Pre-cell phone days, as these were…Constantino, our driver wasn’t exactly available, as one might define available today, in this decade…waiting for a text or call, preoccupied with being at attention, trying to keep someone else safe and happy, even to the point of O lets say, dependent upon us, paralyzed with need…he was a grown-up…plus we’d been paying him in advance…plying him with bills…no, Constantino had gone home, had family dinner…he came back to get us…we’d already arranged a meeting time and place when he’d return; after the sun finished dropping out. After the bowl of the sky turned from violet to pink and red, then to black …cell phones still don’t work at Monte Alban anyway…we come strolling down from the landing site, he is waiting at the location when we arrive, leaning against his car, toothpick in his mouth…we haven’t seen any little green men nor any mythical ancient Aztecs save for the Danzantes carved in the rock slabs…just icons…nothing actually still breathing.
We jump in the vehicle and he drives us down to Zaachila. There is very little light pollution here. You look up at night and you see stars. We go to the nicest restaurant in town. He waits for us on the sidewalk…he is already stuffed. His wife, he says, she makes the finest food in town…we go through the front door. A waiter escorts us to a courtyard. We eat a fascinating stuffed crab dish…the crab’s shell is stuffed with crabmeat, topped with hollandaise and a little cheese on top and baked under bread crumbs…it’s not unlike oysters Rockefeller except, of course that it’s crab and it’s served with saltine crackers and lime wedges…we devour chile rellenos, empanadas con hongos and flor de calabasa.…we roll out of the place. He is standing respectfully, talking with another man. He smiles greatly at me. How was everything?
Incredible!
Good, where would you like to go, my friend?  The night is just started. Down to the zocolo? Have a brandy, a coffee? A postre?
Yeah…let’s go do that…go downtown.
Do you like to do shopping?
At night? Here?
Many good shops downtown…I take you.

In his car, we hear the radio, Zaachila radio. He gives us the monologue…it’s radical, political, some kind of peace movement..nobody likes the government here…some violence…the soldiers will come, he says….it’s easy to see…you look out the window, you see stars.

Ah yes, uh… last time I posted the bit about a hollandaise recipe, I got caught up writing about getting fired from some hotel circle San Diego job about 20 years ago. So caught up in fact, that I failed to actually include a recipe for the sauce, so here it is. It’s really quite easy to do…great on eggs, for eggs benedict…

3 egg yolks
2 teaspoon water
12 tablespoons (1 1/2 sticks) unsalted butter, chilled and cut into small pieces
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
2 teaspoons freshly squeezed lemon juice
1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper
Directions
Pour 1-inch of water into a large saucepan; over medium heat, bring to a simmer. Once simmering, reduce the heat to low.
Place egg yolks and 1-teaspoon water in a medium mixing bowl and whisk until mixture lightens in color, approximately 1 to 2 minutes.
Place the mixture over the simmering water and whisk constantly for 3 to 5 minutes, or until there is a clear line that is drawn in the mixture when you pull your whisk through, or the mixture coats the back of a spoon.
Remove the bowl from over the pan and gradually add the butter, 1 piece at a time, and whisk until all of the butter is incorporated. Place the bowl back over the simmering water occasionally so that it will be warm enough the melt the butter. Add the salt, lemon juice, and cayenne pepper. Serve immediately or hold in a thermos to keep warm.

Susan Feniger, celebrity chef stands near a meat cart eating pickled spicy pig hocks at midnight in the middle of one of Oaxaca city’s unlit side streets. The rest of the party is confused.
What do we do now?
I’m not eatin that stuff.
This area is like death, Susan….
Mary Sue just sneers at her. The shops have rolled their metal grates down. Dangerous part of some little Mexican city.
Look at the temperature of that stuff…who wants some poison?
Susan’s like O come on. Please you guys, be real…Chris…eat this…
Seriously? Chef. Chris. Don’t, says the photographer…there’s a writer with us too…I can’t remember her name.
I really don’t care. I’m already sick from food, but whatever, I don’t mind what happens.
Mary Sue as usual says nothing. I never know what’s her trip…she can put on the smile of sarcasm…O she’s a hater. Definitely didn’t have no holes in her shoes when she was a kid…certainly thinks she’s something special.
Alright….ah, tastes good. Yeah that’s Ok, it’s kind of tepid…it’s in the bacteria ‘danger zone’ if you will…the danger zone…crap well, if there’s enough jalapenos in this it should kill everything anyway
Susan says, O lighten up. She’s sticking the 80 degree greasy pork meat in her mouth. In my mouth, tries to get some in Liz’s mouth…Liz is like O nope. That’s sick.
The dangerous neighborhood is crawling with zombies. Susan’s wrists are jangling with silver jewelry. Always with the silver bracelets w/fobs and bells and little iconic doodads…Nose ring, earrings like I don’t know 12 of em or more…

Downtown Ogden’s only Community Garden, The Oasis is located between 24th and 25th and between Monroe and Madison…it’s not super well known yet…it’s by that 7-11 where all the Ogden PD are always hanging out…the neighborhood has fallen into disrepair, to say the least, and those of us who live in the community want to be part of bringing that area back to life. The Sonora Grill and Rickenbacker’s employees went to the Oasis Saturday morning and did some maintenance …shoveled some mulch, picked up some trash, pulled weeds…left no garbage behind…If you want to do something to satisfy your soul, hit the Oasis, bring a friend and a Frisbee…volunteer a little time to checking in on the place. Bring the kids…It’s fun, free and easy.

So whats the deal with Monte Alban? Where was that outer space thing going…well, it’s a collection of giant rudimentary pyramids and there’s something in there that we know as a ‘Ball Court’ where the native Zapotecs used to play a dangerous and difficult game of like one-on-one soccer and but the ball was a human skull, or a rounded rock like the size of a human skull and you could only use your shoulders, knees, body, face, whatever, but you couldn’t use your hands and you had to get the ‘ball’ in the Ball Court’s goal, which was quite small and the winner of the game got to live and the loser was killed. Sounds pretty wacko…but at the same time, exciting. But what else were they doing? Not like they had to go to jobs or shovel snow…all these cats were in the business of building these Pyramid structures using technology they learned from The Aliens. And the real big clue to the Zapotecs from Monte Alban/Aliens from Rigel 12 connection is right in your face. Very obviously situated in the middle of the place…one of the stone structures is not in the shape of a pyramid. It is an aberration. It seems like it doesn’t belong there, right in the giant Monte Alban compound. This stone structure, some experts believe looks like a ship. Possibly, it’s supposed to be a rocket or some kind of spaceship from out in the physical universe.
I don’t really know. I mean scientists will tell you that we seem to know all this history about these like ancient ‘rituals’ and stuff and ball courts and things. So why can’t there be space aliens too, right? I figure it’s a 50/50 chance there are aliens. Either there are or there are not…so since you can’t rule out Aliens 100%…you really can’t say for sure they don’t exist…and so anyway, my traveling companion, K and I are discussing this while we watch the sunset and we’re looking down from the pyramid’s stairs at this structure which is even called ‘The Ship’ and I’m saying to K,
Are you hungry? We should go back down into that town we passed and eat some mole.
Zaachila?
Yeah, Zaachila…get some mole, yeah?

It’s awesome here in Ogden today because it’s still quite hot outside. I am a hot weather person. I used to love living and cooking in San Diego. It’s no secret. Cooked for 8 years in Las Vegas as the Executive Chef of the Border Grill inside Mandalay Bay Casino, Hotel and Resort on the Las Vegas Strip…I like it hot. Hot, like Mexico and Mexican food…Las Vegas is trashy though… however, San Diego…I lived there on and off for a couple years, between bouts of San Francisco, learning to cook, losing jobs, you know, on to the next one. But San Diego, there was a truly great city.
There’s a lot of great food there. Some stupid food too…I got fired at one hotel for refusing to make hollandaise sauce from a powdered hollandaise sauce mix.

Every afternoon I put in several prime ribs to roast and I removed a couple of the cooked ones for service…this hotel, we sold tons of it. We served great big deadly slabs of prime ribs and topped it with space-age Hollandaise sauce that we made from a secret yellow powdered chemical mix. Better living through chemistry. Just add water.

I had been told to use it by the sous chef. He would get busted and I would get fired if I didn’t go with the yellow powder but I just couldn’t. I knew what I was supposed to do, but I could make it 10 times better with actual fresh ingredients and it costs less and takes half the time. So every afternoon when the sous chef walked away, I slipped around the corner to the refrigerator, grabbed the eggs and vinegar, clarified some butter and threw together some delicious hollandaise sauce. It takes about a second and a half. No one ever knew…until the fateful afternoon the Executive Chef caught me in the act and insisted that I use the powdered hollandaise sauce mix. I refused.

I said, no I won’t, this powdered sauce is garbage!
He said, in his Swiss accent, O.K. Chris! You must do what I tell you or you get off of my line and don’t come back.
Good! Fine! I’m too good for this kitchen anyway!
And I rolled up all my knives in my knife roll and I split. Of course I needed the job pretty bad, but I had my self-respect. I can be a little stuck-up. A little elitist…Believe me, it’s not that hard to make hollandaise from scratch. And then I was out the door and on to the next one…

K and I were just watching the late afternoon sun go down in the west. We were sitting on a row of stairs going up a pyramid…One of the several pyramids of Monte Alban just outside of the city of Oaxcaca…while were there in the area we had seen so much, done so much, eaten so much…Grasshopper pizza AKA tlayudas con chapulines…seriously…and we had a driver, Constantine. We paid him about 100 bucks and he was glued to us for days. You gotta do that in Oaxaca; get a driver!
Monte Alban is a vast compound on top of a mountain that once, a couple thousand years ago was filled with people who probably thought it was a very spiritual location…it’s a pretty good place to watch a sunset, I can tell you. There is also some speculation about whether or not this is one of the locations where the space ships landed…but it was inevitably colonized by European aliens, not little green men from outer space.

I bumped into a local guy at the grocery store today; someone who recognized me from Sonora Grill. Out doing some Sunday family grocery shopping. We each introduced our respective families to each other and then we talked about cooking and specifically about making a roasted tomato, garlic, jalapeno salsa…and he was getting ingredients with which to make the salsa…we just had a good chat.
I grew up in a high population density type location, so it’s taken some time to adjust to the one-on-one that sometimes occurs in Ogden…my social skills need a bit of work. I was grateful for just being able to talk to someone about Mexican food. Just being a chef. Being able to eat as much food as I possibly can and then never getting too fat…A chef really doesn’t eat as much as folks might imagine. We’re too busy running around cooking. Another opportunity to be grateful; I get to go to work in the kitchen almost daily. It has truly been a blessing. Thanks, grocery store.

Well, snow is upon us. I can feel it in the air. It hailed like mad last night downtown. I just live several blocks from the restaurant (which is quite convenient for when you need a fix of some awesome Mexican food). They opened a new coffee place down by the Sonora Grill. It’s nice. The cold rain and the coffee, ahhh…it all reminds me of a time when I was a younger Executive Chef in Portland, Oregon. I had a good time in the Pacific NW… Making Northwest style food, like salmon and berries and hazelnuts and spring greens and whole lambs and all that sort of thing…hitting Grateful Dead hippy comunes type organic farms on Sauvie Island on the weekends…kind of had that green culture vibe in Portland. I think it exists here in Ogden too.

The company I worked for, McCormick and Schmick’s had sent me to Seattle to be the Executive Chef at this Seafood joint downtown. It was an awesome job, for sure. I loved every cold and wet, coffee-drinking minute of it. I can handle rain. Snow, that’s a little tougher…

Anyhow, the company loved me, respected me, and sent me to the big city to basically be the Hatchet Man and fire everyone in the restaurant, one at a time… It’s a hardcore business for sure…I recall standing there in the Seattle drizzling mist, across the street from the restaurant with a paper cup of Starbucks coffee in my hand and a cigarette in my mouth, thinking…who am I gonna fire today? Which one of these poor guys is going home without a job today? and then I’d walk in and cut someone’s head off…after several years of that, I was ready to quit smoking for sure…I did too!

Did anyone see the travel channel’s show No Reservation with Anthony Bourdain in Mexico City? Man they were eating tacos like there was no tomorrow! They were eatin eyeball tacos! But then the bullfight in Puebla. I don’t know if I’m for the bull or the matador…I’ve been to Mexico, but I’ve never been to Puebla. If anyone’s going down there and wants to sport for my ticket and put me up for a few days or something…I could be quite entertaining! We can eat mass amounts a tacos! My favorite are the tongue tacos. Unfortunately, I recently had some at a particular taco truck in the vicinity that were…disappointing, let’s say… I’m a bit of a Bourdain acolyte. It’s true. But who doesn’t love to go places? Seriously, hook a chef up with a weekend in Mexico! I got my passport and my Spanish is still pretty good…