Cooking Is Connection, Not Perfection
Last Saturday our family spent the day at Quinta Brava, a cooking school at the home of Chef Miguel Alvarez. It was an extraordinary day and the lesson was as much about the culture of cooking as it was about Mexican recipes.
We spent the first few hours around a table on his small farm learning about Oaxaqeño food. We learned about the nine different types of mole, the core ingredients to most of the cuisine, the four processes for preparing salsa, the types of corn and mushroom corn (huitlacoche) and so so much more. Chef Miguel spent years learning to cook high-end cuisine around the world and came home to open his own restaurants in Oaxaca. But he eventually came back to his roots and was humbled in the process of connecting with his ancestral relationship to food through his mother and grandmother.
We went to the market to buy ingredients and the boys had a chance to chew on raw sugar cane with chili powder and lime. We walked through his farm to greet the goats and chickens while picking squash flowers, limes and herbs for the meal.
We milled the corn to make masa and then transformed it into our own tortillas (all hands on - we did the grinding on the stone!). We made tacos, tetelas, empanadas and memelas with cheese, beans, meats, cilantro and various types of salsa.
As soon as we finished the tortillas, we jumped right into making a meal of soup, salsa, guacamole (which has the word MOLE in it because of the process of blending it 🤯), rice, chicken, mole and tortillas. So much extraordinary food!
I’m always excited for the deeper why and for me, the best takeaway from the day was Chef Miguel sharing a story of joining an elder to cook in Oaxaca. She gave him a massive bag of onions to chop and so he popped in his headphones getting to work perfectly slicing and chopping the onions, per his culinary training. She yanked out his headphones and told him that he was doing it all wrong. The other women were roughly chopping the vegetables but chatting and joking and connecting with one another. It was all going into a big pot, the perfect slicing didn’t matter. The point of cooking wasn’t perfect execution, it was communal love, joy and journey. The food still tastes delicious whether the onions are chopped with precision or roughly cut. But relationships are everything.
