Our Cooking Story: How This Guide Works
We are a guide, not a restaurant. This page explains how we reach what we say, and why you can check it.
Who is behind this guide and what the judgment rests on
We are an independent guide to Mexican-American food, writing for home cooks and diners in New Hampshire who want a straight answer before they order or cook. Our judgment rests on a method rather than on a list of credentials. We read the public sources on a question, we write down what each one says, and we keep every figure the way its source printed it.
We do not claim years of experience, awards or a list of places we have visited. We see the businesses we point to from the outside, through their own pages, the local listings around the area and what they publish, and we say so when that is all we have. We would rather tell you what we cannot confirm than round a figure up to sound sure.
As UNESCO's record of traditional Mexican cuisine explains, corn, beans and chili sit at the center of a food culture built on farming, ritual and the knowledge of community cooks. We keep that in mind when we write about a plate of food, because the dish usually has a longer story than the menu does.
We would rather tell you what we cannot confirm than round a figure up to sound sure.
If you want a dish to choose tonight, start with the dish helper on What We Cook, and come back here when you want to know why it answered the way it did.
What this guide will never put on a page
We do not sell a mention. No business gets a place in these pages for payment, a free meal or a review we have made up, and no figure is rounded up to make a point. When a question has no sourced answer, the page says so instead of filling the gap.
Four figures, each traced to the source that printed it
These are the figures on this site a reader can check in a click. Each row gives the figure, what it measures, the period it covers and the source. Where the source gives no date, the table says so rather than guessing one.
| Figure | What it measures | Period covered | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| 9 major food allergens | The allergens US federal law recognizes on packaged food labels, with sesame as the ninth | Sesame added from 1 January 2023 | U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Food Allergies |
| 2 hours | How long take-home food, including cooked leftovers, can wait before it goes in the refrigerator | Current guidance, checked 10 November 2026 | Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Preventing Food Poisoning |
| Approximately 60% | Share of corn tortillas in Mexico made from nixtamal, corn steeped in lime | No date recorded for this figure | Brigham Young University ScholarsArchive |
| 3.5% in 2026, 2.8% in 2027 | USDA forecast for the rise in food-away-from-home prices across the US | Forecasts for 2026 and 2027, USDA update of 23 October 2026 | USDA Economic Research Service, Food Price Outlook |
| A forecast is not a price you will pay, and a national figure says nothing about any one restaurant. | |||
The price figure is a national forecast, so read it as a direction and not as a menu. Before you act on any figure here, open its source and check the date beside it.
Hearing a cook explain the method, not only reading it
Some readers pick up a method faster by hearing it. This interview-style video shows a cook talking through Mexican kitchen cooking, which is the kind of method this page describes in words.