~ Hilda Joy
​Our very American Fourth of July culinary celebration can be enhanced by reaching across our Southern border to our Mexican neighbors and borrowing one of their well-known street foods, Eliote, but adapting it to please several people.  After all, we corn-consuming Americans owe Mexico thanks for its agricultural gift of maize.  The word ‘Elote’ derives from ‘Elote,’ a Nahuatl word meaning ‘corn on the cob’ or ‘tender cob.’

Having grown up in Chicago with its large Mexican population, I learned to appreciate Mexican food at an early age.  The first Mexican food I ate as a child was a tamale sold by a street vendor in our neighborhood.  This inauthentic treat, wrapped in paper rather than in a corn husk, acquainted me with masa and a spicy filling and gave me a life-long taste for Mexican food.  I did not know about Elote until much later in life when I was strolling along one of Chicago’s beautiful Lake Michigan beachfronts and getting hungry.  I bought a cob of Elote and fell in love with it and am still smitten by it.

You might not find an Elitero from whom you can buy a single cob on the street, but you can easily grill this dish in a quantity to feed your family and/or friends.
EnJOY

​Jessica Rath

This is for all of you (us) who don’t like to spend a lot of time slicing and dicing. All ingredients go into ONE pot, so there isn’t much to clean up, either. Nonetheless, the taste is exceptional – good enough for a special occasion!

Hilda Joy
Originally Published 6/28/19
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​Many years ago, I read a magazine article entitled In Defense of Stinginess, clipped it, and pasted it into an album I had started of words I wanted to reread.  The premise of the article is that we benefit from making things ourselves and primarily we benefit by foraging for food.  When we moved from an apartment to two acres Northwest of Chicago, I finally had the opportunity to start foraging.  Our property abutted an abandoned railroad right of way that had been built to assist dairy farmers in two counties to move milk to market.  Though rails and ties had been removed, occasionally a spike would appear.  This narrow-wooded area was home to a host of wild foods.

This was about the time that Euell Gibbons published Stalking the Wild Asparagus and other books about looking for wild foods.  Spying a few stalks of wild asparagus growing under a river birch in our front yard, I immediately bought this book, which became a food bible of sorts.  Other teachers were neighbors, friends who grew up in rural environments, and the landscape architect who was charged with laying out the path of a paved bike path through the right of way.

Soon, I was finding and utilizing chokecherry, elderberry, red sumac, raspberries, both red and black, chicory, dandelion, day lilies, ground cherries, wild onion, wild grapes, and, most flavorful of all, wild strawberries.  In retrospect, I realize I bypassed plants.  One of my daughters once said, “If I have children, I shall send them to you so they can eat things like day lily buds, which you say taste much like green beans when steamed, buttered, and salt-and-peppered.”  The local forest preserve provided us with black walnuts and hickory nuts and, when springs freshened, watercress for a short time.  Our property was planted with many fruit trees:  apple, apricot, peach, pear, plum, crabapple; there were also five long rows of Concord grapes.  We were blessed.

In New Mexico, I am finally learning to forage for wild foods, having in Spring been taken on a hunt for chimija and just recently being given a large haul of wild spinach—aka, lamb’s quarters and pigweed—so I could cook delicious quelites.  A friend promises me he will soon help me find sorrel along the Abiquiu roadsides.  This summer, I shall dig up chicory root and roast it to add to coffee.  Right now, I am expecting a windfall of verdolaga, most of which shall be cooked in the local style with bacon and onions.  Some of it will definitely go into the Bode family recipe for verdolaga salad.  I hope our readers will try this salad.  If so, please let me know.