April 13, 2017 Puerto Escondido to Oaxaca Lunch – Restaurant Catedral. Dinner- Pastries from Carmelita's pastry Shop

April 13, 2017 Puerto Escondido to Oaxaca Lunch –  Restaurant Catedral. Dinner- Pastries from Carmelita's pastry Shop

We woke at 6:00 to make the flight at 8:00 to Oaxaca in the small ten seat Aero Tucan airplane.  It was quite trilling to ascend over the coastal mountain range and land in the Central Valley.  We arrived around 8:30 and found a couple to share a taxi with that delivered us to our respective hotels for 160 pesos instead of 320 pesos.  We rested for a while to catch up on our lost sleep and at 11:30 went to Restaurant  catedral, which is the fanciest restaurant we have eaten at on the trip.

We soon discovered that we had arrived an hour early for lunch which began service at 1:00, so we made a reservation for 1:30 and walked the long block to the museum shop at the Museum of Oaxaca to look at the color collages on rice paper made by Eduardo Lugo we had admired previously. After looking at more than a dozen we selected three and asked if the museum had shipping tubes.  They did not but directed us to a store three blocks down the street named Provender that sold all things related to art and architecture.  We soon were directed the architectural area and were shown a plastic tube for carrying architectural drawings for 113 pesos.  We bought it because it was long enough to hold the rice paper pictures safely and even had a shoulder strap that allowed the tube to be carried hands free.

We returned to the museum and bought four paper collages for 320 pesos and rolled and taped them into the tube.

It was after 1:00 when we returned to Restaurant Catedral.  We were shown to a table in the patio and ordered water.  Soon we were brought two types of bread, a toasted roll stuffed with a bit of cream cheese and a plain roll.  We ordered mezcal coctels with guayaba juice. Soon we were served an appetizer of chicken stewed in the restaurant’s famous black mole sauce on a toasted flour tortilla topped with freshly pickled red onion.

  In the research she did on the restaurant, Suzette had selected two dishes she wanted to try, a salad of toasted Oaxaca cheese served with grilled nopales and fresh verde lago leaves and blanched fava beans dressed with a cilantro sauce.  Her salad was fabulous and very reproducible except perhaps for the silky smooth pusillanimous chili sauce served with the salad.  The theme of this trip is to collect regional Mexican recipes.  As you will soon see we captured three good recipes today.   Decided to try a yellow mole with beef dish and a green soup of herba Santa with requeson, and toasted strips of blue corn tlayuda.  Tlayuda is just an oversized flour or corn tortilla.  When the waiter served Suzette’s salad my soup was served.  In the fancy restaurants like Catedral the soup is brought to the table in a clay pitcher and the ingredients, in this case a rib of a Chile, the two tlayuda strips and a ball of requeson were in the soup bowl.  The soup bowl is placed in front of you and the soup poured by the waiter into your soup bowl.  It is a more decorative and elegant way to serve soup in my opinion and avoids inevitable spills and smudges on the soup bowl.

The soup was a dark green and tasted fabulous.  We discussed replicating the soup.  It was an easy base of chicken stock mixed with masa to which puréed herba Santa was added.  One could easily substitute spinach or purslane or boiled chayote.  I loved the soup.

For entrees Suzette ordered the ravioli stuffed with pork cochinillo and I ordered beef in yellow mole.  I was thrilled to finally find a legitimate restaurant that made an authentic yellow mole.  When the entire arrived I was a little surprised to find that my yellow mole was closer to a light brown.  The beef was a piece of brisket that had been stewed in the sauce.  In the bowl were several blanched green beans, two halves of a boiled and buttered new potato and two halves of a boiled and peeled chayote.  I have never seen chayote served this way and loved it.  I cut the vegetables into pieces and ate them with bits of meat and sauce.  Flour tortillas were served with the meal and I enjoyed dipping a tortilla into the mole sauce also.  There was also a side dish of pickled white onion and chili.  I tried the onion and it had a good crisp crunch and a bit of chili bite to it.  Soon I found myself unable to eat any more due to the richness of the sauce and the complexity of ingredients.

Suzette’s dish was an entirely different story it was recognizable and completely within our realm of food experience. It was fresh raviolis stuffed with deliciously tender shredded pork over which was spread a fresh tomato sauce made from oven roasted tomatoes and onions.  The dish reminded me of our meal at Christian Ettienne in Avignon nineteen years ago, which was the first time I tasted oven roasted tomatoes.  The sauce reminded me that the Mexicans had been roasting tomatoes long before the French ever knew what a tomato was.  The sauce was excellent and very reproducible, so we had captured three new recipes.

The meal was expensive but well worth it, we agreed.  We would probably never will find hoja santa soup anywhere else, since it is indigenous to Oaxaca.

I asked the waiter to box the remaining mole dish, so we can enjoy it for breakfast with eggs.  We returned to the hotel to rest.

We awoke and dressed at 7:30 and discussed dinner.  Neither of us could imagine eating dinner, but I was keen to try some pastries.  There were two pastry shops we had walked past about five or six blocks from the hotel so we walked first to Camelita’s Pastellria and then to Queman’s a block further across the street from Provender at the corner of Independencia and Morales.  At Camelita’s we bought a cream caramel and Opera torte from the pastry showcase and several baked cookies, a meringue, an orange cookie, and two French looped pastries.

We then walked to Queman’s, which sold mostly large pastry cakes, and bought two small chocolate coated rats for 15 pesos each.

We took all of our pastries back to the hotel and put the rats in the freezer and the baked goods into the fridge and ate the cream caramel and opera torte with herbal tea infused with rum for a lovely late night dessert.

We then went to bed.

Bon Appetit