Salsa Verde Cruda
Hey my friends,
This is a post about travel, about fallout from segregation, and how I discovered Oaxacan cuisine. If your tacos are quivering in anticipation of salsa verde, just skip to the bottom for the recipe and read the stories below on a rainy day. Que ustedes disfruta!
-S-
The birth of my wanderlust.
I didn’t grow up traveling very much. My parents worked hard to give us a loving, stable home, and though we didn’t have a lot, we had all we needed. Traveling for me as a child was tracing a winding path through the mountains between Durango and Grand Junction to see my grandparents on holidays, and a couple of road trips to see family in southern California.
In middle school I flew on an airplane for the first time, deep into the heart of Texas, with my friend Sadie. Her sweet and generous aunt and uncle welcomed us to Houston, it’s humidity, and a taste of the privileged life. We experienced things like: Cokes, frosty with chipped ice, that we sipped on while riding around in their big van, a trip to Galveston to fish (on a boat!) using real shrimp as bait, roller coasters and junk food at Six Flags, swimming in the pool in their backyard, and cooling off with air conditioning inside of the house! It was all a marvel and I have two small photo albums to prove it, if you ever need more of a window into this exotic world.
Then there was a road trip with my best friend Jenny and her dad to Baja when I was in high school. I used my babysitting money to buy the cutest green swimsuit for the trip. We ate fried mozzarella sticks which I coined “cheese gum” at Denny’s in Winslow, AZ, and eventually arrived somewhere in northern Baja. That’s where I experienced fish tacos for the first time, tried Kahlua in coffee at age fifteen, and explored the Sonoran desert in the open bed of a pickup truck without a seat belt. It was completely exhilarating!
I’m not sure how they did it, but my parents planned a fabulous trip to the east coast the summer after I graduated high school. That was where I met my first love, Lobster. He looked good any way he showed up, stuffed in a brioche roll with a side of chips to being all dressed up in a beautiful bisque. We stayed at a B&B in Maine, and I ate things like eggs benedict for the first time with a sprig of “Queen Anne’s Lace” to adorn it. We drove right past New York City. I do remember a feeling of longing and the view of the Big Apple from my car window as we went over George Washington bridge, as well as my dad’s white knuckles as he gripped the wheel, not real thrilled about navigating highways, tollways, and traffic like none of us had ever seen. We toured the White House in D.C., and we took a rented speed boat up the Severn River in Annapolis to see where my dad lived for a few years as a kid.
And then I headed into the next chapter of my life.
My little sister Emily and I, with our grandparents, circa 1981.
College, roots, and the trickle down from segregation.
I studied at Colorado College, and I got a work study job washing dishes in the cafeteria for the first semester of my freshman year. Then somehow, I got upgraded to the very lux job of filing all of the paperwork in the Financial Aid Office. I made close to $200 a month, and felt kinda rich because I could buy my school books, hockey tickets (DU sucks!), have late night tea with friends at Montague’s over a study session or to just talk about the hockey player who winked at me in my Psych class (fodder for a solid semester), and I could buy an expensive bagel sandwich at Wooglin’s Deli. The world was my oyster.
But by the time I was midway through my sophomore year, I was ready for more adventure. And adventure that was related to my roots…
My grandparents, “Joseph” and “Mary” Salazar, were born and raised in a small town outside of Taos, New Mexico. They met in a one-room schoolhouse, and reconnected again in their twenties, where they were both living in Grand Junction, Colorado. You can read their story here. Their first language is Spanish. But sadly, speaking anything other than English in Colorado in those post-WWII years was just not welcomed. It’s not something a lot of people even know, but there was segregation happening in Colorado, and “No Mexicans Allowed” signs were posted on windows of certain restaurants and businesses. My grandparents, heads held high, walked right in anyway because in all sincerity, they’d claim “We’re not Mexican! We’re Spanish.”
And there’s a lot of complicated psychology behind that declaration which nearly all of Mexico and even New Mexico could relate to once the conquistadors arrived centuries before.
But that meant that my grandparents did not teach their children to speak their native tongue, and they went by the English version of their names as opposed to José and María. Pressure to assimilate was still stronger than nearly four centuries of roots in what is now New Mexico. So, I grew up listening to my grandparents speak Spanish to each other at home when they didn’t want us to know what they were talking about. And they’d take me and my sister to Spanish Mass at the Catholic church when we stayed a night over the weekend. But that meant my mastery of Spanish amounted to counting, some food vocabulary, familiarity of Ranchera music, and the added bonus of having a strong aversion to drinking from a communal cup with strangers.
I took Spanish classes in school and spoke about as much Spanish, if not less, than my gringo friends, and I found that very annoying.
So, I applied to a study abroad program in Costa Rica, and spent fall of my junior year diving headlong into really learning Spanish, and experiencing the world at a completely new level. The most amazing host family, giant spiders and iguanas, food completely new to me, Salsa dancing lessons, and a bit of an obsession with a particular Tico surfer all made for a semester to remember. The recipes collected during my time there will surface on this blog before long.
If you can believe it, this all leads up to my discovery of a really delicious salsa verde recipe.
Oaxaca, Mexico, and cooking before cooking was cool.
This post marks the beginning of a series of recipes which I collected over the course of a fall semester, studying in Mexico. After my abroad program in Costa Rica, I returned home only to search out another program. I had fallen in love with exploring the world and I wanted to hone my Spanish even more.
There were fifteen of us from Colorado College, including my sister Emily — a sophomore at CC — who joined me for this semester of adventure. Our small group flew down to Mexico City, studied Frieda Kahlo’s art in her home now preserved as a museum, La Casa Azul. We gazed at the murals in the parliament done by her husband, Diego Rivera, watched traditional baile folklorico, and ate palitos off the street carts.
For two weeks we all stayed in Cuernavaca, just about two hours drive from the city, in a hacienda up on a hillside with a long dining table situated on the back patio overlooking a beautifully manicured garden. We took Spanish immersion classes by day, ate amazing food around that table, and went salsa dancing by night.
Then we boarded a small commuter plane, and we flew down to la Ciudad de Oaxaca to meet our host families and begin fall semester at La Universidad de Mesoamericana with all of the other Mexican students.
Living and eating in Oaxaca was a cornerstone experience in my cooking journey. I still vividly remember meals and flavors from that semester of 1999. That’s right. I just put that in writing. But the point is, it was a LONG time ago, and here I am, still thinking about it.
I took classes like literature — we read Les Misérables in Spanish (ok, confession: I read some of Les Misérables in Spanish, but then a few of us watched a really old film version with subtitles before the test because, well, this wasn’t my thesis and hanging out with my friends was the more valuable cultural experience in my young opinion.) There was Mexican history, and other core classes. But one of the electives offered was COOKING.
That’s right. Ding! Ding! I was in.
And so, I relished every moment of what is still probably my favorite class ever, taught by “Chef Armando.” He gave us a grocery list every week, and we were sent out into the mercado central to shop for our ingredients. Talk about a great task for practicing Spanish, learning the metric system, making peace with meats at room temperature covered with flies, and a whole new world of chiles, toasted insects, and smells. For this kid who experienced the gag reflex every time I walked by a cow’s tongue shrink wrapped in the grocery store back in Colorado, I was tested. But I was not about to be defeated.
I’m so grateful to the foresight of my 21-year-old self because starting from day one, I kept a journal recording every single recipe we cooked over the semester. Sure, you can google just about anything these days, but there’s something truly authentic in this storehouse of recipes that was taught to us before the influences of Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook. The “world wide web” was only being used as a fancy new alternative to encyclopedias and letter writing, so these recipes were just actual things that Armando cooked.
There are many recipes in the journal that I haven’t yet recreated since those days in the school’s test kitchen. But one thing I’ve made regularly through the years is salsa verde. It’s simple, so full of flavor, and once you’ve made it, you’ll know I’m not actually trying that hard. If I’ve fed you and you’re reading this... and you were ever deeply impressed or intimidated by my salsa skills, you can just shrug me off and realize, you have the same skills if you have a blender.
That’s great news, right? So, let’s do it.
Salsa Verde Cruda
Recipe adapted by Stephanie Kunstle from Chef Armando / La Universidad Mesoamericana
Note: This is truly too easy to be this delicious. But it’s just that simple. The only way you can mess it up is by not adding enough salt. Salt brings out the flavors of the raw veggies, so taste as you go, and once it’s a flavor bomb (should not taste salty, but just of all the fresh flavors), then it’s done. It can be made a day in advance, and it keeps well in the refrigerator for a week. I like to serve it over carnitas tacos, or just as a dip with chips. It’s yummy on eggs too. Serves 4, but I often double or triple it - or if your blender isn’t huge, just make more than one batch. You will need a blender and a fine mesh sieve.
Ingredients:
300 grams tomatillos (roughly 8)
50 grams white onion (½ small onion or ¼ large onion)
Small handful of cilantro, stems intact
1 clove garlic, peeled
2-3 Serrano chiles
Salt
Preparation:
You might just want to mix a good margarita right now because that will be more work than making this salsa, so you should celebrate that!
Husk the tomatillos and rinse/rub off any sticky or dirty spots, then halve them and throw them into your blender.
Warning: DO NOT, I repeat, DO NOT touch your eyes, nose, or mouth while cutting chiles. You will deeply regret this move. Ask me how I know. You can wear gloves to cut the chiles, but I never do because I hate gloves while cooking. An alternative is to rub your fingers with a very thin layer of butter or olive oil and that will create a buffer for your skin if you are worried about having your fingers tingle for the next few hours. But that can be slippery when handling a knife, so take caution there too. Honestly, I often just go with the burn. And sometimes I regret that decision. Your call. So… Cut the chiles lengthwise, then remove the stems and the seeds and discard those. Add the chiles to the blender. If you’re worried about making it too spicy, start with two chiles, and then you can always add the third after tasting the final product.
Add your chunk of onion and garlic clove to the blender.
Wash your small handful of cilantro well, and add that to the blender.
Add a teaspoon of salt to get started, and blend it all together until smooth. Taste for salt, and add more as needed until it tastes amazing.
Quickly sieve the salsa over a bowl to drain out most of the naturally occurring juices. If you skip this step, the juice from the tomatillos will separate over a short period of time and rise to the top. I like to let the water drain out, and then what’s left is a really beautifully concentrated salsa which is a bit thicker for dipping and drizzling. Enjoy!
PS: I always save the juices that have run out, thinking: this would make an amazing cocktail. But I have yet to create that cocktail because I’m usually doing twenty other things. But stay tuned. I feel it coming on.