Dimitri Comes to Bend

Surprise! Our friend Dimitri texted out of the blue on Monday that he and his friend Joe would be in Bend for the weekend. Dimitri still lives in Northern Virginia just outside of DC, so he was not on our bingo card for weekend visitors. He and Joe, a friend currently from Virginia but from Portland in the past, were flying into PDX. After visiting Oregon wine country and exploring Portland, they would be driving to Bend for a long weekend.

Mediterranean Crew: Greek, Italian, Italian

Dimitri and Joe had plans to dine out on Saturday at the same time we were at the Trevor Noah show at the amphitheater, so we set a get-together for Sunday starting with pre-game at Viaggio Wine Bar. We met them there after they returned from a day trip to Crater Lake, which if you have never seen before like Dimitri, I guess you have to see. But honestly, battling buses of tourists is not my thing and I would have preferred to visit Paulina Lake instead.

Dimitri and Joe are fellow winos, so we thought that a visit to Viaggio would be welcome. There, they could drool over the curated selection of bottles on the shelves and Coravin selections on the glass list. Where else can you find shelves full of Wachau and Kamptal Riesling, Piemonte wines of all sorts, or Rhônes for days? Maybe in large cities, but in the small city of Bend three hours in any direction from civilization, the selection at Viaggio is miraculous.

After a bottle of Pibarnon Bandol rosé, we drove to the house where all I had to do was assemble dinner. In planning dinner, I wanted something that I could put on the table with little to no effort. Gone are the days of à la minute cooking where cooking is the focus rather than our guests. Hence our menu of chips and salsa verde, enchiladas de carne adovada, and posole amarillo with bacon, corn, and green chiles. Ann made another summer berry and brioche pudding and I had plenty of lemon-thyme sorbet base in the fridge ready to go into the freezer.

How I arrived at this menu is anyone's guess. I was definitely looking for a slow-cooker meal that would not involve a lot of active cooking on my part. Probably in the back of my mind was the kilo of Chimayo chile that I scored in New Mexico in December. And then, I found some really good looking pork shoulder at the store. Also, who does not like enchiladas? Chips and salsa as well as posole are natural companions to carne adovada, so that part of the menu should not be a surprise.

Before we get into dinner however, Dimitri came bearing a gift, a 2014 Glen Manor Petit Verdot. I texted Jeff, "A friend showed up with a bottle of this," to which he replied, "Keep that friend!" I remember this wine. I believe I did a pairing for it for a barrel tasting. I could be wrong; 2015 was a hot minute ago.

Dimitri Brought Us a Gift

Chips and Charred Jalapeño Salsa Verde

My usual salsa verde is tomatillos (large can, drained), cilantro (one bunch), garlic (4 cloves), and a serrano chile. When I am lazy, I used canned tomatillos rather than roasting fresh ones. I am often lazy these days. I wanted to change it up a bit with some smokiness, so I charred two jalapeños and used them instead of the serrano. I also threw in an avocado and a pinch of smoked paprika for added smoke.

It was good, but next time, I want it smokier. Maybe I try using a charred poblano. Definitely will char fresh tomatillos on the next iteration. It will be a fun experiment. A batch of salsa verde or chimichurri is usually in our refrigerator: we eat a lot of vegetarian and fish tacos that benefit from salsa.

Saturday, I made a batch of slow cooker carne adovada. Like most dishes, I used no recipe for this super simple stew. I started by cutting the pork shoulder into large cubes, then browning one side of the cubes, followed by transferring them to the slow cooker as each batch browned. I want the flavor that browning creates, but I find that browning all sides of the meat tends to contribute to dryness. Browning one large side of the pork chunks suffices to yield both flavor and succulence.

After the meat was all browned, I added a diced onion to the pork pan along with call it a dozen minced cloves of garlic. Once the onions cooked, I added a a bit of Mexican oregano, rubbed between my palms into a powder, a lot of spicy ground Chimayo chile, and a lesser amount of ancho powder to add some balance to the Chimayo chile. The chile was probably a cup in total, 3/4 Chimayo and 1/4 ancho. After stirring this into the onions well, I added perhaps a couple cups of water, a splash of Sherry vinegar, and a small amount, perhaps a tablespoon, of agave nectar. Once this sauce came together, I poured it over the pork, stirred well, and put the slow cooker on.

I believe that adovada must have acidity; your grandmother may disagree as is her right. Not a lot of acidity, but some. So I always put a bit of vinegar in mine (as I do my Mexican-style chorizo). I also think that spicy Chimayo chile needs just a hint (below the taste threshold) of sweet to help mellow it, hence the agave.

When the pork was cooked, some six or seven hours later, I separated the liquid from the pork. I separated the meat and the cooking liquid for several reasons. With the liquid chilled, I could peel off the layer of pork fat that I did not want in my sauce (and use it to cook anything else; who does not love chile-flavored lard?). Because I was making enchiladas, I wanted a more solid filling that would not bleed through the tortillas. And, I wanted a thicker, more intense sauce to fold into the filling and to cover the tops of the enchiladas.

After defatting the cooking liquid, I reduced it as far as I could without it becoming too salty. I salted the pork cubes during browning. But it was a really mellow thin sauce after hours of braising and I wanted a thicker, more in-your-face chile sauce for the enchiladas. I made a quick paste of a tablespoon of flour (for thickening), half a cup of Chimayo chile, and a little of the reduced braising liquid. After stirring really well to remove all lumps, I stirred this slurry into the sauce and cooked it gently to thicken.

Enchilada Sauce, Thickened with Flour and Chimayo Chile

Once we got back to the house, assembly of the enchiladas was trivial. I mixed some of the carne adovada with some of the sauce and the meat shredded as I stirred it. After seasoning it to taste, I rolled the tortillas around this filling, placing them in an oiled half hotel pan, seam side down.

I digress, but this is my blog, so I will digress if I want to. When I retired from the restaurant, I kept one of the half hotel pans for my home kitchen. If you have worked in food service and are of a certain age, you will remember that hotel pans used to be thick and heavy, not thin and flimsy as they are today. I kept one of the old school thick pans for home use and I use it often. I had some really awesome hotel pans too, but they are far too large for home cooking.

I spooned more sauce over the top of the rolled tortillas to make them into true enchiladas ("sauced with chiles") and then scattered over just a bit of melting cheese. I used mozz, but any melting cheese such as queso chihuahua, queso quesadilla, queso oaxaca, queso asadero, or Monterey Jack would be perfect.

Posole Amarillo with Bacon, Green Chile, and Fresh Corn

I am a huge fan of hominy. I grew up on it, always fried in bacon grease as it is traditionally served in the South. It was good. When I was in grad school in Texas, I learned that the rest of the world does not see the dish the same as I grew up with. Posole is always always a stew with pork, red chile, and white hominy. It was good: I loved this stew at first bite. Then I went to New Mexico and found that they often serve a drier posole as a side dish, more akin to my southern hominy, but with local chiles. It was good. Then I started making casseroles of hominy bound with cream sauce. It too was good. What I figured out is that posole dishes are as numerous and varied as the people that make them. I feel free to riff on this ingredient in any way that seems appropriate to me.

Over the years, I learned that hominy is not always white. It is the color of the corn from which it is made and as we all know, corn comes in many shades: white, yellow, red, and purple. I have used the different colors for effect over the years. I used a lot of maíz morado, purple hominy, at the restaurant. This time, I felt like using yellow hominy.

This time, I fried up some bacon most of the way done, then added diced red onion and garlic and let that cook. Then I added the hominy and diced mild green chile (Anaheims that I torched on my patio). It too was good. I made it Sunday morning and refrigerated it. While the enchiladas were in the oven, I reheated the posole and sliced the kernels off two ears of corn. They went into the dish as a sweet counterpoint to the smoky green chile vibe going on. It was even better.

Enchiladas de Carne Adovada and Posole Amarillo

After dinner, it had cooled off enough to go outside so Ann put the tunes on out on the patio and we all took our dessert, summer berry pudding and lemon-thyme sorbet, outside. I opened a bottle of 1977 Warre's Port, because I save those kinds of wines for fellow winos like Dimitri and Joe. It was a great night!

Dessert on the Patio

Ann's Berry and Brioche Pudding

Lemon-Thyme Sorbet with Summer Berry Pudding

Santa Fe: Saturday, Ghost Ranch and The Pink Adobe

After our foray into downtown Santa Fe last evening, I was up on Saturday morning by 8:00, just a few minutes after sunrise. I was looking forward to today which was to include a trip to Ghost Ranch near Abiquiu, NM followed by Rob's birthday celebration at The Pink Adobe in Santa Fe. I will never forget the date of Rob's birthday; he was born on Pearl Harbor Day.

After coffee at home and a leisurely start to our day after a late night the evening before, we needed to get moving to be able to have brunch and get to Ghost Ranch, a 75-minute drive northwest from Santa Fe. I'm uncertain how we decided to go back to La Choza for brunch, but I wasn't complaining after having had a wonderful dinner there on Thursday night. We arrived about 10:50 and waited in the lobby for a table when they opened at 11:00.

Once we were seated, we got an enthusiastic greeting from our server whom Rob and Dyce knew from their time as regulars at the restaurant when they lived in Santa Fe. Today, I had more time to examine the menu and spied blue corn burritos. Had I seen them on Thursday night, I would certainly have ordered them in preference to the burrito made with a flour tortilla. In addition to being Team Green in the chile world, I am also Team Corn in the tortilla department.

Blue Corn Burritos with Green Chile
The Best Dish I Had in New Mexico

Dyce's Chicken Adovada Quesadilla
The Chicken Adovada was Delicious

Sopaipillas, Classic New Mexican Dessert

We were discussing with our server on one of her table visits how delightfully spicy the chile is, especially the green chile. She responded with, “The green has an opinion!” Absolutely it did! My experience in growing chiles tells me that the hotter and drier the weather, the spicier the chiles. I might be wrong, but I hold that growing chiles is just like growing most fruits; the more the plant struggles, the smaller quantity of fruit, but the better its flavor.

After our necessarily brief but wonderful lunch at La Choza, we set out north on US84 up the Rio Grande Valley. We ultimately crossed that famous river at the town of Espanola, where I saw many bare scarlet twigs of Red Osier Dogwood decorating its banks, bringing beautiful color to the river just in time for the holidays. Just a bit further north in the town of San Jose in the middle of the Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo, we bent northwest along the Rio Chama where it joins the Rio Grande.

Following the Rio Chama, a few minutes later, we found ourselves in the town of Abiquiu (rhymes with barbecue) and found the highway situated above and alongside the Abiquiu Reservoir on the Chama. By this point, the geography had changed. Gone were the flats with the piñon-clad rolling hills; here were highly eroded buttes and other interesting formations. I really admired the Badlands-esque formations of rich red soil interlaced with layers of white or gray volcanic ash. Just beyond the town, we turned into the dirt entrance road into Ghost Ranch, about 15 minutes before we were to take a tour of the property with one of the guides.

Roadside Scenery Near Ghost Ranch

The White Stripes are Layers of Volcanic Ash

After stopping near the ranch entrance to view the small log cabin off to the right, Curley's Cabin of "City Slickers" fame, we headed further into the ranch and parked in front of the compound that houses the Welcome Center and two museums. After checking in at the front desk and being told that we would meet our guide at the bus parked in front of the anthropology museum, we wandered about the Welcome Center a bit.

The Welcome Center has a large collection of movie memorabilia from all the films that have been shot here; using the ranch as a movie location must be a good business. Some of my favorite films with scenes shot here are "No Country for Old Men," "3:10 to Yuma," and "City Slickers." That's a crazy mix of Coen-nutso, Eastwood-western, and Crystal-comedic films!

Curley's Cabin from Movie "City Slickers"

But it was not movies that brought us to the ranch. Ghost Ranch is where famed artist Georgia O'Keeffe lived and painted at various points in her extraordinarily long life. The tour that Rob and Dyce had arranged was with a guide who would show us some of the formations around the ranch that have been memorialized in O'Keefe's landscape paintings.

While waiting for all the members of our tour group to assemble, we spent a few minutes walking around the anthropology museum.

Dead Leaves on a Fremont Cottonwood Outside the Museum

Viga and Latilla Ceiling Detail

Detail of an Exquisite Pot in the Museum

After about five minutes in the museum, we joined our group outside. Our guide was wonderful and gave us a heartfelt tour of the countryside that she clearly loves, stopping every so often to show us a feature in the landscape along with a copy of that feature in a painting. One thing that really struck me is that some of the features that appear so large in the paintings are actually very tiny details that O'Keeffe picked out of the vast landscape.

Following are some few of the photos that I took in the harsh light of the afternoon. I have seen so many photos of Ghost Ranch whose colors have been doctored to enhance the look of the rock formations. These colors are as we observed them.

O'Keeffe's Beloved Cerro Pedernal, "Flint Hill"

Say's Phoebe on Coyote Fence at O'Keeffe House

I Love This Landscape

Cerro Pedernal Through Coyote Fence

Viewed in the harsh light of the afternoon or in the warm tones of sunrise and sunset, I love the colors of this landscape. If you’re a desert person as am I, you will find beauty as O'Keeffe did in the browns and sages, the terra cottas and ochers, the muted color spectrum of the earth. Ann and I appreciate the austere beauty of these landscapes that some might call barren.

While we understand that not everyone will love the New Mexico landscape, it speaks to us. We could become blasé about the desert landscape, living as we do in the high desert, but it does not seem likely. This trip to Ghost Ranch was a fantastic reminder of how beautiful these landscapes are. It is also a great reminder that while the high desert of Oregon is different from New Mexico, we are fortunate to live there. And fortunate to be able to visit New Mexico.

I loved our tour, but if there were a downside, it was that we had to remain on the road. I am sympathetic to trying to keep the landscape from being loved to death. On the other hand, I love to immerse myself in a landscape and understand it at a more intimate level. Walking a landscape is a different experience to viewing it from a road.

Flash forward to the house in Santa Fe. When I was changing for dinner, I noticed that the painting on the wall facing our bed was an O’Keeffe, a view of a hill that I had photographed earlier in the afternoon. I don't know how coincidental this really was, but I found it so. I photographed the conical hill partly because of its shape, but more so because I was attracted to the trees clinging lopsidedly to the side of the hill. I was not aware that it featured in a painting until I saw it hanging on the wall back in Santa Fe.

Conical Hill with Trees, Subject of an O'Keeffe Painting

After we drove back to Santa Fe and rested for a few minutes, we got ready to go to dinner to celebrate Rob's birthday. The dinner was set for a Santa Fe institution, the Pink Adobe, where we were to meet Rob and Dyce's friends Jean-Marc and Mary to make a party of six. We decided to gather in the restaurant's bar called the Dragon Room for cocktails about an hour before dinner. When we arrived, the place was packed, but we managed to cobble together a table for six.

I was sitting with my back to the wall where I could contemplate the two aquamarine Dale Chihuly chandeliers hanging from the tall ceiling. I have always admired Chihuly's blown glass sculptures that fuse two disparate art forms, sculpture and glassblowing, into a new form. Although Chihuly is a Pacific Northwester, it seems somehow fitting to have examples of his work in Santa Fe, a town of many artists and works of art. His glass is not of the southwestern vernacular, but it somehow works for me especially as a flowing organic form contrasting with the angular Pueblo interior of the bar.

Twin Chihuly Chandeliers in the Dragon Room

Unfortunately, our table was adjacent to small group playing Brazilian jazz tunes. Their music, while suitably mellow, was amplified in a small space that needed no amplification, the result being that we could not hear each other. When Jean-Marc and Mary entered and we introduced ourselves, Rob went next door to the restaurant to see if we could be seated early so that we could hear ourselves think. Our table was sitting open and we moved there.

Although the Pink Adobe has a fairly standard American menu, I had already decided that when possible, to stick with more traditional New Mexican foods during my short stay in the state. Accordingly I ordered the Plato Mexicano: a chile relleno, a blue corn enchilada, and what was called carne asada, but turned out to be a small steak. I had hoped that the carne asada might be a bit of crispy skirt steak bits rather than a more American grilled steak, but the steak was well cooked.

The server asked me for the usual choice of red, green, or Christmas, but there was no chile on my plate. I asked the server for it and she brought both sauces to the table. Both were good and spicy, but they don’t hold a candle to the chile from La Choza. This isn't a knock on the Pink Adobe; it is a compliment to La Choza. On the other hand, the chile relleno was the best we tasted in Santa Fe.

Plato Mexicano: Relleno, Enchilada, Carne Asada

Churros for Dessert
Quite Toughly Bready and not Ethereally Light

At some point during our meal, a table of five was seated near us, a posse of Insta-chicas in fake furs, leopard print clothing, and skirts that didn't leave any parts of their anatomy to the imagination. I guess I am getting old, but I am tired of kids on their phones constantly, filming TikToks, posing for selfies, and making influencer videos. Whatever happened to the art of conversation?

Speaking of which, we all went back to the house for a nightcap and more conversation before Jean-Marc and Mary headed home and we headed to bed.

Pork and Nopalito Enchiladas

I felt like cooking this weekend, despite a huge sold-out wine dinner on Saturday night. As the younger guys shoulder more of the load in the restaurant kitchen, my days are moving more and more to logistics and paperwork and my nights are going more the direction of third wheel, in the crew's way, except on busy nights when I am quarterbacking, what we in the business call expediting. None of this involves a pan in my hand and so I think my cooking at home is my way of compensating for this, for finding again what was so enjoyable that it got me into the business. Enough introspection; I made some kick-ass enchiladas on Sunday.



Pork and Nopalito Enchiladas/Guajillo Salsa Roja

Not sure what the genesis of this dish was. I know Ann and I were coffeeing in the sunroom as we do pretty much every Sunday morning, talking about dinner as we do pretty much every Sunday morning, and somehow enchiladas came up, which was enough for me to run with.

Pulled Pork, Nopalito, Green Onion, and Cheese Filling

A quick trip to the supermercado yielded a slice of pork shoulder, some guajillos, a bag of tortillas, a bunch of green onions, a couple cans of tomatoes, and some quesillo especial, grated cheese for pupusas. I have a couple of jars of nopalitos in the refrigerator and I decided to use up some of them in the enchilada filling which also contains the shredded pork shoulder, green onions, some quesillo, and a little bit of the guajillo sauce to moisten it.

Rubbed Pork Shoulder, Tomatoes, Guajillos, Garlic

I wanted to roast the tomatoes hard to give them a bit of a char and I wanted to slow cook/roast-braise the pork until it was fork tender, but not having someone to wash dishes for me, I wanted to use a single pan for the entire operation. I put the tomatoes, a few guajillos, and a dozen cloves of garlic around the outside of the roasting pan, with the rubbed pork shoulder in the middle. The spice rub that I use for pork differs with my mood and the flavor profile I am looking to achieve. This one was pimentón (smoked paprika), cumin, garlic powder, oregano, cinnamon, salt, and black pepper. Because of the spice rub, I did not add any additional seasonings to the salsa roja.

Roasting the Tomatoes While Braise-Roasting the Pork

I tented the pork so that it would roast-braise under its lid while the tomatoes, chiles, and garlic roasted around the edges. I roasted until the tomatoes were good and caramelized, the chiles a little charred, and the pork was falling apart. Meanwhile, I soaked the remainder of the stemmed and seeded guajillos in warm water for a couple hours. Into the blender went those chiles with the roasted tomato mixture and out came the most wonderful salsa roja. Three ounces of guajillos to two 28-ounce cans of tomatoes was just about a perfect ratio. Guajillos are a kitchen workhorse everywhere, having wonderful chile flavor with little to just a bit of spice. If you don't know guajillos, it's time to meet them.