My pal Lisa Battle, blogging for Livability.com, discovers the joy of Lara’s and other panaderia (bakeries) way down south in Texas.
Lisa Battles (guest blogger)
It’s probably going to be quite a long while before I get to Harlingen, Texas—located in the Rio Grande Valley near the southern tip of the Lone Star State—to taste my way through its Mexican-style neighborhood bakeries for the Bakery Boy Blog. So when I learned that my Nashville friend Lisa Battles recently visited there and blogged about a couple of neighborhood panaderia (Spanish for bakeries) for Livability.com’s Best Places to Live Blog, I decided to let her story fill in for now.
- Marrinitos (little pigs)
Lisa found Lara’s Bakery and quickly became enamored with the pan dulce (sweat breads), marrinitos (cake-like treats formed with piglet-shaped cookie cutters and rich with molasses), and pan de muerto (“bread of the dead”). The latter are loaves either molded or decorated to resemble skulls, bones, and other spooky shapes in celebration of the Mexican holiday known as the Day of the Dead.
Pan de Muerto ("bread of the dead")
Livability.com is a website that ferrets out “the best places in America to live, work, play, explore and belong,” and then celebrates whatever makes them special. Here is a link to Lisa’s bakery-related blog post: http://livability.com/best-places-to-live-blog/longing-warm-harlingen-mexican-sweet-bread-cold-day
Meanwhile, I’ve been brushing up on my Spanish as I prepare to write blog posts about several panaderies I sampled during a recent trip to Puerto Rico. Stay tuned and feel free to suggest bakeries anywhere that you think I should check out.
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LARA’S BAKERY 403 West Polk Street, Harlingen, TX 78550; 956-423-1219 (no website)
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Bakery Boy Blog 