I have set up a resource for tapas lovers at http://mytapas.atspace.com
and was wondering whether tapas are a part of Mexican food culture? If
so I'd love to have a couple of recipes to add to the site.
I've just come back from Granada, Spain where I noticed a Mexican tapas
bar close to the Plaza Nueva and wondered whether it was authentic!

fshep wrote:
I have set up a resource for tapas lovers at http://mytapas.atspace.com
and was wondering whether tapas are a part of Mexican food culture? If
so I'd love to have a couple of recipes to add to the site.
I've just come back from Granada, Spain where I noticed a Mexican tapas
bar close to the Plaza Nueva and wondered whether it was authentic!

You made a nice site. Congratulations.

Here's a link: http://www.lomexicano.com/mexicanfoodrecipeglossary.htm

Look at "antojitos".

"Tapas" means "lids" in Spanish, I suppose it refers to the fact that
those little snacks are kept warm in covered pots?

"Antojitos" are "little whims". They are trifles. They are little
nothings. They are snacks.

But Americans, unfamiliar as they are with Mexican criollo cooking,
tend to believe that the antojitos cooked by the mestizos and the
indigenous tribes are the very essence of Mexican cooking, and they
make the same mistake as the American would make at a buffet or a tapas
bar.

They fill up a whole damned plate with antojitos, eat all of that
grease and the refried beans and the rice with hot chile sauce and they
wonder why they have such abdominal discomfort.

And the sit down Mexican restaurants play along with this
misconception, selling the gringos so-called "combination plates" of
antojito crap that they could buy at a sidewalk taco stand and charging
them double or triple the price of street food!

I have been disappointed many times in Mexican restaurants by the lack
of anything on the menu more authentic and interesting than antojitos.

The Mexican version of tapas are antojitos, and, because of the fact
that antojitos are often made with yellow corn, and the fact that
Spaniards regard yellow corn as being only fit to feed to their pigs,
it's very unlikely you will see antojitos being offered in Spain as
"tapas".

A good friend of mine is a Mexican-American and he was talking about
visiting Spain, saying that he wanted to see what it was like in his
"home country", even though he's never been out of Arizona or
California.

I told him that he would be very surprised if he ordered a "corn
tortilla" in Spain. A Spanish tortilla is made with *eggs* not corn!

I doubt if you will ever find a taqueria in Spain that sells antojitos,
but if you went to Mexico City, you might find a taqueria that sells
tapas, along with the traditional antojitos.

Another guy I know travelled through Spain by train. Being unfamilar
with Spanish, he found "ensalada" on the menu, and thought it was the
Mexican antojito called "enchilada" which he was familar with. He was
very surprised to be served a salad!

Pale Fire wrote:
fshep wrote:

I have set up a resource for tapas lovers at http://mytapas.atspace.com
and was wondering whether tapas are a part of Mexican food culture? If
so I'd love to have a couple of recipes to add to the site.
I've just come back from Granada, Spain where I noticed a Mexican tapas
bar close to the Plaza Nueva and wondered whether it was authentic!


You made a nice site. Congratulations.

Here's a link: http://www.lomexicano.com/mexicanfoodrecipeglossary.htm

Look at "antojitos".

"Tapas" means "lids" in Spanish, I suppose it refers to the fact that
those little snacks are kept warm in covered pots?

"Antojitos" are "little whims". They are trifles. They are little
nothings. They are snacks.

But Americans, unfamiliar as they are with Mexican criollo cooking,
tend to believe that the antojitos cooked by the mestizos and the
indigenous tribes are the very essence of Mexican cooking, and they
make the same mistake as the American would make at a buffet or a tapas
bar.

They fill up a whole damned plate with antojitos, eat all of that
grease and the refried beans and the rice with hot chile sauce and they
wonder why they have such abdominal discomfort.

And the sit down Mexican restaurants play along with this
misconception, selling the gringos so-called "combination plates" of
antojito crap that they could buy at a sidewalk taco stand and charging
them double or triple the price of street food!

I have been disappointed many times in Mexican restaurants by the lack
of anything on the menu more authentic and interesting than antojitos.

The Mexican version of tapas are antojitos, and, because of the fact
that antojitos are often made with yellow corn, and the fact that
Spaniards regard yellow corn as being only fit to feed to their pigs,
it's very unlikely you will see antojitos being offered in Spain as
"tapas".

A good friend of mine is a Mexican-American and he was talking about
visiting Spain, saying that he wanted to see what it was like in his
"home country", even though he's never been out of Arizona or
California.

I told him that he would be very surprised if he ordered a "corn
tortilla" in Spain. A Spanish tortilla is made with *eggs* not corn!

I doubt if you will ever find a taqueria in Spain that sells antojitos,
but if you went to Mexico City, you might find a taqueria that sells
tapas, along with the traditional antojitos.

Another guy I know travelled through Spain by train. Being unfamilar
with Spanish, he found "ensalada" on the menu, and thought it was the
Mexican antojito called "enchilada" which he was familar with. He was
very surprised to be served a salad!

I shall go and check out your Antojitos - sounds terrific! The English
too have the same mentality with tapas-style meals - they treat it as a
buffet and pile the plate high. Communal eating is not really part of
the English way...
Interesting what you say about tortillas and ensalada: a similar example
I found recently was just over the water from Spain in Morocco, where a
"tagine" is a stew. In nearby Tunisia, a tagine is the same as a tortilla!
Thank you for your kind remarks about my site - I am putting a lot of
effort into it. Frazer

"Pale Fire" wrote in message
oups.com...


But Americans, unfamiliar as they are with Mexican criollo cooking,
tend to believe that the antojitos cooked by the mestizos and the
indigenous tribes are the very essence of Mexican cooking, and they
make the same mistake as the American would make at a buffet or a tapas
bar.

This are very sweeping statements as were some others in this same post.
Please do not put all Americans in the same pot. Actually, Americans have a
wide variety of knowledge about other cuisines.....from nothing to expert.

Charlie

Charles Gifford wrote:
"Pale Fire" wrote in message
oups.com...


But Americans, unfamiliar as they are with Mexican criollo cooking,
tend to believe that the antojitos cooked by the mestizos and the
indigenous tribes are the very essence of Mexican cooking, and they
make the same mistake as the American would make at a buffet or a tapas
bar.

This are very sweeping statements as were some others in this same post.
Please do not put all Americans in the same pot. Actually, Americans have a
wide variety of knowledge about other cuisines.....from nothing to expert.

Americans' typical lack of discrimination in Mexican cuisine is what
has condemned them to Antojito Hell, and they don't even know there's a
way out.

They think, "This is it. This is Mexican food," as they look around
Taco Bell or Del Taco.

At first, antojitos are a treat. But after one has eaten each of
perhaps eight different antojitos twice, one wants something different
and perhaps searches out something better.

That's why I read the menus very carefully in sit down restaurants for
non-antojito entrees and research the Spanish language newspapers and
surf the web for non-antojito recipes to translate from the Spanish.

Americans' typical lack of discrimination in Mexican cooking is what
allows even major
Mexican restaurant chains like El Torito and Acapulco to stay in
business by selling
"combination plates" of greasy antojitos at two or three times taqueria
prices.

And purveyors of such food have to learn to fight anti-antojito
discrimination. For instance, the other night I was watching a cooking
show where a columnist for the Los Angeles Times was showing Julia
Childs how to make tamales.

As she used an electric mixer to stir a cup of lard into her masa, she
was telling Julia that home rendered lard contained 2/3rds less
cholesterol than factory processed lard because it wasn't hydrogenated.

And my stomach was turning flip flops as I watched all that lard go
into the masa. And the columnist even claimed that it was better to
make tamales with butter than factory processed lard. The columnist
claimed that the excess lard would drip out in the steamer.

I've seen home made tamales that sweated grease for two days in the
refrigerator. Yechhh!

Ah, well, maybe the indigent Mexican tribes don't die of
arteriosclerosis. They just die of diabetes and a poor diet. The Indian
women are less than five feet tall and they are four feet around the
waist from eating all the carbs.

I was talking to my friend Luis at the biker hangout. He was in
excellent physical shape for most of his life. I asked him what his
favorite Mexican restaurant around Los Angeles was. He told me that he
didn't eat Mexican food anymore, that it was dripping with lard, that's
what made it taste so good.

We don't know what Luis died of. The autopsy couldn't find any anything
specific. He was only 53.

On 15 Nov 2005 06:48:15 -0800, "Pale Fire"
wrote:

Charles Gifford wrote:
"Pale Fire" wrote in message
oups.com...


But Americans, unfamiliar as they are with Mexican criollo cooking,
tend to believe that the antojitos cooked by the mestizos and the
indigenous tribes are the very essence of Mexican cooking, and they
make the same mistake as the American would make at a buffet or a tapas
bar.

This are very sweeping statements as were some others in this same post.
Please do not put all Americans in the same pot. Actually, Americans have a
wide variety of knowledge about other cuisines.....from nothing to expert.

Americans' typical lack of discrimination in Mexican cuisine is what
has condemned them to Antojito Hell, and they don't even know there's a
way out.


You repeat your error, pale fire. All your opening paragraph up above
needed was the simple addition like so:

But Americans, IN GENERAL, unfamiliar . . .

TThat was the gist of Charlie's comment.

There are a lot of us offended by the same mentality.

Further, your using "Americans" to descrbe the US (and perhaps
Canadian peoples) is an error in itself. Mexicans, Colombians and
Peruvians, after all, can be described as "Americans."

Rest of senseless non-sequitar rant deleted.

BTW, Julia Child died years ago. Further, restaurants in Mexico are
getting the message. Many places I have eaten no longer use lard for
cooking. The Mexican government is getting the word out to its people
about health.


jim

"Pale Fire" wrote in message

Americans' typical lack of discrimination in Mexican cuisine

I am sorry that you didn't understand my post. If I thought it would do any
good, I would have attempted to correct some of the other errors in your
newest posting. I doubt it would.

You have my sympathy over the death of your friend Luis at such a young age.
An autopsy with no conclusions is very rare and always disturbing.

Charlie

Are antojitos eaten as bar snacks like tapas, or like a mezze, or
antipasti?

Fraze wrote:
Are antojitos eaten as bar snacks like tapas, or like a mezze, or
antipasti?

They are snacks, to be eaten out of hand, except for some of the
messier ones that might be drizzled with a mole. Then maybe you'd eat
*one* on a plate, while waiting for the main course.

In America, the main course usually never comes, just the appetizers.

The Los Angeles Times columnist who was showing Julia Childs how to
make tamales told her that tamales could be eaten out of hand without
any sauce whatever, but that Americans(1) always seemed to expect
tamales to be messy.

I can't tell you how many *cold* sauceless tamales I've eaten while in
a hurry to do something else.

Most Americans probably think of an antojito as an entree, instead of
just a snack to be eaten out of hand. So the restaurants serve them
whole plates full of the gut busters
and the satisfied diners walk around farting, satisfied that they have
"experienced"
authentic Mexican "dining".

Just show me an American who knows what the name of the national dish
of Mexico is.
Just one. I looked for it for *years* and have only found it on Mexican
restaurant menus three times, once in Ensenada, twice in Los Angeles.

(1) Some people in here don't like the way Americans have
"expropriated" part of the name of the continent they live on and call
themselves "Americans", instead of United Statesians...

I suppose we could just call ourselves Californians and Floridians and
Texans and forget about the union that makes us a great nation and let
the Patagonians be the ones to call themselves "Americans".

Oh, well, I think I will stick to common *American* usage, and call
Americans "Americans", just like I've been doing for the last six
decades.

I am British and you hear very little of Mexican food here - except
chilli con carne which as I understand it is not Mexican at all

2 years ago my husband and I were visiting my husband's Grandmother and
cousins, who live in England. We thought it would be really special to make
a dinner that we really love here in California... tacos. It took us nearly
all day and many shops to find tortillas and salsa.

Lynne

"Fraze" wrote in message
ups.com...
I am British and you hear very little of Mexican food here - except
chilli con carne which as I understand it is not Mexican at all

Fraze wrote:
I am British and you hear very little of Mexican food here - except
chilli con carne which as I understand it is not Mexican at all

My English ancestors came from Upwey (the one near Dorchester), London,
and Tenterden in Kent. The cottage in Upwey is a bed and breakfast
nowadays. They left London in 1623, Upwey in 1628, and Tenterden in
1635 and colonized Massachusetts.
Some of them were Puritans, some were not.

There is as much discussion in this NG about what chile is as there is
about how to make antojitos, it's so hard to get deeper into Mexican
cooking when Americans have a "taco mentality*.

Chile is a *sauce* made from red and green hot peppers. You can put it
on anything you want or you can add it to various dishes.

"Enchilada" just means *something* is in a chile sauce. The something
is usually a tortilla.

"Enchilado" is cheese with hot chile bits inside it, it's shorter than
saying "queso enchilado".

"Chili con carne" is from Texas if it's made with pinto beans and
kidney beans and hamburger. It can taste cloyingly sweet, or it can
taste like somebody mixed cigarette butts into it. It's probably smoked
chiles that create that disgusting flavor.

But some wonderful *chile colorado* is made in New Mexico from chunks
of beef that are tenderized by boiling, then browned in a frying pan
and then the red chile sauce is added and the mixture is simmered for a
while to get the chile to penetrate the beef.

New Mexico chiles can be rather mild, compared to jalapeno, ancho,
poblano, arbol and serrano chiles.

"Chile verde" can be made in a similar fashion with chunks of pork and
green chile sauce.

But the national dish of Mexico is Mole Poblano. It can be made with
roasted turkey or chicken covered with a poblano chile sauce that
contains chocolate! Imagine hot spicy chocolate sauce. You'd think it
would be too sweet, but it isn't.

I posted a recipe for Mole Poblano here several months ago. It's not
necessary to go to all the trouble of making your own mole from
materials that might be difficult to acquire locally. You can mail
order various chile sauces like pipian, chipotle, mole, and guajillo
from places online like MexGrocer.

Pale Fire wrote:

"Chile verde" can be made in a similar fashion with chunks of pork and
green chile sauce.

But the national dish of Mexico is Mole Poblano.

I don't think it is quite national. The folks I was with in Chipas
had different ideas (though not all that different).


I posted a recipe for Mole Poblano here several months ago. It's not
necessary to go to all the trouble of making your own mole from
materials that might be difficult to acquire locally.

I live in a modest size town in Illinois. All the necessary
ingredients are readily available in a regular supermarket,
including all the different kinds of chiles. It's not necessary
to go to the actual Mexican gorcery store. There are two
brands of premade mole poblano sauce available in our town,
at several specialty stores (not just the Mexican one) and both
are pretty good, though homemade is better. Most Mexican
restaurants here serve chicken mole. All but one taste like they
use Dona Maria brand premade sauce. One uses a sauce that tastes
like neither prepackaged brand. I doubt, however, that it is homemade.
None of the restaurants actually cook in chicken in the sauce,
most unfortunately.

Doug McDonald

"Pale Fire" wrote in message
ups.com...

snip

But the national dish of Mexico is Mole Poblano. It can be made with
roasted turkey or chicken covered with a poblano chile sauce that
contains chocolate! Imagine hot spicy chocolate sauce. You'd think it
would be too sweet, but it isn't.

There is no one national dish in Mexico. Like many other large countries with
isolated indigenous populations regional cooking becomes predominant. Mole
Poblano is simply a regional dish invented by nuns and probably Spanish.


http://www.fiery-foods.com/dave/nancy1102.asp

Legend holds that mole poblano was invented in the 1680's by Sister Andreas, a
nun of the Convent of Santa Rosa in the city of Puebla. It was created in honor
of Don Manuel Fernandez de Santa Cruz and his guest, Don Antonio de la Cerda y
Aragon, Viceroy of New Spain. It seems that the archbishop was coming to visit,
and the nuns were worried because they had no food elegant enough to serve
someone of his eminence. So they prayed for guidance and Sister Andreas had a
vision. She directed that everyone in the convent begin chopping and grinding
everything edible they could find in the kitchen. Into a pot went chiles,
tomatoes, nuts, sugar, tortillas, bananas, raisins, garlic, and dozens of herbs
and spices such as cinnamon and cloves. The final ingredient was the magic one:
chocolate. Then the nuns slaughtered their only turkey and served it with the
mole sauce to the archbishop, who declared it the finest dish he had ever
tasted.

Dimitri

"Fraze" wrote in message
oups.com...
Are antojitos eaten as bar snacks like tapas, or like a mezze, or
antipasti?


I have limited experience, but they are very versatile. Bar snacks, sure!
Antipasto, yes-no. They often serve the same duty as the pasta course would
in Italian dinning. Mezze is closer I think. If you are familiar with
Lebanese food, Arabic "mezze" can be a meal in itself or a part of a meal.
Most often it serves as a meal. This is exactly like antojitos, but not
necessarily like tapas. Antojitos can be almost anything. The many
varieties of enchiladas are a case in point. Antojitos of course. But they
can be used in many ways. Consider antipasto; it is a fairly recent
development in Italian cuisine. Traditionally, pasta was the first dish on
the table. Plenty of it. It was to fill up on before more costly (meat)
dishes were served; kind of like serving bread at the start of a meal. Or,
perhaps, with a little more subtleness, rice in some cultures. I suspect
that antojitos, antipasti, and tapas were on a similar evolutionary trip.

Charlie, who is supposing