- “20 kilos of lemons? There are only two of us, are you sure?”
- “Very safe!”
Colin was amazed at some of the quantities on that historic shopping list.
It was the beginning of the pandemic in Mexico, and we had decided to get away from civilization towards the coast with the camper van.
Weeks?
months?
Nobody knew very well what was going to happen and the news coming from Spain was devastating.
How to make purchases for an uncertain long season, when you don't have a refrigerator and you live in six square meters?
We knew that being on the Pacific coast was going to help us with proteins, but basically everything else we had to take with us.
I bought spinach, basil and cilantro seeds that were mostly used to feed the mice, which had no mercy towards me.
I remember that in my desperate fight against rodents I sacrificed two meters of fishing line (a very precious commodity) to make a hanging seedbed;
Three days later I saw how a mouse climbed down on him as if it were a military operation, and then immediately gave a good account of my newborn seedling.
“Fucking mice” was a phrase that he could repeat ten times a day…
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The perfect ceviche in 10 easy steps
For the first time in my life, making food was not about creating the most delicious menu, but about using perishables in the smartest way and managing nutrients well.
Without a refrigerator, the means I had available to preserve what we caught were salting, smoking or “encevichar.”
The ceviche was undoubtedly the star dish, since in addition to being delicious, it met all the other requirements of the moment, having a full immune system and lasting a couple of days without refrigeration.
In the five months that we were on that beach we never lacked any of the four basic ingredients for its preparation: fish or seafood, onion, chili and lemon (lime).
The first two weeks we were able to add tomato and cilantro, until they started to turn brown;
In the second week, the fashionable companion was the cucumber until it was gone;
In the third, it was the turn of the grated carrot (a common ingredient in ceviches from Baja California Sur), and now, after a month, we were left with bottled olives and ketchup as possible extras, thus getting closer to a ceviche. Acapulcan.
The head and bone of the fish were always used to make broth, the skins were dried to make pork rinds, zero waste.
These small torreznos de mar replaced the tostadas (in Mexico ceviche is usually served on top of or accompanied by “tostadas” which are fried corn tortillas), which due to their addictive nature did not make it to the second week.
The ceviche recipes in Mexico are endless, even in the same state there are discrepancies about which one is authentic, but I won't be the one to start that discussion.
Rather than unleashing controversies about ingredients, I prefer to share my favorite recipe for this dish, which by the way does not fit with any of the “official” ones and which I arrived at thanks to a pandemic and the laws of food decomposition.
There is no doubt that the tastiest ceviche is the one you eat on the beach, with your feet full of sand and the fish you caught yourself, everything else is secondary!
Chef Gloria Pidal, known on social media as Glorionce, lives in a van in Baja California, where she fishes, cooks and records her recipes.
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