Experiments and Surprises

Appears in

Food from My Heart: Cuisines of Mexico Remembered and Reimagined

Published 1992

About

I left Guadalajara in 1971 with no clear idea of what I wanted to do next. It was one of the floundering, unhappy times a lot of young people went through in those days, during or after college. Up to that time my life had been governed by a strict code of rules and ethics that no longer applied in the whole distressing shift of values that was going on then in the world. I was unable to think of any future plans at all and was just generally unstrung.

Cooking helped me through this bad period. My father and I spent a lot of time alone together, holed up on the ranch. The two of us would go into the kitchen and cook for hours, experimenting with everything under the sun. But mostly not Mexican! My Tía Panchita, my mother’s sister, gave us a lot of the Lebanese recipes she had learned when she married my Tío Ernesto Ellis, whose family was Lebanese. (There are a lot of Middle Easterners in Mexico.) We made Arabic bread, pomegranate jelly, baby eggplants stuffed with walnuts, grilled loin of lamb with the lamb tripes wrapped around it.