This is the Ceasar Salad from the only known Mexican restaurant in Pasto, Colombia. A family friend of Mario’s, my generous and beautiful host was not quite sure what to do with it. She had traveled to the U.S. to visit her sister; she’d been to cities I’d never seen. She commented that North Americans do not eat proper lunches, as in Colombia, where lunch is unequivocally the meal of the day. She didn’t understand how people could eat so much in the evening. And, for all her travels and as worldly as she was, she did not understand how people ate salad. Literally. We talked about how to put the leaves on a fork and eat them.
It was a big contrast to Bogota, where one of the most frequented restaurant chains, Crepes & Waffles, has a variety of salads to offer. Lunch on a good day means a line well outside of Crepes, though I think most come for the crepes.
It reminded me of my host family in Bangalore, India almost five years ago. My American roommate and I decided to cook for our host mother and family, a strong Kerela woman who helped feed the neighborhood. They hated the salad. ”Pass, um, the leaves, please…” her daugther-in-law grimaced at the sight of them. Uncooked vegetables? Really? Who eats that? Few in Bangalore and few in Pasto.
And who in Colombia eats Mexican food? Few and far between. (“Latino,” may be a generic term in the U.S., but anyone familiar with Tex-Mex, or Mexican at all, knows the difference.)
Crepes and Waffles!!! Yum!
few in Beijing too … all of us living in the high-rises wanted to cook dinner for our families as a thank you for the countless dumpling parties they had thrown for us. we were supposed to be in charge of preparing all of the food, but we got to the party and found that a full Chinese meal for 30 or so people had been prepared as well– probably anticipating that our dishes would not go over will with the Beijing crowd. and they didn’t. Jess and I made a salad that our ay-yi and shu-shu genuinely tried to like (in spite of our ay-yi asking us repeatedly if we needed to use her wok to cook it) but no one else would even touch. lesson learned …
Yea man, what’s up with those leaves?
Our host sis’s reaction was amazing in Bangalore…To think of it, I didn’t eat too much salad at home growing up, only when people came over, (my parents didn’t really know how to make all that raw stuff taste good)…and to this day, I still don’t really eat salads and probably won’t unless I plant them myself (fresh stuff is overpriced and very wilty in AK). Ensalada in Bolivia is usually some semi-cooked veggies cut up small & drenched in mayonaise…Blech…It seems most places prefer to cook their veg…Buen provecho!