Started the new year right with a small open house party with a few friends and a giant pot of menudo. Just the smell of menudo makes me happy. I have a friend who makes it what I think of as “the right way,” meaning the way my family made and ate it when I was growing up. We usually bought it from Tlaquepaque Bakery in Placentia, but my dad would make it occasionally too. I had the side accents too: green onions, oregano, lemon, corn tortillas con queso….yum. As we ate, my friends and I talked about how it’s such a popular cure for hangovers, wondering if it’s the spiciness or tripe or what.
My friend Elva used to run a coffee shop on Lincoln, and her husband Frank usually made her soup, and occasionally on weekends he would make menudo. So the coffee shop offered menudo on weekends! I was a regular customer in the 2000s, and was thrilled to find that they made it the way my family did. So even though she sold the shop three years ago, I called up Elva and asked if Frank still made menudo at all, and she arranged a small batch for purchase. So grateful to them for this little taste of heaven….
I am very sensitive to food lately, maybe because I lost my dad last March? I visited my Aunt Lucy last week after Christmas and her daughter Elaine cooked up a batch of pilaf, beans, and a small green chile pozole, as well as the family’s annual tamale stash. I gorged like a little piggy. Food tastes and smells are so powerful, like hyper stashes of childhood sensations and memories….