Jennifer: read your blog contest requirements with enthusiasm! It really made me think about my various culinary experiences, and so I decided to enter.

Here's my story and recipe.

When I was young and impressionable, and just foraying into the world of flavors and textures, I spent a summer in between college semesters working at a gourmet Mexican restaurant in Massachusetts, called "Casa Mexico". It was a colorful, lively place, full of clay tile interiors, real Mexican wait staff and cooks (unusual in the '70s), and inventive dishes created and copyrighted by the owner, who traveled to Mexico to purchase ingredients, artwork and serving dishes for his restaurant.

These dishes, decorated with birds, flowers and insects, proved to be so popular that customers and staff stole them on a regular basis. My own particular haul of two small square dishes by the now-famous artist Ken Edwards only recently gave up their lives to my tile kitchen floor, proving that in the end, crime does not pay. But I digress.

The cook at the restaurant proclaimed me the only waitress willing to help cook, and regularly let me behind the serving line to observe, as I was fascinated by the techniques and ingredients of authentic mexican cookery. I learned that omelets puff beautifully under the broiler, mole has an infinite number of ingredients, which even the Mexican waiter proclaimed authentic, and that there was nothing better than a bowl of the cook's special spicy zucchini soup, garnished with a fresh spiral of crema, for lunch before my shift started.

The aforementioned Mexican waiter, Manuel, who could crank up his tips to an amount almost equivalent to the dinner bill, by singing and playing guitar at his tables, used to tell me it was just as good as his abuela's (grandmother's). As the recipes were strictly secret, I had to observe in a sly fashion, to obtain them. And so my very close estimation of the recipe:

Spicy Zucchini Soup
2 small red onions, cut into slices, rings in each slice kept together
4 cloves garlic, unpeeled
2-3 serrano peppers, or more to taste
4 small zucchinis, unpeeled, chopped into large chunks
2 quarts chicken stock (homemade is best!)
or 1 can chicken stock and 3 cans water
2 medium russet potatoes, peeled and chopped
A few leaves of fresh young spinach
Mexican crema or sour cream, thinned with a little cream or milk

Brown the onion slices in a very hot dry black iron pan, until the juices from the vegetable ooze and burn. Keep the rings in the slices together, to facilitate turning them in the pan. Let the onion get very very brown, almost black.
At the same time, if there's room, place the unpeeled garlic in the hot pan, and let the skins burn, to roast the garlic until it's starting to be soft. Roast the peppers, too, until the skins blister. Remove.
Roughly chop the onion, peel and chop the garlic and peppers, and combine with the zucchini chunks, chicken stock and chopped potatoes. Bring to a boil, and simmer for 20 minutes, until all are tender.
Puree, add the spinach leaves for a bright color, and pass soup through a strainer to make very smooth.
Serve in heated bowls with a spiral of crema. The crema should be thinned to the same thickness as the soup, ideally, to float on top in a decorative manner.


A few years after I worked there, I received a couple of small checks as a result of litigation regarding some sort of underpayment of staff at the restaurant. Casa Mexico later closed both its locations, and passed onto what must be a long list of restaurants that didn't survive. Don't I wish I could have been at the auction that offered those dishes! I still think about that.