I cook from the repertoire of recipes and techniques that my mom taught me – both by osmosis and direct instruction – I am respecting and renewing my culture.

   Rooted in corn and chiles, ours is a cuisine of robust flavors and smells and of bright and earthy colors. As such, it reflects the robust and colorful culture that is my heritage.

   Julia Child inspires me to continue pursuing knowledge of food and culinary arts as part of my culture – how these foods, in this place, prepared in this way, presented and eaten thusly reveal the ongoing life of a people.

   She ends her story by declaring that “the pleasures of the table, and of life, are infinite – toujours bon apétit!”

   To which I say, ¡Claro que si – que aprovecho!

Lamb tacos? B-a-a-a-d!

Some ground lamb left over from delicious stuffed bell peppers made a few days ago went into tacos for lunch today.

The ground meat taco is basic Sonoran Mexican food, or as it appears on restaurant menus in my hometown of Tucson, "old-style taco". It is ground beef on a corn tortilla folded over and fried. Stuffed with cheese, lettuce, maybe some sliced green olives and covered with salsa cruda, it is true comfort food.

Lamb simply didn't work the way beef does in these tacos. The taste was off just enough so that the combination of meat and corn didn't work.

Memo to self: Stick to the basics when making the basics.

(Photo credit: Grub Street)

Get ready for Salsa Sunday

A new "feature" of this blog, starting Sunday, will be salsa recipes, one a week. We'll call it Salsa Sunday.

Included will be recipes from a standard salsa cruda to the best replication I can come up with of my Tia Lily's fabulous chile verde. I'll borrow recipes and components of recipes, and when I do, the source and/or originator will be credited.

In all instances, fresh ingredients will be at the core of the recipes. That means for me adhering to my religion -- going to the Fillmore Farmers Market Saturday mornings. At the core of the fresh ingredients will be chiles, with the notation that there will be some recipes that call for dried chiles.

For this Sunday's recipe, I will buy a lime, cilantro, ripe red tomatoes, scallions, garlic, jalapeños and a milder chile like an anaheim. On hand, I will have salt, black peppercorns and vinegar.

¿Listo? Entonces, te veo en Domingo.

(Photo credit: www.mexicofoodandmore.com)

Going hunting for chorizo, tortillas

Heading to my hometown of Tucson, Ariz., for a few days to visit family and friends, handle some personal business and eat good Sonoran food.

Oh, and I will be certain to bring back as many dozen big flour tortillas and pounds of American Meat Co. chorizo that I can fit into a back pack.

San Francisco's food scene is glorious, but it does lack for the food we grew up on. Oh, there's plenty of Mexican food here, some of it even very good.

But the unique flavors and textures of Sonoran Mexican cuisine don't seem to make it out of the dessert, unless strapped to the back of a traveler.

That will be me in the middle of next week.

Hasta pronto, y que aprovecho.

¡Viva Rick Bayless!

Reversal of the long-time dumbing down of Mexican food by the likes of Taco Bell and Chili's may have momentum with Rick Bayless' victory in Top Chef Masters.

The outcome on Bravo TV Wednesday surely surprised many people and, one would hope, began building long-overdue respect for Mexican food. Bayless was taken aback by his victory. The judges expressed open surprise that the food Bayless laid before them was superior to the competing classic French and Italian dishes. Give them credit for recognizing it and overcoming their biases.

Chalk it all up to two equal factors:

* Rick Bayless' relentless attention and faithfulness to the details of regional Mexican cooking. He visits Mexico frequently, and on those excursions, he has learned the recipes and the techniques it takes to carry them out, how to use the wide array of ingredients and a genuine respect for the people, the culture and the food.

* The nearness of Mexican food to its indigenous roots. It is closer to its roots than French and Italian are to their roots. It is fundamental cooking with ingredients that are consistently one, two, three steps closer to their original states than what other classic cooking presents.

Note that I said other classic cooking. Those of us for whom Mexican food has been our life-long nourishment always knew it was classic and had a place beside the world's great cuisines. Now it can be declared.

That Bayless defeated a classically trained French chef, the delightful Hubert Keller, and a classically trained Italian-American chef, the volatile Michael Chiarello, in the finals of Top Chef Masters is further testament to his skills and the cuisine.

In doing so, he won over a panel of judges whose palates and prejudices had seemed to favor the classics of the French and Italian kitchens. Judge Gael Greene was openly amazed that Bayless' winning black mole had 27 ingredients and took him 20 years to perfect. Her reaction to how it tasted: “You set off sky rockets tonight.”

The best part of Top Chef Masters was watching all these great chefs in action, their passion on full display. Here's how Bayless characterized it in a post-competition interview with the Los Angeles Times:

"At this point in my life, I’m 55, and what I really want to do is prove to myself that I can still cook at all. I don’t work on the line anymore, but I miss it! I cook all the time at home. I love it! I just want to cook."

(Photo credit: Google Images)