Super Bowl Dip

After many years of cord cutting, we're finally able to watch the Super Bowl at home for the first time in ages. When we realized this, of course, we had to have some food to go along with the game. Pretty much immediately, I thought of the quasi-traditional 7-layer dip that so many people serve. And I asked myself, "How can it make it tastier and more fun?"

Ready to Watch the Super Bowl

I spent a little time thinking about what might comprise the layers in the dip and started making a list of things that individually would be really good with nacho chips.

You can see what I came up with from bottom to top in the photo above:

• Chipotle-Garlic-Bacon Frijoles Refritos. I debated the longest time about what kind of beans to use for the refritos, finally settling on pintos rather than either black beans or mayocobas. Traditionally, beans are refried in lard which I don't have on hand. Rather, I fried up a few slices of bacon and put the cooked pintos, a couple finely chopped chipotles, and rather a large amount of minced garlic into the bacon grease. After I mashed the beans to smooth and cooked them until they separated from the edge of the pan, I chopped the bacon and added it to the beans before seasoning them.

• Salsa Fresca. My fresh salsa is easy to make and delicious, consisting of finely chopped grape tomatoes (in lieu of large tomatoes in the late summer), white onion, cilantro, a finely minced jalapeño, with lime juice and salt to taste.

• Tinga de Pollo. I haven't made this delightful taco filling in a few months and I don't know why as it couldn't be simpler. To prepare it, I place slabs of onion in the bottom of a roasting pan, then layer on a bunch of chicken thighs lightly dusted with a spice mix of New Mexican ground chile, cumin, granulated garlic, salt, and Mexican oregano. The thighs roast until they are done and ready to come off the bone. After they cool, I pick the meat off the bones and add it to half the onion slabs that I have roughly chopped. The other half of the onions goes into the blender with a couple of chipotles en adobo and a small can of tomatoes. After I blitz the sauce, I pour it over the chicken and onion mixture and cook it down until most of the liquid is evaporated to make a delicious taco filling.

• Queso Fundido. Who doesn't like a gooey queso with chips? There are all kinds of ways to make queso fundido (melted cheese) but honestly, the easiest is just to throw some Velveeta and a little milk into the microwave. I added pickled jalapenos and chopped pickled nopalitos to the queso to give it a bit of zing.

• Chorizo. Mexican chorizo may be my favorite taco filling, especially when mixed with eggs. No eggs in this batch of chorizo, however, that I made from pork shoulder, ground Chimayo chile, cumin, garlic, salt, Mexican oregano, and a touch of red wine vinegar for acidity.

• Guacamole. It wouldn't be a Super Bowl dip at all without guacamole. The avocados are tiny now and hard as bricks, so I bought a bunch of them and kept them on the counter for a week to ripen. I made the simplest guacamole ever from avocados, salt, and lime juice, just looking for a nice citrus flavor to lift the rest of the heavy ingredients.

• Cotija Cheese. Grated cotija serves the same role in Mexican cuisine as pecorino does in Italian. I wanted it not only for its white color to serve as a backdrop for the top garnishes, but also to add a bit of saltiness to the dip.

• Top Garnish. The point of gilding this particular lily was to bring to freshness to the rest of the ingredients. On the top, I spooned on the remainder of the salsa fresca and scattered over some sliced green onions. Before topping the whole with a little bouquet of whole cilantro leaves, I used a squeeze bottle to drizzle on a crisscross of thinned chipotle sour cream.

Paella Party

Ann had wanted me to make a paella for her 60th birthday, but we just could not get large enough group together for such an event at that time. We instead went to Walla Walla wine country to celebrate her birthday and postponed the paella party until the end of October. My large paellera makes enough rice to feed a good 16 people, so it's overkill to make a paella for a small group. Besides, more people is more fun.

Paella Mixta

At its heart, paella is very simple: short-grained rice cooked in broth in a wide, open pan. And thus it depends primarily on two things: the quality of the rice and the quality of the stock used in cooking that rice. I started the day before in making a couple gallons of stock in our big stock pot. For paella, I make stock that complements the garnishes in the paella. So, for example, if I am making a traditional Valencian rabbit paella, I would use rabbit stock. In this case, I wanted to make a paella mixta with chicken, chorizo, and shrimp, so I made a mixed stock.

Starting the Stock; Eight Hours Yet to Cook

In my restaurant days, we would have lots of things laying around for making stock (and sometimes purposefully intended for stock). At home, I start by raiding my freezer in which I collect various bits intended for later use. In this case, I found a whole pork upper shank that I had been saving as well as a bag of trim from frenching a pork rack. Whenever I french a rack by totally denuding the rib bones for presentation purposes, the trim either ends up ground for sausage or other charcuterie or it ends up in the stock pot.

To the pork hock and the rib trim, I added a bunch of pork neck bones, sliced pig's feet, chicken wing tips (from prepping the chicken wings for the paella), shrimp shells (from prepping the shrimp for the paella), a bundle of parsley stems, carrots, celery, saffron, and garlic cloves and peels. Then I added a quart each of chicken stock and clam juice and topped the pot off with water and onto the stove it went to gently simmer for about eight hours, until the giant pork hock was fully cook and fall-apart tender.

When the stock was done, I separated the solids from the broth, mainly in an effort to get the stock as cool as possible as quickly as possible. Nobody wants a foodborne illness from warm stock sitting around growing bacteria. I lightly salted the stock before putting it away. When making paella, I find it easier to control the salt by pre-salting the stock lightly (it will reduce and concentrate the salt) than by trying to guess how much salt to add to the paellera.

At the point when I could bear to put my hands on the hot solids, I picked and reserved all the useable meat. Truth be told, I made more stock than I needed to have leftovers for a great pot of soup, which I did in fact make later in the weekend using the leftover pork meat. You can almost never have too much stock on hand and if you do, you can always cook it down to glace or demiglace and freeze it.

Appetizers: Meatballs in Romesco, Marcona Almonds, and Olives

Despite there being enough paella to feed a small army, Ann and I thought that we should provide some appetizers for our guests that they could munch while I was outside on the patio cooking. The morning of the paella, I made a batch of pork meatballs (pork, parsley, garlic, oregano, basil, and red wine) and that afternoon, I braised them in a big batch of romesco (roasted red peppers, garlic, almonds, white bread, sherry vinegar, and olive oil). These we set out with Marcona almonds (the best!) and some green olives. Simple, but tasty.

Paella Mise en Place from lower left: Vegetables (Piquillos, Onion, Poblano),
Rice, Olive Oil, Chicken Wings, Lima Beans, Shrimp, Salt, Diced Hard Chorizo,
Mix of Parsley/Garlic, and Mix of Pimentón/Saffron

Just before our guests arrived, I lit the fire outside and put out my mise en place for the paella with no fear of lack of refrigeration: it was only about 40 degrees outside and the sun was sinking fast. It would be in the low 20s by morning. The ingredients that I use in my paella vary each time and are certainly non-traditional. I started by learning how to make traditional paella valenciana and now I make my own to suit my mood. I feel lucky not to be bound by the strictures of custom and family pressure to make paella just so.

Preheating the Paellera

Everyone who saw my steel paellera (I love this 55cm Pata Negra from Garcima in Spain) heating on the fire pit on our patio mentioned how perfectly the pan fit on the fire pit. Actually, it was the other way around. I have never cooked a paella on gas before, always lighting a wood fire in the back yard. In our new home in Bend, we have no back yard or really any yard (a plus for travelling), just a patio in the courtyard of our house. And lighting a real fire on our patio wouldn't be all that awesome: we get enough smoke in the house during wildfire season. So, we actually measured the tripod on which the paellera stands and bought a round fire pit that would accommodate it. How is that for planning?

I'm going to say now that I did not make my best paella over the gas. I need more practice to get the perfect soccarat, the crust on the bottom, which I scorched a bit this time. Counterintuitively, I feel like I had better control using a wood fire that I could adjust by moving wood in or out as necessary. I will say that the wind guard around the fire pit really helped with a more even flame. Although I did have to rotate the paellera a bit during cooking, I didn't have to be constantly fiddling with it as I have in the past over a wood fire with an uncontrolled breeze.

Step 1: Brown the Chicken Wings

Steps 2 and 3: Sauté the Vegetables, Then Add the
Pimentón, Saffron, Garlic, and Parsley

Step 4: Add the Stock and Bring to a Mild Boil

Step 5: Add the Rice

Step 6: Add the Shrimp and Lima Beans

Here, you see the cooking paella with all its garnishes (notice how low the flame is now compared to the previous photos), the last to go on the dish are the garnishes that take the least amount of time to cook, the shrimp and the butterbeans/lima beans. The beans are a nod to traditional paella valenciana to which many would add a white bean called the garrofó, or another white bean, or even flat green beans that resemble our romano beans. I'm pretty sure that a traditionalist would cast an evil eye upon these alien beans while silently acknowledging that they taste pretty good in a paella.

Artsy Shot: Flames Glowing Beneath the Paellera

It was well and truly dark by the time the paella finished, at which point, we all migrated into the kitchen where I covered the paella with a towel and let it rest for ten minutes before serving. All eight of us (Ann and I, Rob and Dyce, Andreas and Michelle, and Mark and Kelly) gathered around the big island in the kitchen and dug in to the appetizers and the paella, with lots of red wine poured all around. To finish off the evening's meal, Rob made a delicious apple and green chile pie, with green chiles from Socorro NM that they purchased on their last trip to Santa Fe where they used to live prior to moving to Bend a year ago.

Rob Made This Outstanding New Mexican Apple-Green Chile Pie
Served with Vanilla Ice Cream

We had a great time. I only wish that I hadn't been so busy cooking because I would have liked to have been a bit more present with our guests and to have had the presence of mind to have taken people photographs. This post seems way more clinical than I had wanted for lack of photos of the socializing that took place all evening. Now that the paella is out of the way and it's too dark too early to make a paella until next spring, I'll revert to dishes that do not take active cooking so that I can relax and socialize.

A Crockpot Kind of Day

It's something that I look forward to each summer, but it always kind of takes me by surprise, that first cold snap of fall that reminds me that the snow is just weeks away. This year, it really wasn't much of a surprise in that the weather forecast for around the first official day of fall has been for lows just above freezing and highs struggling to the upper 50s.

Pork and Beans: White Beans with Pork Necks and Chorizo

The real surprise came around 3am when I awoke to very cold temperatures in our bedroom. Here in the high desert, it is exceedingly common for everyone to open their windows at night even in the summer, forest fires willing, to let in the cold night air. By the time I awoke around 5:30am, it was 35 degrees outside and the cold air was streaming in through the open windows.

In anticipation of colder weather, I always lean hard into comfort food, slow-cooked food, and eagerly await that first batch of whatever from the crockpot. At the grocery store earlier in the week, aware of the forecasted colder weather to come, I picked up a couple pounds of pork neck bones as the basis for whatever I would put in the crockpot to celebrate the coming of fall, probably my favorite season of the year.

And last night, I put a couple pounds of white beans in the ceramic crockpot liner to soak overnight, rinsing them twice before going to bed and once again when I awoke. On willing myself to brave the cooler temperatures outside the delightfully warm bedcovers, I went downstairs to start the beans cooking, make a pot of coffee, and start the pork neck bones browning.

While Ann and I started in on our coffee and the first of our New York Times crossword puzzles for the morning, the pork neck bones browned over low heat. I would get up from time to time during the puzzles to turn them and then when they were browned, to add them to the pot of beans slowly heating on the counter.

Ann left to go to her fitness class and I left to go on my morning walk down the river and back. It was a great morning to walk, starting at 45 degrees and mostly sunny. It was one of those days when I walked out of the shade and into a patch of sun and loved the momentary heat on my bare legs, so in contrast to recent weeks when I would scurry quickly from patch to patch of shade, avoiding the sun as much as possible.

My walk really hammered home that fall is upon us, even as my very cold hands on this keyboard do right now. The deciduous scrub along the river has already dropped half its leaves, with the remaining changing color, highlighting the bright red, orange, and white berries still on the branches. I decided to count the species of wildflowers still in view and until the last moment, I thought that one hand would suffice for the tally. In the end, I spied a scant few blossoms of only seven species (storksbill, alfalfa, rabbitbrush, fireweed, goldenrod, white sweet-clover, and yarrow), a sure sign that the snow will fly on the mountains soon, possibly tomorrow night.

After my brisk walk without breaking a sweat–finally!–I was looking forward to getting home and smelling that first aroma of the beans and pork cooking as I walked in the door. Our house is well-insulated and as a result, the indoor temperature never reached 60 degrees, making me crave a warm blanket, a crackling fire, and a cup of tea, thoughts unthinkable just days ago.

The chilly temps also made me crave that warm bowl of beans for dinner and I must admit that it was something of a torment to smell them cooking all afternoon, especially after I added the aromatics to them. After my walk, I cooked up a couple onions, a bunch of garlic, and half a stick of hard Spanish chorizo with a teaspoon of La Vera pimentón and a teaspoon of dried thyme. This certainly perfumed the air in the house and the crockpot did a great job of continuing to make the house smell wonderful after I put this sofrito into the beans.

White beans flavored with a bit of pork might seem very simple, very mundane, and very peasanty, but they made a fantastic dinner that comfortingly warmed our bellies on a chilly day. I'm so happy fall is here, cold hands be damned!

Great Northern Beans Soaking Overnight

Slowly Browning Pork Neck Bones

Sofrito in Same Pan: Onions, Chorizo, and Garlice

Sofrito Cooking, Scraping up All the Brown Bits from the Pork

Deglazing with Some Bean Cooking Liquid

Deliciousness after Seven Hours on Low in the Crockpot

Huevos con Chorizo

In my book, there's almost no better quick meal than huevos con chorizo, whose name is its recipe. Here's your recipe: fry up some Mexican chorizo, add some beaten eggs, and cook until the eggs are set. Done. It does not get simpler than that.

Huevos con Chorizo

For me, while I love it any time, I find that huevos con chorizo works really well as hangover brunch food à la menudo and posole. Speaking of hangover brunch food, I should post on huevos rotos sometime, but that's more Spanish than Mexican.

In the case of the huevos in the photo above, it was dinner time and Ann and I were really hungry. I had no plan, but I had a pound of ground turkey in the refrigerator. While I would rather have ground pork, my cardiologist is happy with the turkey. It would be nearly impossible for most people to tell that the meat in my chorizo is turkey, rather than pork.

As for chorizo, I don't buy and pay exorbitant prices for something that I can make so easily. Just to be clear, we are talking about loose Mexican chorizo, not the incredibly delicious hard sausages from Spain. I don't have an exact recipe, but for a pound of ground meat (pork or turkey), I will start by sautéeing a finely diced poblano pepper and a half a large yellow onion until the onion turns translucent. At this point, I will add a pound of ground meat and break it up.

Next, I add seasonings: an ounce of ground mild Numex chile, a couple tablespoons of freshly ground cumin, 4-6 cloves of finely minced garlic, and a couple of pinches of Mexican oregano finely crumbled by rolling between my palms. At this point, if I want spice, I'll add something spicy, typically a couple of tablespoons of sambal oelek (crushed red jalapeños). There was no spice in this batch.

And then, I splash a couple of glugs of red wine vinegar in the pan, because chorizo without vinegar tastes weird to me. Adding vinegar is very traditional. Along with the vinegar, I'll generally add a small amount of water and let everything cook and meld together until the water is evaporated.

An Aside on Spices. If you're serious about cooking, consider buying a good spice grinder. I really do like my Waring Professional, but at $175-200, it is a splurge. For chorizo, I always grind cumin to order. I rarely grind my own chile, though. Ground chile is something that is best left to industrial equipment.

Also, Mexican oregano (Lippia graveolens) is not Greek oregano (Origanum vulgare). They taste very different. Go easy when using Mexican oregano; it seems much stronger to me. Also, it's typically not going to be labeled Mexican oregano. If you buy a Latino brand such as El Guapo, it will be labeled simply orégano, but it will be Mexican.

I buy a lot of El Guapo spices from the Latino aisle of my grocery store. This brand of spices is way less expensive than the traditional American brands three aisles over in the grocery store. As much cumin/comino seed as I use, I'd be broke if I had to pay what they're asking for it in the spice aisle.

Next come the eggs. Sometimes, I want more eggs than chorizo, sometimes more chorizo than eggs. It's a feeling thing. But generally, I will do about 8 extra large eggs to a pound of chorizo. The photo above is 6 eggs to a pound of chorizo, because I was feeling the chorizo more than the eggs, probably because we ate this for dinner rather than brunch. This being retired stuff is a bit weird in that we pretty much eat only two meals a day, a departure from work days of breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

In a departure from tradition and now that it is summer and we have a counter full of ripe tomatoes, I felt like serving this batch of huevos on slabs of fresh tomatoes, with tortillas on the side, because what's better with eggs than fresh tomatoes and how many months a year do we have perfectly ripe tomatoes?

Anyway, that's your huevos con chorizo. It's a great, simple meal. And if you venture so far as to make your own Mexican-style chorizo, you might not buy pre-made chorizo again. ¡Buen provecho!

PS. I like huevos con chorizo so much that I have blogged about them before 8 years ago and totally forgot about it.

Paella

Ann has been talking about me cooking a paella for months. Our last experience in doing paella at the beginning of October was that the weather was brutally hot, so she scheduled it this fall for the end of the month. Naturally, it was the hottest day we have had in a month, topping out at 83 degrees and somewhat uncomfortable in the sun. Fortunately, the gusty winds out of the south made it somewhat bearable.

The Guest of Honor

Once guests started arriving, we could see the telltale darkness on the horizon out west and several of us started looking at the radar to see how bad and how soon the rain would be. How soon? A lot sooner than the predicted 6:30. How bad? Some gusty wind and a bit of rain, not enough to send us inside, the wisteria vines on the arbor giving us enough cover.

Searing the Chicken and Chorizo; Look at the Wind!

Sofrito Cooked, Stock Coming to Boil

Rice About Half Done, Adding Mussels

Mussels Just Open, Shrimp in, Max Flame for Soccarat

With all the wind, I couldn't get the paella done as quickly as usual; the heat was blown off the pan. Such is cooking outdoors over a fire. Of the hundreds of frames I shot, these are all the photos worth looking at and many of these are pretty terrible. I'm afraid I'm not very good with the camera. I was trying to use my 50mm prime lens and I still don't have it figured out. I need to find another strategy for shooting handheld interior shots in low light without resorting to flash. (The little voice is saying, "use the iPhone, idiot!").

Little Devil's Stairs/Glen Manor

We've seen more bears this year than ever; we seem to have a bumper crop and I'm starting to worry about bear-human conflict. We all know the bears won't win. Sunday was no exception; as we drove down Keyser Run road about a mile before the Little Devil's Stairs trailhead, we saw a big black bear galloping down the middle of the road in front of us for about 25 yards before going crashing into the woods next to Keyser Run.

The sun wasn't up terribly high by the time we hit the trailhead at 8:30 and the woods were even darker, especially up in the canyon that is Little Devil's Stairs. Taking photographs in this dim light was a non-starter and so there are no photographs of the canyon itself or of Keyser Run coming down through it, which is a shame because it is ruggedly beautiful.

The first half a mile from the trailhead and parking lot was an easy walk through the woods. From there, the trail climbed a thousand feet over the next mile. Trekking poles were of no use going up and Ann stowed hers. The trail, as it meandered back and forth across the stream between the canyon walls, required handholds in a few places. It took me a little while to get used to climbing with my pack on. I'm not terribly used to the altered center of gravity which is not noticeable on most hikes.

From the top of the stairs, we continued the gentle climb to the Fourway intersection with the Keyser Run fire road and continued across on the Piney Branch trail, staying to the left at each trail intersection making a big counterclockwise loop that ultimately saw us rejoin the fire road at the Bolen Cemetery, a reminder of the hardscrabble life that people led up in the hollows before Shenandoah National Park was assembled in the 1930s.

Bolen Cemetery: Life Before SNP

After gaining a thousand feet in a mile, we spent the next five miles giving all that elevation up going gently downhill along the Piney River or Piney Branch. We took a break for lunch (goat cheese, arugula, sun-dried tomato pesto, and chorizo wraps along with a couple handfuls of blueberries) just at the point where the trail crosses to the opposite bank of the creek, shortly before recrossing the creek for a quick climb up to the cemetery and a final mile of fire road down to the parking lot. The hiking sites say we did just over nine miles; our GPS said 8.5. I tend to believe the GPS; the hike didn't feel all that long.

Cooling off in Piney Branch

Hiker Lunch: Goat Cheese, Arugula, Sun-Dried Tomato, and Chorizo Wraps

Here and there through the woods, I found patches of sunshine (and flowers making use of that sunshine) for photos. Many of the following photos are iffy, the lack of light and lack of a tripod being what they are. We walked through large patches of White Bergamot, Monarda clinopdia, but I could never get the camera to focus on the very airy bloom heads in the dappled light. Ditto for the off-white bloom spikes of American Wintergreen, Pyrola americana. We were both surprised to come upon a patch of Squawroot still in bloom. In my book, it's a late spring flower, not a mid-summer one.

There were lots of Doll's-Eyes in various stages of ripening, but only one that had fully turned white and that was in a little glimmer of sunlight. Too bad they are poisonous.

Actea pachypoda (Doll's-Eyes or White Baneberry)

White Sweet Clover, Melilotus albus, Surprising in the Woods

The pale touch-me-nots have just started blooming along the stairs but in a couple of weeks, the stairs should be awash in golden blossoms. This is probably the most common plant along the moist part of the trail and at times, we had to wade through them so tight were they packed alongside the narrow trail.

Pale Touch-me-not, Impatiens pallida, All over the Stairs

For the past several hikes, I have seen lots of Geums in the woods and none in enough light to photograph. This one is missing a petal and the white bloom is blown out from overexposure in the dim light.

A Geum, probably virginianum, Missing a Petal

A Beautiful Heal-All

Moth Feeding on a Heal-All

Meadow Rue in Full Bloom

Possibly Common Nipplewort, Lapsana communis

I am surprised that this is the first and only Columbine that I have seen in bloom this year. I must be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Columbine, Aquilegia canadensis

Fly Poison, Amianthium muscaetoxicum, a Lily

Indian Pipe

Also Indian Pipe??

For weeks, I have been trying to get a decent photo of long-leaved bluets, which are often found trailside in the woods. The light is too low and the blooms are too small. This is the best of dozens and dozens of frames.

Long-Leaved Bluet, Houstonia longifolia

Very Few Roses Still in Bloom

We had yet to encounter any Purple Flowering Raspberries this year but all along this trail we found them almost everywhere there was a little clearing. They are a most beautiful and spineless raspberry, but sadly the fruit isn't all that good to eat.

Purple Flowering Raspberries, Rubus odoratus, Everywhere

Black Cohosh Along the Fire Road

I thought these maidenhair ferns were beautiful. Though I don't pay too much attention to the ferns growing alongside the trail, I don't recall seeing maidenhairs elsewhere.

Northern Maidenhair Fern, Adiantum pedatum

After our hike as we were heading back in to Front Royal up and over Chester Gap, Ann wondered aloud if we could go to see Jeff and Kelly. I mentioned that we were on the wrong side of the mountain, but cut across to the west side as soon as we got to the foot of the mountain in Front Royal. Soon enough, we were pulling up to a full parking lot and a jam packed tasting room. It's always good to see them busy.

Enjoying a Well-Earned Sauvignon Blanc

It seems that I knew pretty much all of the guests in the tasting room and being grubby and tired after a hike, I just wanted to get a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc and head outside under the shade of an umbrella. So I just kind of bypassed a whole lot of line, gave Kelly a hug, and asked her if she would grab me a bottle of SB. And with that, we went outside to drink our wine, rest, and wait for things to die down so that we could socialize a bit.

Kelly invited us to stay for the staff blind tasting afterwards. Once all the guests had left, we all gathered on the back patio and tasting four blind wines. Had I known that this was going to happen, I would have brought a bottle along. We tasted a Virginia Rkatsiteli, a Willamette Pinot, a Piemontese Barbera, and a California Petit Sirah. Begrudgingly, we had to leave around 7:45 and got back to the house just before hiker midnight, 9pm. After a shower, that was all she wrote for Ann. Too much fun made her a sleepy girl!