FFF – Mexican Style Rice Fun Fact

Click here for printable recipe: Mexican Style Rice

Fandango’s Friday Flashback (FFF) invites bloggers to highlight a post written on this very date in a previous year.  Last year, on November 8, I posted:

Mexican Style Rice – A Popular Side and Staple – click here to visit post

As shown above, the recipe calls for chopped carrots and green peas as add-ins (click here for printable recipe.)

The picture at the top of the post, however, features a plate with fresh chiltepín peppers instead of peas.  Traditionally, Chiltepín peppers only grew wild, and they were found fresh at small local markets or street produce stands; my mom told me that when she was a little girl, some ladies used to pick them from wild bushes “up near the hills” of Coahuila (her natal Mexican state) and sell them in town, on the streets; people would add a few of the green pearls to their tacos, or drop them in the pot while cooking rice.  I imagine peas were not available there for the most part, being a semi-desert region, but the rice sill got studded with green veggies (or was this the original version, and peas were used later on because it was hard to find chiltepín peppers in larger cities?)

Nowadays, it is possible to find dry chiltepín peppers in packages at some supermarkets in Mexico (as seen in the photo), but it is still not common to see fresh ones.  I saw fresh chiltepín for the first time in my life outside a market in Culiacán, capital city of Sinaloa, during my recent trip to Mexico, and could not help buying a mound and preparing the rice (pictured at the top of the post) at my sister’s place, to re-create the Mexican Style Rice from my mom’s childhood.

 

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I am joining Fiesta Friday # 301 with Angie @ Fiesta Friday, this week co-hosting with Antonia @ Zoale.com