Avocado paletas

I adore Mexican paletas. They are so simple and make use of just a few simple ingredients to create lovely and light desserts. Mostly I go for the pure fruity ones but using the blessed, beautiful avocado makes for an incredibly rich and creamy taste treat without any added fat or dairy. Here's the super simple recipe.  You'll need some popsicle molds.

Yield: 6-10 popsicles

Ingredients:

1 cup water
1/2 cup sugar
2 ripe avocados
2 tbsp freshly squeezed lime juice

Put the water and sugar in a small point and gently heat until all the sugar is dissolved. You're basically making a simple sugar solution. Let it cool.

Cut and pit the avocados and put them into a blender along with the lime juice and cooled sugar water.

Waz it up until it's smooth. Then pour the bright green mixture into the popsicle molds and freeze for at least two hours.

To serve, run a bit of hot water on the outside of the mold and gently remove the popsicle. Let the oohing and aahing begin.

Blueberry paletas

On an incredibly hot day when you have a gang over for a bbq, you don’t necessarily want a heavy dessert but a hit of cool sweetness is always welcome. Mexican paletas, or popsicles, are the perfect solution. I prefer making my paletas without cream or yogurt but there are lots of people out there how will make blueberry or strawberry ones with dairy. Also, not having dairy means you can have them with a meat dinner if you’re kosher and swing that way and they are vegan.

You will need a popsicle mold for these.

Yield: 8-10 depending on the size of your molds.

Ingredients

500 g blueberries (frozen works fine)

2/3 cup water

2/3 cup of sugar

juice of half a lime

a few fresh mint leaves

First make a simple syrup. Mix the water, sugar, and mint leaves in a small pot and heat until the sugar has completely dissolved. Let it sit to cool for a bit. Once it’s cooled down, remove the mint leaves.

Put the syrup, lime juice, and blueberries into a blender and liquify it all. If you are using the fresh, larger blueberries, you might want to strain the liquid in a fine sieve to get rid of all the little seeds.

Pour the blueberry mixture into the popsicle molds and freeze. You need at least three hours, if not more, for them to freeze nicely.

To serve, loosen them from the molds by running a bit of hot tap water on the outside. They should slip out pretty easily.

© 2016 Gail J. Cohen

The cooking show

First cooking class was today and I ended up being the only one in the class so it was essentially a private course and got to pick exactly what I wanted. Things started off brilliantly when I arrived and was offered coffee or chocolate. I had chocolate and it was brought to me steaming in a huge bowl with a side of sweet bread and hibuscus preserve. Dip that baby into the chocolate and you've arrived in heaven.

The class began with cleaning and preparing corn to make tortillas. We then stuck it in a bucket and headed out to a local "molino" — essentially a place where you bring stuff (corn, mole ingredients, chiles, chocolate, beans) and they grind it for you. In our case from the corn came masa, ground superfinely.

We continued with a trip to the neighbourhood market, Sanchez Pasquas, where I learned much about local herbs, fruits, and more. Most of that info has promptly been forgotton because I wasn't taking notes. I will say that there is lots of green stuff I can't buy at home. I am most sad about avocado leaves. This little market was pretty much only food and was a lot less busy, shall we say, than the big markets near the centre of town. We bought a bunch of ingredients for our class like cheese and squash blossoms, as well as these local plums that I had never seen and we used to make aqua fresca (basically sweet fruit water). Also discovered a new kind of basil here, that has a really sweet, lovely scent to it and which is not used at all for cooking but for "guarding" your business and also as a body cleanser.

Grinding the corn and making the tortillas. The ones on the bottom are the flavoured ones.

Back at Casa Crespo, we made three kinds of tortillas with our masa: plain, with plantain, and squash blossom and epazote (a widely used herb in Mexican cooking that is delicious cooked but smells like diesel fuel when raw).

Also three kinds of basic tomato salsa, well one salsa with two additions to make different flavours: cumin and avocado leaves. The latter was my favourite and I'm going to have to try to bring some dried ones home.

The first course was the plain tortillas with quesillo, the Oaxacan string cheese, and my salsas.

Tortillas con quesilla y salsa, ceviche, the local plums, and making rose petal ice cream. 

I had also opted to make ceviche, since I never have, so we made a version that was simply white fish (I didn't ask what kind) along with pickled chiles, olives, capers, onions, and tomatoes. Topped with a few slices of avocado it was totally spectacular.

Luckily that course was quite light because the squash blossom soup was rich, rich, rich.  We used an ear of corn, tons of squash blossoms, mushrooms, and a little squash with some onion, a fair amount of milk and a bit of cream but the thick double-cream type cream.  What I really noticed was when sauteeing everything in butter that it smelled very sweet. I took a small taste of the fresh butter and it was like nothing I've ever tasted before. Fresh, sweet, creamy but with a particular flavour that I suppose is due entirely to the cows and the terrain from which it comes. 

Squash blossoms (flores de calabaza) that became a rich soup.

The main course I chose was not one of the seven "official moles" of Oaxaca but one the chef called mole de fiesta, obviously served for holidays and festivals and the one he said he would be making in the restaurant next week for Day of the Dead. It had many ingredients: onions, tomatoes, pecans, almonds, raisins, guajillo and ancho chiles, plantain, oregano, chocolate, allspice, garlic, and cloves. Unlike many that I've made, this mole starts with frying most of the ingredients in oil (rather than dry roasting). It makes it very rich. I'm sure given more time to sit around the flavours would deepen dramatically but even after the short hour of cooking it had, it was really quite amazing. I had it served with poached chicken.

The ingreadients for mole de fiesta and the final product. 

Then last but not least on this eating fest, we made ice cream and since I'd never had it decided to go with rose petal ice cream rather than Oaxacan chocolate. It was also a taste sensation but probably one of those things that you'll either really like or dislike. Again, the bonus of being the only one in the class was I didn't have to worry about whether anyone else wanted to do it.

I, of course, got to eat this giant feast after I made it, sitting solo in the chocolate room in the restaurant. We didn't make anything too crazy: ant mole or worm tacos (they are on the menu there) but it was totally worth it and really pleased to have done it.

Everyone needs a certificate of conpletion.