Abundance Is Seasonal, Not Quantitative
Huitlacoche doesn’t look like much. Dark, almost black, the corn fungus that grows when the season goes wet. If you’d never seen it prepared, you might walk past it at the market. But in the pan, butter, epazote, garlic, the heat doing its work, it smells like corn and earth and rain and something richer than both. It smells like a moment in time, not a flavor you can recreate whenever you feel like it.
That’s what season means. Not a calendar category. An arrival. Algo que llega y se va, something that shows up and then is gone, and you either caught it or you missed it.
Dennis holds up the huitlacoche at the market. He’s not explaining what it is. He’s pointing at the timing. This is here now. Next week, probably not. The question isn’t whether you have access to it year-round. The question is whether you know what to do with it when it arrives.
Here’s the wound: we learned to want everything all the time.
The global food supply chain made strawberries available in January and asparagus in November, and somewhere in that convenience we lost the relationship between arrival and appreciation. When you can have everything always, you stop noticing when things arrive. And when you stop noticing arrivals, you lose the cooking intelligence that was built around them: the knowledge of what to do with huitlacoche in August, with nopales after the first rain, with chapulines when they’re freshly toasted, con los chiles secos en temporada.
That’s the wound: the loss of the calendar as a cooking teacher.
“Esto es lo que hay.” This is what there is.
Dennis uses this phrase not as resignation but as orientation. In the ancestral kitchen, “esto es lo que hay” meant: this is what the season is giving you right now, and your job is to know what to do with it. It was the starting point of cooking, not a complaint about limitation. Abundance, real abundance, was always seasonal, not quantitative. Having a lot of one thing at the right time was more valuable than having a little of everything all year.
The Aztec agricultural calendar organized food production around this logic. Eighteen months (twenty days each) tracking what was growing, what was ready, what was being celebrated with the food that was present. Not a grocery list, a relationship with time. The seasonal Spanglish move happens here: Dennis can say “esto es lo que hay” en ingles as “this is what we’ve got” and the sentence loses its intelligence. Because “this is what we’ve got” sounds like making do. “Esto es lo que hay” sounds like showing up to what’s actually here.
Si solo habia nopales, hay que ser nopales. If all you have is nopales, then become an expert in nopales. That’s not deprivation. That’s mastery through specificity.
Innovation is creativity times execution, not ingredients times budget.
Dennis builds this equation from the kitchen: when you have nopales and only nopales, you don’t make a worse version of a dish that calls for something else. You make the dish the nopales want to be. You figure out what the nopal does, the slight acidity, the texture, the way it pairs with egg or chile or lime, and you build toward that. The constraint is the teacher.
He traces the Aztec calendar as a circular model of this logic: abundance isn’t the accumulation of options, it’s the depth of engagement with what’s here. The round calendar, not a linear beginning-to-end but a cycle that returns, encoded the principle that ingredients would come back, that the relationship with food was recurring and deepening, not one-time and consuming.
The kitchen bridge is here: su abuela didn’t apologize for making a nopal dish instead of a more “prestigious” one. She made the nopal dish. And the knowledge in that dish, the way she cleaned the spines, the way she sweated out the slime, the way she seasoned it so the acidity worked for the flavor instead of against it, eso es lo que hay means she knew exactly what she had. Esa profundidad: that’s the inheritance.
Find one seasonal ingredient at your local market this week that you’ve never cooked. Something you’d normally walk past. Buy it. Don’t search for a recipe first. Ask the vendor what they do with it. Then cook it once, with what you have.
You’re not trying to master it. You’re starting the relationship. Eso es lo que hay is always an invitation, not a limitation.
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