Street Food

My obsession with food has followed me, unsurprisingly, to Mexico. I've been here 10 days and think I'm starting to get a handle on eating.

Today I had the best tacos of my life (in Mexico a taco almost always means two small, soft, freshly made corn tortillas wtih some meat, vegetables and sauce) in a marcado (market) near my new host's home in the Moctezuma neighborhood, eastern Mexico City. I went for a walk in my new neighborhood and stopped for tacos in the first marcado I came to. Marcados are big buildings that house several dozen individual stands - vendors of cooked food, raw fruits and veg, and other household items. For example I wanted a simple piece of cloth (to sit on, for a blanket) and I bought one in the marcado; it has a nice green and red cotton weave. Then yesterday a new friend, Yunuen, informed me (amusedly) that this type of cloth is used to mop floors. This is my kind of country! So many things are both beautiful and functional (my favorite qualities) here.

Back to tacos; so I have discovered that not all tacos were created equal and the quality of the taco mostly depends on where you find it. There are two main kinds of "street food", the stuff you find in stands on the street and the food in marcados. This morning i had a porc taco for breakfast, that was in a oily red sauce with a spoonfull of rice - it cost 4 pesos or 30 cents. I washed it down with an OJ, queezed on the spot for 12 pesos or a dollar. I was pretty happy with my $1.30 breakfast, since I'm on a budget. But later in the day I went to this Marcado and asked a woman at a taco stand (fancier, with metal benches in a calm, quiet corner of the market) how much they were; 12 pesos this time, $1 each. Still very cheep as compared to the US but three times as much as my breakfast taco. (Tacos are eaten for every meal, but some are for breakfast and others for lunch and dinner; I have no handle on this yet and chose my tacos via ennie meenie miney moe). Anyhow, these tacos were a whole different food. The corn tortilla was fluffier, I want to say "al dente". The filling was this honey colored roasted pork, at least 1/3 fat (but not in an unapealing way) topped with a salad of cilantro and minced onion and a choice of red or green sauce. I started with red which had a strong and fantastic chipoltle flavor (orange fanta to drink) and then couldnt resist a second with the green sauce which may have been "mole verde", which tastes like onions, herbs and citrus. A lime is always included on every plate, no matter what you're eating and lime juice helped reign in the pork and onion.

This is a web image but looks something like what I ate

When I paid the woman bid me farewell and called me Joven (pernounced "Hoben") which litterally means "young one". But in my mind it means somthing more like "my child".