Borscht

Borscht, originally uploaded by Kelly Sue.

Borscht is an ugly word. Yet the dish itself is one of the most gorgeous things. The beet base gives borscht a deep magenta color, shifted slightly red by the diced tomatoes. And a finishing touch of olive oil makes the surface shimmer with tiny orange beads. On the first day, the soup is thin and the broth is transparent, sour-salty-sweet. The flavors develop further over the next few days - the broth gets thicker - in Russian, we say it becomes 'navaristyi' which captures it perfectly and untranslatably - and the potatoes and the beans turn a beautiful, light pink. Be careful not to boil when reheating, as the borscht will lose its magenta color and start to turn a rusty, earthy orange.

It's my last week of work at Danzantes, and my turn to cook the staff meal. Tere usually cooks the staff meal. She's 33, and used to party hard, until she burnt out. Luckily she discovered cooking - learned it from a Spanish woman who used to own a restaurant in Oaxaca - and now works as an in-home chef for the owner of the restaurant. While the owner is off traveling in India, and because the restaurant is short staffed, she steps in a few days a week to help out and cook the staff meal. She has prepared amazing soups and stews. Her fragrant sopa vegetariana was one of the most satisfying meals I've had. The secret ingredient? Yep, bacon. She has deep-fried taquitos stuffed with tomatoey shredded chicken and taught me to make the tastiest runny guacamole (I could drink the stuff) while making it all look incredibly easy. During the Grito (the independence day holiday last week. No, not cinco de mayo, people...), Tere cooked the traditional pozole - a spicy soup made with shredder turkey, and bursting grains of corn (this isn't the hominy crap you can buy in a box at whole foods), served topped with radish, lettuce and white onion.

One can appropriately show appreciation for food by callin it 'rico' or 'tan rico' or 'muy rico' or 'que rico'. Rico translates as rich, but also good or great. Tere's staff meals are always rico.

So I was both excited and really intimidated by having to follow her act. I wrote a list for the runner, using Google Translator to figure out all the "como se dice"-s and tripling all of the amounts. The ingredients arrived throughout the morning. First showed up the beets - each the size of my head. Next, the head of cabbage the size of a beach ball. With 20 minutes left before the comida, I discovered that the canned white beans that I requested were actually 'refritos' - but the Olla Express (pressure cooker) came to the rescue!

Slinking around Carlos - a juggernaut of a man, who crowds kitchen with his massive frame - trying to dodge him while he spilled oil on the floor, overflowed the steam table, sliced open his hand all the while belting banda music, I bounced back and forth between the cold table where I was frantically trying to chop up jicama and oja santa for prep and the giant cauldron of borscht on the burner at the opposite side of the room. I've often wondered about my kitchen companions. Carlos has been in the kitchen now for 4 months; Octavio for only a month. Carlos used to make sushi rolls at the Mexican chain SushItto (which I haven't dared to try). Before Danzantes, Octavio fixed cars and had never stepped foot inside the kitchen. Now, they are both firing orders with preternatural ease. I, on the other hand, am all nerves - no quiero desmadrar nada. Thanks for Harold McGree and Herve Thies, I'm overthinking everything I do. Is the temperature on the deep-fryer too hot? Have I overbeaten the egg-whites past the stiff peaks stage, and therefore stressed the proteins too much? In addition to sight and taste, I cook by sound and by smell. At home, I listen to sizzling onions to see if the temperature of my pan is correct. I'm able to smell the progress of a piece of meat in the oven. In a professional kitchen, with the stereo blaring, Eloy making a racket at the sink, and five other things cooking on the burner next to me, I'm unable to discern the smell or the sound. So I'm left with sight, which is really disorienting.

As I raced to finish, I kept trying to convince myself that the soup had international appeal. After all, my friends from Sweden and Singapore and France, and my friends who are Korean-American and the whitest white from Idaho have all loved boscht.

I put 6 bowls for the staff on the pass but no one was coming to get them. Lots of Mexicans I met like their food tibio. Not hot. Not cold. Tepid. When my food is tepid, I send it back. Here, when ordering, you can respond by saying, "dos tres" when asked whether you want your champurrado or your atole de leche caliente o frio. Most of the time your soup comes served dos tres. Finally - when the soup was dos y media - Alina came to fetch the bowls. She wrinkled her nose inquisitively and told me that she's only ever had beets as dessert food - in a salad with pineapple and yogurt, or candied.

Eventually, I felt relieved when the bowls came back empty, and some even asked for seconds and thirds. Since no one could actually remember the word 'borscht', it quickly became knows as Russian energy soup, for its uplifting effect. The borscht became fully adopted and Mexicanized when someone finally busted out the tortillas.

Then the soup was deemed 'rico' and I could finally relax.

Making salsa all day, dancing salsa all night

P1020104, originally uploaded by kitty424.

It's my last month in Oaxaca and I'm living out my idiot dream. I didn't actually think it was going to happen. I kept telling people about my plans - but mostly as a way of practicing the simple future tense in Spanish (voy a tratar encontrar trabajo en un restaurante....blahblahblah) - but didn't think I'd actually do it. Then I got back to Oaxaca and realized that I had nothing to do. And I had told enough people, and that I should actually try to make it happen. Really, how many times during the last four years of doing CAD (still too pretty for it) did I dream about being someone's bitch in the kitchen? Bastante!

After a couple of non-starters (and one run-around that perhaps deserves its own entry), I got a call back from Los Danzantes - an upscale place in the historical center - that agreed to take free labor in exchange for the potential media coverage should this wanna-be writer actually get a story published about the experience.

So I find myself in a kitchen (dad: "I thought three degrees from MIT was a guarantee that you'd never have to wear a hairnet"), on my feet, for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. I'm chopping cebollin, slicing something called xoxo, stuffing flors de calabaza with goat cheese and blanched avocado leaf, rolling out dough for cream cheese and quince marmalade empanadas, boiling the filling for jamaica and quesillo tacos, liquefying pounds of chile peppers for salsa, battering shrimp in coconut, deep-frying strips of tortilla. And I'm loving it. There's something so liberating about turning off your brain and chiffonading cilantro. Of course, the brain is not completely off. It's composing a great coming-of-age novel about my self-actualization. Something along the lines of Eat, Pray, Love. One that doesn't start with a complete emotional breakdown and mostly involves Eating. It ends with business school rather than a a religious awakening. But aaaaaanyway.

I'm one of the oldest people in this kitchen. The head chef, a year out of a culinary institute in Puebla, is 24. The others are even younger. Ricardo is 21 and works weekends when he's not in culinary school. His spiky, gelled hair pokes through his hairnet. Carlos, who speaks the undecipherable, slurred Spanish of Veracruz, dropping most of his S's and R's constantly tells me about my beautiful eyes. All morning we belt along with a station that plays "Vete Ya" by Alacranes Musical about 10 times a day.

It's so completely different from home cooking, where I can dilly dally, drink a glass or three of wine, and my friends (excluding one Danny) will still be impressed if whatever I made does not come out exactly as I had planned it. My parents are worried that I'll "find myself" as a kitchen prep cook, rather than getting this out of my system. I'm loving it right now, but I'm also pretty sure that I'm too pretty for this as well. Taking the long view, an 8 hour day on my feet and without facebook is not for me either.

At night, I'm taking salsa lessons with Ney, the gayest straight guy ever ("It's okay. Tell your boyfriend I'm gay"). Ney teaches salsa full time, and enters (and wins) big time competitions in Mexico. He's an incredible lead. Two nights ago Ney and I went to a dance club after the lesson. The place was almost completely empty. I ordered a beer, and a little later asked the waiter to put on some salsa. He looked confused, but left, and later came back with a bottle of Valentina salsa and a spoon. Tomar, traer, tocar? I guess they sound close...

Other nights, my friend Jorge and I walk around the streets of rainy Oaxaca - sometimes for hours in search of the perfect molotes (little deep fried pockets of spicy potatoey goodness. not unlike Indian samosas). Jorge speaks a perfectly enunciated Spanish, telling stories about how he illegally snuck into the US and lived in Tennessee for a year in a barn with a bunch of other Mexicans, working in a car factory and missing salsa dancing, or about how as a police photographer he would go out to burn fields of marijuana outside of the city.

Jorge is a dance instructor too. He teaches on Thursdays and Fridays at Candela, a popular salsa club in town. Jorge dances a callejero Cubano style - his joyful, carefree, informal street style is contrary to Ney's formal academy line style.

Thursday night are gringa/zocalo boy nights at Candela. It's full of blonde tourists and zocalo boys - burros en primavera who know smooth phrases such as, 'you have beautiful eye' or 'you dance very nice.' On Thursday night, I feel like one of the better dancers at the club. On the weekends, it's a different scene. The dance floor is packed with amazing dancers, and a 6-piece salsa band plays popular dance tunes.

Meaningful conclusion goes here.

Random picture and what I did the last couple of days

México, originally uploaded by kitty424.

(1) Danced salsa daily. Tried to reconcile the formal, choreographed style I'm learning in class with the callejero Cubano style I'm learning from my friend Jorge at La Candela.

(2) Had nieves de Guayabana in front of the Nuestra Señora de la Soledad.

(3) Wrote a review of a shitty new martini bar in town. 300 words and not a single opinion! "Our decor is minimalist". Um, Really? I thought it was "outdated funky office furniture from the dot-com boom".

(4) Bought a SEXY hair net to report to work at Los Danzantes - an upscale Zapotec restaurant in the historical center.

(5) Paid 4 pesos in Mexican equivalent of a toll to the guys with accordions on my walk to town.

(6) Had several (more) amazing moles at La Cathedral. And the best G-ddamn horchata of my life.