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.