I have always prided myself on my $15 a day food budget. Often, I can eat out three times a day and still stay within budget. There comes a point, however, when I get sick of Mexican food. At its base, it’s just cooked meat and some form of a taco. For a long time I thought they either didn’t produce vegetables in Mexico or they shipped them all to the US. Then one day, I stumbled upon a public mercado.

The place was filled with fruit and vegetable vendors. It was a mosaic of colors, like the beautiful stained glass windows of the church across the street. I’d found produce in Mexico! My first thought was, “okay, they have vegetables; why don’t they don’t make it to the food stands?”

To be fair, you can often get sauteed onions or mushrooms on your taco, and there’s always that plastic dish filled with sliced radishes swimming in questionable water, but what do they do with all the other vegetables? At the market, I saw spinach, carrots, cucumbers, and tomatoes; all the raw ingredients for a meal that seems to have eluded Mexico: the salad.

One day a woman came to the hostel and told us her friend had invited her and any of us at the hostel to come to dinner. Her friend was a chef at what is arguably the nicest restaurant in Puerto Vallarta. Promised a multi course dinner at an insider’s price, I jumped at the opportunity to visit a restaurant I’d never considered before as entrees there would have absorbed three days of my food and lodging budgets combined.

The meal was divine. There were stuffed peppers, soups, steamed vegetables, and yes, even a salad. Subsequent visits to other nice restaurants in town showed me that it wasn’t the US who was getting Mexico’s vegetables; it was the restaurants. Since then, I’ve made it a point to interject my roadside taco stand forays with the occasional meal at a nice restaurant, having discovered it wasn’t vegetables that were restricted from Mexico but my budget that restricted me from encountering them.

For those of you who would like to explore the best cuisine of Mexico, I recommend the following cities, known for their culinary creativity: Puerto Vallarta, Puebla, Oaxaca, Mazatlan, and Mexico City (specifically the Polanco, Condesa, and Roma neighborhoods).

In addition to the food stories I’ve written since discovering healthy food in Mexico, I recently posted food photos from my Getting Beyond Street Food in Mexico.