Mixiotes de Noche Buena

with my husband Remi and my twin brothers-in-law Joel and Javier

 A few years ago Remi and I were in Mexico for Christmas.  Dinner for Noche Buena required that he get up at the crack of dawn to kill turkeys with his cousin for dinner.  My Christmas Eve dinner only required early rising for the 18 mile trip to the grocery store in the next town.

his name was Dinner

 Remi's brothers came for dinner and we repeated Thankgiving and ate another multinational dinner for Christmas Eve.  Pollo con chiles y epazote, tortillas, sweet braised carrots, mashed potatoes, mac & cheese, cranberry sauce, spinach salad, and chocolate cake covered in bittersweet ganache with sea salt caramel and Tahitian vanilla bean gelato. 

My brothers-in-law who having been working here for a few years are obsessed with mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce having eaten a few Thanksgiving dinners with us.  I added sweet braised carrots from the Joy of Cooking for a little more traditional American cooking, and they requested mac & cheese.  I had never actually made mac and cheese, but had a great easy recipe for it from Ellen, my bf of 30 years!, which oddly I'd written inside the cover of a Rick Bayless cookbook after eating some at her house a few years ago.  The boys were a little disappointed that I didn't make spicy pecans to top the spinach salad and Remi explained to them that the blue cheese dressing was vinaigrette with queso apestoso (translation: stinky cheese...yes Mom, I know you agree).

Even though they didn't have to kill anything, the guys were in charge of the main dish.  They made mixiotes with chicken with sweet and hot peppers, epazote, and onions en papillote.  In Mexico we would have wrapped it all in the outer skin of the maguey or century plant.  I have had mixiote wrapped in maguey and it is delicious, but also illegal because peeling the outer skin of the plant can kill it. I just read about some sustainably harvested mixiote so I'm pretty sure we won't end up eating our little packets of food with our heads shrouded as if we were having some bizzare dinner of ortolan.

los tres mosqueteros

Javier and Joel are really interested in learning to cook more than eggs. We have been talking about recipes and I'm dying to get Joel's recipe for green sauce which Remi says is fantastic. We have a food exchange going: they teach me the green sauce and I teach them  pierogis with peppers and sausage (you can take the girl out of Cleveland...).  They had pot roast with potatoes somewhere and were asking me about the recipe.  They were pretty into it while I was telling them about browning the meat on all sides and trying to figure out the translations for the various herbs, but put the brakes on when it came to the actual cooking time.  So I guess I know what's for dinner the next time they visit.