Dia de los Muertos

I've always loved the Day of the Dead. I remember learning about the tradition and being totally mortified by the idea of all this food being lovingly prepared to honor the dead, paraded to the cemeteries and left there for the spirits to eat. Because I love me some Spirits, but please...all that great food going to waste? Yikes, that's just painful. (Really, the food doesn't go to waste. But still, the mere whiff of the idea made me worry.)

My dear deceased Papa was from New Mexico. And when he was raising my sister and me, he and my mom had a wonderful tradition of making enchiladas every Friday night. Our kind of enchiladas were different from everyone else's. They were flat. The New Mexican style enchiladas (or "enchies," as we called them) involved chile sauce, stacked fried corn tortillas, cheese, purple onion and a whole lotta love.

I know the smell of minced garlic sauteing in bacon drippings like I know the back of my own hand. It's a savory, rich, delicious smell that always makes my mouth water. And this was always the first movement of Papa's symphony. Bacon drippings and garlic slices. They would do their dance together in a stock pot, and he'd slowly add the rest of the ingredients for the red chile sauce. And I would always pull up a stool next to his stove and grate the cheese for the enchies. We would talk, tell jokes, and just hang out.

Papa often let me and Sis put together the enchies. Take out the cool plates, stack a fried tortilla, then add the onions and cheese and ladle some chile sauce over it. Repeat. Mom, Sis and I got two layers, Papa got three. (There was some weird macho gender rule about men always having three layers, women having two. Whatever.) Each plate was prepared according to the desires of the intended: no onions for Sis, more cheese for me, extra chile sauce for Papa. Then we'd carefully place the plates in the oven to let them bake. Twenty minutes later, they'd come out all red-gold and molten. We'd add a fried egg on top and tuck into the best meal of our week.

Enchies were our every-Friday-night ritual growing up. Of course, that was in the late seventies, before we all figured out that eating a pound of cheese a week maybe wasn't so good for the cholesterol numbers. But it was a heavenly ritual, and it brought our family so much closer.

I made enchies last Friday for my little family. Bear can't eat enchies yet, but DH loves them to bits. (Thank God, because while I know chile runs in my veins, it's not always a given that the gringos we love will like chile!) But I just hope Bear is getting a sense for that heavenly smell of bacon drippings and garlic. It is the scent of my childhood, and the ghost of my father all in one.

It's a nice way for me to introduce Bear to his Abuelo. And you can bet I'll be making a round of enchies for Dia de los Muertos this year. We won't process down to the cemetery to leave them for Papa, but we'll light a candle and put up his picture. I think he'd like that.