Patricia Mulvey discovered her favorite taste of summer during a disastrous trip to Mexico in 1995. The bright moment of that trip was the Ensenada Slaw. She describes it as "a lightly dressed, crisp vegetable salad with a touch of heat from hot sauce and a touch of acidity from lime juice."
Mulvey — who now lives in Madison, Wis., and runs a farmers market menu planning service — was on the trip with her husband. They had borrowed a Ford Escort from a friend in San Diego and were cruising down the Mexican coast when a large rock appeared in the road. It was being used by a construction crew in lieu of a safety cone. Mulvey had to act fast.
"Well, if I swerve left, I'm going to hit 60 mph oncoming traffic. If I swerve to the right, I'm going off a cliff," she says.
She elected to stay the course and drive over it. Mulvey's husband got out to survey the damage, which didn't seem too bad — but when she tried to start the car, she says there was "a hideous, shredding, shrieking, awful sound. [It] threw me into a tizzy and I just spazzed out."
Mulvey jumped out of the car and ran toward the construction crew. She waved down the man on the road roller and said, "Hay un gran pierna in la calle." Translation: "There is a big leg in the street." He ignored her. She then waved down the next car on the road and hitched a ride to nearby Ensenada.
Once in town, they called a tow truck and went back to the car. When they arrived, Mulvey was alarmed to see the area "teeming" with machine gun-wielding federales with drug-sniffing dogs.
"My stomach's doing flips as the guys come up to us with their guns and tell us we can go," she says. "And we so wanted to go."
When the tow truck driver examined the car, he found the entire oil pan had been torn out, and there wouldn't be a quick fix.
"We decide to just call it a night — find a restaurant, have a margarita, and we order the fish tacos, which are topped with this amazing slaw. It was a revelation to me. It was bright; it was crisp; it had just the right hint of heat," she says.
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