![]() It was because my mom was visiting a lot and showing me how to make these recipes, but we never wrote them down. ![]() It was my daughter, when she was 8 years old, who suggested that I write a cookbook. That was my aha moment: she wasn’t going to know my grandma, and it was time for me to step up those traditions. Yes, after my grandma passed away in 2004, my daughter was a little under two years old. Have you thought about what you want to leave behind when you’re gone? Was that part of your motivation to write this cookbook and write down all these recipes and traditions? Hart Van Denburg/CPR News Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack, serves fresh, homemade salsa and corn chips at her home office and studio in Highlands Ranch, Oct. You don’t want to put cold salsa on your nice hot plate of food. I hate when you go to a restaurant and you get cold salsa. As a little girl, I would always be there thinking, “Isn’t that going to burn her hands, and her eyes?”īut after the tomatoes and chiles roast, I add them to the molcajete, too. After she roasted all the ingredients, she would take them in her hand and crush them up. My grandma was always roasting chiles, every day she was making fresh salsa. The smell of roasting chiles on the stove is one of those scents that was part of my childhood. It just tastes so much better made in a molcajete. ![]() You do the same process if you’re making guacamole. While that roasts, I grind up a couple of garlic cloves with a little bit of salt in the molcajete, and make a paste. I put whole tomatoes and peppers onto a cast iron skillet, and roast them. It gives salsa a very traditional, delicious flavor. I make it with a molcajete, which is a mortar and pestle made of lava rock. Traveling inspires me to come up with new flavors. I come home with those inspirations and I try to recreate them here. You can have a smoked cactus salad, and it’s just amazing. For example, we had nopales, which are cactus paddles, growing up, but the way they make food with them in, say, Oaxaca, is just amazing. There's always something to learn it's such a vast cuisine. These scents bring me so much joy, and those scents have evolved and grown into me with my culinary journey.īut traveling has brought me a whole different awareness of some foods that I didn't even know existed until I left El Paso. She was always roasting chiles, simmering canela, which is cinnamon, to make avena, which is a Mexican oatmeal. ![]() I grew up with my grandma next door to me, and she was always cooking. The recipes that are near and dear to my heart come from the memories that I have with my grandma in her kitchen. My goal is to continue the stories so that even if my children didn’t know my grandma like I did, they’ll still know all those stories and continue sharing them generation after generation.ĭid you learn to cook at home in Texas, or during your travels to Mexico?ĭefinitely at home, in El Paso. But after that, who knows what’s going to be left behind. Maybe our children and our children’s children will talk about us, and if we’re lucky, a third generation will, too. The saying I always think of is, “Your departed are only forgotten if you forget them.” I was thinking the other day about our own legacies. Yes, and that’s what we try to show with all the colors. Some people have the misconception that it’s a sad holiday, or they may conflate it with Halloween. Hart Van Denburg/CPR News A Monarch butterfly adorns a ceramic cup in Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack’s Highlands Ranch kitchen. It’s evolved not just in my family, but throughout the world. It was more of All Souls Day, or All Saints Day, or Día de los Angelitos, which is a celebration to honor children.Īnd as it’s evolved, it’s even become bigger in Mexico. My grandma would take me to the cemetery and we’d leave flowers for her two children who passed away when they were little. What do you remember about celebrating Día de los Muertos growing up? It all reflects her impeccable eye for style: she worked as a designer before becoming a food entrepreneur, which is clear on her Instagram page spoke with Colorado Matters host Chandra Thomas Whitfield about Día de los Muertos, how she learned homestyle Mexican cooking and her secrets to good salsa. Hart Van Denburg/CPR News Photos of Yvette Marquez-Sharpnack's family members nestled next to marigolds and sugar skulls. She also decorates an ofrenda, or altar, at home with photos of her father, her grandma, her great-aunts and other family members. Of course, Marquez-Sharpnack’s traditions for Día de los Muertos include food, like Mexican hot chocolate, which she starts by simmering large cinnamon sticks on the stove for an hour, filling up her house with the scents of her childhood. “There are parades, people get in costume and dress like La Catrina, which is this beautiful Mexican sugar skull come to life,” she said.
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