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James Beard Award winner · Bestselling author Mi Cocina + Salsa Daddy Mexican cooking, stories + my life in Mexico New recipes every week on Sazón ↓
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Recent posts
My family loved Thanksgiving, and my grandmother and mother both passed that love on to me. When my grandmother was alive, she was the only one allowed to make Thanksgiving dinner. My mother took over when she got sick, and eventually my dad, my mom, my brother, and I all started cooking together.
Our traditional meal rarely changed, and we loved it that way. But I’ve always loved taking the familiar flavors, aromas, colors, and ingredients of an American Thanksgiving and giving them a Mexican twist.
This year, I created a family-style Mexican Thanksgiving menu with eight recipes. This week, I’m sharing the first four: Pavo Zarandeado, Pollo Zarandeado, Salsa de Arándano con Chile Morita, and Tamales de Elote con Rajas con Crema.
Next week, I’ll share Camotes Asados con Miel de Guayaba; Ejotes con Chayote, Rábanos y Ajonjolí; Empanadas de Calabaza y Nuez; and Atole de Pera.
I hope you cook one or all of these dishes and feel inspired to create your own Thanksgiving menu. I hope you love it as much as I do!
Comment TURKEY to read the whole story.
12 Nov 2026
Spend less time in the kitchen this Thanksgiving with these make-ahead side dishes and desserts. Get these recipes at the link at our bio 🦃!
📸: Bianca Clendenin/TODAY
12 Nov 2026
In October 2019, I bought a car in Mexico City for my year-long road trip around Mexico to research the food for Mi Cocina. After I signed the papers, I decided I needed to take it out on the open highway, so I picked up a couple of friends and drove to La Marquesa for dinner.
La Marquesa is famous for its roadside food stands and regional comfort food: quesadillas, green and red chorizo, fresh trout, rabbit, and beautiful blue corn tortillas. But the thing I absolutely adore, and get every time I go, is the pambazo.
A pambazo is a Mexican torta made with a roll that’s dipped in red chile sauce, usually guajillo, then griddled with a little lard until the bread gets toasted and crisp. It’s filled with potatoes and chorizo, then topped with lettuce, crema, cheese, and a bright, spicy salsa verde. It’s so incredibly delicious.
Originally, pambazo referred to the bread, not the sandwich. The earliest reference I found dates to 1726, and by 1946, there was a published recipe very similar to the pambazos eaten today.
When I started thinking about the version I wanted to make, I thought about all the pambazos I’ve eaten and loved across Mexico. My biggest complaint, and this is purely personal, is the filling. I’ve eaten pambazos that were mainly smashed potato with a sprinkling of chorizo, and that’s just not my jam. I want a sandwich to feel substantial, and I love chorizo, so mine has a lot of filling and equal parts potato and chorizo.
I used a telera because I can’t find pambazo rolls here in Mazatlán, and I finished it with a five-minute salsa verde cruda. It gives you brightness and fresh flavor against the cooked guajillo salsa, the sautéed filling, and the crisp, caramelized bread.
This is the pambazo I want to eat, made from everything I’ve loved about the versions I’ve eaten across Mexico.
Comment PAMBAZO to read the full story.
04 Nov 2026
¡Feliz Día de Muertos! 
In Oaxaca, Puebla, and Michoacán, mole is as much a part of the season as marigolds and sugar skulls. Families prepare it to share with the living and as an offering to the dead. A plate of mole on the ofrenda is an invitation for your loved ones to return and taste what they loved in life.
The first time I saw mole negro, I couldn’t believe the color. It looked too dark to be food, and I expected it to taste like smoke and ash. Instead, it was nutty, warm, bright, and really delicious. The color seemed impossible, and the flavor made no sense to me for something so dark.
I’m sharing this story today because mole negro is one of the foods families prepare to welcome their loved ones home.
Comment MOLE and I’ll send the link to read the full story.
01 Nov 2026
Abolutely GORGEOUS day today! The rain stopped and the city is ready for día de muertos!
31 Oct 2026
It took me a long time to build my altar this year for Día de Muertos, and it was really hard. I’d been dreading it for a while. Most years, I’m really excited about it, and while it can be an intense emotional experience, going through old photos and objects and thinking about the people in your life that you loved and have lost, once you do it for a few years, it starts to feel like decorating the house for the holidays.
It’s been fifteen years since my mom passed away, and while that loss is still felt daily, I think enough time has passed that it doesn’t hurt quite as much. I look at her photos, her cookbook, her spoons, and all the things that remind me of her, and I remember the joy and don’t really think about or focus on the loss.
This year, I lost my dad, and that wound is still fresh and that grief is still intense. Before I put up the altar, I realized it would be the first time both my parents were on it, and I think that’s why I put it off so long.
But I also know that, for me, building an altar is a way to process grief and feelings and emotions and loss. When my dad died, I grieved him, but I didn’t grieve both of my parents. When I built this altar, I grieved my parents and that loss, and what it’s like to be without both of them, and how much they both meant to me. That was very different from what I experienced in April when my dad died, and I think it’s helped me further process his passing.
So I wanted to share some photos of the altar that I built for Día de Muertos. For the last several years, I tried very hard to include only photos of my mom and not photos of them together because my dad was still alive. But this year, they’re together, and I can celebrate the love that they had for one another.
It’s been really painful, and I know that everything I’m feeling, every tear that I’m shedding, needs to come out and needs to be expressed because I also know that holding it back isn’t good.
So to everyone who is building an altar this year and who lost someone they loved this year, all of my love and thoughts go out to you, and I hope that you find some release and healing and comfort in the altar you build to remember them this year.
30 Oct 2026
One of my favorite food duos is pork and beans, they’re just perfect together. Part of that love comes from Sunday dinners at my grandmother’s, where there was always a big pot of pinto beans filled with cueritos, chunks of salt-cured pork belly. My father and I used to play-fight over who got them. I was probably three years old at the time. Even before we sat down to dinner, my dad would go into the kitchen, fill a bowl with beans and a lot of cueritos, and sit at the kitchen table with me on his lap while we ate them together.
That love followed me as I traveled through Mexico. After visiting every state and living in Mazatlán for six years, I’ve tasted many regional versions of beans with pork, but frijoles con costilla de cerdo has become one of my favorites. I usually ate it in someone’s home. A friend would invite me over for dinner, and their mom would make it.
It’s the kind of dish that feels like a warm hug from your mom, even though my mom never actually made it. It isn’t a special-occasion dish, but it kind of is. You make it to show love and compassion. You’re not showing off your skill or prowess in the kitchen. You’re taking a little extra care to give your guest, friend, or neighbor something really delicious and satisfying. There’s so much love in this dish that you can taste it.
My version is made with Mayocoba beans, pork ribs, and a guajillo and ancho chile salsa, all cooked together until the pork is butter-soft, the beans have absorbed all that chile and pork flavor, and the broth is rich and velvety.
Comment “PORK” to read the full story.
29 Oct 2026
For Día de Muertos, calabaza en tacha is traditionally prepared by cooking pumpkin in a dark piloncillo syrup scented with canela and spices. Because I love those flavors so much, I decided to turn it into a creamy pumpkin dip made with spiced piloncillo syrup, orange zest, chiltepin, and cream cheese. It’s topped with toasted pepitas, Cotija, and more of that syrup, then served with crisp Siete Churro Chips.
Siete Churro Chips are made with cassava flour and coconut sugar and have that light, airy crunch I love with a creamy dip. They’re coated with cinnamon and sugar, so every scoop gives you pumpkin, caramel, chile, salty cheese, and that cinnamon churro flavor.
It’s sweet, savory, spicy, and perfect for this time of year.
28 Oct 2026
One of my favorite things to do for Día de Muertos is walk through the Mercado de Jamaica in Mexico City at sunrise. During October, giant trucks pull into the loading docks filled with freshly cut cempasúchil, terciopelo rojo, nube, crisantemo, and alhelí.
The flowers are still glistening with morning dew as workers unload armfuls, and by afternoon, every bouquet and every truckload has disappeared into homes, shops, cemeteries, and plazas across the city.
The scale is awe-inspiring, but what moves me most is how the flowers are used: to decorate altars and graves, create paths for returning spirits, frame doorways, perfume the air, and fill streets and plazas with color.
In the full newsletter, I explain the meanings of the flowers of Día de Muertos and how they are used across Mexico.
Comment FLOWERS and I’ll send you the link to read it.
26 Oct 2026
I’ve wanted to make mole manchamanteles for a while now, but because it uses apples and pears with tropical fruits like pineapple and plantain, I’ve crave it most in the fall.
Manchamanteles literally means “tablecloth stainer,” which makes perfect sense once you see its deeply red chile color. It’s one of Oaxaca’s seven famous moles, but the earliest written recipes I found come from eighteenth-century central Mexico and calls for ancho chiles, chicken broth, chicken, sesame seeds and nothing else. Another one I found uses plantain, sweet potato, and apple.
Today, the ingredients vary enormously from cook to cook. My version has ancho, guajillo, and cascabel chiles with pork, pineapple, plantain, apple, and pear. I simmer the pork first, use its broth in the mole, and sauté the fruit in lard so they become tender and lightly caramelized without getting mushy.
The pineapple ended up being my favorite bite: bright, tangy, sweet, and tropical against the mole’s deep, toasty, savory flavor—like a trumpet’s high C cutting through the low E of a double bass.
Comment MOLE to read the full story!
21 Oct 2026
It’s fall, the weather is starting to get cooler, and one of the most popular comfort food dishes in Central Mexico is pastel azteca. It’s a layered casserole, similar to a lasagna, but with all of the ingredients you would find in a really delicious chicken enchilada.
For this version, I’m layering Siete Gluten Free Sourdough Style Tortillas with tomatillo-chile salsa, shredded roast chicken, roasted poblanos, corn, crema, and lots of queso Chihuahua. The tortillas are soft and pliable with a flour-like texture and a mild sourdough-style tang, so they’re easy to layer and hold up beautifully to all of the salsa, crema, and cheese.
As it bakes, the tortillas absorb the salsa, the cheese melts into every layer, and the exposed edges get crisp and golden. Let it rest before cutting, then serve it in big squares so you get chicken, poblanos, corn, crema, salsa, and melted cheese in every bite.
It’s cozy, saucy, cheesy, and exactly the kind of dinner I want once the weather starts cooling down.
20 Oct 2026
Building an altar for Día de Muertos is probably the most important part of the holiday. It’s a very personal act of love, remembrance and honor, one of the highest forms of love you can make for the people and pets you’ve lost.
There’s no right or wrong way to do it. It can be as elaborate, creative, simple, bright, loud, private or public as you want. It’s about you, your love and your memories of those people and pets. It’s about including things on the altar that are important to you because they’re important to the memory of the people you’re building it for.
Last year, when I made an altar for my mom, my grandfather and my lost pets, I went through old photos and gathered as many paper photos as I could. But I think what mattered even more to me were the physical objects: a cutting board my grandfather made me when I was a teenager, my mom’s old stethoscope from when she was a nurse, her first cookbook that she got when she was married and used to teach herself how to cook more classic mid-century American recipes, and the eyeglasses my grandmother wore when I was a little boy.
The photos are definitely significant reminders, but the objects had a powerful meaning and connection. When I held them and touched them, I actually felt the presence of that person. Those are the things that meant the most to me.
Apart from that, candles, a glass of water, a pinch of salt, flowers, papel picado, food, pan de muerto, foods or drinks they liked, incense and sugar skulls are all commonly used when building an altar.
But I really think it’s about you and your connection to those people and pets. No one is going to judge you, so make it how you want.
The most important thing is that you should feel good about what you’ve done. You should feel proud of it, and it should make you feel connected to those people.
And if it does that, then you built a great altar.
I put together a guide to altar building that you can use to help you decide what you want to do. I have listed out what is commonly used and why they are used and the significance they have.
Comment ALTAR to read the full guide.
17 Oct 2026
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