tortillas

Diego Rivera’s food paintings lay bare Mexico’s soul

Diego Rivera’s food paintings lay bare Mexico’s soul

Now that we've run out of other tidying projects, we've been sorting and cleaning up our files of travel photos. We're using Zoner Photo Studio X (zoner.com) for sorting purposes because it lets us tag large groups of photos with key words. Then we can look at related photos together. One thing that jumped out at us was that Diego Rivera obsessed about food almost as much as we do. As we looked at our photos of Rivera murals in Mexico City, we were struck that bread, tortillas, and tropical fruits all turned up even more often than the hammer and sickle of the Communist Party. His sympathies may have been with Marx and Lenin, but his truest devotion was to home cooking. The large...Read More

Duran Central Pharmacy — a prescription for chile cuisine

[caption id="attachment_449" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Counter at Duran Central Pharmacy"][/caption] The drugstore lunch counter is a dying breed all over the country, but it's alive and well in Albuquerque, N.M. Duran Central Pharmacy (1815 Central NW, Albuquerque, N.M., 505-247-4141) has been around for 45 years and in the same location since 1975. It's close to the tourist-haunted Old Town, yet locals make up most of the clientele. The food isn't fancy, but it's definitely special and highly local. Because it's full of chile peppers, it's good for you. The red chile sauce avoids beans and it also eschews such adulterants as cumin. The green chile is also a straight-ahead stew of chopped green chile peppers with just a little sautéed onion and garlic. [caption id="attachment_450" align="alignleft"...Read More