Comida de Campos
Here’s a nice way to spend a Saturday: Get up early, take a few friends, drive towards Taos, walk through an organic farm, pretend you’re cooking outdoors and finally eat what you were supposed to cook. You can have all this and more at Comida de Campos (PS: Web-site for ‘Comida de Campos’ still under construction as of 08/14/2002).
Serious loser alert: I manage to lower exposure compensation on my camera by 1 stop early in the day and not realize it until the end of the day, which means that all pictures are under-exposed. I tried to rescue them in Photoshop, but I think I was not successful for all of them.
It’s Saturday 07/27 early in the morning. Candice and I wait for our house-/dog-sitter Elke. She’s supposed to take care of the dog while we’re at Comida de Campos. Funny enough Elke is also from Germany and moved to Santa Fe a few years ago. She also one of the ones who can’t imagine going back to where she came from. Elke has been taking care of the our neighbour’s dogs for quite some time now and we met her while she was up here.
Soon after she arrives, Pam and Joe show up as well and we get on the way up towards Taos.
It takes us about 1.5 hrs to get to Embudo, which is right between Santa Fe and Taos. We get off of the main road at the famous Embudo Station (which is, or was, a good place for a nice dinner) and drive on a dirt road along the Rio Grande for another 2 miles.
When we finally arrive at Comida de Campos we are, of course, at least 45 mins late. Margaret (the owner of the farm and cooking school) and her son are waiting for us and so is Rob. Rob is a Yoga-instructor (for some seriously famous people, who I don’t want to mention here) and stays at the house that Margaret rents out – he will join us for the cooking class today.
Margaret offers breakfast. Gladly accepted – thanks! Home-made blueberry muffins – yum. New Mexico version of oatmeal – not so yum in my opinion, but I was never a fan of oatmeal.
Introductions make the round and we find out a bit about everybody.
Then Margaret starts off with a tour of the farm and the collection of raw cooking material. We are supposed to get some fresh herbs, corn, zucchini, chilli and whatever else we need for today’s cooking class.
So here we are, inspecting the farm: Joe, Pam, Candice (blocking Margaret) and Rob. We meet the mini-goat; learn how to select chilli (the skin is flat); hear about the problems of an organic farm run without pesticides and select all the vegetables we need for lunch. Margaret is nice enough to throw in some extra pieces for us to take home.
We take the vegetables back to the open-air kitchen, which is a marvelous installation, because it allows for the preparation of food in the open; I mean you can sit out there, clean the corn and see a butterfly right in front of your nose. Margaret also has a really cool old stove, which looks like it could be right out of an old movie.
We start preparing the dough for tortillas, following one of Margaret’s recipes. It’s the first hand-on session and even easy enough for me. While we mix the ingredients Margaret does not stop chatting and all of us agree later on that we had the best time, because we felt immediately at home and comfortable.
Left and rigtht of the stove are two Adobe horno ovens which are used for the ethnic parts of the cooking exercises. Margaret shows and explains the process of cooking food in those horno ovens. The left has been heated earlier this morning and a nice fire is burning right in there. Margaret moves the coal and ashes to the sides and starts throwing in some corn.
Next she takes a nice piece of pork (shoulder?) which she rubbed with a mixutre of garlic, salt and pepper, and wraps the piece of pork in aluminum foil. Finally the piece of meat in foil gets wrapped in a wet sack (you can see it in the picture below in her right hand) and throw into the oven.
Now that all the ingredients are placed into the oven, the little wooden door gets placed over the opening and the girls have a lot of fun getting their fingers dirty and sealing the door in place with some mud. Pam and Joe in front of the sealed Adobe oven, after her fingers are clean again …
Margaret has lots of flowers in the cooking area and one of the bushes attracts Admiral butterflies. I take a few pictures of those huge butterflies and we are told that the one on the picture is a regular visitor. The broken right wing makes it easy to identify it. Joe also wants to play with the camera and takes the picture on the right.
In the meantime Margaret takes care our tortillas on the oven. See the huge one? That’s mine …
The same way we filled the left Adobe oven, the same way we are going to reverse the process on the right one and empty it in order to get to our lunch. The actors: the closed oven, which was filled with the same stuff the day before by Margaret; a group of hungry Santa Feans; the opened oven with the food visible.
Margaret filled the oven the day before and the food has been in there for about 10 hours. The principle is very easy: heat it up, move ashes and coal, throw food into oven, seal oven, fire dies, oven stays hot, cooks food slowly. She cooked the same way for up to 300 people. The Adobe oven was slightly larger, but the principle the same.
After a few more dishes, it’s time to indulge on all the food right next to the kitchen area in the open. Besides the tortillas, we have fresh salsa, Calabacitas Con Maiz (squash, corn, onion, garlic) and Carnitas del Horno (the aluminum-sacked pork shredded and heated up in a pan with onions). The dinner is crowed with Margarets own Vanilla ice-cream.
This concludes the “offical” part of the cooking class, but we’re in for a special treat. When we arrived we see something that looks like a cave entrance in the distance (see second picture below). Margaret confirms that it is indeed a cave and the guest house of one of her neighbours. She checks with the neighbour and we are allowed to briefly visit the place. So we walk over there to check out the cave.
The interior is absolutely breath-taking. We can’t belive that this is man-made and has been carved out of the mountain. This is a home made from solid stone with beautiful carvings on the walls. Take a look at the two pictures below:
After finishing the tour of the cave we are allowed to see yet another guest-house in progress from the same guy who built the cave home. Margaret’s dogs follows us around and enjoy a quick visit to the Rio Grande, which seems to be rather muddy that day.
On the last stop on the way back to the kitchen we get to see the kittens of the cat that has been around us all day long and Pam can’t help it and has to squeeze them for a while:
Early afternoon we leave Comida de Campos with a full belly, a few plastic bags full of fresh produce and certainly some nice memories.
Thanks Margaret, we had a great time and hope we were good guests. And we did use that produce the same day – evidence below.
August 16th, 2002 at 8:14 am
The photos and narrative are great. However, by seeing my photo I’ve just realized that maybe I’ve been enjoying too much of my own cooking…..
Oh, well, life is good.
thanks,
m
March 3rd, 2005 at 10:33 am
you need to put recipes on this web site