Mi Cocina
Recipes and Rapture from My Kitchen in Mexico: A Cookbook
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
NEW YORK TIMES AND LOS ANGELES TIMES BESTSELLER • JAMES BEARD AWARD WINNER • IACP AWARD WINNER • A highly personal love letter to the beauty and bounty of México in more than 100 transportive recipes, from the beloved food writer and host of the Babish Culinary Universe show Pruébalo on YouTube and Food52’s Sweet Heat
“This intimate look at a country’s cuisine has as much spice as it does soul.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
ONE OF THE BEST COOKBOOKS OF THE YEAR: Bon Appétit, NPR, The Boston Globe, Food & Wine, Vice, Delish, Epicurious, Library Journal
Join Rick Martínez on a once-in-a-lifetime culinary journey throughout México that begins in Mexico City and continues through 32 states, in 156 cities, and across 20,000 incredibly delicious miles. In Mi Cocina, Rick shares deeply personal recipes as he re-creates the dishes and specialties he tasted throughout his journey. Inspired by his travels, the recipes are based on his taste memories and experiences. True to his spirit and reflective of his deep connections with people and places, these dishes will revitalize your pantry and transform your cooking repertoire.
Highlighting the diversity, richness, and complexity of Mexican cuisine, he includes recipes like herb and cheese meatballs bathed in a smoky, spicy chipotle sauce from Oaxaca called Albóndigas en Chipotle; northern México’s grilled Carne Asada that he stuffs into a grilled quesadilla for full-on cheesy-meaty food euphoria; and tender sweet corn tamales packed with succulent shrimp, chiles, and roasted tomatoes from Sinaloa on the west coast. Rick’s poignant essays throughout lend context—both personal and cultural—to quilt together a story that is rich and beautiful, touching and insightful.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
In the intensely personal essay that opens this fantastic cookbook, Mexican American food writer Rick Martínez compares his midlife desire to learn about the food of Mexico to his coming out as gay in his early twenties—he needed to fully explore an intrinsic part of himself. Martínez quit his job, bought a car, and ate his way through all 31 of Mexico’s states and Mexico City, trying everything from the velvety whole-pig carnitas of downtown Mexico City to the grilled octopus skewers of coastal Oaxaca. His stories and the gorgeous photos that accompany them are amazing, but the heart of Mi Cocina is the 100+ recipes. Martínez is wonderfully precise, even telling you in vivid, tactile terms what your tortilla dough should feel like. (Pro tip: Get a digital scale—they’re inexpensive and immensely useful.) Half thought-provoking memoir and half eye-opening recipes, Mi Cocina is not your average Mexican cookbook.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A 19-month culinary quest through Mexico results in this excellent recipe collection from erstwhile Bon Appétit editor Martínez, his debut. While he highlights the country's most popular regional dishes, Martínez explains his recipes are guided, first, by his "own preferences"—which avoid labels of "authentic" (ones that, "as a public-facing cook in this industry," he admits to being "complicit" in perpetuating), yet take a practical approach to ingredients. The native and hard-to-find chilhuacle amarillo chiles in Oaxacan mole, for instance, can be substituted with guajillos. Mexican basics such as tortillas, beans, and salsas are accompanied by a flavor-profile chart of dried chiles and helpful tips (to "coax a deep... and nutty flavor" out of arroz rojo, toast the rice until it's "really browned"). Mexico City proved to be a melting pot of cuisines, and Martínez also shares recipes for the shawarma-like tacos Árabes he enjoyed in Puebla and a tamarind-infused sweet-and-sour shrimp stir-fry that nods to Chiapas's Chinese immigrants. He also serves up an impassioned defense for cooking with lard (which is lower in saturated fat than butter) and cops to a favorite recipe: pollo al pastor, his chicken rendition of the classic pork dish. This intimate look at a country's cuisine has as much spice as it does soul.
