Recently on Twitter, the very talented Pati Jinich wrote that she was irked by the word posole. "It is Pozole with a Z!!!! Posole is nothing, nada!! Posole equals not Pozole. Sorry and good night.", she wrote. Now I admire Patti a lot but I think she got this one wrong, along with many of her enthusiastic followers who were quick to throw posole under the bus. My response was: "Posole is an old tradition from the US Southwest. It refers to the grain and the final dish. It's hundreds of years old and to deny this is to deny...

I've been in Mexico working on a project and this dish stood out. Scrambled eggs cooked separately and then drowned in tomatillo salsa, topped with a handful of chopped epazote. I love epazote. You might know how well it works with beans, black beans in particular, but it's also terrific in a quesadilla. It likes cheese a lot. Mushrooms and octopus, too. It turns out eggs are also a natural partner. Simple and perfect. Don't forget the tortillas.

A few years ago, a friend's teacher daughter described a situation where her students were intensely debating whether they could call people Mexicans. "You can't call them that!" The teacher was confused, as she should have been. But really, Mexican for some of them was a dirty word. The probably heard the phrase, "those damned Mexicans!" and in case there's any doubt, that's not good. Fox News recently had a graphic declaring that Trump had cut aid to "3 Mexican countries." For the record, Mexico has a group of states within its borders, not countries. I think the subtext of...

Part of the fun of being featured in The New Yorker was hearing from people all over the world and their stories about beans and/or Mexico. One of the most surprising contacts was the wife of Alfred W. Crosby, Jr, a professor and historian from California who wrote the seminal book, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. (Greenwood Press, 1972) It's a fascinating book and of course I went straight to the index to look up "beans" when I got my copy. The bean was-third of the alimentary trinity that supported Meso-American civilization when the Spaniard arrived--the...

Fame is like caviar, you know - it's good to have caviar but not when you have it at every meal. -Marilyn Monroe I'd be willing to try having caviar with every meal. It's not every day that there's a New Yorker profile about you and your company. I loved it, but of course with an article that long and a subject as personal as beans, there are a few problems. But they're insignificant and I forever will be grateful for this passage: Watching Sando and Lupe cook, I realized what I’d been doing wrong. I’d been trying so hard...

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...

For me, there's little better than a road trip in Mexico. My friend Gabriel estimated that over nine years we've traveled approximately 50,00 kilometers (about 32,000 miles) together. I'm glad he likes to drive! I'm also thankful we all like the same music and have the same hunger for Mexican food. On the way to the Huasteca of Hidalgo, we stopped at Convento de los Los Santos Reyes in a pueblo called Metztitlan in the sierra. This is exactly the kind of thing I love to do, especially when the site is deserted and we are free to run and...

My favorite sentence is, I just got back from Mexico. I would like to write it more often! The down side is coming home to an empty refrigerator. This morning, after pots of French Roast coffee (the Mexicans do many things well but good coffee is mostly hidden), I made brown rice, garbanzo beans and a salsa from the new chiles I bought on my trip. They're oak-roasted heirloom chipotles from the Huasteca of Hidalgo. They are incredible and we were going try and import them but the FDA requirements are so tough that we had to pass. It's a...

Random Photos from over the last several years with the Rancho Gordo-Xoxoc Project. I am one lucky fellow!

Delicious, beautiful, exotic. Did I say delicious? I meant to. I don't have favorites but if you were to invite me to Veracruz I would only hesitate for a few seconds. I think it might be Mexico's most beautiful state. It runs along the coast and it feels Mexican but it's like nowhere else in the country. Papantla smells of vanilla and heat. It's a little off putting at first but the best thing to do is just roll with it. For me, breakfast with salsa macha means the rest of the day will be mild in comparison. It's a...

If you love beans, you want beans. You don't want a lot of other things getting in the way. But if you're making soup, you do need to do something. My answer is to fry stale tortilla strips. I know for most of us, frying isn't something we do everyday. It can be messy and if you don't use the oil again, it's seems wasteful. I have a very small cast iron skillet and it's perfect for a small bit of frying. I also have peanut oil in an old wine bottle that I keep in the fridge between uses....

For many reasons, this post won't be for my vegetarian and vegan friends. For many reasons. I was in the Valley de Tehuacan with Yunuen and Gabriel from Xoxoc. We were there to visit Lourdes, who makes our wonderful bean pots, cazuelas, comales and steamers, all out of the local clay. More on her later. We arrived in Tehuacan just in time for comida, the main meal of the day. We also happened to arrive in October, which is the month of the slaughter of the local goats and the town celebrates by making a dish called Mole de Caderas....