Christmas Day in Oaxaca

It was kind of an odd day. We started the day with breakfast with our host family and decided it must have been leftovers from their Christmas Eve feast rather than some sort of traditional Christmas breakfast. We started with bananas, then thick slabs of caramel jello and chopped bits of bright green apple jello, then spaghetti in a creamy mushroom sauce, then chicken breast stuffed with fruits, then finished with sandwiches of thin sliced ham lunchmeat with mayo on Pan Bimbo (the Mexican Wonderbread equivalent). Z and I rushed off to church, but found it locked and empty and had to assume they had cancelled because it was Christmas.

We wandered back to our place, stopping to sit in a park and talk for a while, then found C moving all our things into a new room when we got back. Our new room is upstairs, and we have a kind of balcony (without any railing) where we can sit in the shade of a pomelo tree and listen to all the songbirds while we eat or work or relax.

For lunch we ate at the fantastic La Olla Restaurant. Z ordered tacos with nopales (cactus) and after finishing about half decided that their sliminess was grossing her out a little too much. C & I agree that nopales are mucous-like and that we don't really like them any more than we like okra, but we were pleased that she wanted to try them.


C ordered chiles rellenos, Oaxacan style. I had some a couple days earlier at the restaurant Flor de Oaxaca and they were tasty, but made me pretty sick that night. At La Olla, they came in two types of chiles - one was stuffed in a dried Oaxacan Pasilla chile (smaller and smokier than the chiles called pasillas in other parts of Mexico), and the other in a chile de agua, which is light green and thin-skinned and usually medium spicy. The stuffing here, called picadillo, rather than the ground beef or cheese that you might get at a Mexican restaurant in the U.S., is made of shredded chicken with almonds, raisins, capers, green olives, herbs, tomatoes, onions and a long list of other ingredients that make it as complex and lovely as a good mole. They stuff the chiles, dip them in a batter made of whipped egg whites mixed with the yolks and a bit of flour, then fry them and bathe them in a light tomato sauce. There's a recipe from Diana Kennedy here which looks pretty accurate. These at La Olla were the best I've ever had.

I, however, won the best ordering prize for the day - I got a thick white fish, perfectly seared in garlic and olive oil, served with spinach and over mashed plantains. It doesn't sound so great, but the three together were perfection.












We also ordered ponche, which is a hot fruity punch kind of like spiced cider, with tiny apples, spears of sugar cane and cinnamon sticks, and hibiscus blossoms.











And we finished with a delicious cake of freshly ground oaxacan chocolate and cinnamon and a bit of passionfruit puree on the side, and then a very tasty flan.









Yum.

That evening we went down to the Zocalo briefly, hoping there would be a replay of the fireworks from the night before (which I missed because I was sick from those darn chiles rellenos from Flor de Oaxaca), but we were out of luck. Just lots of people walking around. We read the Christmas story and watched some fireworks from our balcony before we said goodnight to Z. Overall a pretty merry Christmas - I hope yours was good too!