Mom’s Caldo vs. Grandma’s Stew

Homeschool day 50 of 180
Government school day 40 of 170

Anyone who reads this blog at all knows that my wife, Lorena is from Mexico. When I got home from work yesterday, Lorena was standing at the cutting board with a mountain of potatoes, carrots, celery, cabbage, garlic, tomatos, and onions. She had the stew meat cooking in a big pot on the stove and a small stack of 3-inch pieces of corn on the cob off to the side. The wonderful invention of the Mexicans is the addition of those pieces of corn on the cob to the stew. It adds an incredible flavor to the broth and soaks up all the flavor of the stew into the kernels. A real win-win deal. I had never had corn on the cob in stew until I went to El Paso to get my Masters Degree. My major professor, Carroll Johnson took me down to a little hole-in-the-wall restaurant that just served caldo. It has been one of my favorite foods ever since.

When I was growing up, Grandma Sarah made almost exactly the same stew, but being gringa, she did not add any pieces of corn on the cob and it seems like she put in more potatoes. It was still incredibly good–especially with home made bread. The other thing she did was add peas, use a little bit different kind of meat, and maybe add something to stiffen the broth. Those stews are both awesome, but surprisingly different from each other. There seemed to be a bit of a different consistency between Mom’s stew and Lorena’s caldo. Boy, I need to remember to ask her about that at Thanksgiving. The other thing I can do is try getting Lorena to add peas to her caldo. Maybe that is another cooking project Kelly, Christian, and I can take on. That’s it! We could invent the perfect synthesis between Grandma Sarah stew and Lorena’s caldo!