Mexican Food Galore

When it comes to eating out, Mexican food is my choice if the real Chinese food is not available. Taco Bell, a fast food chain selling simple Mexican food like taco and burrito is one of my most visited places when I was too busy to cook. My list of ‘favorite restaurants’ also consists of several Mexican places – Qdoba, Pancheros and Los Tres Amigos. The style is very similar to Malaysian ‘chap fan’ – rice (or beans) with seasoned meat – but of course the taste is very different.

BUT, it wasn’t until the trip to Mexico that I realized how different real Mexican food tastes like. They are so fresh and full of spices. Now it is even more like Malaysian food. Four very important ingredients – cilantro (ketumbar/芫荽), lime (limau nipis), salsa (sauce) and tortilla. Onion is widely used too but I tend to ignore it since I am not a fan of onion. J Cilantro can be found in anything. Lime are cut in halves and served as a side dish. Some of us have had a halved lime served on our dishes, especially on seafood dishes. In Mexico, you get a whole bowl of it! It is served along with tortilla chips and of course, salsa! Lime is also used to make lime juice, which of course, is also a very popular drink in Malaysia (limau ais!). You can have it made with water (natural) or with soda (mineral). Hehe, yes, I learned the difference between natural and mineral pretty fast. Tortilla also comes in two choices – corn (maize) or flour (harina). The corn tortilla is really yummy when it is warm but becomes dry and hard easily. It is always served warm and wrapped in cloth. Salsa – this is the must try ingredient no matter where we go. Every place has its own style, from really spicy to mild and from watery to more chunky, almost like pico de gallo (raw, chopped up mix of vegetables).

Cuatro Cienegas is a desert. Sure, there are lots of desert springs with aquatic life but you would not expect the place to have any restaurants with good seafood. Wrong. The first week that I was there, we went to a little restaurant that served ceviche. Ceviche is a dish of raw fish seasoned with lime and peppers. However, I did not try it since it was also loaded with raw onions. Instead, I had a fish soup (caldo de pescado) that was very light and refreshing. It was not ‘chao cho’ at all. There were also a significant number of huge chunks of fish!

Calde de Pescado (Fish Soup)

 While it was fun to eat out and try all the different food at CC, it was also pretty costly to be eating out all the time. The house that the guys lived in has a small kitchen where we get to do some cooking.

Kitchen in the house

JC and JR were great cooks of Mexican food, giving me the opportunity to learn a recipe or two. We had lots of tacos and pasta (not so ulu until we can’t find pasta sauce lah). JC is a vegetarian so she made really good vegetarian tacos like the lentil taco.

JC's lentil taco

JR once made us vegetables enchilada. Enchilada is like a mini burrito but covered with some kind of chili sauce. Like in Malaysia, there are all kinds of chili sauce in Mexico. I can just snack on chips and chili sauce all day!

JR's vegetable enchilada

Another Mexican dish that looks like a mini burrito is the flautas (flute). The flautas is the crunchy version and the sauce is serve on the side. We had this at one of the local restaurant in town. Like every restaurant that I have been to in this little town, it is very casual and there are only about 4 or 5 tables. The owner of this little restaurant was the cook, the cashier and the server.

Flautas de Pollo (Chicken Flautas)

I also had the opportunity to try a very unique dish, crepas de huitlacoche, at a more upscale restaurant that we went to in town. Huitlacoche is a type of fungus that grows on corn. It is more like a paste and occasionally you bite into little black pieces with springy texture. It reminds me a lot of ‘bok nee’ but has a stronger flavor. This place also has the best salsa in town, in my opinion.

Crepas de Huitlacoche (Corn fungus crepes)

On my birthday, we went to the east side of town for dinner at a little hawker stall called Alheli. It was my favorite place of all the places we went to at Cuatro Cienegas. It reminded me so much of mamak stalls back in Malaysia. One of their specialties is a set of tacos with beef, pork and two other parts of cow (probably some kind of intestinal parts). It was lots of meat but delicious! The meat was very well marinated and cooked very ‘thiam’. They also had baked potato that was so good although you don’t want to know how much butter they put in it.

Alheli

Taco set

Butter loaded baked potato

As you can see, most of the dishes are meat dishes. It was a little ‘jelak’ after a while. The vegetables are mainly lettuce, avocado (neither of which are my favorite) and tomatoes. It is a desert with very harsh environment for growing vegetables. But, they do have very delicious mango. Since I didn’t get to go back home to dad’s garden for fresh mango this year, I got my share of it from Mexico. There is an ice-cream shop in town that also sells popsicles (paleta) and ice-cold drinks. They have a mango drink that is made out of fresh mango. It is basically mango juice with ice. No added sugar since their mango are so sweet and besides the ice, it doesn’t seem like the juice was diluted with any water because it is a thick drink. On a hot sunny day, which is everyday, the mango juice is definitely a blessing!

I also discovered a Mexican spice that tastes very much like ‘sui boi hun’ that we use for ‘jambu’ – tajin. It tastes great with mango and hijama (hong guak).

Tajin with mango

Lastly, I also got a nice surprise on my birthday. The team bought some cinnamon buns and topped it with Mexican chocolate chip cookies.

The birthday surprise

It was nice to try all the different food there but I sure miss vegetables and fruits. Unlike most Mexican food that I have had, the food in Cuatro Cienegas does not have lots of rice. I definitely missed having rice after being there for two weeks.

Most adventurous birthday

This year’s birthday was pretty special even though I didn’t get to spend it with any family members or close friends. We had an early breakfast and head out to Poza Azules, one of the ponds in the Cuatro Cienegas Valley. I get to go along this trip because two of the grad students in the team here, JR and JC, are monitoring the limnology and hydrology of the pond systems in the Cuatro Cienegas Valley. Poza Azules is named for its blue color. It is a decent sized pond but just one look at it will take your breath away. The blue color is due to carbonate precipitates of the high metal content in the area.

Poza Azules

It definitely made me wish we could swim in there. However, it is no longer open for swimming due to the negative human impact on the stromatolites (structural outcome of the interactions between microbes and chemicals in the water column). In the picture below, the stromatolites are the spherical looking sponges in the water. 

Stromatolites at Poza Azules

The plan for that morning was to sample only two sites but as we were driving towards the second pond, JR noticed that the GPS showed another site of interest, Poza Tio Candido, to be very close to us. As it was still pretty early, we decided to check it out. We parked by the path and walked according to the direction provided by the GPS. A first timer here, GPS coordinates are very important! A lot of the landscape looks very similar. If it weren’t for the mountains surrounding the valley, I would not have a good sense of where North is (the Sun is not always helpful because it stays right above us for a good part of the day).

As we walked to Tio Candido, I had an unfortunate encounter with a pile of old cactus. Throughout the entire trip, I wore my Teva flip-flops as we often had to get really close to the pond where the ground is muddy and we are likely to sink. It is easier to clean and wash off with flip-flops than when wearing sneakers. I was looking around the area as we were walking instead of looking down. All of a sudden I felt sharp pain on my foot and realized that I had stepped onto a pile of old cactus. JR had to remove my flip-flop and individually remove all the cactus torns that got stucked to my flip-flop while I balanced on JC as at that position, I was surrounded by cactus. Phew, lucky thing that it was old cactus and the torns were more brittle.  

Tio Candido

Unlike Poza Azules, Tio Candido has a completely different ecology. The vegetation around and in the pond is much denser. We also got to see some turtles and frogs on the lily pads. It is just amazing to see all these water bodies in the desert and each of them has their own unique ecology. 

The channel feeding into Tio Candido

After we sampled Tio Candido, we head towards the last sampling site for the day, Poza Escobedo. On the way there, we passed by a cattle ranch. The pond there looks completely different, like an oasis in the middle of the desert. The grass around the ranch definitely looks like it is well fertilized by the cattle. While the green grass looks really fresh in the desert, it just feels weird standing around it. It does not seem to fit in the desert. Furthermore, the pond is extremely green, which is worrisome because it can be polluting downstream water. 

The pond by the cattle ranch

The last pond for the day, Poza Escobedo, was named after a revolutionist, Escobedo. The fort that he had fought in still stands near the pond. 

Escobedo Fort

The fort is just a square building with an entrance and two windows. Poza Escobedo is formed from karstification, which is when the minerals dissolved and the ground is eroded, allowing the ground water to rise above the ground level. This pond also has high mineral content, causing the water to have a bluish color. However, unlike Poza Azules, Escobedo does not have all the stromatolites growing on the sediment. This makes the pond looks like a clear blue glass with the sediment so white and clean. 

Poza Escobedo

Clear water of Poza Escobedo

While these ponds are pretty far apart, some of the ponds in this valley are connected underground. Driving through the dessert, one often sees a water body that appears and then disappears underground. While the entire terrestrial ecosystem is pretty stable, the wetland ecosystem is not at all. Talking to the researchers in the group and also some of the conservationists in town, the water levels in the ponds and the structure of ponds can be highly variable. It is definitely a very fragile ecosystem. This is why it is had caught the interest of environmental organizations such as World Wildlife Fund and the Nature Conservancy.  

We travelled to all these ponds with the guide of a biologist from Pronatura, a local non-profit organization that is responsible for the conservations of various ecosystems in Mexico. His group had started a project to try to create a wetland to attract migratory birds to the valley. To do that, they created a dam at one of the river that runs in the valley. It was a great opportunity for us to look at some of the conservation projects that goes on in the valley. 

The river that was dammed.

The area in which the wetland will be created. 

It was an extremely hot and long day but definitely very educational and interesting.