In the Weeds: Cooking with Quelites

/ 1 Comment

It’s Andy here today introducing our guest blogger, David from Albuquerque. You’ll also find me over in OurLittleCorner digging up some dirt about weeds.

It’s always a special treat to have our friend David from Albuquerque as a guest blogger here at BigLittleMeals. When I first met David, which was more than 50 years ago, he was into “weed” (as it was called then).  Now it appears that he is more into “weeds” – which, as you will see in today’s blog, is not the same as being “in the weeds”.  While this all may seem complicated, rest assured that, per usual, David has written an entertaining and enlightening account about alternative cuisine. You will never look at a “weed” (or perhaps a taco) the same.

Quelites
By David from Albuquerque

Ever since I was a little boy I have really been drawn to foraging. We lived in a new development on the outskirts of Farmington, New Mexico, where hundreds of 1000 square foot, $4000 homes had replaced peach, apricot, pear and apple orchards. The orchards that had not yet been bulldozed were not tended or irrigated, but somehow many of the scraggly little trees survived and produced golf-ball sized fruit. It wasn’t too pretty, but it was doggone delicious. I would climb up into a peach tree and eat until I was sick of eating, which if you have ever seen me eat you know to be a prodigious amount. Mom made jam, and sometimes we went fishing in the mountains and would gather chokecherries, which made terrific jelly.

“Feral” asparagus.

In the springtime she would give all the kids grocery bags and we would walk along the ditch banks gathering what I guess you would call “feral” asparagus, which she froze and we ate all year long. We ate it often enough that I thought urine always smelled that way and didn’t realize it came from the asparagine in asparagus. But maybe it is a stretch to refer to gathering feral domestic plants (or stealing fruit from other people’s trees) “foraging.”

On the left is a photo of me at about 10 years old in Farmington, NM and on the right, a few years later, I am eating a chapulín (aka grasshopper) in Guanajuato, Mexico.

We didn’t have enough interaction with our Native or Hispanic neighbors to learn how to gather or prepare the native plants. I tried a few times to eat prickly pears, but the little stickers were too much to contend with.

As a teenager, I learned about “Mormon tea” (Ephedra viridis, which contains a stimulant, pseudoephedrine, but doesn’t taste so good) and Cota tinctoria, known by many names, including Cota and Navajo Tea (which does taste pretty good). Maybe the old people among the readers of this blog remember Euell Gibbons TV commercial for Grape Nuts cereal. One of the funniest bumper stickers I ever saw said, “Help Save Our Forests, Pull Euell Gibbons’ Teeth.”

Euell Gibbons hocking Grape Nuts cereal in the early 1970s.

But I want to tell you about quelites. Many years ago I learned that local Hispanics say “quelites” [pronounced “keh-LEE-tays“] to refer to what is known in English as “Lamb’s Quarter” (Chenopodium album). I tried cooking some, but the results were underwhelming at best, and my family wouldn’t eat it. (I think it improves the flavor to blanch it in boiling water, then draining and discarding the water before using the lamb’s quarter in a recipe.) Of course, some of them won’t eat Swiss chard either.

Volunteer lamb’s quarter growing in my garden. These came up in a place I had dumped chicken poop compost and were over six feet tall by the time I photographed them. Usually they are only 12-18″ tall.

I also learned that what the locals call “verdolaga” is known in English as “purslane” (Portulaca oleracea), and that it is good to eat. Then a couple of years ago I was out botanizing with a Mexican friend and she called amaranth (Amaranthus spp) “quelites.” She is from central Mexico, so I figured this was some kind of regional variant.

Volunteer amaranth growing in my garden.

Freshly harvested verdolaga, before removing the big stems

Recently, I found Alan Bergo’s website to be real eye opener for me. It turns out that the word quelite comes from the Nahuatl quilitl, which means, roughly, “greens.” Another friend told me that the Nahuatl root of the word is the word for the color green. And there may be as many as 350 individual plant species of quelites used in Mexican cuisine.

This is from Biodiversidad Mexicana, a site that has a lot of terrific information and book recommendations. It’s in Spanish but full of illustrations that speak for themselves.

Regardless of what I am trying to grow in my own garden, I raise a bumper crop of the three mentioned above. What is more, the specimens that grow untended in the cracks of the sidewalk often look healthier and more succulent than those in my garden. I have pirated a recipe of Bergo’s below and tried several others I found by Googling around the web. Frankie, my wife, will eat these and even likes some of them. I have given her amaranth greens a couple of times without telling her what they were and I don’t think she realized she was eating “weeds.” You really should check out Bergo’s website. There is great info there and his photos are better than mine, too.

Ingredients for the Quelites Mexicanos recipe. The
quelites mixture is already blanched.
Dinner, with a quelites taco, beans and “pastore pie,” which is a dish I invented that is a New Mexican take on shepherd’s pie, with carne adovada below and polenta and cheese on top.
…

In the Weeds: Cooking with QuelitesRead More »

Better Angels

/ Leave a Comment

It’s Ann here today. Andy is over in Our Little Corner with a blog that makes me tear up and makes me smile.

Should I be uncomfortable with the fact that we recently bought tickets to bring our children and grandchildren to see a Broadway play in which both Abraham Lincoln and his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, are made fun of? Are there some people (Lincoln, for example) whose reputations are too great to be “messed with”? If you’re not familiar with the Off-Broadway-now-On-Broadway play, Oh, Mary, let me share a few lines from reviews:

From The Guardian: in the play Mary is “an incorrigible drunk, a feisty thorn in her husband’s side, a nasty piece of work, a self-proclaimed ‘rather well-known niche cabaret legend’ and a total hoot.“

From The Chicago Tribune: “At times, it feels like you are watching an extended ‘Saturday Night Live’ sketch making campy hay by deconstructing early U.S. history and imagining the battles of a closeted gay Abe (not so much of a stretch) and his unhinged spouse (no stretch at all).“

Mary Todd Lincoln

Cole Escola – who uses the pronoun “they” – plays Mary, and you’ll get a kick out of their visit with Oprah and the rest of the women on The View, discussing the play. (And – if you’re titillated by these reviews and are dying to see it yourself – Oh, Mary is playing at the Lyceum Theater in NYC through November 10.)

Cole is in pink.

My blog title, “Better Angels,” refers to the much more familiar and serious side of the Lincolns.

It was March 1861; Jefferson Davis had just been inaugurated as President of the Confederacy; seven Southern states had seceded from the union. Times were unbelievably tense in the U.S. And Abraham Lincoln, who had been elected President of the U.S. in November, delivered his first inaugural address. The entire speech was eloquent but perhaps this is the most memorable part:

“I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

It’s been almost 2 1/2 years since I wrote a blog “The Infinitesimal Speck” which mentioned “the better angels of our nature.” Andy likes that phrase because he likes Steven Pinker’s book about violence, The Better Angels of our Nature. But I was reminded of the phrase again during Barack Obama’s recent speech, when he urges us as a country to tap “the better angels of our nature.”

Enough reflecting. Here’s our pick for today’s recipe:

We’re already posted an Angel Food Cake recipe. A Devil’s Food Cake recipe would be very apropos for today’s political scene, but we’ve done lots of chocolate cake recipes already. So how about a recipe that was a favorite of Mary Todd Lincoln? Even if she was nasty, unhinged, and a drinker, I’ve read that she often made this cake for Abe because he loved it. That’s so sweet of her! Let’s just focus on her good qualities.

…

Better AngelsRead More »

My Premarital Music Years

/ 6 Comments

It’s Andy here today. Ann is over in OurLittleCorner getting all worked up about a “musical” vegetable while trying to remain as calm as a cucumber.

Is musicality cultural or inborn?

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about music. What got me started was a NYTimes article entitled Why People Make Music by Carl Zimmer. In the article Zimmer reports on current research findings that suggest that music may be “something that is universal to all humans that cannot simply be explained by culture.” Related to this I came across a piece on the NIH web site that points out that Darwin believed that “musicality evolved by sexual selection, functioning as a courtship display in reproductive partner choice.” Additionally, a number of sources claim that shared musical preferences can actually make or break a romantic relationship.

This prompted me to ask myself if unbeknownst to us, Ann and I were drawn together by our inborn musical proclivities. As a (now retired) sociologist, I’m highly skeptical of claims that innate human characteristics can explain social behavior. However, because research suggesting an evolutionary function of music in romantic relationships is intriguing, in the name of science I’ve decided to share my personal prenuptial music preferences to explore the possibility that music had something to do with Ann finding me to be a suitable reproductive partner choice.

Darwin claimed that “musical displays stem from the strong emotions that define both human and nonhuman courtship rituals.” (source: Oxford Academic)

To give you some insight into the evolution of my musical development, I’ve created a brief autobiographical video. In it I identify four distinct phases in the development of my musical preferences that defined the musicality (to borrow Darwin’s term) that I brought to that blind date back in 1966 when I first met Ann.

For want of a better term, I’ll call the first phase of my musical journey my “Cowboy Wannabe Years.” It is the earliest time I can recall being enamored with a particular type of music. Not only did I constantly pack a cap gun and don a cowboy hat, I loved the music by such folks as Gene Autry and Roy Rogers. Tex Ritter recorded my favorite song, There Was Blood on the Saddle. I’ve included it in my video, but be advised that if you are squeamish you may want to skip that part.

My first notable connection to music was with the cowboy songs of Tex Ritter (1905 – 1974)

The second phase in my musical development was my “Wacky Music Phase.” Spike Jones was the epitome of this genre (if it can be called that) and I watched his TV show religiously. I loved all of the squeeze horns and silly musical antics. You’ll get a glimpse of his show on my video.

Then came my “Tween Big Band” phase. While other kids were tuned in to rock and roll hits of the era I was listening to my parents’ 78 rpm albums of Glen Miller. I still get a nostalgic charge listening to his American Patrol.

The final stage of my prenuptial musical development occurred while in college. I discovered jazz. My first jazz album, Sketches of Spain by Miles Davis, remains my all-time favorite. The selection included in the video still brings goosebumps every time I hear it.

I had the opportunity to visit Shelly’s Manne Hole in Hollywood in 1963 . Shelly Manne and his band, Cal Tjader, Mongo Santamaria, and George Shearing all got on the stage together and played some some of the most incredible jazz I’ve ever heard. If there’s a jazz heaven that was it.

So, without further adieu here is a video depiction of the development of my premarital musicality.

An autobiographical account of the evolution of one man’s prenuptial musicality – produced and directed by yours truly.

Now that we’ve seen the video, let’s revisit the question of whether or not Ann and I were “drawn together by our shared musical proclivities.” I have to conclude that the answer is a resounding NO. Ann was never a fan of blood-in-the-saddle kinds of cowboy songs – which is understandable; she thinks that the likes of Spike Jones are just plain weird (to borrow a current political term); she never liked the Glen Miller-ish big band sounds; and she definitely is not a jazz fan. This leads me to believe that my “courtship display in reproductive partner choice” had more to do with my good looks, charm, and quick wit than with my musical preferences. Sorry Darwin.

Scroll to Top