Mexico – Experiments in my New World Kitchen and Garden

Happy Harvest: Frijolon Gris

It has been a long time since I played in the garden. I have not been a good steward of my land and as we got busier and busier over the holiday season, I left my precious Oaxacan runner beans to fend for themselves. We experienced a very wet season, followed by several nights with freezing temperatures and the mornings have been foggy. You would have thought my forgotten bean crop would be a goner, but you’d be wrong.

Mid-February and this is my harvest.

I looked and I saw a few funky pods. When I opened them, the beans were fine. I ran into the house to get my incredibly wonderful ayate de ixtle, which is a large harvesting sheet, perfect for beans, made from the fiber of the maguey plant. This prized piece is from Hidalgo and takes hours to make. It’s especially clever because you can fold up the four corners and wear it like a backpack and not lose a single bean.

Dirt and dust can slip through but the harvest remains intact.

I picked the obvious pods but the more I picked, the more I found. They are good at hiding and once you get the rhythm of their growth patterns, you find a lot of them.

The pods looked very funky and many of them split open as I threw them unto the ayate. You can see that I was also harvesting a little borage with its pretty flowers.

You can pick up the ayate from the four sides and make a sack. I hung this and hit it with a stick and the rest of the beans came popping out of their pods. When you open the ayate de ixtle back up, you can easily pick up the spent pods and these will obviously go into the compost bin. The beans remaining are amazingly clean.

This is a shot of the plant last October. You can eat the flowers raw or cooked.

The bean is Frijolon Gris, a grey runner bean (Phaseolus coccineus) from Oaxaca that clearly has acclimated to Northern California. The hummingbirds love it and they were nice enough to leave me a lot of beans. I also suspect that many of the early beans fell into the soil and they’ll be naturalized but I’ll keep some of these for planting in the spring, just in case. I would guess you would have similar results with any of the runner beans, like Scarlet Runners, Ayocote Negro, etc. but these are particularly pretty. Lacking an authentic ayate de ixtle, I bet you would have great results with an old sheet.

The inevitable question is probably how to get the beans or the ayate de ixtle and for now, sadly, the answer has to be whipping out your passport and going on a Mexican adventure. Now that the COVID crisis is easing, I can’t think of a better way to celebrate.

Jesús Helguera, Our Calendar Artist

One of the first things I did when I started Rancho Gordo was to offer free calendars every year featuring almost exclusively the art of Jesús Helguera. I love the idealized, often policially incorrect, images of post-revolutionary Mexico. There are some real problems but there’s a clear sense of Helguera’s patriotism, and loads of campy good fun.

I asked Karla from our customer service department to do some research on Helguera so we all could know a little more about him. She used an uncredited book I have, Jesus Helguera (1989, Galas de Mexico) for much of the information. – Steve Sando

The Jesús Helguera Story
by Karla A. Moreno

Renowned Mexican painter Jesús Enrique Emilio de la Helguera Espinoza was born on May 28, 1910 in Chihuahua, and spent his early childhood in Mexico City and Cordoba, Veracruz. When Jesús was 7, his Spanish-born economist father moved the family to Ciudad Real, Spain, to escape the effects of the Mexican Revolution.

*Rancho Gordo owner, Steve Sando, loves this image so much, he brings it back every few years on our calendars. It’s the only repeated image we’ve used so far.*

During his elementary school years, Jesús began to develop his lifelong interest in art. He created murals with scenes from literature, illustrated his history lessons, and painted large-scale rural maps. Even at a young age, his teachers recognized his devotion to painting; one instructor made him responsible for his school’s art class at the age of 9. He completed his high school studies at the Escuela de Artes y Oficios in Madrid. At the age of 14, he was admitted to the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes, and later studied at the famous Academia de San Fernando.Helguera met Julia Gonzales Llanos in an art class; she served as a model and inspiration for many of his paintings. The couple married and had two children, Fernando and Maria Luisa. Contemporaries described Helguera as outgoing, sincere, and affable — a loving husband and protective father.

Helguera worked in Madrid and Barcelona as an illustrator for books, magazines, and comics for many years. In 1938, due to the Spanish Civil War and its resulting economic issues, Helguera returned to Veracruz. Capitalizing on the current vogue for mural-style work, the tobacco company Cigarrera La Moderna hired Helguera to produce artwork for its cigar boxes and calendars. His works during this era display his fascination with both indigenous mysticism and Catholic religion, and feature an idealized, romantic aesthetic. His heroic images of Aztec royalty, smoldering volcanoes, and smoky-eyed women inspired generations of imitators.

In 1940, Helguera painted his most famous work, La Leyenda de los Volcanes (The Legend of the Volcanoes), inspired by Aztec stories of Popocatépetl and Iztaccíhuatl. In 1954, he joined Imprenta Galas de Mexico, a large printer of calendar artwork. At Galas, he was known for spending long stretches in his studio, painting whenever inspiration found him, regardless of the hour.

Helguera worked until his death in December 1971. His last painting, Las Manañitas — showing a gallant caballero serenading a radiant maiden perched on the sill of a bougainvillea-covered window — now hangs in one of Mexico City’s leading cultural sites, the Museo Soumaya of Fundación Carlos Slim.

*If you ever needed any help in deciding how hip and great Linda Ronstadt is, here’s proof.*

Helguera was largely unrecognized by fine-arts culture in his lifetime; not until 1985 did he finally received formal recognition from Mexico’s Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes. Throughout the years, Helguera’s works have been broadly pirated, reproduced (not always faithfully) on ceramics, stone, metal, and wood. Millions of copies of Helguera’s works have hung proudly in countless Mexican homes, both in Mexico and in the United States, and for thousands, through the annual Rancho Gordo calendar.

One of our most frequently asked questions is, “When do you release the calendars?”
Unless there’s some weird problem, we start shipping calendars with all of our holiday orders starting the Friday after Thanksgiving. This year (2021), we may start earlier because if anticipated crazy shipping times. We keep including them in all of our packages until they run out, generally in February but some years it can be as early as December. First come, first served! – Steve

Guisado de Lupe: A Delicious Tomato Surprise That Will Make You Flip

In Hidalgo, a meal with my pal Lupe is essential. She is a great cook. I would almost describe her cooking as colonial. She prefers good olive oil to manteca (lard) and while she’s fiercely patriotic and loves all aspects of her Mexican culture, there’s a European sensibility to a lot of her dishes.

When we were filming the article that featured the Rancho Gordo-Xoxoc Project for Sunset Magazine last year, Lupe made this dish and it’s forever haunted me. She told me it was from Michoacan and called Minquiche. I’ve done some research and there are similar elements but I think Lupe’s dish has morphed into something even more delicious than the original. If you are an expert on the cuisine of Michoacan and want to set me straight, it would be my pleasure.

Lupe in the kitchen

My notes are rough.

Roasted tomatoes. Cazuela. Canela. Harina. Rajas. 15 minutes. Crema. Queso.

Coming home, I was just as confused as you might be.

So, I sauteed onions and garlic in olive oil. When soft, I added some canned roma tomatoes and their sauce and a stick of our canela. You should only use canela, not commodity cinnamon. It’s a different bark and the canela has a warm, woodsy flavor while the cinnamon is harsh and astringent. I let this cook and reduce a bit. Then I added some previously roasted, peeled and chopped Poblano chiles. After seasoning with salt, I added some fresh mozzarella cheese and a big happy dollop of creme fraiche. I removed the canela stick and being cheap, I gave it a quick rinse and will use it for something else in the future.

I believe Lupe fried the flour in the oil to make a roux but I don’t think this is needed at all so I skipped this step. Long, slow cooking in a wide pot, like a cazuela (or even a Windsor pot) encourages evaporation and tastes better than a flour-thickened sauce.

This was incredible. Great with tortillas or rice and even though it doesn’t sound like a main course, a bowl on its own was just perfect.

Dealing with prickly pears

My cactus has gone nuts this year and I have dozens and dozens of prickly
pears and a constant stream of paddles. I’m thinking of selling the
pears at market but how do you clean them?

After a little web research, it seems that a culinary torch works best. I had pretty good luck with a burner from my range.

One of the sites suggested water afterwards and the stinging in my hands makes me think this is right.

But whatever the pain, it’s worth it. You can eat the tuna, seeds and all, and it’s a great snack.
You can also blend it with water, a little sugar and some lime for an agua fresca.