Assault on the Tastebuds

The pig is not really a sacred animal in Mexico.  They hang them up by their legs or cut off their heads and display them in the open-air markets, squish them in trucks to go to the slaughter house, and serve them at elaborate weddings.  I remember my first Mexican wedding - it was very elegant, with round tables and chairs draped in white linens, wrapped with teal blue ribbons and bows, beautiful matching linen napkins, and in the middle of the table a big bowl of pig skin salsa - I thought it was a regular salsa as most tables always have a bowl of salsa on them - so I started to eat it with tortilla chips and then after a few chews of what I thought was onion, I realized it was like chewing on my arm - skin it was, Chicharron (pig skin) is a very common thing that Mexicans like to eat, I guess you could say it's a bit of a delicacy here - they like to eat it in the form of raw skin sliced up, or pickled and made into a salsa, or it can be dried into spicy or plain potato-like chips in a bag to snack on, they also sell it in the markets in big dried slabs and they eat it with pozole, in the form of a crunchy tostada with salsa ontop, or slow cooked in a spicy tomato sauce served for breakfast.  I have seen people carrying huge bags of this up the streets on their backs on a hot Sunday.  But no matter how they prepare it, I have not warmed up to this dish.  Maybe the simulated chicharron potato chip, but even that I am not sure what's in it.

At my first Mexican birthday party, the main dish was a strawberry tamale with refried beans, which I thought was odd as it was like eating a sweet dessert with beans.  Corn tamales here can be sweet or savory - chicken with green sauce, green chile with cheese, pork with red sauce, prune, coconut, guava or strawberry.

Menudo is a rather repulsive dish, it's a soup made out of cow's stomach, but apparently it is famous for curing hangovers.  The pure smell of this cooking miles away can make me want to vomit more than from the alcohol I drank the night before, it really does smell like the inside of a cow's stomach!  I also inadvertently tried cow's tongue cut up in small pieces disguised as beef in a quesadilla.  I knew right away before even swallowing that it was like chewing on my own tongue!

Pozole is a Mexican soup made with white corn, chicken or pork, and they throw fresh lettuce, onion, oregano, lime and cilantro on top, I thought this was really disgusting the first time I tried it, to put fresh lettuce in hot soup, now I absolutely love it!

The only thing I have not tried yet is the iguana - if I could just catch one...