Mexican Cuisine

June 20th, 2006 by Potato

As I mentioned in my previous reports of Cancun, the food down in Mexico was not very good on the whole. I don’t deal with spicy stuff very well, and almost everything was hot. Some other standbys had strange interpretations (in particular, the bruscetta, which is essentially defined as consisting of tomatoes on bread; it had no tomatoes, just a slice of french bread with a thin tomato paste and some cheese).

One thing that I did like when I was down there was a cucumber dip for nachos. I never caught the name of it: the cucumber dip was always served with a red, spicy paste dip, and the waiters told us a name that seemed to refer to both of them. When we asked for some later, we got only the red paste dip, and had to painstakingly explain the properties of the cucumber dip to get some of that, too. Now, I forgot even the name of the red paste dip.

Anyhow, it was a very surprising how well cucumbers went with nacho chips, and it’s a kind of dip I’d like to make here. However, I’m having no luck trying to Google the recipe, so I’m hoping someone has heard of this stuff before and can help me out. Essentially, it consisted of cucumbers chopped very finely (into roughly 3 mm cubes) in an oil base, along with small amounts of diced tomato and (we think) grapefruit. It had some sort of sweet green herb for flavour (Cilantro, perhaps?), as well as just a hint of spice, presumably from ground cayenne pepper (or from being in the same room as the spicy red paste dip).

Update: I got some supplies and made an attempt at reproducing this. I’m not quite there, but what I made was eminently edible. The recipe is now available in the recipes section as Cucumber Salsa.

One Response to “Mexican Cuisine”

  1. Ben Says:

    I was going to say, it sounds kind of like Salsa Verde, but with cucumbers not tomatillos