Villa Victoria Blog

My Three Week-Long Walkabout / Part 1

I once asked my mother what she thought of me.  She looked at me and said, "Creo que eres una aventurera", "I think you're an adventuress".  That was a pretty good distillation of my character and I took it as a compliment.  I love travel.  I just finished a 6,500-mile car tour and I'm still aglow from my experiences.  

On August 7 I rode a Greyhound bus to Medford, Oregon.  I will always remember the two middle-aged Mexican sisters who offered me some corn chips straight out of the big bag from which they were eating.  The man next to me had had a brain injury and wore a full helmet to protect his skull.  Every time I left my book, the biography of Edgar Cayce, in my seat when I got off at a rest stop, I could tell he had picked it up and looked at it.  I shared the beef jerky I taken as provisions with them.  There is something very intimate about riding in a bus.  

Selina, Utah

New York ****ing City From the George Washington Bridge (standing traffic)
 Clinton, Connecticut (Pequot Indian Casino)Housatonic, Massachusetts -- CSA BountySaratoga Springs, New York Continued above...

Reverse Oregon Trail

Saturday I am heading out from Oregon to the East in a car.  I am taking dried apricots, plums, walnuts, cashews and 3.5 pounds of beef jerky made from a beautiful 11.77 pound hunk of grass fed bottom round from Bill the Butcher in Madison Valley, Seattle.

      

Classic Cleveland Recital

Last week my husband, Ken, and I went to Cleveland to attend our daughter's Senior Harp Recital at the Cleveland Institute of Music.  She and her fellow musicians were great.After the performance I high-tailed it to my daughter's house to get the food going.  I had already prepped most of the food for 50:  Red Chilaquiles with eggs, cotija cheese and cream;Beet, Jicama and Orange Salad on Watercress with Oregano Vinaigrette; 8 pounds of Guacamole, pictured below in all its uncomplicated glory. Avocados, onion, tomatoes, chile serrano, cilantro, lime juice and salt -- that's all guacamole is!  The secret to good guacamole is a SHARP knife.  In this case, I used a razor-sharp 5.5 inch Kyocera Santoku knife.  We drank Spanish Cava bubbly and finished the late dinner, merienda,  with Orange Wedding Cookiesand Chocolate Truffle Cookiesand hot Mexican Chocolate.
 

Susanna Palazuelos

Susanna Palazuelos gets things done.  She wrote the recipes for the Mexico the Beautiful cookbook.  Here is my well-worn and dog-eared copy.She owns and operates Banquetes Susanna Palazuelos, a luxury wedding and catering service in Acapulco which serves 90,000 guests a year.  She is Mexico's culinary ambassador, travelling all over the world giving culinary demonstrations.  She has been president of the Mexican Red Cross in the state of Guerrero.  

I met Ms. Palazuelos yesterday at a cooking class sponsored by the Mexican Consulate in Vancouver, British Columbia.   I heard about the class on Friday, called Edible British Columbia  on Saturday, signed up for the class, booked my hotel room at the Marriott Pinnacle, and by Monday at 1 p.m. I was on the road headed north.

Tuesday morning at 10 a.m. Susanna started her presentation with Crema de Aguacate (cream of avocado soup); she seamlessly moved on to Ensalada de Nopalitos Y Jícama (cactus and jicama salad); and then she gradually built an incredibly complex Ceviche (marinated fish), all the while peppering her talk with facts and history about Acapulco and Mexico.Born in Acapulco to a food-minded family, Ms. Palazuelos' great great grandfather penned one of Mexico's early cookbooks in 1895.  Her father was an exacting self-styled gourmand and everyone in her family cooked.  When she was eleven years old she went to boarding school in San Antonio, Texas to Our Lady of the Lake School.  In her twenties she went to hotel school in Switzerland and from there she got a job with the Hilton Hotels in Public Relations.  She met her husband and they settled in Puebla for a few years, but she yearned for the open-air freedom of Acapulco where, "A bird can fly in one end of your house and out the other".  Back in Acapulco, she started catering and doing weddings and one day a prospective bride told her that she wanted something spectacular.  Susana had them get married on the beach with flowers, dramatic lighting, and beautiful displays.One thing led to another; people wanted more and more elaborate events.  She catered for Henry Kissinger and Queen Elizabeth.  She counts among her clients corporations as, Sony, American Express, Aero Mexico, Ford, to name a few.  Back in the 80s, when the airlines started to pay more attention to Cancun, her  beautifully crafted caterings revived destination travel in Acapulco.

Her earliest culinary memories are of mangos, jicama and chiles; ceviche with clams and oysters; and a complex tomatillo soup called clemole which her mother made with poblanos, radishes and lemon.  Wow! 

Ms. Palazuelos taught us how to make Huachinango a la Talla (grilled red snapper) which was painted with a beautiful sauce made of guajillo and ancho chiles and perfumed with cloves.  Capirotada, the traditional Lenten bread pudding dessert, was served with ice cream made with vanilla beans from Papantla, the birthplace of vanilla.