La Gourmandista

I’m Mexican and proud of my roots. The kitchen is where I keep the most treasured memories of my childhood. It was there that my mother first taught me to cook, when I was eight years old. Mom insisted with great affection and, throughout my youth, tirelessly encouraged me to try new things.

Thanks to all those carefully kept memories, I always wanted to be a cook. Even so, it wasn’t until 2015 that I stepped up to the stoves of Le Cordon Bleu in Paris to learn traditional French cuisine and pastry, as well as oenology. After my training, I was lucky enough to intern at a great Parisian establishment, a restaurant awarded two stars by the prestigious Red Guide at the time. I learned a tremendous amount in a very short time.

Back in Mexico, devoted to and in love with the savoir-faire the French are so proud of, I wanted to learn everything my country has given the world. Because who doesn’t get hungry at the thought of some good tacos — real tacos, that is? So I decided to dive into traditional Mexican cooking. I learned about nixtamal —cooking corn with lime to make tortilla dough— and about the seven moles of Oaxaca. Moles are sauces, almost always spiced and highly characteristic of my country’s cuisine; I promise to tell you more in my posts. I discovered ingredients, dishes and even festivities I had never heard of.

From then on, I felt ready to reinvent myself and devote myself entirely to cooking. The time had come to reap the harvest my mom had sown for years, although this time I did it in the United States, on the outskirts of the capital. That is where my journey began. At first I was just a pair of small hands, working as a kitchen assistant (a fancy way of saying dishwasher, ha). Over time I began working as a private chef in people’s homes, and even as a chef instructor, to share what I had learned. One day, to my delight, I found myself in front of a group teaching them how to make tamales, that nixtamalized corn dough wrapped in its own husk. Who would have thought?