You developed a recipe for buñuelos for your cookbook; tell us more about why these sweet treats are a holiday staple for you. Vangie: Buñuelos are just as important to have as a holiday staple as are tamales and biscochos. This tradition is as old as time with Mexican families. You will see them in the stores as soon as winter starts. My mother would always make them the day before Christmas so they would be fresh. She never liked to make food too much ahead of time, so you can imagine how busy we were the week before Christmas preparing everything. How does the round buñuelos recipe differ from the buñuelos recipe for the tree cookies? Is it a different recipe? Vangie: Yvette made this simplified version using our basic uncooked flour tortilla dough recipe and cookie cutters to shape them into ornaments. We usually let the dough dry longer before frying to keep the edges from curling upward as they dry.
Your cookbook is coming out soon. Tell us more. Veronica and Yvette: Muy Bueno: Three-Generations of Authentic Mexican Flavor offers Mexican recipes from the hearts of three generations: our grandmother Jesusita, mom’s favorite recipes and a more Latin fusion contribution from Yvette and me. Muy Bueno takes readers through a journey of oldworld northern Mexican cuisine, traditional south of the border home-style dishes, and Latin fusion recipes and treasured stories. The cookbook is due out fall 2012 published by Hippocrene Books and will have 100 of our favorite recipes. Every recipe will have a full color photo by our fabulous photographer Jeanine Thurston. Recipes include traditional and contempo-
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rary Mexican recipes, from classic Enchiladas Montadas (Stacked Enchiladas) and Menudo, to lighter, modern dishes like Pan Fried Tilapia with Mango and Avocado Salsa. This cookbook is a rich history of our family with anecdotes throughout. It will also include a glossary of chile peppers, and instructions on essential techniques like roasting chiles, making tamales, fresh tortillas, and red chile sauce. The main reason we started this cookbook was to pass along our favorite family recipes and stories to our children. It wasn’t until Yvette and I moved away from El Paso that we missed our family recipes and that prompted us to write them down and eventually led us to write this cookbook.
Your grandmother’s recipes influence your cooking and inspired your blog. In what ways would you like your blog to influence a new community of cooks? Veronica: We aren’t professionally trained cooks but have learned quite a bit about cooking just by being present in the kitchen. think there’s a new generation of people out there who want to preserve their family’s culture through food—it has for us and we love what’s it’s done in helping us preserve so many of our childhood memories. The most we can hope for is that others will get in the kitchen, try our recipes and like what they made.
Yvette with Grandma
Veronica with Grandma