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Día de los Muertos 2026
The mother of all sauces
The Sauce
The sauce is only a handful of ingredients. It doesn’t matter the exact number, just that it’s a few. The sauce is simple. But the sauce is hard.
- Tomato
- Onion
- Garlic
- Salt
At random moments, since I was a toddler, my mom would be cooking, and I would be somewhere nearby, and she would pop quiz me and it would go something like this:
“What goes in the sauce?”
“Tomato, onion, garlic, salt.”
“And what if you want to cook the sauce with meat?”
“Add cumin.”
“Why?”
“…I don’t know…I forgot.”
“Because it just tastes better with meat. But not when you are making rice, and not as a raw salsa. When do you have to fry the sauce?”
“I don’t know.”
“When you are making salsa for tacos…and you feel like it. When should we roast the tomatoes, when should we boil them, and when should we put them in raw?”
“…I don’t know, stop asking me all these questions.”
“When you just want it to taste really good.”
