Origins, Vegan Mexican Cooking, and Caffeine with Writer Andrea Aliseda
A Q&A with one of my favorite writers!
Today’s Q&A is a long time coming! Andrea and I have been internet friends for a few years now (her work is frequently linked here) and we finally got to meet IRL on my most recent trip to LA. If you don’t know her, you should and now you will. Andrea Aliseda is a veg-mex writer and recipe developer whose work has appeared in Bon Appetit, Whetstone, Epicurious, and more. She’s the Kitchen’s guest editor for Latinx Heritage Month. Make sure you follow her on Instagram and Twitter. I’ve learned so much from her work and am excited to share this Q&A with you!
Abigail: Can you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about being the Kitchn's guest editor for Latinx Heritage month?
Andrea: Yes! My name is Andrea Aliseda, but my friends call me Dre. I’m a writer whose work focuses on Mexican foodways, culture, origins, and history through a vegan lens. When I’m not working on stories, I write poetry and fiction. Currently I live in LA, with two husky-mutts and my partner.
For this Latinx Heritage month I guest edited for The Kitchn. I was tapped by the incredible Hali Bey who was spearheading the project. For the package we wanted to land on something personal to my experience as a vegan Mexican American and my work. I had been thinking about quelites by the time she had reached out and was fascinated by the role they play in contemporary Mexican cuisine given how ancient they are. They go back further than the Mayan and Aztec civilizations and I read somewhere that they might even go back further than maíz (but don’t quote me on that!), and they’re still used today. Quelites having thousands of years of food memories, and seeing them just sprout out from the ground, to eating them in modern dishes, I mean talk about lineage!! That’s powerful. It’s really fascinating to me being vegan in a culture that exalts meat in the mainstream, but the foods that it casts its shadow on tell a very different story. One that continually points to beans, fungi, maíz, vegetables, grains, chiles, and quelites––which are at the core of Mexican and Indigenous cuisines.
It was a really lovely experience to work with Hali again, to work with the The Kitchn team. And to bring two incredible voices in the vegan space into the fold, Ernesto Gonzalez and Alex Cardenas, who really care about origins in the work they do and what they express about the foods they eat. It was my first time being an editor since my time at my college paper so, it was really cool being part of every step, and being so closely involved in the creative direction, being at the shoot! It was a really good time.
Abigail: What was your relationship with food like as a kid? Were you always in the kitchen and what did you like to eat?
Andrea: As a kid my family leaned more on eating out than on home-made meals. Both my parents didn’t really know how to cook, though my mom did love to bake for a while.
We’d eat tacos very very frequently, there was one around the block from our house which marks my internal compass in Tijuana. Taquerias were our version of church too, because we’d regularly cross the border on Sundays to bow our heads at taquerias when we moved to San Diego. My favorites were carne asada and al pastor, with a ton of lime juice and no salsa––because I couldn’t hang (yet). I was really a very hungry child, that hasn’t changed much, and loved eating good food.
When we lived in Tijuana we’d go to a little Spanish restaurant sometimes and I gorged on their paella and this octopus dish that was literally just octopus in a sauce. I loved all kinds of seafood, but was always super picky about land animal meats. My mom would have to trick me to get me to eat things like menudo, which is made with tripe, by saying it was chicken.
In San Diego it was a lot of fast food. We loved the egg McMuffins from McDonald’s and hash browns, KFC, a peanut butter pastry near our Karate dojo, and IHOP.
When I did sneak into the kitchen, I’d make my half burnt quesadillas or avocado toast snacks. I tried making eggs once with tons of lime, uuff I’ve always loved lime, and the result was a sour batch of hard scrambled eggs. I was in heaven. I remember wanting to learn to bake cakes so I asked for an easy bake oven, where I made many frustratingly undercooked cakes.
The scene in Matilda where she makes pancakes was huge for me, so sometimes I’d try to make pancakes. She’s my original influencer.
Abigail: How do you approach cooking and developing veg-mex recipes? I loved seeing the empanadas you made inspired by Paola Velez. Do you have any favorites or exciting ones you're working on now?
Andrea: Home-cooking is mostly a very intuitive, creative, meditative space. I let myself be guided by my senses, tuning out and listening to podcasts or music. I especially love the creative process of veganizing recipes, and figuring that part out myself. But I also love recreating other people’s recipes. I’m super influenced and inspired by what I see (I’m a very visual person) too, so often just watching the process will ignite something even if it’s not an exact recreation. I’m no stranger to busting out my phone and looking up a recipe too, in fact I get a lot of joy out of experiencing other people’s dishes in the intimacy of my kitchen. I really need to start growing my cookbook collection, though!
When I made those empanadas I had literally just watched Paola’s episode on Selena and Chef, it was around 7 p.m. and the burning desire to make them put me right in my kitchen without a second thought. I didn’t have everything I needed, but I managed, and they came out so good! Now I know banana blossoms are delicious in empanadas! For the most part, unless I plan for it, it can be very much, cook with what you got, which I think can inspire really creative approaches to things. It’s not by design, but it is super helpful when it comes to recipe development.
I can get really hooked on stuff too and have different phases of foods or dishes I’m obsessed with (i.e. cake, escabeche, the TikTok lemon pasta, etc). But also, sometimes the pendulum swings and I’m writing a lot so my partner will take the cooking load. Or we’ll just have easy things that are in rotation, like vegan quesadillas, beans, rice, salads, sandwiches, pasta, tofu, tacos, soups, etc.
My approach to developing recipes is inspired by my home-cooking, by nostalgic foods that I’m craving or want to veganize, or by a client’s request. Recently I was asked to develop a recipe for champurrado. I adapted Doña Ángela’s recipe from De mi Rancho a Tu Cocina for it, because we grew up using the little instant packets of maizena for atole or champurrado and not from scratch. I also got to develop a twist on champurrado, which I’m really excited about, I use black sesame butter and ufff I really dug the results. Recipe development is not as free flowing or easy going as home cooking, though it can be a product of something that was, it’s super calculated, and much more precious. And that always makes me feel a bit insecure about its results because it’s hard to mimic intuition in these scenarios. I wish all recipes were guides instead of set rigid rules. Even so, I really enjoy that kind of work. I love the process of veganizing, adapting, and developing recipes, I have a lot of fun doing that. The constraints are a welcome creative challenge.
Abigail: You describe your work as origin seeking. What does that mean to you?
Andrea: I’m really fascinated by getting to the root of something. Like yeah we eat this food, okay but why? Where does this food, dish, ingredient come from? What context was it born out of? I love imagining people in the past and desperately wish I could be a fly on the wall and know what they were talking about and what they were up to when nixtamal, for example, was invented. In Mexico they’d call that being chismosa (nosey) but I like to call it journalistic curiosity haha. It’s not a coincidence my favorite marvel stories are the origin stories. I wish I could write the origin stories of all sorts of foods and ingredients in a way that was easy to trace and tell. Unfortunately due to colonialism, so much history and text was destroyed, so it makes it really difficult to pinpoint exact origins. It’s a big puzzle, but I love making the connections in Mexico and through the Americas. I think going vegan set this curiosity into high gear because of my experiences being told that I couldn’t be meatless and Mexican. And now I’m sort of uncovering all this stuff that points otherwise, that reveals the origin of a very complicated nation that is Mexico, of its land and cuisine, and it’s so very plant-heavy.
Abigail: Some of my favorite stories you've written take something that seems trendy or trivial (like colorful tortillas or celebrity tequila) and find something way deeper. How do you find those stories and do them justice? Are there stories you want to tell that don't always have an obvious peg?
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