La Boca Loca: Mexican cooking for New Zealanders

Description

Lucas Putnam and Marianne Elliott opened their Mexican restaurant, La Boca Loca in April 2011, with a clear goal: to bring the freshest flavours of Mexico to Wellington using fresh and locally available ingredients. Their customers loved the taste of their freshly prepared Mexican food and many wanted to learn to make it themselves at home, so this book makes it possible to recreate and share the taste of Lucas's childhood. While there are plenty of fabulous Mexican cookbooks already available, they are often published overseas and in New Zealand we don't have the same access to all the required ingredients. In La Boca Loca, Lucas and Marianne have included a guide to the essentials of your Mexican pantry, and where you can source them in New Zealand. There is also a section on the basics of Mexican cooking so you'll soon feel confident handling chillies, preparing masa, pressing tortillas and making fresh and cooked salsas. Once you've mastered these core skills there is no end to the variations you can create. La Boca Loca includes a collection of the most popular dishes from their restaurant menu over the past four years, along with some of their personal favourites. You'll be amazed how easy it can be to make delicious, fresh Mexican food and inspired to create your own dishes, using the flavours you've enjoyed at La Boca Loca at home.

Born in New York, LUCAS PUTNAM moved to California as a child and grew up eating Mexican food. Previously an editor at Pixar, in 2001 Lucas moved to Wellington to work at Weta Digital on the Lord of the Rings trilogy. The films kept coming, he stuck around, became a citizen and now calls New Zealand home. But he never lost his love for Mexican food, and eventually realised the way to bring the flavours of his childhood to his adopted home was to open a Mexican restaurant in Miramar. Lucas opened La Boca Loca with his Kiwi partner Marianne. MARIANNE ELLIOT is a human rights lawyer who until 2007 worked for the United Nations in Afghanistan. She shares Lucas's passion for fish tacos and tequila, and for helping people develop a more sustainable and nourishing relationship with food.