🇲🇽 tiny newsletter edition #3: buen viaje! tiny takes mexico!

hello hello! 

this week, i wanted to share a ~tiny~ recap of my recent weeklong trip to mexico city & oaxaca.

more than any city i’ve ever been to, this trip felt like i barely scratched the surface. especially mexico city – it's an enormous, sprawling metropolis, and i was only there for 3.5 days! 

i thought about a lot of different ways to share my favorite spots with you and landed on a few options: 

1. instagram guides (mexico city here, oaxaca here) *only my highlights!

2. custom google maps (mexico city here, oaxaca here) *includes every stop

3. original, un-edited itinerary, with honest notes in orange (here) *chaotic AF! 

that's the real bulk of the trip content, it's all in there! choose your own adventure, or click on none! 

for the rest of this letter, i thought it would be fun to share a few recommendations that i'd classify as trip-adjacent, but super accessible for wherever you are. consider...

📺 watching joe pera talks with you. i saw this show on the plane ride there and i loved it!! it's an extremely wholesome show about the life of a slow-talking, mr rogers-esq, middle school choir teacher in the upper peninsula of michigan. this (free!) episode, all about his experience growing beans in his garden, has the same calming energy the (not-free-on-the-internet) episodes i watched on the plane did. 

☕ drinking mexican hot chocolate. something i really loved about mexico city is that everywhere we went, there was an extensive non-alcoholic drink menu. i had lots of delicious beverages, and plenty of variations of mexican hot chocolate. one delicious + accessible version is the nestle abuelita mexican hot chocolate, which is likely at a grocery store near you, and is exactly what i had in mexico while waiting to get in the hot air balloon. just add hot water - it's a big step up from swiss miss! 

👩🏻‍🍳 making rosa's cinnamon sugar rolls. breakfast was included at ignacia guest house, and it was so good that i immediately abandoned my list of morning neighborhood spots. one of my favorite dishes was a cinnamon sugar roll, which was so much lighter than i was expecting it to be. i asked the chef, rosa, if she'd share the recipe, and lucky for us, she said yes! her dough is made from scratch, but with a frozen puff pastry sheet and a canister of cinnamon sugar, you’ll be good to go. 

her instructions (translated by me to the best of my ability) are as follows:

1. roll out the puff pastry sheet into a thin rectangle, and sprinkle a generous portion of cinnamon sugar over it 

2. use a rolling pin to roll/push the spices into the dough (so they don't just sit on top!)

3. use your hands to roll the rectangle of puff pastry all the way up tightly

4. cut the rolled up dough into cross sections

5. place rolls swirl side up on a sheet tray and sprinkle with more cinnamon + sugar on top

6. bake!

*i am still in my quarantine, but i'm planning on trying this with frozen puff pastry sheets and cinnamon-sugar at 350 degrees for 18-22 mins. here’s a video of rosa kindly showing me her technique (and using kirkland original cinnamon, heck yes!!). 

💌 and that's the tiny letter! thank you for reading, xo aud 

ps i got a lot of tips for the trip from this book. now that i'm back, i want to dig deeper into mexico's history, starting here. for any serious chefs reading this, i've heard great things about this. oh, and if you're looking at prices in pesos and getting stressed, take off a 0 and cut it in half to get to usd. (i.e. 100 pesos = $5 usd!) final tip - it's very common to need to reserve museums/tours ahead of time via email and then pay in cash upon arrival. adios por ahora!