La Comida

The food in Mexico, in general, is really good. The produce and the meat are much tastier than in the U.S., probably because it's not all bred to look good, be easy to process and be as cheap as possible. Of course, you can get an amazing variety of food in the U.S., but San Miguel de Allende, because it has so many foreigners, probably has a greater variety of stuff than anywhere else in Mexico except maybe Mexico City. There are lots of little gourmet and import grocery stores where you can get exotic foods like Thai rice noodles, brie, sesame oil, German ham, lox, etc.

This is one of the reasons we came to San Miguel de Allende -- here, you can be in a genuine Mexican city (as opposed to, say, Cancun, which might as well be in the U.S.) but not have to live without all the products that spoiled Americans like us hate to be without. Of course, there's no dim sum here, but there are compensations, like freshly squeezed orange juice on practically every corner. I am really getting spoiled by the OJ, which I buy for breakfast every morning. It's going to be hard to go back to Tropicana.

San Miguel also has stores all over town which make rotisserie chicken, and of course lots of tortillerias which churn out delicious fresh tortillas. So for lunch yesterday I had a piece of roast chicken with tortillas which were still hot and a perfect, sweet, yummy little avocado.

It's also going to be hard to go back to paying U.S. prices for food. The freshly squeezed OJ usually costs 10 pesos (80 cents) a cup, and there's even a little store near our house that gives you a whole liter for that price. A whole roasted chicken is $4, the avocados are about 15 cents each, and the tortillas are about a dollar a kilo. It's nice to be a "rich" American.

Today I found a place that sells pastes, which are descended from Cornish pasties. I bought two -- one was full of sweet, spicy, rich mole (the Mexican sauce that is made from chocolate, not the little weasely animal), and the other was full of melted cheese and sliced mushrooms. Pastes hail from the state of Hidalgo (which I visited once and remember as having absoutely nothing else to recommend to it except maybe a complete absence of gringos), so they are hard to find here.

Some Mexican foods are better to look at than to eat, though. I bought a box of these:



They are called obleas (wafers) and are pretty much tasteless except for the little bits of caramel and pumpkin seeds attached to them. I'm pretty sure that they're more or less the same as communion wafers. Brightly colored body of Christ, anyone?