Molemolemolemolemole

This might make you start reminiscing about the guy with the mole in Austin Powers, but mole (pronounced mol-ay) is also the name of a sauce that originated in Mexico's southern state of Oaxaca. Or family of sauces really - mole covers anything that is made using ingredients ground together.

I'm sure once upon a time these were made in backbreaking sessions with the mortar and pestle but these days, its all about the blender. Every Mexican home has one, and they are constantly whirring, making salsas, moles, soups, refried beans and desserts.

Besides the mole, Oaxaca has its own family of cheeses - a fresh, stringy kind and one that looks and tastes like haloumi - edible flowers and leaves and countless varieties of chilis. Its big specialty is chapulines - fried grasshoppers - although they are caked in so much salty seasoning its difficult to tell that you are eating an insect. So what better place than to learn from an expert how to master these delicious recipes?

The pork man

We enlisted in a cooking course at a restaurant in downtown Oaxaca, which involved a morning visit to the markets to learn about regional foods, buy the ingredients and turn it all into a delicious multi-course comida, or lunch. We were greeted by a dizzying variety of fruits and vegetables, many of which I'd never seen before like squash flowers, guanabanas - a sweet, black fruit that looks like a cactus on the outside and mameys - look like papaya with silky soft orange flesh.

The variety of foods on offer was amazing, with each vendor specialising in a particular food group. Besides fruits and vegies there was the pork shop with rows of dangling chorizos sausages, the beef shop with thin strips of flank steak and the chicken shop with piles of wings, breasts and drumsticks. There was also the dry goods sellers with dried chilis, beans, flour and rice. Interestingly the bags of dried dog biscuits were located in among the other foods, and the same scoop was used for all!

Chicken lady

On the way back to the restaurant we dropped by a shop with a whole row of what looked like massive coffee grinders on their side. In fact, that's exactly what they are but you can get anything you like ground down - in case it won't fit into your blender at home. There were vats of sloppy re-fried beans, tomato salsa and corn tortilla dough. 

Our group of seven - us, an English couple and three Americans, selected chicken with a green mole based on pumpkin seeds, green tomatoes, squash leaves and lettuce. We also settled on chilis rellenas - jalapeno chilis stuffed with a mix of chicken, tomato sauce, almonds, olives and raisins. To start we opted for quesadillas, fresh salsas and avocado soup. Dessert was Oaxacan chocolate ice-cream.

We got to work making tortillas, which apparently is always done first. We rolled the corn dough into little balls and placed it on the tortilla press. You have to carefully lift it out of the press with one hand and place it on a flat pan, for 10 seconds on one side, one minute on the other and 20 seconds back on the first side. On the third flip it puffs up like a balloon before settling back down.

All hands in dough

We made this interesting variation of with small red flowers from a bean plant, fresh cheese and a herb called epazote, which smells faintly of fennel. These were pressed into smaller, thicker tortillas before being cooked.
The tortillas were lined with stringy cheese to make quesadillas. As a bit of a twist, we added squash flowers and chapulines (grasshoppers, remember!) which have a really strong (but great) taste.

The blender got a massive workout in preparing this menu. First it was enlisted to grind up the ingredients for red and green salsa. Red salsa was really simple, just cooked tomatoes, garlic and serrano chilis. Green salsa calls for a special variety of green tomatoes, plus coriander, garlic and chili. We made variations of the red salsa, using toasted avocado leaves - apparently edible - and smoky-tasting dried chilis. Peanuts were shallow-fried in oil and chili and blended, which was an interesting variation. Also there was one variety where we blended worms into the salsa mix!

Molemolemolemolemole

We then blended the green mole ingredients together with chicken stock and cooked them in a pan. Next, the blender turned bright red pulversing baked tomatoes and chilis for the stuffed chili sauce. It went back to green when we started on the avocado soup, which is really simple as it just involved avocado, cream (sort of sour like creme fraiche), chicken stock and a few other spices.

The stuffed chiles were also quite easy to make. There was an attempt to de-spice the jalapeno chiles by scraping out all of their seeds and boiling them for a few minutes although when we sat down to ate them I don't think it was all that successful as they were too spicy for most! We used boiled chicken with the red salsa and chopped almonds, chilis and raisins for the stuffing - which was delicious all on its own and tasted almost like a tagine.

Finally, it was time to make the ice-cream. We used large discs of Oaxacan chocolate, which was super-dark, gritty and spicy because it had already been blended with cinammon and chili. We added evaporated milk and cream, blended it up and then let the ice-cream machine do the rest.

The eating part was, of course, the most satisfying. It was really interesting to see how all of the flavours came together in all of the little steps we had taken to produce the meal. The salsas were amazing - especially the red one with the dried chili and the peanut one. The jalapeno chilis had me guzzling down my juice that we made from dried hibiscus flowers (which interestingly they call jamaica), but the fire was quickly put out with the creamy avocado soup which followed.

The mole was exquisite and surprisingly not too heavy like some of the ones made from chocolate can be. And of course the ice cream, well how can you go wrong there? Overall it was such a diverse mix of flavours, as I said when we went to the traditional restaurant last week its surprising to get such balanced and delicate flavours from Mexican food.

Here are some more pics from the cooking day:

Adam toasting avocado leaves

Making a drink from hibiscus flowers

Making the chocolate ice-cream

Stuffing the jalapeno chilis

All hands on deck

Dried chili gallery

Adios Mexico City - the highlight reel

After 2 months living in student digs in a gritty Mexico City barrio, its now time for us to move on and see more of Mexico. Leaving was bittersweet - on the one hand it got us off our asses and prompted us to see a bit more of the city and catch up with friends but at the same time, I definitely could have hung around longer. Not having a mobile phone was a bit of a barrier to socialising some times. Say what you will about social networking but organising to meet up with groups of people on skype and facebook is nigh on impossible.

We had some highs and lows in our sightseeing missions earlier in the week. Going to the National Anthropology museum, which catalogues Mexico's long and amazing history of indigenous cultures, was a definite high point. It was a great complement to seeing the ruins of Aztec and Maya cities, because it had so much stuff on what life was like, and all of these amazingly preserved artifacts - pottery, jewellery, weapons etc. There were separate exhibits on all of Mexico's different regions and it was amazing to see the similarities between groups that had barely any contact with each other.

Going to the network of Aztec-built canals in Xochimilco, a neighbourhood in the south of Mexico City, was a complete waste of time. It's billed as a bit of a Venetian experience, where you hire a boat and cruise the calm waterways while listening to the strains of merimbas and mariachi music that float by on other boats.

Boat traffic jam

Our first mistake was agreeing on the ridiculous price offered without haggling - 400 pesos for an hour - compare this with 100 pesos for two people at the anthropology museum. And we should probably have guessed that going on a Sunday, the big family day here, might be a little busy. Also there was just the two of us on this enormous barge-like boat with a big table down the middle - it would have been more fun in a group.

As the boat pulled out from the platoon, it quickly became clear that there were far too many other boats all trying to squeeze down a very narrow waterway. After about five minutes our boat was stuck in a giant traffic jam with 40 or 50 other boats, all carrying large family groups who had had the commonsense to bring their own banquet lunches and beer. We sat there drinking overpriced coronas and munching on tough-as-a-board burnt corn cobs.

Lady selling cardboard-like corn cobs

The first half of the tour was spent being jammed in with the other boats while the gondaleers tried desparately to prise the boats free of each other so they could start moving. At one point another boat spun around quickly and ploughed right into the side of ours. It hit the chair I was sitting on, throwing me off it and slamming me face first into the deck. Soon afterwards the impact made my beer topple over and it spilt all over me.

The weirdest thing about Xochimilco is that it comes really highly recommended - at least five people told me it was a must-see in Mexico City. Adam and I were totally miffed - it was sold to us as a pleasant, tranquil experience but floating listlessly on a crowded waterway while being rammed by other boats was not  even remotely relaxing! And it was not exactly scenic, cruising these smelly backwaters that were flanked by the marshy backyards of dilapidated houses. If you came with the right attitude and a lot of beer you could potentially have fun laughing about the lameness of the experience.

We had lunch with some friends from the Spanish course after the exam finished - which most found pretty easy. Later that night we went to a party hosted by two Swedish classmates who are housesitting a friend's place in the outskirts of the city.

The funny thing about this house was that, while it was a three-story palace, it was still undergoing renovation and not quite finished. It had power and water but no stove, kitchen or fridge. It was pretty wild though - everyone was drinking this dubious punch and dancing to really bad 80s music. At one point someone called a couple of cabbies but only one of them left with people and the other one just hung around and joined the party! An hour after he arrived I spotted him carving up the dancefloor, a cigarette in one hand and a glass of punch in the other.

We had a nice dinner with some of the people in our house the night before leaving, which was fun but low key, important considering how hung over we were from the party the night before.

As it comes time to leave this magnificent metropolis, I have been reflecting on the most striking things about Mexico City - it is without a doubt one of the craziest places I have experienced, but also one of the friendliest - it has a big warm beating heart and even though it is one of the biggest cities in the world it doesn't have a cold, impersonal quality at all.

Here are some more weird and wonderful Mexico City tidbits:

The door to door salespeople: there's something kind of cool that in a city with a racing heartbeat, there are still guys pedalling door to door on cycle carts selling their wares. Each vendor has a unique cry, so that people in their houses will know who is at the door. The funniest by far is the tamale man, who sounds somewhere between a crying baby and a power tool with the way he cries "Tama-lEEEEEE."

Another strange breed of street seller are the guys who have these little mobile ovens that look like mini steam-trains. I think they even run on coal. They emit this high-pitched whistle to alert people they are coming, which sounds like a steam train on helium.

PDAs or public displays of affection: for a conservative ultra-catholic country, there is a lot of love on display in Mexico City. It probably has something to do with parents not letting their kids bring boyfriends and girlfriends home. But these teenagers really go for it in public - not just pashing but full-bodily groping on park benches, at bus stops and on street corners.

Boozy cabbies: if there are drink driving laws in this country, clearly the cops are not trying to enforce them. Many people we've spoken to have noticed their cabbie taking a swig of a beer at the wheel while driving them somewhere. Mini-bus, or colectivo drivers as they are called also seem to like a tipple. We sprung one sitting in his bus on the side of the road with all the lights on, chugging back a family-sized Corona.

Road rules? Anyone? Not sure if there are rules on whether you should indicate, give way or stop at traffic lights, but it doesn't seem like anyone cares. Stopping at traffic lights is optional after 11pm, but most people only stop if there are cars in the way. If there are no lights, the fastest car into the intersection gets to go first. And indicators? What are they for? Are they even needed on cars driven by Mexicans?

School's out!

Friday was the last day of our six-week Spanish course in Mexico City. We had mixed feelings about its ending - on the one hand we will be sad to leave such a fun and exciting city, right at the time when we were starting to feel comfortable and make friends. But another part of us is glad that the studying is finally over! It was hard work turning up to class at 9am five days a week, and fitting in numerous homework exercises around our demanding social schedule.

But the best thing about learning a language is that life is your classroom, and the more often you get out and use your newly acquired skills, the more you will learn. I found it a bit awkward at first striking up conversations with people in the house, and strangers especially, when most times I wouldn't understand their response and have the right thing to say in return.

As the course progressed, I realised I was able to chat more comfortably and freely with people, and moved from inane conversations about the weather to more meaty subjects, such as what they are studying and how they are liking Mexico City.

I'm now able to understand the garbled sales pitches from hawkers in the metro as they extoll the benefits of their bootleg merchandise, and when I hear snippets of the news or radio advertising I at least know what they are talking about. Sometimes I can understand the mumbled slang of Chilangos - Mexican City residents - but still only snippets here and there.

All in all the course has been great preparation. We did quite a bit of grammar, but I wouldn't say there was too much of a focus on it. We did plenty of other stuff too - debates on topics such as the benefits of the internet, the role of advertising, the environment and Mexican history. There were also some useless topics such as the merits or otherwise of infomercials.

Next week there are three exams - a written one where I will have to write a short story, an oral exam where I will have to debate a topic with another student and finally a multiple choice reading and grammar exam. I'm feeling pretty relaxed about it seeing as it doesn't matter whether I pass or fail - I'm just here to improve my Spanish so I can communicate better, and I'm not trying to gain access to a higher level of study like some of my classmates. If you complete all eight levels of the course you receive a qualification to teach Spanish - I have just completed level four so there is still a way to go before fluency!

It will be sad to leave the city, and all the people we have met through the course at the uni and also in our student house. Hopefully we will be able to catch up with them when the exams are over on Wednesday, as we are heading south to Oaxaca on Friday morning.

On Saturday afternoon we enjoyed a long boozy lunch with Leigh, one of Adam's classmates with his girlfriend Laura and her parent's restaurant, which has just opened in the trendy neighbourhood of Condesa, not far from the city centre. Eating here really changed my idea of Mexican food. The menu uses traditional ingredients from the south-eastern states, which had well-developed cuisines before the Spanish arrived. Some of the ingredients featuring chapulines, or grasshoppers, which are finely ground and used as a delicious salty seasoning and mole - a thick brown sauce made the original way with several varieties of chili.

The food was delicately arranged on long slim platters, the flavours exquisitely balanced. For entree there was a trio of ceviche - raw fish marinated in citrus juice. One was served with watermelon, another with portobello mushroom. There was also soft pork meat encased in wafer-thin fried banana strips.

Adam had seared tuna with watermelon and eschallot for his main course, while I had a beautifully seasoned quail served with chopped peanuts and a spicy chapulines sauce. Dessert was a coffee, kahlua, mezcal and cream cocktail for Adam and for me,  banana ice-cream with this delicious crunchy crumble arranged on the plate like a sandy beach.

The meal was so different from other Mexican food we have tried, which tends to be very meat and cheese heavy, and almost invariably includes tortillas, even with breakfest dishes like scrambled eggs. This food was so delicately balanced and light that even after a three course lunch with cocktails we did not feel wiped out.

After lunch we hung around chatting, and were then invited up to the bar to taste some of the many varieties of Mezcal that the restaurant had on offer. Mezcal is like a cousin of tequila in that it also comes from a cactus, but it is derived from the maguey, while tequila comes from the agave plant. Mezcal is pretty strong - 48 per cent was the average, and if you shot it back all in one go you would be on the floor pretty soon.

This is probably why Mezcal is so misunderstood outside of Mexico. People try to shoot it like tequila and it totals them. Instead, you are supposed to sip it like whisky and chase it with lime or other citrus, salt and even freshly chopped tomato or tomato juice. Instead of wiping you out, it gently warms you - some varieties more so than others - and gives you this pleasant, happy feeling, rather than an out of control drunk feeling.

We sampled about five different kinds - apparently Mezcal tasting is becoming quite trendy, there are tasting saloons all over the city. I couldn't taste much difference between them, although one was quite sweet while others burnt my throat more. It's much easier to tell the difference between varieties of wine!

Party at the mad house

Life as a student in Mexico city has been, until now, considerably tamer than you might imagine. The share-cum-boarding house that we are staying in is relatively peaceful - except for a pair of noisy Spanish girls who constantly yell to each other across the echo-ey atrium and insist on smoking and chatting right outside our room.

Our limited Spanish made it hard for us to interact with the other housemates at first, and for the first few weeks we hardly saw anybody except for briefly in the kitchen and all we would manage was a quick Hola.

But as my Spanish has started to improve, I have managed a bit more small talk with the housemates, beyond hello and how are you and where are you from. We have an impressive array of nationalities here - besides the Spanish girls, there is a Spanish guy named Felix, a Colombian named Juan, a couple of French, a Japanese guy named Ken, a Costa Rican guy whose name I keep forgetting and a handful of other randoms who reside in the other part of the house we rarely visit.

Last night we were watching TV in the common area - not something we do that often - when we met a few more people - three Germans named Patrick, Larissa and Franci, who spoke excellent English which made it possible for Adam to communicate properly with them.

They had teamed up with the Colombians and the Spaniards, who were cooking Spanish omelettes and making Sangria, for an impromptu banquet on the terrace. The Germans made schnitzel and we supplied our own national delicacy - beer - to the gathering.

New friends...Adam with Patrick and David

After the meal a bottle of tequila was busted out, quickly shattering any semblance of a civilised atmosphere. We put some party music on our laptop and it wasn't long before all hell broke loose. At first it was us and the Germans up one end of the table speaking English, and the Spanish speakers down the other end of the table, but after a while the two groups blended, resulting in the development of a curious Spanglish blend, as the Spaniards dusted off their English and we switched to Spanish.

When the tequila bottle was drained it was quickly replaced by another, and another, and another (don't forget there was quite a few of us). This is the beauty of Mexico - there is always a corner store handy, ready to sell you tequila at just about any hour of the day.

I was handed some change for my (small) contribution to the tequila bottle, and I sung out "diez pesos, diez pesos de vale" - the typical cry of street and subway hawkers when selling their wares. It caught on instantly, and pretty soon the whole party was yelling "DIEZ PESOS!" at the top of their lungs.

Dancefloor antics

The party did take me back a few years - most of the students here are a bit younger than us, and alcohol makes them pretty hyper, but it was amusing to watch the Spaniards busting out the macarena and their flamenco stylings, and to watch people being pushed up and down the street in a wheelbarrow.

Needless to say, Catalina, the lady who runs the house, was not very impressed, but what is a student house if you can't throw a party every now and again?

Here are a couple of shots of the wheelbarrow fun..

Taxco - a new kind of chaos

This may look like the big Jesus statue that towers over Rio de Janiero, but I can assure you we're nowhere near Brazil. This salmon-pink lookalike overlooks a hillside town named Taxco in the highlands a few hours south of Mexico City.

We headed to Taxco for a few days over the long weekend - Monday was the anniversary of the post-revolutionary constitution being signed. This town absolutely defies gravtiy, its buildings clinging to a series of steep cliffs.

A tangled maze of super-narrow cobblestone streets wind their way up the slopes, and from a distance it looks like the white-walled red tile roof houses are built on top of each other. The streets are so steep, you practically have to walk tip toe to get up them because your ankle joint doesn't allow your foot to be flat while you are leaning so far forward.

But this hillside setting and the way the houses are built gives the town a quaint medieval charm, and it looks like it has been transplanted from the mediterranean. It would be a great location to film a James Bond car chase, with the cars screaming through the steep narrow streets and tight hairpin bends.

In fact being in Taxco felt like being transported back to the 60s, because all of the taxis were VW beetles and many of the ordinary cars were too. Some of the turns are so tight that drivers had to do three point turns just to get around, and clipping wing mirrors trying to get past passing traffic.

Most of the roads were only one car width wide and had no pavements, so drivers had to wait for oncoming traffic to clear the street before negotiating the way, weaving in and out of pedestrians. Needless to say some of the narrower streets terrified me, and each time a car went past I flattened myself against the nearest wall like spiderman.

We gave up being backpackers for a few days and installed ourselves in a nice hotel that was right in the centre of town (halfway up the steep hill) behind the central plaza and cathedral. We were given a top floor room, that looked straight out to the cathedral and all of the way down the hill.

Taxco exists in this unlikely location because it is a mining town - it sights right atop a lucrative silver mine, and the ore is processed locally and made into jewellery. The town was packed with Platerias, or silver shops, full of necklaces, rings, bracelets and even silver statues of bulls and jaguars and other animals beloved to Mexicans.

The town seemed to enjoy a comfortable wealth from its silver riches, with all of the buildings well-constructed (ie actually finished - this is quite rare in Mexico from what I've seen) and freshly painted, with ornate balconies made from red tile and of course the European-looking red tile roofs.

But as we meandered further up the hill, unpainted buildings, many unfinished concrete block structures with bits of steel hanging out the top, began to dominate. Many were without window panes, with boards nailed over them instead. Right at the top of the hill there were a few mudbrick houses with makeshift tin roofs.

We discovered this part of town when we decided to hike up to the Jesus statue one day. After we'd zig-zagged up a few streets, we discovered it was quicker to walk up the stairs that connected one street with the next - although this was much steeper and involved walking up about 500 stairs and then another steep road to the statue. But the view was worth it - and from up here the town seemed strangely flat, its streets like little wrinkles the chaotic array of buildings.

Our plan was to leave on Monday to be back in time for class on Tuesday, and we were waiting at the bus stations, tickets in hand at the right time, but ended up missing the bus because it left from a different bay than the one advertised in the extremely muffled announcenent. There were two buses leaving at the same time, and confused, we joined one queue only to discover when we got to the front that it was for a local bus and our bus had left five minutes earlier.

All of the buses were full for the rest of the day, and despite having a cracker of an argument in Spanish (it must be improving if I can politely insult people!) we were only offered a 50 per cent discount on tickets for the following day. The guy's reasoning was that we were the only people that had been confused by the announcement - if there were say five or six people that had missed the bus, all would have been excused and not have to pay.

There was an upside to this tragedy, as we simply jumped back into a VW cab and went straight back to the hotel, which offered us a bigger, quieter room for quite a bit less than we had paid over the weekend, so we enjoyed another day chilling by the pool and sipping on $3.50 margaritas.