Guest Post: Mexico on Acid

Baroque Diva and I have sung gigs together in Boston and Miami, and besides both being sopranos who sing a lot of early music, we share a love of food and of sparkly jewelry (she's a good shopping buddy!). At the moment she's busy moving and getting set up in her new home, so I was excited when she asked me to write a guest posting for Delicious Bytes. So here I go:

Mexico On Acid

Unfortunately, not the fun kind. Like possibly as many as half of all voice professionals, I have trouble with GERD, or gastroesophageal reflux disease. This wouldn’t be so tragic if I didn’t love to eat so much. So it was with great dismay that I felt my GERD acting up to an unusual degree, just days before a long-anticipated musical tour to Mexico City. The idea of having to pass up moles, chiles, Mexican Coke (which is made with real sugar!), fried food, limes—basically everything good about Mexican food—made me want to cry.

For my first meal in Mexico I decided the heck with it; if I already felt horrible I was at least going to eat what I wanted. I ordered chilaquiles, which are fried tortilla strips covered in red or green sauce, crumbly white cheese, crema (which is basically sour cream but so much nicer than our American version), frijoles, and either egg or meat. Showing some restraint, I chose the green sauce because the tomatillo-based salsa verde is usually fairly mild, and also completely delicious. I was in heaven.

And then my stomach tried to KILL me. For the rest of the day. Since I was professionally obligated to sing well that week and therefore not have stomach acid ravaging my vocal chords, I decided to take it easy. And I found that it is actually possible to eat a GERD-friendly (or should I say, GERD-unfriendly?) diet in Mexico City.

I still sighed over friends’ pollo con mole and chile rellenos. But I found that even the milder cuisine of central Mexico is quite lovely. I ate lots of hand-made corn tortillas and lots of Mexican rice (which you can often find made with just veggies, no tomato sauce). Salad was unfortunately off-limits due to plan not to get sick, but there are plenty of cooked vegetables to be found, especially squash and nopales, which are the pads of the prickly pear cactus and taste kind of like tangy green beans but have a slight okra-like sliminess. Knowing that papaya, which is the only fruit I’ve never really liked, is a miracle-worker for digestion, I ingested gobs off it every morning at breakfast, and surprisingly came to like it.But the saving grace of the whole trip, the culinary experience that made me rally each day, was popsicles. Oh, the popsicles! Across the street from our hotel was an ice cream store with a large freezer case full of brightly-colored paletas, or popsicles. The milk-based ones are tasty, but the water-based fruity ones are even better. Full of big chunks of actual fruit and the whole seeds, they’re a safe and scrumptious way to devour the tropical fruits of Mexico. I had one or two every day; the man working in the shop came to recognize the crazy American paleta lady. Never in my life could I have enough guava and mango and guanábana and mamey popsicles, and by the end of tour I’d converted most of my colleagues into paleta fiends as well.

So, it turns out to be quite possible to enjoy the fresh and wonderful cuisine of central Mexico while on (stomach) acid; it just takes a little creativity and a dozen or so paletas.

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More info on Kathryn Mueller can be found at her website!