San Miguel de Allende

Traveling from Huatulco in the south all the way to San Miguel in central Mexico didn’t make a lot of sense, in retrospect. It took a couple of short flights to get there; we could have made the trip by bus back when our boat had been near Manzanilllo, which is far closer. But one thing about cruising is that it’s so hard to know just where you’ll be at a given time. Last summer, when we booked the week-long trip and cooking classes, it seemed like the timing would be right. As it turned out, we had moved much further south by then… oh, well.
On the way to San Miguel, we spent a couple of days exploring the state capital city of Guanajuato.
A classic Spanish colonial city, its architecture and sidewalk-café vibe made us feel like we were in Europe.
From Guanajuato it was only about an hour’s drive to San Miguel de Allende, so we stopped in the quiet town of Dolores Hidalgo, on the steps of whose church the Mexican Revolution of independence from Spain literally began in 1810.
Monument to Miguel Hidalgo, father of the Mexican Revolution
Then we settled into our 4-room hotel right off the main plaza in San Miguel and began to walk its cobbled streets.
The city has a very well-preserved historic center, and has been attracting artists and writers from around the world into its vortex since the early 1900’s.
Some of you will remember that several years ago, we spent a week with chef Hugh Carpenter in Napa Valley, cooking and visiting family-owned boutique wineries that are off the beaten path. ‘Camp Napa’ was such a hit for us that we vowed to repeat the experience. Hugh and his wife Teri spend time in San Miguel every year, presenting the perfect opportunity for us to take a ‘vacation’ off the boat.
Each morning, the 16 of us made our way just outside of town to Rancho Casa Luna to cook, laugh and generally carry on for several hours, then enjoy the happy results of our labors around an enormous table with some cervezas. The recipes are perfect: Mexican ingredients, but contemporary gringo techniques like grilling on skewers, chilled soups and unusual salsas.
Rancho Casa Luna
Morning coffee, Mexican style
Hugh (center) tells us how it’s done
Hugh’s wife Teri at the Rancho
… not sure why Stan was so excited about this egg!
Corinna crumbles queso fresco on her roasted chile cocktail sauce
Chicken Satay with Chipotle Honey Glaze and Spicy Banana Salsa
In the afternoon or early evening, we’d meet up again and Hugh and Teri would take us to visit the homes and studios of some of their artist friends.
A Canadian couple makes these colorful, whimsically designed ceramics
One day, instead of cooking we drove to the home of some other friends just outside of town. It’s an old hacienda they bought in the early ’90’s and lovingly restored. Some of the indigenous families who lived on and around the property in support of… or more likely enslaved by… the original Spanish colonialist owners now are employed working the ranch.
Ranch foreman Miguel prepares to ride out
The ladies here prefer to prepare the food in the traditional ways they learned from their mothers and grandmothers. They claim the flavors are much better, and they’re right. Where in general, Mexican tortillas are made from corn flour obtained from the U.S. since NAFTA, at this hacienda they grow and dry their own corn, then take it to a nearby mill twice weekly.

They are very proficient with the old wooden tortilla press
Fresh soft cheese is made by hand as we sit around talking…
… then formed into a small wheel to have with our hot-off-the-griddle tortillas.
Absolutely stupendous flavor and texture! I’m ruined now, can’t get excited anymore by the tortillerias with their cranking machines.
They also made mole (MO-lay) for us using a traditional grinding stone called a matate (ma-TAH-tay.) The word ‘mole’ means mixture; mole sauces vary in their composition, but always have numerous ingredients in addition to the toasted dried chiles. And yes, a bit of chocolate goes in there, too.

I suppose I don’t even need to mention how much we enjoyed our lunch…
The one dark cloud over our adventure was that, while we were traveling, the marina back in Huatulco finally lost its already problematical electrical power supply, leaving Pax without shore power for days while they worked to rewire the entire dock. (One of the transformers aboard Pax had already exploded before we left in response to the power surges, an expensive loss for us.) So Stan had to fly back early, missing four whole days of our trip in order to run the generator aboard the boat for awhile each day, providing the power to sustain our battery bank and freezer contents.
So that sucked.
But it’s part of living aboard a boat, especially as far off the beaten path as we are beginning to wander. The very good news is that Stan is determined to return to San Miguel next year. And Valerie is most certainly down with that!