Adventures

Dining with the Dead ~ A Feast for the Souls on Day of the Dead Cookbook

Hello friends!

It has been a long time since we last made a new post on our dear Yes, more please! blog, but finally we are back and with great news!

We want to present you our first cookbook: Dining with the Dead ~ A Feast for the Souls on Day of the Dead

As you know a few years back we announced that we were starting our mission on writing our first cookbook. It all went well, but it took us longer than we expected. And when I say longer I mean it. This cookbook has been cooking slowly and developing its flavors one recipe at the time. A labor of love, dedication, persistence, and it has absorbed almost all our time (and souls).

It was back in 2016 when we embarked on a singular idea: a cookbook that celebrates the food of Día de Muertos (The Day of the Dead) along with its history, traditional Mexican cuisine, and its relationship to the culture of Mexico.

We began with a trip to Pátzcuaro in Michoacán, México, where we photographed and documented the local traditions and cuisine before and during the Day of the Dead. We encountered events and people of unspeakable beauty and sincerity. Then we returned and gathered and recreated family recipes and created our own versions of over 120 recipes including tamales, moles, delicious beverages, and baked goods like Pan de Muerto (just to name a few). We researched and structured the book with a history of the tradition, its origins in Mexico, and instructions on how to participate in the celebration.

After four years of hard work, from traveling and driving to the State of Michoacán in a small flimsy white car, lots of mileage, short budget and travelling to towns and flower fields, cooking, designing the cover, creating the book layouts, editing photos, more cooking, research, writing, documenting, reading, more cooking, creating and fine tuning recipes from personal memories from travels, more cooking, Mercados, test proofing recipes over and over, dozens and dozens of tamales in our freezer, salsas, sweet pastries, breads, baking, more coooking and our dear old electric stove Mildred calling it quits on the middle of our cooking journey,more cooking, learning that our little casita could not have a gas line installed, asking help from our followers and friends to buy a new stove! (thank you so much! Friends), more cooking, rice, beans, drinks, stories, sources, heated arguments, more cooking, editor fights, reconciliations, smiley agreements, more cooking, great ideas, more cooking, fighting for a hard cover and good paper to print the book, more cooking, sending cookies to our editor, than you baby jesus for professional editing!(our editor is a Jedi when it comes to condense and trim a text), more cooking, lighting photos, Ian’s magical way to shoot and light photos!, more cooking, mole speckles on the walls, more cooking, glossary, professional indexer help, more cooking, plan recipes, drawing storyboards, gather ingredients, sourcing ingredients, cooking them carefully, because there is no more!, more cooking, photo shooting step-by-step, photo-shooting, beauty shots, more cooking, infinite memory cards, three bottles of lens cleaner, eat the left overs of recipes for the rest of the week… months!, and try, try again, and again, does it needs twice that amount of garlic? or Chile?, more cooking, batterie chargers, write recipe notes, cook-set up- photoshoot-write-eat-repeat, more cooking, back pains, learning that you could design a layout in Lightroom for a book of 384 pages, but that your computer video card will crash and heat up sooo bad that it will shut down every 35 minutes!, more cooking, placing a sticky note on the corner of your monitor so you can remember to save evry 15 minutes!, working with caution, working at night because room was cooler and computer won’t heat up so badly during the summers, more cooking, buying a 4 terabyte external drive to be able to save all the rest of the material we generated, more cooking, collaborating with a graphic designer that could translate and make our ideas work in the layouts, more cooking, fights in the kitchen about camera angles, food on the floor-Mariana messed up!, more cooking, finding plates and pots, and pans, to re-create the warmth of a dish, more cooking, finding a real volcanic stone metate in Austin!, more cooking, grinding masa, dramatization, looking for a seller of cacahuazintle corn, sourcing online!, more cooking, budget not even enough and long time gone, more cooking, fonts and design, more cooking, more editor support, tears and joy, and frustration and heat fumes from the chilies, more cooking, vacations? What is that? What-does-that-word-even-means? Can I look it up in the dictionary?, more cooking, …. out of breath now…uff!

After all this work it took a village of three, tres, trois, ëyi, 3, III, focused, passionate, and crazy stubborn people: Ian, Mariana and our editor Aaron… plus ofcourse all the help of our friends and family along the way! They all deserve their own post and I will create a proper letter post to all the gratefulness we have for your help and kindness.

After this odyssey and hard work we finally finished writing our cookbook! We are happy and proud to present you “Dining with the Dead: A Feast for the Souls on Day of the Dead” . We ended up with a big beautiful book of 384 pages with more than 500 photos and over 100 recipes with step-by-step instructions. We thought we had finally reached the peak of the iceberg when our editor sent us the e-mail we all had been dreaming of: “I just sent your book to the printer, congratulations”… music to our ears, it felt like when Moses standing on the ocean with its cane opening a wide road of possibilities!. By the beginning of March 2020, the book was finished and at the printer….And then, Covid-19 struck, shaking the whole world, the lockdown began, and the printing process was frozen.

Now, as the world slowly starts opening-up, we thought we were going to start at where we left by just re-sending the book to the printer and keeping on with the project, but the publisher of our book was greatly affected by the pandemic and is working at a 25% capacity. So, our new and final hurdle remains—to get “Dining with the Dead” printed!

Earlier this year, our editor encouraged us to try to find a way to rekindle our project.

So today, we have a new challenge. To make our book a REALITY, we are working with our editor on a KICKSTARTER crowdfunding campaign, more likely (Kickending, since our project is already done heheheh). When we reach our goal, we hope to soon have our book in the hands of readers who want to understand, love, appreciate, and celebrate this rich and beautiful Mexican holiday, and the traditional Mexican cooking that revolves around it. Hopefully, by reaching our goal in the middle of July, the book will be printed this Fall before the holiday.

Please help us by making a PLEDGE!, and by SHARING our Kickstarter campaign to as many people as possible. We are excited by the possibility that with your help, Dining with the Dead will be the first Día de Muertos themed COOKBOOK, one that we hope will reconect first, second, third, any past, present and future mexican generations with their roots, families and heritage and introduce Mexico’s wonderful food and traditions to people from all cultures.

Please check the following link to see the first released book content, recipes, photos, our campaign video, images and some mockups of the book and its content. There are also some great rewards from photo prints and some special items we design to complement the campaign, please click on the following link:

Its great to reconnect with all of you. Let’s cook!

Thank you for your time, consideration and all your support.

Here is the link for sharing:

DINING WITH THE DEAD KICKSTARTER CAMPAING

 

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Dia de Muertos-Day of the Dead-Family Altar and Offerings


The tradition of celebrating Day of the Dead dates from Pre-Columbian times, when the natives of Mexico focused a great deal on the manner in which someone died and rituals were created to commune with the dead and deities from those ancient times. As often happens when two cultures meet, the Spaniards combined the native rituals with their own beliefs which produced a festival that assimilated the ideology, religion, art, agriculture and all the ingredients of the existing culture and resulted in our modern “Dia de los Muertos”.
In 2003 The Day of the Dead, was named by UNESCO as a patrimony intangible of humanity. It is a symbol of Mexico’s cult to the dead and the fascination for the unknown. It is a remembrance of life and the necessity to keep our bounds that seem so impossible to achieve and maintain when our loved ones depart. It is of great importance to remember and maintain these traditions of a rich and colorful culture. Mexico has a lot of good traditions to share with the world…

In Mexico, Day of the Dead is celebrated over three days starting October 31st. November 1 day of all saints, and November 2nd day of all souls. We celebrate the people who departed in hope that they might come back and visit to celebrate with us. And if they are coming all the way from a different dimension we better have some feast worth the trip!

Family altars are decorated with the remembered ones’ favorite foods, photographs, possessions,sugar skulls, drinks and flowers. Candles are placed to illuminate the way for a safe journey back home. This phenomenon it is assimilated with respect and irony, defying the dead as they laugh about her. With a sarcastic bitter-sweet humor Mexicans celebrate the ones that are no longer with us but with the biggest respect they built altars to commemorate them singing, drinking and praying. Now a days people also makes altars for their Favourite historical characters, artist, singers, anybody who means or have influenced in some way your life, or that you just simple admire.

Our family altar

This year our altar is dedicated to our family. Starting at the top, my great grandma Elvira Soto Herrera, my mother’s grandma. A beautiful and strong lady she was born in Jalapa, Veracruz and became a widower at early aged. She was a strong, honest and intelligent woman who educated and supported her five children with an exemplary motherly courage. One of her looks with those incredible eyes and you knew what she meant. She always used to received me with a big smile and tell me “Como está Mi Reina?” showering me with hugs and kisses. Her flour tortillas were legendary, as well as her refried beans with her not so secret ingredient lard! and her unique sazón. She just needed to make one phone call: “Im making tortillas” and the whole family would be there in a flash. Her white stove was a beautiful workhorse in her kitchen.

She loved to spend time with her canary birds that will warmly sing back at her, it was a remarkable symbiosis I was fortunate enough to presence. She faithfully blamed Noxema for her flawless skin. Her lavender eyes where unique and they will turn periwinkle or aqua green upon the color the garment she was wearing. Im almost sure that Bisa Elvira’s –they way I used to call her a short for Bisabuela– happiness and good appetite was do to the little bottle of Tabasco sauce she always carried on her handbag, always prepared to eradicate blandness. She worked at a flower shop until her late eighties, by conviction. She had a beautiful laugh and had a great sense of humor. I miss her and remember her dearly.

The next photo frame, the gentleman in the fedora hat is my grandpa Alfredo Ruiz Sandoval my mom’s father aka Tito Alfredo. He was born in Yahualica, Jalisco. At a young age he defied his family prohibition of becoming a bullfighter and with all his courage, his first “corrida de toros” was a success until his father pulled him out of the ring plaza in the middle of a bullfight, he had to fight a bigger bull. After his bullfighting dreams crashed, he travel to the North of the country and studied and work in USA. A few years later he become a successful merchant and restauranteur. For me its clear that Tito Alfredo, was a bullfighter by heart and although he never became bullfighter in real life, he always showed all his courage in each life faena by always helping and supporting his family, Ole Matador! I know he must be “Toreando Estrellas”.

Beside Tito Alfredo is Margarita Sanchez Guzmán my Grandma Margarita, my dad’s mother from whom I learned my love for cooking. This tall, strong and beautiful Lady from Ciudad Guzmán, Jalisco also became a widower at a young age, she managed to support her seven children by herself through cooking for other families. Although I always remember being with her in the kitchen or going with her to el mercado, one of my favorite downtimes with her was listening to her old records of “Los Churumbeles de España” and Juan Lejido. We would seat at the sofa with a photo album and she would tell me stories about her dancing with my grandpa along her favorite song “El Beso”. Since I did not met my grandpa Guillermo, these stories were music to my ears. I will close my eyes and imagine them dancing.

With no doubt some of my happiest memories and moments with my Abuelita Mago were lived in her little kitchen. From my first given task in the kitchen: shelling peas to the magic moment when she taught me how to drive the “tejolote-pestle” in the molcajete and I made my first salsa martajada. Aromas, flavors, textures, craft, laughs, all the love she put in her cooking was nurturing me at a time when I needed the most. Her company and caring always will be with me. Thank you Abuelita Mago aka “bolita” how we the grandchildren used to call her for a short of Abuelita.

The first picture of the last portrait row, is Betsy Cleghorn-McEnroe, Ians’ mother. This beautiful Lady was born in a small town in Michigan. Betsy raised her four children out in the country. She had a gardener soul, learn how to grew corn, potatoes, zucchinis, green beans, strawberries, and all sort of vegetables to feed her kids. Quilter extraordinaire, loved to cook, craft, an insightful soul, funny and loving person. Every time we spoked with her on the phone we were left with a delightful peaceful feeling. She truly cared, she listen and gave you the most surprising advice, facts and interesting feedback. I have not ever met somebody that loved Christmas more than her. She would go crazy with the decor, dinner and presents.

Her Christmas trade mark:”the thrift shop present”. She will give the most funny-obsolete-thoughtful presents that made you believe you were born to own that funky object. Once you opened the present for some strange reason you were stroked by a feeling and inner voice that said: “you have been wanting this for so long, I just didn’t know it!”. Later in the year seeing that present hanging in the closet or on a shelf, will produce an spontaneous burst of laugh that will hug you. We miss Betsy dearly, and every year we remember her departure on her favorite day on Christmas Eve. We will always love you Betsy.

The following photo is my dear cousin Badir Saleme Ruiz aka “Dirba di-du” the nickname I used to call him by. This young gentleman was born in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Had the most beautiful green eyes I’ve ever seen!, along with a humble heart. Smart, intelligent and always willing to help. At a young age his ingenious nature led him to disassemble a whole radio and re-assemble it back again. Then he kind of did the same with every electro domestic object around his home. Later, intuitively he concocted a stereo-computer-monitor to function into a TV with a stereo sound. He also motorized his bike around, just genius! He would call me Mananiux, and fixed my hairdryer every time it burned out, until he figured out some sort of device added to the electrical components and fixed for good. That hair dryer last me about 12 more years!.

Dirba loved arroz con leche, enfrijoladas, quesadillas and carne asada with extra chard, grilled cebollitas and a good michelada. Dirba left us early, he was young, many more things to fix, circuits to create and left us all with his sincere smile. Thank you Dirba Didu for being so humble and generous. I miss you. Im preparing you arroz con leche, stop by!

Last frame in this altar is Manuel Nuño Sánchez, my father. He was born in Guadalajara Jalisco, a rebellious and curious soul. A loving person, that gave all his efforts always beyond his best. From him I learned to be extremely curious. To handle any homework or task I was given with extreme importance and abandon. From little school projects taking them to unimaginable heights to life attitude.

I particulary remember a time when I was in 3rd grade and we where asked to bring a model or a maquette representing the Discovery of America. Huge task for a 3rd grader. He took it to heart and made me read all about the history and asked me what impressed me the most? “I Said the Carabelas-Caravels” So he glanced at me and next day he brought home tree small scale assembling caravel model boats of Columbus caravans: La Niña, La Pinta y La Santa María. He taught me how to assemble them and we painted each piece and glued every single detail, we basted every cloth sail of each ship and assemble the maquette. It was a masterful class of dedication, patience and perseverance. Beyond belief. Almost no body believed I had made that. Teacher had to speak to him. So there is my first lesson of how to handle a task at every level. He had the best sense of humor, and made me laugh with his funny jokes. Sometimes we would laugh so much that our stomach hurt, just about simple little things.

My father was a free soul, he loved to read, eat and he loved fresh fruit. When mandarins were in season he would buy 5-8 kg and we used to seat down on the roof top or at a park and eat them all! We used to eat tomatoes sliced with a squeeze of lime juice, sea salt and Valentina and eat them with abandon. Freshly squeezed juices beets, carrots, apples, spinach you named it. Tacos, tortas de queso fresco, my grandmas pozole Blanco and Mole were some of his favorite meals. He liked to listen to Carmina Burana and Gregorian Chants. He made lamps out of old instruments like trumpets and horns. But most important of all, He wanted me to learn how to be daring, to be-my-free-self, he gave me wings. I remember him and miss him more often than I should.

Food Offerings

This year, we are treating our souls guest with this altar. We will receive them at the fist hour of November 2nd at midnight, I will set the food offerings November 1st around 10 pm and with for them to arrive. We will take a second photo and a video to incorporate in this post to include the food and how is placed in the altar.

The menu for the offerings will be: For my Bisa Elvira, her favorite food was mole poblano and “asado mazatleco”. This year Im making mole for her. For my Tito Alfredo his favorite food caldo de pollo or res (chicken or beef stock Mexican style, Birria or mole. This year Im making Mole Poblano for him as well.
My grandma Mago loved Frijolitos de la olla /Beans from the pot and a good molcajete salsa, so Im making a good bean pot for her to receive her. Betsy loved fish. so Im preparing cod with butter-lemon caper sauce and corn cob on the side. She also had a sweet tooth and Im sure she will love a piece of pan de Puerto with a cup of hot cocoa. For Dirba, Im making arroz con leche and some burritos of machaca-dried meat-and a cold beer. And for my father Im making tortilla soup, and planning on eating tons of mandarinas.

For all of them and for us I’m making Pan de Muerto, since its one of the most important elements that can not be missed on an altar. This bread resembles a skull with bones and represent each soul in transit.  Im sharing with you this link with my recipe for Pan de Muerto.

 

 On November second Day of the Dead we will celebrate with our departed we will have diner with them,

set up the food offerings and enjoy Pan de Muerto with a cup of hot cocoa.

As we warm and sweeten up the memories of the ones that are no longer with us.

It is a good excuse to make this delightful bread and maybe…

acquire a new family and tasty tradition…

Music is always a must when we are remembering, waiting and celebrating with our departed family.

Who better than Chavela Vargas to make the waiting more pleasant for our departed. I hope you enjoy it.

This song “Las simples cosas” The simple things,  talks about the important things in life, about love and time…

The next song “El último trago” The last drink, is about saying goodbye to a loved one…

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Slow Wine Austin 2017

Slow Wine Austin 2017

Wine is a food product that can be produced through many different means. Even with the modern demand for wine creating mega-growers with hectare vineyards and highly modified production methods there are many that maintain a different standard. Yesterday we attended an event hosted by Slow Wine ( part of the Slow Food organization). What’s Slow Wine? A quote from their website sums it up best:

“Slow Food believes that wine, just as with food, must be good, clean, and fair — not just good.

Wine is an agricultural product, just like any of the foods we eat, and has an impact on the lives of the people who produce it, as well as on the environment – through pesticides, herbicides and excessive water consumption which are all commonplace in conventional wine production”

The same group lists initiatives:

“Through our guide, online magazine and international tour, we support and promote small-scale Italian winemakers who are using traditional techniques, working with respect for the environment and terroir, and safeguarding the incredible biodiversity of grape varieties that are part of Italy’s heritage.”

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