Marinated Ancho Chiles a la Luz Barreras (Chiles anchos Nana Luz)
Catere Victor Nava stuffs his chiles with cheese; we use a chicken or pork and dried fruit filling like they do at Las Mercedes. The intro is long but sweet and comes from my first book, Food From My Heart. This is another of the wonderful dishes shared by Margarita...
Red Snapper Hash (Salpicon de huachinango)
This recipe for red snapper hash has become my signature dish, but actually I adapted it from one of the dishes my mother found when everyone was passing recipes on to me in El Paso. It was originally done with crab, but here the cost would be prohibitive for what was...
Basic Tamal Dough
There are dozens of dishes called tamales with nothing in common except that they are folded before cooking in a wrapping, usually corn husks or banana leaves. This particular formula, in which masa is beaten very light with lard, is probably the most versatile tamal...
Burnt Milk Ice Cream (Nieve de leche quemada)
This is one of the most famous and characteristic of the Oaxacan nieves. Actually it has two versions, one more distinctively Oaxacan than the other but also harder to approximate here. To add to the confusion, in other parts of Mexico the term leche quemada refers to...
Oaxaca “Burned” Mole Chichilo
This is one of the “seven moles” of Oaxaca — less rich and elaborate than a mole negro, but with a more complex intensity than some of the family. The thickening comes from masa, so it is less caloric than nut-thickened moles. It is also one of the few where...
The many lives of Zarela Martínez
Culinary legend Zarela Martínez introduced finely tuned, highly researched regional Mexican cuisine to a national stage, and has continued to blaze trails for more than three decades.