Don't Like 'Em? Egg 'Em

President Bush once got a shoe thrown at him. Mexico's President Felipe Calderón recently received a more culinary assault.

Armed with cartons and baskets of eggs, Mexico City legislators launched a breakfast-worthy offensive on Calderón for having raised the tax on food basics like bread, beans and... eggs. Congressmen—inspired by generations of ticked-off teenagers or low-grade vandals—actually egged the president of Mexico when he made a visit to a ritzy neighborhood, ironically, to promote the fact that he didn't raise the price of milk.

If you read Spanish, check out the story here.

The Trash

This is a story about what happens to the refuse and rotten leftovers.

The trash is not normal here in Mexico City. Or rather, the trash looks the same as it might anywhere, but its collection is a tale of mystery and intrigue.

Trash trucks roam the streets—painted green beneath the muck—and men right atop the pile and on the bumper, jumping down when the truck makes stops. But they don't pick trash up off the street. No, they have an emissary: a man who rings a skull-sized bell with all his might so that residents may run out—pajamas and house slippers be damned—to daintily turn in their garbage bags.

I did this running in my first home in Mexico City. I spent mornings on edge listening for that trash bell and, when I heard its call, went into Speedy Gonzalez overdrive to gather my bags and run them down the street, literally. The trash truck isn't patient.

But my apartment for the last year and a half is situated in the back of a building on a major thoroughfare where, go figure, the trash truck doesn't pass. By the time I hear the bell on the block behind me, I know I won't make it before the truck rumbles away. So I would put my trash out on the street, assuming—wrongly—that another, perhaps quieter, trash truck would pick it up. Hey, other people piled their trash on the curb as well, so I thought it was safe to assume...

But it wasn't. Some city worker might get around to picking up the trash—or then again he might not. At least not before the rats burrow in and make an art project of your banana peels, onion skins, paper towels, juice boxes and wine bottles all over the front walk.

Sick and tired of my trash and others' decorating the sidewalk outside my building, I asked around. Among the solutions proposed by neighbors: Put an altar to the Virgin Mary out front—then no one will throw their trash there. Huh. Also: Hire a trash man. Hmm. That sounded more reasonable.

I found a man on the street, a man who might euphemistically be called a freelance trash agent. He agreed to come by.

Scruffy and mustachioed, with bright eyes and a wide smile, my trash agent arrives with his oil-drum push cart promptly at 9 a.m. on Thursdays, accompanied by his lovely red-haired wife. They ring my bell and I grab the bags piled on my back porch and hand them over. While I wait, the woman sweeps the stoop with her birch-branch broom, and I tip them $2 for their effort.

They are industrious, my trash agents, and do more than pick up bags. Taking note of my dying Christmas tree—its needles already faded to a dull sage and drooping—my trash agent offered to take my tree immediately. "But I have to take down the ornaments," I protested and asked if he could come back tomorrow. He replied that no, not tomorrow: His cart was empty today.

Wasting no time, my trash agent and his wife bustled into my living room and helped take down every ornament and light strand in what must be a record 3 minutes then hauled off my Canadian pine to its final resting place.

Their world remains a mystery to me—I don't know where they bring the trash or for what mafia they work. But the trash, you see—and trash agents in particular—are not to be taken for granted.

The Raisin Ladies

Having grown up on shriveled, dried-out raisins—oh, and "California Raisins" commercials...y'all remember those?—I never thought of the raisin as a delicacy but rather as an afterthought: a sugary addition to oatmeal or cereal or bread pudding, something that at the very least needed 10 minutes in hot water to gain some plumpness and something resembling edibility.

Then on a trip to my local farmer's market (around the corner from my apartment in Mexico City), I stumbled upon a jar of the plumpest, juiciest, purple pitch-colored raisins I ever saw in my life. I tried a sample—the ladies with their little stores selling everything from canned beans to fresh cream always want to offer a little taste; like a dealer they know you'll pay for the second try—and bought 200 grams on the spot. I took my baggie home and promptly threw a handful of raisins into my yogurt. If it was possible to dry heaven in the sun, the makers of those raisins achieved it.

I thought my obsession was personal; surely no one else could be so enamored of a few dried-up grapes. But I gave my mother a sample when she visited, and the raisins—of all the amazing food we tried during her stay—were the biggest hit, the winner of the week. She visited the raisin ladies at their tiny store in the market and bought another few hundred grams, feeling guilty that she was eating through my stash.

And when she left, she made a special trip to buy two kilo-bags of raisins to traffic home to Florida. The raisin ladies were ecstatic—I doubt they'd ever sold so many raisins at once in their life. Now every time I swing by, it's "How's your mother? Tell her we say hello!"

Street Food by Night

Cheese-less Quesadillas

The quesadilla is eaten so often stateside that it's practically as American as pizza and hamburgers. Who hasn't eaten a quesadilla dripping with goopy cheese inside a flour tortilla? So it came as shock when I started to order quesadillas in Mexico City and they came with...no cheese.

The north and south of countries are often divided and marked by sharp cultural and culinary differences, and it's as true in Mexico as it is in the U.S. For example, it's a given that American southerners eat grits—mmm, cheese grits!—and northerners usually don't. In Mexico, northerners eat quesadillas the way we think of them: flour tortilla, melty white cheese. But in Mexico's southern region, a quesadilla is made with a hand-tossed corn tortilla and stuffed with all sorts of delicious fillings—but don't expect cheese unless you ask for it extra.

Mushrooms, zucchini flower, beef picadillo, mashed potatoes (yes, really), chicken in red sauce... The list goes on. Order a quesadilla, and the señora will ask, "With what?"

Grasshopper Dinner: Part I

Before the Spaniards arrived, indigenous Mexicans knew nothing of cows: neither beef, milk nor cheese belonged to the traditional diet. Bugs did. Creepy crawlers like worms, crickets and ants. Bug consumption in Mexico has all but disappeared, except for the worms drowned in bottles of tequila or mezcal and fried grasshoppers, which, as a snack to be eaten like peanuts, go great with beer.

The most interesting food experiences, like the most interesting relationships, often start with a remarkable first encounter. So it was with me and grasshoppers.

My ex-husband, Rubén; his climbing buddy, Omar, and I had driven out to nowhereland in the northern state of Chihuahua with camping and climbing on the brain. This was years ago... a stifling hot day in the desert; it was summer. The first thing we noticed upon arriving and scouting the rocks was that wasps had installed their nests in nearly every crevice near the top. Climbing would be impossible.

So I was content with just camping and all that entailed—relaxing, reading, eating and relaxing some more—but the boys wanted adventure. They found it in the grass, where thousands of grasshoppers scratched their violin thighs. Knowing that grasshoppers were considered a delicacy in some parts of Mexico (not these parts), the boys decided to catch crickets in the teeming fields, cook them and eat them for dinner.

I argued against it—just because one type of 'hopper is edible doesn't mean they all are, I said—but the boys would have none of my naysaying. So I agreed to be the control group, a designated driver of sorts. Should one or both end up poisoned or hallucinating, I'd get us out of there.

Armed with plastic baggies, they pounced catlike on the unsuspecting crickets until they had several dozen captured. They heated a pan on the camping stove and fried the critters, whose inch-long bodies began to turn lilac and purple and smell of seafood. When the grasshoppers appeared to be "done," they scooped them into warm tortillas and ate grasshopper tacos. The critique was largely positive. They tasted good; no one got sick or high, and the boys felt like hunters, or at least gatherers, of a different era.

Edible Flowers

How can you forget the first time you taste a flower? I remember when my childhood friend Cathy taught me to suck the nectar from a red honeysuckle flower (we seven years old and walking in the "woods," a sad lot of scrub forest where a house still hadn't been built). And I remember the first time I ate a flower, petals and all, in the zucchini-blossom pancakes that my grandmother made one sunny, summer morning in her sparkling kitchen on Long Island. Those delicate yellow-orange flowers are a staple of southern Italian cooking and it turns out they're a staple of southern Mexican cooking, as well.

Sold in handsome bouquets in traditional markets here, zucchini flowers—typically sauteed with onions and herbs—are a popular filling for Mexican street foods like gorditas, huaraches or quesadillas. A warm quesadilla de flor de calabaza is a typical breakfast food here and a personal favorite of mine: a corn or flour tortilla stuffed with melted strands of Oaxacan cheese and a sauté of zucchini flower, onion and the Mexican herb epazote. This one's for trying at home!

Ingredients
1 bunch fresh zucchini flowers
1/4 c. onion, diced
6-8 epazote leaves, minced
2 tblsp. olive oil (or other vegetable oil)
8 oz. Oaxaca-style cheese, pulled in thin strands
Corn or flour tortillas

Start by separating each zucchini flower from its stem and stamen (best accomplished by gently pulling the petal at its base; it should separate without breaking). Then rinse. In a pan, saute the onion in the oil until transluscent, then add the flowers and epazote. Cook over low heat for two minutes or until the flowers begin to wilt (but not fall apart).

Heat the tortillas on a griddle. When soft, add the cheese and a tablespoon of the flower filling. If the tortilla is large, fold in half; if it is a smaller corn tortilla, cover with a second tortilla. In both cases, cook until cheese is thoroughly melted and the faces are slightly toasted.

Final note: In theory, any kind of good melting cheese could make this recipe work, but the delicate flavor of Oaxacan cheese, also known as quesillo (in case you have a Mexican market nearby), is ideal with the zucchini flowers. And if you can't find epazote, although the flavor is really unique, you might experiment with basil.

Enjoy!