A Southwest Dinner

We're getting close to the summer travel season when we are going to be on the road somewhat often. Before we leave for Virginia for my daughter Ellie's wedding, we wanted to have Rob and Dyce over for a casual dinner.

Rob and Dyce Brought the Most Gorgeous Peonies

I really am trying to avoid dinners with lots of last minute cooking so that I can relax and focus on guests. That shifts meals towards braises and dishes without touchy timing. Ann had kindly suggested all manner of dishes, but nothing grabbed me.

Unclear on what to make and rooting through the freezer, I found a bag of cleaned and cubed pork shoulder from a foray to Costco. Their shoulders come in two packs and that's a ton of meat. I typically break down both shoulders into cubes for braises like carnitas and freeze what I don't need right away.

Knowing that Rob and Dyce are fond of New Mexican food had me thinking along those lines and so I decided to make chile verde. After pondering for a few days, I decided to make a posole casserole to accompany the pork, and to offer empanadas for an appetizer. After a week of beautiful weather, it cooled off again and the choice of heartier food seemed lucky and apropos.

Then I remembered the heirloom masa harina that Ann gave me for my birthday and I decided to make tortillas to accompany the meal. And so the menu was set with the only last minute task to cook the tortillas. Somehow in the course of moving, my tortilla press did not make it to this house and so I improvised using a cast iron pan and a cut open Ziploc bag.

Empanadas de Picadillo Dulce, Cilantro Aïoli

Empanadas I make with an egg-enriched pie crust that never fails to bake up flaky and golden brown especially when brushed with an egg wash. Habitually, I fill empanadas most often with picadillo dulce, a sweet and sour pork that I first learned about by reading old Spanish-language recipes in the Biblioteca Nacional de México.

The filling is clearly of Moorish origin, containing almonds, olives, and sometimes raisins, though I have made it my own through the years. This version was ground pork shoulder, almonds, olives, onion, poblano chile, garlic, Mexican oregano, and three types of dried red chile (the majority ancho). I made it sweet and sour with brown sugar and Sherry vinegar. I have outlined the process in a previous post.

Masa Balls for Tortillas

Ghetto Tortilla Press: My 1930's Griswold Skillet

Tortillas on the Table

Chile Verde, Posole-Chipotle Casserole, Tortillas

Chile verde is not a recipe but an idea. At essence, it is cubes of pork braised in a salsa verde. There are as many ways to make it as there are cooks and they are all wonderful. I am certain that I make it differently each time and this time, I used the slow cooker to free our single oven to use in baking the posole.

For chile verde, there are two essential steps. First, make a salsa verde and second, brown the meat and braise it in the salsa.

For salsa verde, I roasted at high temperature (say 400F) a sheet tray of poblano peppers, Anaheim peppers, onions, garlic, and tomatillos. I rotated the chiles as each side became blistered. Once done, I pulled the tray out and covered it in film so that the veg could steam until cool and loosen the pepper skins.

Next up, I skinned and cleaned the peppers, dicing and reserving three or four Anaheims for the posole casserole. The peppers, garlic, tomatillos, onion, and a bunch of fresh cilantro went into the food processor. I blended it until roughly smooth and put it in the slow cooker.

For the pork, in recent years, I have adopted a process by which I only brown one surface of the cubes. This provides great flavor while not drying out the pork. After browning all the pork and putting it in the food processor, I deglazed the pan with a splash of water and poured all the porky goodness into the slow cooker with the pork and salsa. Eight hours later, the pork was tender and the sauce reduced to just the right thickness.

The posole casserole, something I started making in my 20s as a broke graduate student, I assembled in the afternoon and put into at 350F oven about 90 minutes before we were ready to eat. Timing is not critical, a delightfully brown crust is.

I admit that I did not make my own posole, though I could. I bought two 28-ounce cans of commercial hominy, the same Teasdale brand that I used in the restaurant. One can each of yellow and white hominy went into a mixing bowl with the reserved chopped green chiles, half a bunch of sliced green onions, and the kernels of one ear of fresh sweet corn for contrast and variation on the corn theme. Purple hominy (maíz morado) would have been cool, but my store had none.

I bound the casserole with a chipotle béchamel: olive oil and a spoon of flour cooked for a minute, then a pinch of salt and one finely chopped chipotle in adobo. After mixing the hominy and sauce, I adjusted the salt and put it into an oiled baking dish and topped it with a little grated white cheese. The result is as delicious as it is simple.

Making tortillas with modern masa harina is a trivial process of mixing the corn flour with enough water to make a workable dough. Then you roll it into balls and smash the balls between sheets of plastic (or a cut open Ziploc freezer bag in my case) in a tortilla press (or beneath a cast iron skillet in my case). We restaurant chefs are used to adapting and overcoming: no tortilla press, no problem. I can even patty them by hand, old school.

After peeling the masa circle off the plastic, it goes into a hot, dry frying pan on low to medium heat. Cooking both sides takes less than a minute and if I had a flat-top, I could have cooked them all at once rather than one at a time. Naturally, I could have fired four pans on the stove and cooked four at a time, but no matter. We were all busy yakking while I was pressing and cooking tortillas.

It should be axiomatic that a tortilla is only as good as the masa from which it is made. And if you use shitty Maseca or Masa Brosa, you are going to get a shitty tortilla. My masa is from Masienda and is processed from heirloom corn varieties grown on small farms in Mexico. It is expensive relative to the big brands (but even so, tortillas cost cents), but it helps sustain small farmers and preserve heirloom corn varieties.

Crunchy Fish Tacos

I've recently revived an old technique for fish tacos and Annie loves the results. Here's how I turned a couple of Pacific Cod fillets into fish tacos.

Pacific Cod Fish Tacos

In recent years, I have been coating fish fillets for tacos with a spice rub and roasting them in the oven. This is certainly a healthy way to eat fish, but many people will miss the crunchy crust of fried fish in their tacos. That got me asking myself how I can get a crispy crust on fish for tacos using a minimum of oil.

Thinking back many decades to when I was just learning how to cook Chinese food (as if there is but a single Chinese cuisine, ha!), I remember using cornstarch not only to thicken sauces and soups, but as a way to coat meat for wok frying. And so I decided to use a bit of cornstarch on fish fillets and to fry them in as little oil as possible.

I cut the cod fillets into pieces that will fit into my pan and then sprinkle both sides with seasonings (sometimes my fish rub, link above). For this particular batch of fish, rather than use a rub, I merely sprinkled both sides with salt, ground New Mexican chile, and a touch of granulated garlic. Then I put a thin coat of cornstarch on both sides.

Pan-Searing Pacific Cod Using Almost No Oil

We eat a lot of tacos at our house because they are quick, tasty, and who doesn't love finger food? One way that I make them quick to prepare is by keeping a lot of garnishes on hand in the refrigerator on a regular basis. These include pickled jalapeños, salsa verde, romaine bottoms, and a squeeze bottle of thinned chipotle sour cream. By planning ahead, tacos take less than ten minutes to bring to the table, just what I want on a busy day or on a day when I don't have the energy or desire to cook an involved meal.

Fish Taco Toppings: (L-R) Pickled Jalapenos, Tomatoes,
Salsa Verde, Cilantro, Chipotle Sour Cream, and Romaine

I've published the recipe for salsa verde before, but it's just a bunch of cilantro, a large can of drained tomatillos, a serrano chile, two cloves of garlic, and a pinch of salt, all blended. We use romaine lettuce on our lunch sandwiches and I always keep the bottoms of the bunches in a bag in the fridge. When it's time for tacos, I slice the bottoms thinly for a crunchy garnish. Chipotle sour cream is merely sour cream, water, salt, and chipotle adobo.

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.

Recipe: Roasted Potatoes and Asparagus with Salsa Verde

Roasted Potatoes and Asparagus with Salsa Verde

The other day, our store had a big bag of small potatoes on special and we brought one home along with a bundle of asparagus whose price has plummeted with the arrival of spring in a lot of parts of this hemisphere, here excepted. We won't see spring temperatures for a few weeks, but a guy can live vicariously via the produce in the stores, can he not?

I ended up roasting one sheet tray of asparagus and another of the baby potatoes, then mixed the asparagus with some of the potatoes for our dinner. We liked the combination so much that I decided to do it again.

But meanwhile, leftover from this dinner was a small container of roasted potatoes and being a hungry guy, I pulled them out of the fridge for my lunch. Right next to them was a container of recently made salsa verde and I thought, "Self, wouldn't these two be good together?" And I put them together and they were good and I filed that note away for our next roasted potato and asparagus dinner.

And that brings us to dinner last evening, pictured above. While the potatoes and asparagus roasted, I made a batch each of salsa verde and another of my pimentón (smoked paprika) sauce, recipes below. This salsa verde is a new sauce that I started making in the last year; the pimentón sauce, I've been making since before opening the restaurant, some 20-plus years ago.

The combination of vegetables with the bright and spicy green sauce contrasted with the rich and smoky orange paprika sauce was as good as I had imagined it would be. And it made a fantastic dinner on a cold March night, warm, comforting, spicy, smoky, low calorie, lowish fat, and most importantly, delicious.

Recipe: Roasted Potatoes and Asparagus with Salsa Verde

You don't need a formal recipe or fixed amounts to serve this dinner. For entrée-sized portions, for every two people, start with a pound and a half each of baby waxy potatoes and asparagus. This would also make a wonderful side for a grilled steak, in which case, this amount would likely serve four people.

1.5 pounds small waxy potatoes
1.5 pounds asparagus
olive oil
salt and pepper
1/2 cup salsa verde
2 tablespoons pimentón sauce

Preheat your oven to hot, about 400F. Toss the potatoes with olive oil, salt, and pepper and put on a sheet tray. Break off the tough ends of the asparagus and cut the remaining tender stalks to serving size; I cut each stalk into three pieces. Toss with olive oil, salt, and pepper and put on another sheet tray. Place the two sheet trays in the oven and roast the vegetables until done. The asparagus will likely take 20-25 minutes while the potatoes, depending on size, will take 35-45 minutes.

Combine the roasted vegetables with the half cup of salsa verde and toss well. Divide into two serving bowls and drizzle with the pimentón sauce.

Recipe: Salsa Verde

This is a recipe that I have published before, but it's a short one and easier to include it here than to go and chase it down. I mainly like to use fresh vegetables versus canned ones, but this sauce is a great use for canned tomatillos because it avoids you having to cook the tomatillos before making the salsa.

I specify serrano chile in the recipe simply because it is a reliably spicy chile that is available everywhere all year round. In practice, I make the sauce with whatever spicy green chile I happen to have. Last year, it was most frequently Sugar Rush Peach peppers because a friend gave me a plant.

You'll need a good blender to make this sauce. Here's a plug for my venerable VitaMix, veteran of the restaurant kitchen. At one point, we had five of them between the kitchen and the bar at the restaurant. And we probably went through about a dozen of them total over the 15-year life of the restaurant. 

1 28-ounce can whole tomatillos, drained
2-3 large cloves garlic
1 serrano chile, sliced
1 bunch cilantro, roughly chopped
1/2 teaspoon Kosher salt (to taste)

Place all the ingredients in the blender and starting on low speed, gradually increasing the speed as the ingredients liquefy, blend until you achieve a smooth sauce. Season to taste with additional salt, if necessary. Will keep, tightly covered under refrigeration, about a week.

Recipe: Pimentón Sauce

This sauce is such a good flavor enhancer and color booster for a dish that we used to make it by the gallon at the restaurant, about a week's supply. Quantities are approximate in that I never measure exactly. Quality matters: use a great brand of real Pimentón de la Vera from Spain, not some knock-off. And restraint matters: pimentón gets really bitter when used in large amounts, so go easy until you get a feel for how you like it. The following recipe yields about a cup of sauce.

1/2 cup mayonnaise
1 tablespoon Pimentón de la Vera
1/2 cup water
salt to taste

Start by putting the mayonnaise in a bowl and sprinkling the pimentón and a dash of salt over it. Mix thoroughly with a spoon, pressing the pimentón against the bowl as needed to remove any lumps. Mix until the paste is evenly colored throughout. Add water in small amounts, mixing it in well before adding more. Thin the sauce to the consistency that you desire. Season with salt as necessary. Store under refrigeration almost indefinitely. I typically load the sauce into a squirt bottle to make garnishing easy.

Arroz con Pollo Soup

One of my favorite meals is arroz con pollo, the dish of baked chicken and rice. I made it frequently for staff meals at the restaurant and it is one of my go-to dishes when I want comfort. It's turned cold here in Oregon (heretofore, our winter has been extremely mild as is usual) and that's got me wanting both hot soup and comfort.

I was going to make a salad a couple nights ago, but the weather turned against that, as did Ann, who in rebelling against the salad idea said, "I want soup." In going through the refrigerator, I saw leftover chicken, chicken stock, and diced Anaheim chiles from our Super Bowl chicken chile tostadas.

I started craving arroz con pollo, but with only a few ounces of cooked chicken on hand, I wasn't equipped to make it. But in response to Ann's request, I could make a killer soup from the leftovers that would taste identical to arroz con pollo.

Arroz con Pollo Soup

Soffritto for Soup

I started by warming the leftover chicken, stock, and chiles with a can of tomatoes while I prepped the vegetables for the soffritto: a yellow onion, half a bunch of green onions, a bunch of cilantro, a yellow pepper, a poblano, and eight cloves of garlic. I sautéed all these veg with a big pinch of saffron until the onions started to go translucent. Into the stock pot they went to simmer for a half an hour. I seasoned the soup with salt and sambal oelek (crushed red jalapeños) and then tossed in two big handfuls of rice to cook in the broth.

I would typically make this dish with achiote instead of saffron, but I don't have any achiote. Achiote was very common and cheap on the East Coast where a lot of our immigrants came from the Yucatán, the Caribbean, and other eastern locales where achiote is king. Out west, there doesn't appear to be the demand for achiote and I cannot find it anywhere, hence the saffron. I'm sure I can find it in Portland, but who wants to drive in from wine country and deal with that traffic?

This soup hit all the right notes: arroz con pollo flavor and soup comfort with just the right amount of sinus clearing spice. What a great soup!

Super Bowl: Chicken and Green Chile Tostadas

I have been a lifelong Washington Redskins fan and remember trips to RFK Stadium and later to FedEx Field vividly, especially when playing the big NFC East rivals, the Cowboys, the Giants, and especially the Eagles with their riotous fans. Then came the restaurant with its 80- to 90-hour workweeks and football all but disappeared from my radar. Post restaurant, we became cord cutters with no access to cable TV. And so, for the last 20-plus years, football has not played a significant role in our lives, especially because Ann has no desire to watch.

But year in and year out, we seem to find a way to watch the Super Bowl, if for no other reason than to keep at least some grip on cultural literacy. This year, we happened to have access to CBS for the broadcast and that got us thinking that we should do something a little special, a little bad food-wise to eat during the game.

We kicked around a bunch of ideas when Ann struck on chicken enchiladas. I suggested that perhaps instead we do tostadas because I could bake the tortillas without any oil for tostadas versus frying the tortillas in oil to seal them against the enchilada sauce.

Chicken and Green Chile Tostadas

When I think about chicken in Mexican cuisine, my mind immediately leaps to the juxtaposition of mild white chicken with mild green chiles. It is a food combination that really works for my palate and I just love the way that each ingredient plays off of and dances with the other. So when I was at the store buying the chicken for the tostadas, I also bought a small sack of mild Anaheim chiles to roast. Yes, you can buy them roasted and canned, but the flavor is not there and they are wicked expensive compared to roasting your own.

Torching the Chiles

Char Each Chile and Place it in a Plastic Bag to Steam

Peeled and Diced Green Chiles

I took the chiles outside and fired up my propane torch to char the skin on each. As I finished with each chile, I placed it into a plastic bag so that it could steam. After sitting for a half an hour or so, the chiles were ready to peel. The easiest way to peel them is to rub the skins off under running water.

Charring the chiles with a torch does not cook them in the way that charring them over a gas burner or under the broiler in the oven does. As you can see in the photo above, they are nearly raw and bright green. To cook them further, I steamed them in the microwave, covered in film, for about four minutes on high.

Enchilada Sauce

I decided to keep with Ann's enchilada theme by making enchilada sauce to drizzle on the tostadas. This sauce is nothing more than a little roux with a lot of mild New Mexican ground chile and a bit of garlic powder, ground cumin, and rubbed Mexican oregano, all thinned with a ladle of chicken stock from the chicken that I poached for this meal.

Chicken, Green Chiles, and Chipotle Adobo

I picked the chicken that I had poached the day before and put and ounce and a half of shredded chicken per tostada in a bowl, then mixed in enough of the diced Anaheim chiles to make me happy, about two parts chicken to one part chile, or maybe three to one. Really, who cares?

I seasoned the chicken with salt and gave Ann a taste. She requested some heat to the mix, so I added about three tablespoons of chipotle adobo to the mix, turning it slightly reddish. The tostada mix ended up with just the slightest kick in the back of the throat.

Baked Tortillas

I baked eight tortillas, one sheet tray full, and left them on the counter to cool and finish drying out. (Click here for tostada procedure.) Then when we got hungry, around the end of the first quarter or so, I put some chicken-chile mix on each tostada, drizzled on some enchilada sauce, and topped each with a sprinkle of cotija and a few cilantro leaves. They were really good, giving us the sensation of eating something bad, while really being quite waistline friendly.

The tostadas were the highlight of our day, being much better than the game in which the Chiefs rolled over and played dead, the lousy half-time show, and the lame commercials. This sparsely attended COVID Super Bowl will probably be memorable for being unmemorable, except that Tom Brady, no matter what you think of him, continues to demonstrate why he is the best quarterback that I have ever seen. Unreal that he can continue to perform at his age, just unreal to defy time the way he has.

Tacos de Calabaza

It's no secret that we love tacos and we love really tasty vegetarian food, so I've been making a lot of vegetarian tacos: rajas con crema, grilled vegetable, spaghetti squash and black bean, and now, butternut squash and poblano pepper.

I thought of these orange and green tacos some weeks ago but I hadn't committed the time to roast butternut squash cubes until yesterday. The idea came from a vegetarian green chile with butternut that I made about the beginning of December. I knew the sweet roasted flavor of the squash would pair tremendously with the mildly spicy earthy flavor of the poblanos. The result was wicked good.

Tacos de Calabaza: Butternut Squash and Poblano

To make the taco filling, I cubed and roasted a butternut, then made a quick sauté of large dice of poblano, diced red onion, sliced green onion, minced garlic, and minced cilantro stems, with just a hint of ground mild Numex chile. I added the squash to the sauté and seasoned it before serving it on corn tortillas with chipotle adobo, cotija cheese, and cilantro leaves. Keeper!

Fish and Black Bean Tostadas

Fish and Black Bean Tostadas

We eat a lot of tacos suaves at our house. Sometimes we are looking for a little different texture, so I have been making tostadas recently. The latest batch is fish and black bean, the black beans helping to stretch the expensive fish and also to bulk the dish so that we consume fewer tortillas. We might only eat 3 or 4 tostadas, but if we're just having tacos, we're probably going to eat 5 or 6.

This dish has three components: the tostadas, the beans, and the fish. If you need a refresher on making tostadas, you can find it here. The black beans are flavored with a soffritto of (scraps from the refrigerator) red onion, shallot, green onion, cilantro stems, garlic, and mild ground Numex chile. The fish (Pacific rockfish) is baked on a sheet tray after being sprinkled with a mix of mild ground Numex chile, ground cumin, granulated garlic, salt, and aromatic Mexican oregano.

For us, tostadas are a great change of pace. And these fish and black bean ones were so delicious that they'll probably become something of a regular replacement for fish tacos.

Spaghetti Squash and Black Bean Tostadas

Spaghetti Squash and Black Bean Tostadas

The last time that I made spaghetti squash with black beans and baked it into a casserole, Ann commented that she'd really like the dish if I were to make it as a tostada topping. You can find the recipe for the topping at the link above. Last evening, I baked a spaghetti squash and made the tostadas that she asked for.

Making Tostadas

Although I see bags of tostadas flying off the shelves at the local supermarket, I don't see the point of buying them, if you have time to make them yourself. All it takes is a bag of corn tortillas, two sheet trays, an oven, and about 45 minutes. Although I lay out the process below, there is a step-by-step photo shoot of how to do it here.

To make tostadas, I lay 8 corn tortillas on a sheet tray, 3 along each side and two in the center. Then I top the sheet tray with another such that the tortillas are trapped between the two sheet trays. This will keep the tostada shells relatively flat.

The tortillas go into a moderate (350F) oven for fifteen minutes, at which point I pull them out of the oven and take the top sheet tray off. This lets the water vapor escape. Then I flip the tortillas over. At this point, you will see that they have shrunk to the point where all eight fit on the sheet tray with almost no overlap.

Re-covering the tortillas, I put them back into the oven for another 15 minutes and repeat the same process for a final 15 minutes. At this point, the tortillas should be dry and crisp. Pull them out and leave them uncovered until you are ready to eat. The hot tortillas will continue to evaporate any last bits of water in them as they cool.

You should eat the tostadas right away, but if you cannot, once they have cooled to room temperature, you can store them for a very long period in a tightly covered container. Humidity is their enemy so keep them cool and dry.

Hearts of Palm Seviche

I don't regularly surf for recipe ideas. Between my brain that thinks in flavors and Ann's wonderful incessant stream of "make this" and "make that," I never want for ideas. But still ideas do come at me from various places, such as when I am wandering through the produce section of the grocery store and the sight of some piece of produce gets my mind riffing. Recently, in something of a surprise, at least to me, one came from an advertisement.

Like a lot of folks, we cut the cord a long time ago and don't watch regular broadcast or cable TV, but we have a couple of streaming channels. We were watching a show the other night when some kind of pre-roll ad starting talking about Hearts of Palm Seviche. And that's all it took to spark an idea.

We both looked at each other and said, "Hearts of palm seviche sounds great."

Hearts of Palm Seviche

It probably sounded great because we have been eating fall vegetables for a couple of months now and are looking for a summery change-up for our vegetarian dinner entrées. Next trip to the store, I bought a couple cans of hearts of palm and all the vegetables that I wanted for the seviche.

It turned out so well that I made it again the week following and it is certain to go on our wintertime dinner menu. 

Hearts of Palm Seviche

You can add whatever you like to your seviche. I thought my first impromptu version was outstanding, so I wrote it down and haven't changed a thing in subsequent versions. This recipe makes two healthy portions or 4-6 appetizer portions.

1 cup grape tomatoes, diced

1/2 seedless cucumber, diced

1 yellow pepper, diced

1 red pepper, diced

1 orange pepper, diced

1/2 red onion, in fine dice

1 avocado, diced

2 15-ounce cans of hearts of palm, sliced into coins

1 bunch cilantro, destemmed and chopped

1 teaspoon Kosher salt, to taste

juice of two limes

Chop and mix. Season to taste. Serve immediately.

Vegetable Tacos

Vegetable tacos are something that I started making seriously this summer during grilling season and because they are so delicious, have become a regular quick dinner chez nous. Since I first posted about them back in October, I have formulated a strategy for making them that I will outline below, using vegetables that I prepared stovetop.

Vegetable Tacos

As I have been experimenting with dozens of veggie tacos, I have fallen into a procedure which involves mixing cooked ingredients with raw ingredients just before serving. This yields a warm, but super fresh taco.

Preparing the Raw Ingredients

In a large bowl, I mix the raw ingredients: green onion, cilantro, tomatoes, cotija, and finely minced chipotle. In season, I would likely include raw corn in this mix.

Searing the Cooked Ingredients

For the cooked ingredients, which I grill in good weather, the mix varies depending on what I have on hand. This pan contains onions, poblanos, yellow squash, and asparagus. Almost anything goes in veggie tacos and I have used eggplant, zucchini, and green beans this past summer. To mimic the intense cooking on the grill, sear the veggies hard if you are using a pan.

When the veggies are done, mix them immediately with the raw ingredients and season to taste with salt and spice. Serve with slices of lime on warm corn tortillas.

Although veggie tacos don't sound all that great, I assure you that they are delicious and addictive.

Chile Verde con Calabaza

It's not a big secret that I love poblano peppers, the large dark green mild chiles from central Mexico, now grown all over and available in most American grocery stores. I discovered poblanos a long time ago as a young man while living in Texas, an opportunity that dramatically expanded my culinary horizons and firmly cemented my love of Mexican food.

I was a poor graduate student living on a $650 per month stipend for teaching undergraduates at Texas A&M. My apartment was $400 per month, so you can imagine that making ends meet on $250 per month was difficult. It forced me to shop where the day laborers shopped, at the bodegas and mercados, and to eat what they ate: lots of beans and tortillas. But it also gave me the opportunity to learn about cilantro, cumin, nopales, dried chiles, tomatillos, posole, menudo, and not least of all, poblanos, all of which I got to taste and cook for the first time in Texas.

When I tasted poblanos for the first time, I was struck by their essential pepper flavor, deep with just a hint of spice, but﹘and here's the payoff for me﹘none of the grassy, bitter, pyrazine flavors that we associate with bell peppers. I don't really care for those flavors in a cooked bell pepper and worse still, like a lot of folks, I despise them when I keep tasting them all night long. For me, poblanos are a glorious solution to that problem and I have not been without them since discovering them.

In the mid-1980s when I moved to the Maryland suburbs of Washington DC, poblanos were hard to find, unlike today when they are a staple at most groceries. The situation improved by the 1990s when they started making appearances in large groceries, even out in the rural Shenandoah Valley of Virginia where I lived at the time. And by the time I started my restaurant in 2002, they were common. Poblano peppers were the only mild green pepper that I used at the restaurant.

And it was at the restaurant when my love affair with poblanos and chile verde really bloomed. We would change the menu daily in response to what our farmers were bringing us. And to make use of the vast quantities of tomatillos and poblanos that we would get in late summer, chile verde was a regular feature on the menu and for staff meals. Diners would probably never recognize the unctuous and delicious green sauce garnishing their plates as chile verde, but there it was nonetheless.

Suffice it to say that when summer slips into fall and brings out the annual hankering for soups and stews, my thoughts run to chile verde. A few weeks ago when I made yet another batch of chile verde, I saw a butternut squash on the counter, pretty typical for this time of year, and thought that it would make a terrific vegetarian chile verde. Ann and I are trying to reduce the amount of meat that we eat without compromising on flavor and I had the idea that really hard roasted butternut could in part take the place of meat. Hence the chile verde con calabaza experiment.

Chile Verde con Calabaza

Garlic, Green Onions, Cilantro, Onions, Poblanos

Cooking the Vegetables

Roasted Butternut Squash

There are a couple of ways to make chile verde, at least. Sometimes, I will put all the vegetables (onions, poblanos, garlic cloves, and tomatillos) on sheet trays and roast them to concentrate their flavors. Then I will add them to broth and make the stew. This is typically the approach I take when working with fresh tomatillos, which are a thing of the past at this time of the year.

Other times, such as this time, I will sauté the vegetables directly in the soup pot and use canned tomatillos. I will rinse the tomatillos and put them back in the can with water or stock and blend them with my stick blender to form the soup base.

Butternut squash can be insipid or delicious. It is really bland when lightly cooked, but like many things, it concentrates and develops deep complex flavors when really roasted. It takes a long time in the oven to achieve the level of concentration of the squash that you see in the photo above. This squash roasted in a hot oven 400-425F) for an hour and a quarter. After all that water evaporates from the squash, you will have about a third as much squash by weight and volume as you started with.

Chile Verde con Calabaza

The following recipe feeds about four people. It fed the two of us quite well, with leftovers for lunch the day following.

1 large butternut squash, about 5 pounds

6 poblanos, chopped

3 yellow onions, chopped

1 bunch of cilantro, chopped, stems chopped fine

1 bunch of green onions, sliced

8 cloves garlic, minced

1 28-ounce can of whole tomatillos

2 quarts of vegetable stock or water (or meat stock if you prefer)

1 teaspoon Mexican oregano

salt to taste

6 corn tortillas, chopped

Cube the butternut squash and put on an oiled sheet tray in a hot oven (425F), turning every 15-20 minutes until the squash browns on all surfaces. It will take an hour or longer. You should not rush this step as it is critical for the development of flavor.

In a large soup pot, sauté the poblanos, onions, cilantro, green onions, and garlic until the onions turn transparent.

Drain and rinse the tomatillos. You can add them directly to the soup pot as-is or you can blend or chop them, your choice. It takes longer for whole tomatillos to break down, so I like to speed things up and to obliterate the skins by blending. I put them back in the can and cover them with water, then roughly blend them directly in the can with my immersion blender, leaving some texture. You can always throw them in the regular blender or chop them with a knife.

Add the tomatillos and stock/water to the pot and rub the the oregano between your palms over the pot to break it down.

Let the stew simmer gently for 45 minutes to an hour to meld the flavors. Season to taste and add the tortillas. Cook for an additional 15-20 minutes to break down the tortillas which will thicken the stew. You can always use fresh or dried masa as a thickener. And you don't have to thicken at all if you want more of a soup than a stew.

Ten minutes before service, add the butternut squash to the pot to warm back through. It is important that you not cook the squash for longer or it will start to break down. Breaking down is OK if you want to make an orange squash soup, but for a green stew with discrete chunks of roasted squash, less cooking is more.

King Salmon with Persimmon-Pomegranate Salsa

There's a lot to love about fall. It's the season when some of our more interesting fruits such as persimmons and pomegranates ripen. I love both fruits and when I saw them appear in our store for the first time since last year, I bought some of each with no particular plan for using them. I knew in time that they would speak to me and when I came across a nice piece of king salmon, I thought that two somewhat unusual fall fruits would make a great salsa. I was right: it made a bright, crunchy, sweet-tart counterpoint for an unctuous piece of fish.

King Salmon with Persimmon-Pomegranate Salsa

I must say that modern improved sweet and seedless cultivars of persimmon are a far cry from the wild persimmons I used to devour as a child in Virginia. An inveterate roamer of the woods and fields near our property in the rolling hills at the base of the Blue Ridge Mountains, I knew where every pomegranate tree was within five miles of our house. And I would keep an eye on the fruit as it developed, knowing that the horribly astringent fruit was no good to eat as a rule until after the first frost. Then I had to battle the deer, the wild turkeys, and other smaller creatures for the tiny fruits that are night and day different from their grocery store counterparts today.

In my adult years, I now know time, not frost, is responsible for turning these delicious fruits sweet, golden, and soft. The frost notion was an old wives' tale, a handy rule for approximating when the fruits would be ripe.

Persimmon-Pomegranate Salsa Ingredients

Persimmon-Pomegranate Salsa

Pan-Searing Asparagus for Salmon Garnish

Here's a useful technique for cooking many vegetables on the stove top. You can sear them, like the asparagus above, in a heavy pan with no liquid whatsoever, right on the stove. For thicker vegetables, if you need to move along their cooking, you can splash the pan with a touch of water which will flash to steam and help steam the vegetables as they pan roast.

Persimmon-Pomegranate Salsa

This salsa, while made with somewhat unusual ingredients, follows my tried and true salsa formula of a fruit (or two!), an onion, cilantro, salt, some spice, and lime juice. How much of each ingredient you use is up to you and certainly the amount of lime juice could vary significantly based on how sweet your persimmons are.

2 persimmons, diced
1 pomegranate, seeded
1/2 bunch of green onions, chopped
1/2 bunch of cilantro, leaves only, chopped
1/2 teaspoon Kosher salt or to taste

1 tablespoon chipotle adobo or to taste 

juice of half of a lime or to taste

Don't forget plenty of salt. Not only does salsa depend on the interplay between salt and lime juice, but salt will make the super-sweet persimmon better, in the same way that adding a bit of salt to almost any dessert will improve it.

Chile Verde con Pollo

Poblanos, the large dark green triangular and generally mild peppers originating from Puebla, Mexico, are my favorite peppers. One of my most favorite ways to eat them is mixed with tomatillos in the stew called chile verde, a hearty and delicious northern Mexican and New Mexican stew. Chile verde is the opposite of chile colorado, so-called "colored" chile made with dried red chiles. I love both, but my answer to the question "Red or green?" is almost always green.

Chile Verde con Pollo

While chile verde is typically made with pork, I also like it made with chicken thighs. In this version, I poached chicken thighs in water for three hours, then picked the meat from the bones and returned the meat to the chicken stock before adding the remaining ingredients and cooking for another hour.

Chile Verde Ingredients

To the chicken stock and chicken, I add chopped yellow onion, poblanos, green onions, cilantro, minced garlic, and tomatillos. Sometimes I roast the onions, poblanos, garlic, and tomatillos before making the stew. Sometimes not. Chile verde is a soup/stew of infinite variation, for example, sometimes I add hominy (posole) and call it posole verde.

In the summer when working with fresh tomatillos, I would husk them and put them on a sheet tray in the oven and roast them until the skins start to brown. In the off-months, I use canned tomatillos. Because so many packers add additional acid to the tomatillos as a preservative, I drain and rinse them to prevent the sauce from becoming too acidic. Then, I put the tomatillos back in the can, add water or stock, and blitz them with the immersion blender.  You do not have to do this. With sufficient cooking, they will fall apart on their own.

Fully Loaded Eggs

Every now and again, I like to serve a nice brunch without working too hard at it. As I get older and more accustomed to retirement, I find myself more often than not eating only two meals a day, brunch and dinner. Along with retirement goes the sentiment of not wanting to slave over a meal quite as often as in the past, so I'm always thinking of ways to put great food on the table with little effort.

Fully Loaded Eggs

A case in point are these fully-loaded eggs that we had for brunch, plain-Jane scrambled eggs in a bowl, topped like tacos.

Taco Toppings

Just before scrambling the eggs, I pulled a container of roasted garlic-chipotle salsa, some cotija cheese, and some jalapeños en escabeche out of the fridge. Then I sliced an avocado and diced up a tomato with a bit of cilantro. Alternatively, these eggs would have made great breakfast tacos.

This was a really tasty brunch that took under ten minutes to assemble.

Grilled Tequila Lime Chicken with Mango-Chipotle Salsa

For me, the hardest part of making dinner is deciding what to cook. Fortunately, Annie is pretty good about throwing out ideas, such as the tequila lime chicken she mentioned last week. I decided to do the chicken as tacos topped with mango salsa. Mangos are 48 cents each right now, so we have a bunch in the house. Recipes below.

Tequila Lime Chicken Tacos with Mango-Chipotle Salsa

You can use whatever chicken you want. I have no use for chicken breasts, so I always buy thighs. I boned out 6 chicken thighs for this dish, using the skins and bones for making chicken stock. And then putting the skins in Charlie's dinner to try to put some weight on him. His tumors are making him really skinny.

Grilling Marinated Chicken Thighs

Tequila-Lime Marinade

Mix the following ingredients and place in a seal top bag. Add the chicken and marinate for at least an hour and preferably overnight. The sugar in the agave syrup will really help give you great grill marks on the chicken, as you can see above. This would also be great for shrimp.

zest of one lime
juice of one lime
1-1/2 ounces tequila
2 tablespoons agave syrup
6 cloves garlic, finely minced
stems from one bunch of cilantro, finely minced

Mango-Chipotle Salsa

Mango-Chipotle Salsa

This is about as simple as salsa gets. Mix all the ingredients. The quantities below are for your benefit. You don't actually think I measured anything, do you?

1 ripe mango, diced
juice of half of a lime
3 green onions, sliced
1/3 bunch of cilantro, chopped
finely minced chipotle, to taste
salt to taste

Enfrijoladas

I'm a hopeless student of languages. Hopeless in the sense of interminably curious and hopeless in the sense that I know bits and pieces of so many of them that they are trampling each other in my brain to the point where I will never be able to master any of them. In fact, as I've added more languages to the mix, my spelling in English, the one language that I have mastered, has become suspect because of the melange of words in my brain.

One aspect that fascinates me is how speakers of languages create new words to describe novel things. English, for example, inherited from its German-based ancestor the tendency to jam existing words together to describe a new thing. An example: the German Bahnhof  is the marriage of the words for train and house, meaning train station.

I've noticed a tendency in the Spanish-speaking food lexicon to create adjectives (and then nouns from those adjectives) using the prefix en or em, meaning in, and a noun, the resulting adjective meaning something contained in or smothered in or by the noun. Let's take one that we pretty much all know: enchilada. Enchilado means smothered in a sauce of chile and by extension an enchilada is a tortilla rolled around a filling and smothered in a wonderful chile sauce.

Off the top of my head, I can think of several others: enmolado, smothered in mole; encebollado, smothered in onion sauce; entomatado, smothered in tomato sauce; empanada, wrapped in pan (bread); and less commonly emparedado, a sandwich (torta/bolillo) between walls (paredes), that is, walled between two slices of bread.

Enfrijoladas de Pollo

Which leads me in a roundabout fashion to enfrijoladas. Now that you know the key, you can figure out for yourself that this means smothered in a sauce of frijoles, beans, seasoned with chipotle. This is a wonderful dish that deserves the acclaim given to its cousin enchiladas. Enfrijoladas are rarely found here north of the border, but they are such good comforting peasant food that I wonder why people aren't clamoring for them.

Roasted Chicken, Onion, Cilantro, and Cotija Filling

If you've ever made enchiladas, you pretty much already know how to make enfrijoladas. Decide on what you want for a filling and prep that. For this batch, I had some chicken thighs that I roasted on a bed of onion slices leftover from another meal. I mixed the shredded chicken with the chopped roasted onions, cilantro, and a bit of cotija cheese. You can put anything, or nothing at all, in your enfrijoladas.

I have seen enfrijoladas in which the tortillas were dredged in bean sauce, folded in quarters like crepes, topped with a bit more sauce and a sprinkle of cheese, and run under the broiler to melt the cheese. That sounds like pretty good stoner food to me!

To make the bean sauce, cook a batch of frijoles de la olla, pot beans. Put some cooked beans, a whole chipotle, and several ladles of bean broth in the blender and blend briefly to get a loose bean sauce, slightly thicker than chile sauce. Season to taste.

Fry tortillas briefly in oil to soften them and to seal them against the bean sauce, just a few seconds on each side. Remove from the oil before they become crisp or take on any color.

Assembling Enfrijoladas

To assemble the enfrijoladas, put some of the bean sauce in a plate. Dip both sides of the tortilla in the sauce and lay on some filling. Roll the tortilla around the filling and transfer to an oiled casserole dish. When all the enfrijoladas are assembled, pour a little more sauce over the top of the dish and bake in a moderate (350F) oven until the dish is heated through, perhaps 20 minutes.

As you can see in the top photo, I cooked the leftover bean sauce down into refried beans and put some of those on a plate. Then I put a couple enfrijoladas on top of that. I garnished the dish with a bit of crema, a touch of cotija, and a sprig of cilantro.

"Stupid good!" said Ann.

Posole Verde de Pollo

We've been kicking around the idea of throwing something in the crockpot before taking our Sunday hikes so that we would have something warm and delicious waiting for us when we arrived at home. It just hasn't been cold enough yet this year to want something super warm and comforting, but the gale force winds and freezing temperatures on Sunday fixed all that.

I decided to throw together a quick posole verde at work on Saturday, leave it in the fridge overnight, and kick it off before we left on Sunday. So on Friday, I marinated chicken leg quarters in finely minced cilantro stems, garlic, and freshly ground cumin mixed into a slurry with a touch of avocado oil, salt, and pepper.

Also on Friday, I cut up three poblanos and a bunch of green onions; slabbed and charred a medium yellow onion; peeled 18 cloves of garlic; and cleaned a dozen or so small tomatillos. I put the poblanos, yellow onion, garlic, green onion bulbs, and tomatillos on a sheet tray and roasted them until well browned, about 30 minutes. To make the salsa verde, I transferred all this to a pan with the sliced green onion tops, sliced cilantro, and a half gallon of pork stock. After this simmered for half an hour or so, I blended it into a rough sauce and left it in the fridge overnight.

Saturday, I seared the chicken.

Searing the Chicken for Maximum Flavor

Then threw in an onion to start deglazing the pan.

Getting All the Good Bits with an Onion

Then layered the hominy, chicken, and onions in the crockpot.

Layering the Hominy, Chicken, and Onions

Then put the salsa verde over it all and put it in the fridge overnight.

Burying it All in Salsa Verde

And we feasted when we got back from our hike.

Crockpot Posole Verde de Pollo