My Mexican Kitchen

A celebration of Mexican ingredients and traditions--plus 100 favorite recipes--from Eva Longoria While hosting Chiles en Nogada draped in a creamy walnut sauce and the Yucatán classic Pollo Asado, made with an aromatic garlic-citrus-achiote paste. In Chicken Enchiladas with Salsa Verde to her Tia Elsa’s Pork and Red Chile Tamales and Conchas that remind her of Mexico City, each recipe offers a delicious tribute to Mexican food and flavors. In addition to recipes for Enfrijoladas, White Pozole, Shrimp Aguachile, Cheesy Tacos de Fideo with Chorizo, and Butternut Squash with Coconut Oil and Cayenne, Eva dives into the backstory of many key Mexican ingredients from vanilla to agave. Alongside recipes that are masa-based like gorditas and sopes, she writes about the history of maiz and masa, nixtamalization, and the commercialization of corn, and she speaks to tequila production and traditions prior to showcasing not one but three recipes for margaritas. Eva’s genuine love for cooking and culinary-related history along with her pride for her heritage shine on every page of this beautiful, meaningful, and delectable cookbook.

Autorentext

Eva Longoria is an award-winning actor, director, producer, and cookbook author. Her first cookbook was called Eva’s Kitchen; she also has a culinary podcast called Hungry for History and the tequila brand Casa del Sol. She hosts the CNN show Searching for Mexico and splits her time between Los Angeles and Mexico City with her husband and their son.

Klappentext

"A celebration of Mexican ingredients and traditions. While hosting Searching for Mexico on CNN, Eva Longoria reconnected with her Mexican roots and tasted iconic Mexican dishes like meat-stuffed Chiles en Nogada draped in a creamy walnut sauce and the Yucatán classic Pollo Asado, made with an aromatic garlic-citrus-achiote paste. In My Mexican Kitchen, she embraces the techniques and flavors she discovered and brings them home to her Southern California kitchen. From dishes based on long-heeded Aztec traditions like Chicken Enchiladas with Salsa Verde to her Tia Elsa's Pork and Red Chile Tamales and Conchas that remind her of Mexico City, each recipe offers a delicious tribute to Mexican food and flavors."--]cProvided by publisher.

Zusammenfassung
A celebration of Mexican ingredients and traditions—plus 100 favorite recipes—from Eva Longoria

While hosting Searching for Mexico on CNN, Eva Longoria reconnected with her Mexican roots and tasted iconic Mexican dishes like meat-stuffed Chiles en Nogada draped in a creamy walnut sauce and the Yucatán classic Pollo Asado, made with an aromatic garlic-citrus-achiote paste. In My Mexican Kitchen, she embraces the techniques and flavors she discovered and brings them home to her Southern California kitchen. From dishes based on long-heeded Aztec traditions like Chicken Enchiladas with Salsa Verde to her Tia Elsa’s Pork and Red Chile Tamales and Conchas that remind her of Mexico City, each recipe offers a delicious tribute to Mexican food and flavors. 
 
In addition to recipes for Enfrijoladas, White Pozole, Shrimp Aguachile, Cheesy Tacos de Fideo with Chorizo, and Butternut Squash with Coconut Oil and Cayenne, Eva dives into the backstory of many key Mexican ingredients from vanilla to agave. Alongside recipes that are masa-based like gorditas and sopes, she writes about the history of maiz and masa, nixtamalization, and the commercialization of corn, and she speaks to tequila production and traditions prior to showcasing not one but three recipes for margaritas. 
 
Eva’s genuine love for cooking and culinary-related history along with her pride for her heritage shine on every page of this beautiful, meaningful, and delectable cookbook.

Leseprobe
Introduction

I wrote my first cookbook thirteen years ago, and although I’ve cooked every day since it was published, I haven’t felt like I had anything worthy of writing down again until now. My last book was a memoir of my life told through food. I was married to a Frenchman at the time and the recipes were a beautiful mix of new favorites influenced by my frequent stays in France, family recipes I learned from my aunt Elsa, friends’ recipes, and more, all woven together with personal stories.

I so clearly remember telling my editor that, while I planned to include some Mexican dishes, I didn’t want the book to be all Mexican food. I saw my cooking as a reflection of me and, although my Mexican heritage is an essential part of my identity, I didn’t want to be defined solely by it.

Here we are, a decade later, and I split my time between Mexico City and Los Angeles, have a Mexican husband and son, and, after a life-changing trip through Mexico for my show on CNN, Searching for Mexico, I can’t imagine writing a book about anything but Mexican food and how it relates to culture, traditions, and history—both of Mexico and my own.

I’m a thirteenth-generation American. My ancestors came into the port of Veracruz from Spain and settled on a ranch just north of the Rio Grande, in what was then Mexico but, after the Treaty of Hidalgo in the mid-nineteenth century, became Texas. 

I grew up in Corpus Christi, Texas, on breakfast tacos, Aunt Elsa’s tamales, and my dad’s famous menudo—Mexican food and Tex-Mex food are definitely in my DNA. But, as I learned when I left south Texas, the version of Mexican cuisine I grew up with—flour tortillas, Frito pie, and smoky esquites from just across the border in Nuevo León—is not everyone’s. I’ve always told people that Mexican food is so much more than tacos and tequila, but until I started traveling throughout the country, and especially after I married my husband, Pepe, and moved to Mexico City, I had no idea how multifaceted and diverse it really was.

When CNN approached me about Searching for Mexico, I couldn’t say no. Four months traveling around this food mecca and eating all day? Don’t threaten me with a good time! I expected to taste some great dishes and meet some wonderful people, but I never could have imagined just how impactful the experience would be. In those four months, we traveled coast to coast, north to south, eating some of the best food in the world and hearing the stories behind it. I’d been to several of Mexico’s thirty-two states before, but for the show, we went to so many places I never would have found on my own. Like the home kitchen of three wonderfully sassy Muxes (the nonbinary Zapotec community in Oaxaca who identify as a third gender), chef Alberto Kuku’s backyard píib (a traditional underground oven used throughout the Yucatán Peninsula) at his home in Xocén, and Lake Chapala in Jalisco, where I fished and cooked with the Coca people, one of the oldest indigenous groups in all of Mexico. I visited farmers, archaeologists, cowboys, chefs, and home cooks. I saw firsthand just how regional the food in this country is—cooking styles and recipes varied from state to state, town to town, and even household to household—and I was continually struck by the importance placed on ingredients.

If French food is rooted in technique, Mexican food is rooted in ingredients and history. It’s a fascinating combination of ancient culinary traditions centered around plants endemic to Mesoamerica—like chocolate, vanilla, tomatoes, and beans—mixed with new ingredients and techniques introduced over centuries of colonization and immigration. I learned that Jewish immigrants escaping the Spanish Inquisition likely invented the flour tortilla, using flour brought from Spain to make an unleavened bread, and that tacos al pas…