My Favorite Meal
I look up at the clock. 8:14. Six more minutes of practice. I glide across the ice and snowplow stop in front of the score keeper’s box. I lean on the glass and put my ear up to the hockey puck sized hole in the wall.
“The usual?”
I nod. Of course, the usual. I know she’s joking, but sometimes I still can’t believe she has to ask me that.
“Totopos?”
I smile. Sometimes mom splurges and lets us get chips and salsa with dinner. Either she wants to treat the two of us tonight, or she just feels bad for me. She knows how flustered I’ve been getting with skating recently. Between knee surgery and spraining my ankle last fall, which may require another surgery (spoiler alert- it will), ice skating has become a negative headspace for me. The sport I have always loved is now a burden – a nuisance. I don’t get any joy out of the activity anymore; I’m too busy focused on the skills I have lost due to physical inability. I don’t even remember my program anymore – there’s no use in having one when I can’t jump or spin, or anything else that would go into a routine.
I wouldn’t say that eating is necessarily a good coping mechanism, but it definitely helped me get through my fallout with figure skating. On the nights where I would come off the ice early in tears of anger and frustration, I would look forward to picking up take-out of my favorite meal and bringing it home to share with my mom. It was always a torturous ride home with the smell of our dinner filling up the car, but always worth the wait. Once we broke into the brown paper bag, I forgot about how upset I was just a few hours before. It was pretty much a foolproof solution. Again, not recommended, but definitely foolproof.
Although this dish helped get me through the last few years of skating, the hypothetical “birth” of my favorite meal was before I even existed. I can only speak so much on what life was like before I was born, but according to my mom, my addiction to enchiladas suizas with beans and rice began when I was in utero. Weird? Yeah, for me too. When my mom starting working as a goldsmith thirty or so years ago, she would take her lunch breaks with her coworker, Ellen (who is a close family friend of ours now, and even ended up marrying my parents to one another). Working in the college town of Amherst, Massachusetts, there’s a lot of restaurant options to explore. Wednesday was Mexican food day, for which they would head over to La Veracruzana, a little family-owned authentic Mexican restaurant, and enjoy a hot plate of enchiladas. Thirty years ago, my mom established what now is my favorite restaurant in the world, as well as what is now my favorite food in the world. My mom told me she would “eat them every week when I was pregnant with you. And as soon as you were born, you started coming to the restaurant… before you could even eat! And it was one of the first foods you ate, mostly because you stole it off my plate.” Since they were in my system before I actually had a developed system of my own, cheese enchiladas suizas have become, and will probably always be, my favorite dish.
Since I owe my love of enchiladas to my mother, I talked to her about Mexican food, which isn’t a strange thing for us. Whenever we hear of a new place in the area, we want to try it. We’re even willing to travel if the food and experience are good enough…one of our favorite places is two and a half hours away. It’s like a game to us: the search for the best Mexican food, or as I like to call it “will we ever find Mexican food that beats La Veracruzana’s enchiladas?” My answer is “no.” I wasn’t surprised to hear that my mom liked enchiladas for the same reason that I did: “They are a comfort food,” she said. “They make me happy. When I eat enchiladas, especially with you, I feel fulfilled.” This was flattering to hear, but I agree: they really are the perfect comfort food. They’re warm and cheesy, not too spicy or overwhelming in flavor… they’re just perfect. They feel like home.
Although enchiladas are a comforting idea to me, they are foreign in a sense. I don’t know the recipe; I can’t just make them when I’m sad to help cheer me up. I’m not familiar with the process that goes into making them, which in a way distances me from them. How can I not know the recipe to my favorite dish in the world? Well, I obviously know what’s in them, but only on the surface level. I know that the enchiladas are tortilla based, filled with cheese and smothered in a cream based sauce. They’re always served with a side of rice and refried beans. There’s so much more to it, though. It’s not just the ingredients (which I don’t exactly know anyways) but how they are put together. The owner of La Ver creates the dish with such ease; it’s second nature to him. I envy how he can whip up the meal in ten minutes, yet I’ve been trying to replicate the dish for years. Every time I make them, they taste like enchiladas usually do – I mean they’re OK. They pass for a kid making a home-cooked meal, but they don’t even come close to the restaurant’s version. Not only have I tried to make the dish, but my mom has too, on a few occasions. She described all the experiences as “unsuccessful.” She seems to be hopeful, though, about someday possibly recreating the dinner. She thinks “it may be possible to replicate it if we get authentic seasonings, sour cream, cheese blend, and the recipe.” Part of really wants to reach out to the owner and ask about the recipe. I don’t think it would be successful though, especially for a family-run establishment. To me, it seems like the dishes they serve are too personal and special to them to give the recipes out like equations for a math problem. Maybe if I sit down and talk to the owner about how much the dish means to me and how long it’s been a part of mine and my family’s lives, he would point me in the right direction to be able to make the dish at home. Certainly making this meal at home wouldn’t replace going to the restaurant – that’s an experience that is irreplaceable for me. Rather, it’s a way for me to access my favorite comfort food if I end up moving away from the area, or, God forbid, the restaurant closes.
At the end of the day, I know I’m never going to get sick of enchiladas suizas. They have a paradoxical place in my heart, being so familiar with them yet knowing so little about them and what it takes to create them the way I love so much. Perhaps knowing the good, bad, and ugly about the meal will take the magic away from it for me. Maybe there needs to be an unknown element to keep me coming back to the restaurant. Even for the meals we think we know, have been making for generations, have the recipe down by heart, etc., we never know as much as we think we do. There’s always new ways of combining flavors and preparing food to update it and make it different, and this is what makes food such an interesting component of American culture.
Photos
storefront of La Veracruzana.
Recipe
Since this dish comes from a restaurant (and a family-run one at that) I don’t know the recipe, nor would there be a “copycat recipe” online like you can sometimes find for corporate or chain restaurants. From my experience trying to replicate the dish, this recipe is the best I have so far (AKA subject to change).
Cheese Enchiladas Suizas
Ingredients:
- 8 corn tortillas
- ½ cup crema mexicana
- ½ cup heavy cream
- 3 cups shredded oaxaca cheese or queso fresco
- 8 tomatillos, husked
- 1 serrano chile
- ¼ white onion
- 2 cloves garlic
- 1/4 bunch cilantro
- chili powder
- cumin
- salt and pepper
Directions
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Spray a 9×13 baking dish with nonstick cooking spray.
- In a saucepan, combine tomatillos, onion, and the serrano chile. Bring to a boil (about 10 minutes) then remove from heat. Add garlic, cilantro, chili powder, cumin, and salt and pepper.
- Combine crema mexicana and heavy cream, then set aside.
- Take a tortilla, add cheese, and roll it up. Make sure to microwave tortilla for a few seconds before assembling enchiladas, or else they will crack. All enchiladas should sit seam-side down in the baking dish.
- Pour tomatillo sauce mixture over enchiladas, then cover with crema mexicana/heavy cream mixture Add shredded cheese on top.
- Bake for 25-30 minutes, or until cheese is melted. Serve with refried beans and mexican rice.
Links
- Skating Club of Amherst, which I was a member of for about 10 years. Through this club is where I went to figure skating practice. It was a huge part of my life and even though I don’t skate anymore, I met a lot of important people to me through this club. http://www.scamherst.org/
- La Veracruzana: my favorite restaurant, and the place where my favorite meal is made. There is a lot of cultural significance in the food itself, as well as and atmosphere of the restaurant. There’s a piece of a newspaper article on the site that interviews restaurant owner Martin Carrera, or you can just check out the site to see what’s on the menu. http://www.laveracruzana.com/
- Silverscape Designs, a jewelry store where my mother committed 23 dedicated years working as a goldsmith. It was while working here that my mom started going to the restaurant on her lunch breaks. When I was little, my mom would bring me to work with her since she had her own office in the back of the store. I have a lot of fond memories of the jewelry store and the people who my mother worked with. https://www.silverscapedesigns.com/
