Come to Co-me: Why Isla Mujeres' Food Rocks

Considering that some people devote entire blogs to food and its adoration, I feel that it's only appropriate to finally discuss the food here in Isla Mujeres. I have no intention of discussing specific restaurants or anything, that's why you go to TripAdvisor. Instead, just some food that has been new or novel for me this year, and, more importantly, why it rocks.

Reason Number 1: It's Mexican food. I've only met one person ever who distinctly disliked Mexican food...and she was in my hostel in Tulum because she was retracing her past life there as a survivor of Atlantis, nursed back to health by the ancient Mayans (and consequently sacrificed by them). She, a white South African, refused to leave her hostel room in sleepy Tulum for three days because she was afraid she'd get mugged--this coming from a person from Johannesburg, one of the most crime-ridden cities in the world. Where am I getting with that story? Basically, you'd have to be crazy to dislike Mexican food!

Reason Number 2: It's cheap and plentiful. There are tons of little "comedores," "loncherias," and street vendors which sell cheap and greasy food. These foods are mostly non-vegetarian, such as tacos and hot dogs, but there are a few vegetarian gems out there. It was hilarious to me when I first moved here because I would ask if the stands sold anything vegetarian. They always looked stricken and said no, but then I would see cheese empanadas or mushroom quesadillas on the menu. I've stopped asking and just started trusting that most of the places will have something. A late vegetarian discovery that I'm really kicking myself for is the vegetarian tamal that the street corner "tamale lady" sells downtown. I never knew about it until a month ago...and I love tamales! As an aside, "tamale" is actually not the correct word, "tamal" is, because you would only add the "e" to make the word plural. When I lived in Oaxaca, I learned how to make tamales by hand, but it's a really tasking process that involves liters of vegetable oil (yes, liters), and banana leaves. Thus, realizing I can have them whenever I wish for just over a dollar? Yesss...

Reason Number 3: Cajeta by the jar.

"Cajeta" is Mexico's version of dulce de leche, but made with goat's milk instead of cow's milk, so it has this fantastic extra layer of tang and isn't as cloying as regular dulce de leche. I had been eating it in crepes and ice cream for a few months already, but I recently bought my own little jar in a Cancun shopping trip. What a mistake. I began sneaking into the fridge between classes, spoon in hand, to dig in. And in the morning, spread over some cream cheese on a so-fresh-it's-still-warm tortilla? Ah, heavenly!

Yes, this cajeta-covered crepe from Playa del Carmen was even tastier than it looks.

Reason Number 4: Expanding my gastro-botanic knowledge of the region. (So what if I made up that distinction.) Know what chaya is? Or how to eat a custard apple? How good a mango tastes when it's actually ripe and it costs 2 pesos? These have been much-appreciated lessons of the past year. Chaya is often referred to as "Mayan spinach" and it is a dark, green leafy veggie that grows wild here in the Yucatan. It is cooked like spinach, and is sometimes even very finely blended and mixed with lemonade or pineapple juice for a very tasty health drink. I know a few people who grow it in their yards now, but when I first got here I had to ask the local fruit vendor if he carried it. To my great amusement, he would lower his voice and look around furtively and say "You want chaya? Come tomorrow at 5:00." It was like some sort of drug deal (not that I'm engaging in too many of those, haha). I suppose the 5 sharp-edged fronds on the leaf are mildly reminiscent of some other, more illicit item. Anyway, makes a great quiche!

Custard apples, dragon fruits, mamey, chaya...yes, I recognize many of these things also grow in Southeast Asia, but it was definitely my first experience with them. A few pictures below

An especially sharp example of a chaya plant. You cut the leaves, which can easily grow bigger than your hand, and steam them like spinach. Some research says it has even more antioxidants than spinach, as well.

Custard apples, which are soft and full of bean-shaped, woodlike seeds. The custardy fruit filling is around the seeds, which you break off and suck on.

You can find this football-fruit, called mamey, in most of the local markets, and the taste and texture has been compared to pumpkin pie filling. I'm not sure I'd replace Thanksgiving pie with it, but it's pretty tasty.

There are pink dragonfruits and there are red ones, and the one above is a pink. The red are red straight through the middle, but the pink are pink on the outside and white, peppered with little edible black seeds, on the inside. Dragon fruits come from succulents (kind of like the disgusting but popular fruit that comes off of a prickly pear cactus), and the inside is so soft and refreshing that you might be forgiven for thinking you're spooning sorbet from an unusual cup.

Tamarind and Hibiscus on sale in the supermarket (or "super" as they're called here). Both are used to make "aguas" or flavored waters called "tamarindo" and "jamaica" (ha-mai-ca), respectively. Both are great because they are sweet with a bit of tart. Another "agua" which is very popular here is called "horchata" (oar-cha-ta), which is made with ground rice and cinnamon, a bit like watery custard or something. I went through an horchata phase but it got cloying pretty fast.

Reason Number 4 1/2: The mystery of the "marañon"
I walked into my trusty fruteria after a walk one day and was confronted with a giant box full of these things:

I asked the owner what the heck these new fruits were, and he responded that they were a specialty of Campeche, the state I visited a few months ago. I wanted to say that the top looked a lot like a cashew, but I didn't know the specific word for cashew, only "nut." He agreed, but said the fruit was really delicious, leading me to believe that this thing was sold for it's big red bottom, not the funny kidney bean on top. He convinced me that I had to try it, so I picked one up. He also convinced me that he had to tell me the folk story behind the fruit. He said that according to locals, God made all the fruits in the world, except this one. The Devil saw how well God could make fruit, so he decided that he was going to make a fruit, too. He put all this work into it, and then at the very end realized he had forgotten to put the seed inside. "Damn!" he shouted, and squashed the seed onto the top of the fruit, where it has stayed since. On my way passing through the door, he mentioned that I could roast the top as well and eat the insides, nothing special. So that night I split open the fruit with some friends, and, whew! it is like sucking on cotton, there is so much tannin. On a lark, we put the kidney bean from the top on the grill and forgot about it for awhile. Several hard blows later, we cracked the shell and tested out the inside. Hmm, tastes like a cashew. Well, if it looks like a cashew and tastes like a cashew...must be a cashew, no? For whatever reason, rather than looking up what a cashew looked like after all of this, I instead went roundabout, trying to figure out what weird fruit this could have been, this "specialty of Campeche." I tried to figure out how to spell marañon, duh, and still couldn't find anything. It wasn't until someone showed me a bottle of Belizean "cashew wine" with a big picture of the stupid thing on front that I finally realized/accepted I had eaten a cashew. What's more, as Wikipedia has since informed me, the cashew itself is actually the fruit of the plant, and the big squishy red cottonball is a false fruit. Guess it turns out that the Devil really has no idea how to make a proper fruit after all.

Reason Number 5: Island-style delivery service.
One of the amazing things about living here is the food delivery service. It's not like Cairo, where you literally could get everything from a chain store, groceries to beer to McDonald's delivered. No, this is much better. There are independent vendors here on retrofitted bicycles or on foot who offer everything from tortillas to elotes (Mexican corn on the cob) to cheese. The tortilla vendors have regular bicycles to which they've attached a cooler on the back and a squeaky horn in the front. They ride around the colonias all day long--but especially in the morning--squeaking their little horns like crazy, offering hot corn tortillas by the half or whole kilo. A half-kilo (a stack of at least 30) is about 50 cents, brought right to your door!

Reason Number 5 1/2: Aside from the tortilla men, the other vendors have their own unique calling cards, almost like elaborate mating calls for customers. There's a tamal-vendor who carries around a triangle and jangles it incessantly. There's a Mexican flag vendor (what a niche, right?) who blows this obnoxious plastic horn. And then there are the ones who use their voices. They have all developed very unique pronunciations of the products they sell, and it took me a few weeks to figure out what the heck they were actually shouting about. There's one selling crema de coco, a coconut candy, who says (cre)-MA de CO-CO! The elote man strangles out the following phrase a few times in succession: yeeee-LLLO-Tes! Another tamal-vendor has somehow picked up the habit of shouting his wares so rapidly that the only word I can still make out, after all this time, is "Tamales!" And then, the most amazing and famous of all of the street vendors: the venerated Queso Oaxaca man. Queso Oaxaca is a stringy cheese, like mozzarella but with more flavor. The Queso Oaxaca man's queso is homemade and so fresh that you can't even put it in the fridge for the first 2 days. And his calling card? He walks around the ENTIRE island in all white with a cardboard box full of cheese on his head. And he sings the following: "QUEEEEEE-SOOOOOO...WAAHHH-KAA-KAA!" His little ditty is so famous that my kindergarten kids will sometimes start doing it! You can hear him for blocks away, he has the projection of a Broadway star. And when you talk to him, he has the voice of an opera star: rich and resonant and unforgettable. Every time I hear him, it's like the pied piper--I can't run to my wallet fast enough to shell out for the most delicious cheese in the world.

A blurry shot of the whiz of cheese...sorry, couldn't help the pun.

Reason Number 6: Going stone-age with the molcajete
When I lived in Oaxaca, I watched the entire food process from the field to the family dog eating the leftovers. I can tell you every step to create corn tortillas (right down to beating away the cows from eating the sun-dried corn). We didn't have a bathroom and our floor was dirt, but even there my Oaxacan homestay mom had a blender. Even with all of that said, Mexican salsa purists will tell you that the blender is really no good if you want to make a great salsa. If you want to go all the way, pura mexicana, you invest in a molecajete. It's a stone mortar-and-pestle that you must cure when you buy it. Lime juice, garlic, salt, there are lots of "cures." Once it's cured and you've made a few trial salsas in it, the molecajete is "seasoned" and ready for future use. Frequent salsa-eaters swear by the difference in taste between a salsa made in a seasoned molecajete versus a blender. So far, my molecajete has gotten a work out in making several chile-heavy salsas from Guerrero, and has even assisted in the making of veggie burgers and an Italian-style salsa arrabiata for a pasta--go globalization! Packing the thing, literally a hunk of volcanic rock, should be a blast...

Seasoned up and ready to smash some stuff

Reason Number 7: I can eat habenero peppers without crying.

If I were not vegetarian, I might wax on further, discussing the joys of octopus ceviche or local Mayan fish specialty tikin-xic (tea-kin chic) or poc chuc, marinated Mayan pork. You are spared, however, from further ruminations on food, and will have to wait for another entry to get a real update on life here. All I can say right now is that there's an election in under a month's time and neither of the big political parties is wasting a decibel of possible noise to flaunt their candidates--sirens and drums outside the window right now, sigh.

Hope all's well dear readers, and, until the next time, BUEN PROVECHO!