Lamb Stew (Navarin d'Agneau)

Left over from our Easter feast, we had a great many grilled lamb chops as well as a good bit of sauce poivrade. It seemed obvious to me that the best way to make use of these leftovers was to make a classic lamb stew, termed a navarin in France. A navarin is a classic Easter dish all over France, typically made with shoulder and often containing turnips, navets, after which the dish likely took its name.

Lamb Stew (Navarin d'Agneau)

The classic method sees raw lamb shoulder browned and removed from the pan. Into the pan go flour and tomato paste and then a sauce is made after these two items brown. The lamb goes back into the sauce and the whole goes into the oven to braise. When done, the vegetables are usually cooked separately, at least in higher caliber restaurants, and combined with the meat and sauce just at service.

The goal is to have an unctuous and richly flavored sauce napping tender lamb and perfectly cooked vegetables. The vegetables often vary according to the season, but carrots, potatoes, turnips, and onions are fairly standard. In the spring, a navarin printanier might also include asparagus, favas, or green peas.

Beautiful Plate of Stew Vegetables

This particular navarin that I made last evening had necessarily to be made differently, given that I was starting with cooked lamb and also because at home, I am not cooking each of my vegetables separately. Moreover, I was certainly not paring them into beautiful lozenge shapes as do the high end French restaurants. Sure, I can do it, but I'm not competing for Michelin stars here, just trying to get a delicious dinner on the table as efficiently as possible.

I started by prepping the plate of vegetables you see above. Because I intended to poach them all together in lamb stock until they were just done, I paid special attention to cutting them such that they would all cook and be done at the same time. I used potatoes, carrots, celery, and halved shallots. Were I making this at the restaurant, I would have used whole tiny potatoes, tiny baby carrots, whole spring onion bulbs, baby hakurei turnips, tournéed celery root, fava beans, a couple morels, and perhaps some fern fiddleheads, each cooked separately.

Next, I boned out the lamb chops and cut it into bite-sized chunks, then made a stock using the lamb bones, vegetable trimmings (and especially the shallot skins, which give brown color to the stock), a few parsley sprigs, and the leftover sauce poivrade (glace de viande, shallots, green peppercorns, and the reduced and strained red wine lamb marinade).

At dinner time, I strained the stock and returned it to the stove at a simmer in which to poach the vegetables. Once the vegetables were nearing doneness, I seasoned the stock, added the lamb cubes, and then proceeded to thicken the sauce with an addition of glace de viande and beurre manié. It is vital, when making a dish with cooked meat, to add it at the very end, such that it just heats through.

Beurre manié (literally "handled butter," meaning kneaded butter) is equal parts room temperature butter and flour kneaded into a paste. By coating the flour with fat, the flour does not lump when added to a hot sauce. It is one of the simplest ways to thicken a hot sauce on the fly and is a technique that every cook should know.

One of the principal tricks of making dishes with highly reduced and long-cooked stocks is achieving the perfect balance so that the sauce dances across the palate rather than lying there limp and listless. I spent a lot of time with my cooks in the restaurant walking them through the process. We would taste the sauce and most often it would start dead and flat. To counter this, I use two weapons, spice and acid, acid being the primary tool.

The tiniest little hint of bite in the sauce will help perk up the taste buds and to that end, ground white pepper is the saucier's friend. A tiny bit goes a very long way because ground white pepper is very piquant. I dusted the surface of my stew with a hint of white pepper and stirred it in.

Spice aside, what really contributes to a lively sauce is acidity. All the long cooking and resulting extraction of collagens creates a palate coating and dull sauce. A tiny bit of acid will fix this. I can remember tasting a dull sauce with my cooks, adding a few drops of good Sherry vinegar to the sauce, and retasting. Watching their eyes light up at the revelation of what acid can do for a sauce was a great reward.

In the case of my sauce last night, I was prepared with Sherry vinegar at hand, but because I made the stock with leftover sauce poivrade (made from most of a bottle of red wine, plus some of the green peppercorn brine, both wine and brine being acidic), my sauce was lively enough after adding the scant amount of white pepper.

Navarin d'agneau, what a great use of leftovers!

Easter 2022

It's been a long time since we held an Easter dinner. In fact, I don't recall having cooked a nice Easter meal since 2017, the year that my mother died and the year that we decided to pull up stakes and move across the country from Virginia to Oregon.

We didn't really find a tribe to celebrate with in McMinnville in 2018 and 2019 and then COVID obliterated the opportunity in both 2020 and 2021. Things have changed in 2022. Since moving to Bend in February, we have not only found a receptive group of friends, but thankfully COVID has relented, at least for the time being. It wouldn't surprise me, however, to be re-reading this post in a few months, once again in lockdown. It wouldn't surprise me at all, so it is now or never to celebrate.

For this particular celebration, I thought I'd go back to my roots and classic schooling to do some really simple French bistro-style food for dinner, starting with a classic terrine maison, then onto dinner with lamb chops, a green peppercorn sauce, asparagus, and pommes Anna. Although the food is simple, the devil is in the details.

John and Heidi in the Spirit!

Shanda Brought Ann Beautiful Sunflowers

Pregaming it at the Kitchen Island

Cocktails

Tom and Shanda arrived within minutes of John and Heidi and we got our cocktail on. For events like this, I prefer to spend my time visiting with friends rather than tending bar, so I generally make one or two cocktails in advance. Ann picked the cocktails this time: a classic Crusta and a cocktail that I worked out involving Mezcal and Maraschino. I don't have a name for the latter cocktail, but I really enjoyed it, so I may come up with a name at some point.

Cocktails, Awaiting Guests

Cheers! Santé! Skol!

The Crusta, pregenitor of the Sidecar, comprises Cognac, lemon juice, simple syrup, triple sec, orange bitters, and Maraschino, stirred on ice, strained up into a stemmed glass with a sugared rim, and garnished with a lemon twist. Classically, I've seen the drink served in a coupe lined with a wide slice of lemon peel around the bowl, but I didn't have enough lemons for that. 

The Mezcal cocktail is all about a smoky profile. It starts with high-quality muddled Maraschino cherries, a bit of syrup from the cherries, a little Maraschino liqueur, lime juice, and a low-end Joven Mezcal. Save the good Mezcal for drinking neat! It is served at room temperature, strained up into a stemmed glass rimmed with smoked salt and garnished with a cherry. It is not at all sweet and the Maraschino adds a floral character to the smoky Mezcal.

Appetizers

Terrine, Cheese, Pickles, Bread, Mustard

What's more French bistro than cheese and charcuterie? For appetizers with our cocktails, I made a terrine and some pickles, and Ann made a delightful loaf of bread. We bought a hunk of Sawtooth cheese, a washed rind raw cow's milk cheese similar to Muenster, from Cascadia Creamery in Trout Lake, Washington, across the Columbia River about three hours north of us.

The terrine is ground pork garnished with ham, pork fat, pistachios, green peppercorns, porcini mushrooms, and dried cherries. I would usually use pork liver in the terrine, but being brand new to Bend, I have no idea where to source good pork liver and moreover, I like to take guests' temperature on liver before I serve it to them.

Ann's Boule

Pommes Anna

Invented in Paris in the 1800s, pommes Anna is one of those classic dishes in the French culinary pantheon, a layered cake of potato slices, butter, and salt, browned on the stovetop and baked to doneness. Although it is surely out of favor in the 21st century, I like it for a party because it is impressive to look at, meltingly delicious, and best of all, because it cooks in the oven, I can spend my time with guests while it cooks. I think that it is such a wonderful dish that is in danger of being forgotten that I trained all my sous chefs in how to make it so that they can pass it down to their crews. 

Slicing Yellow Potatoes Old School
on the Mandoline

Pommes Anna, Pre-Slicing

To make pommes Anna, you should slice potatoes thinly, about 1/8 inch or 3mm. To do so, I use my old-school French stainless steel mandoline, pictured above. I don't use it much any more, but it used to get a workout at the restaurant. This is probably my third or fourth one, several having been destroyed by the rigors of the restaurant kitchen.

If you are looking for something just to make this dish, I would not recommend that you spend $200 on a classic mandoline. A cheap Japanese benriner or even a knife will work just fine to slice the potatoes, as much as I do love the heft of the old-school hunk of French stainless steel. 

The choice of potato is up to you. Starchy russet potatoes hold together better and brown better, but the texture is drier and way less sexy. Waxy potatoes, such as the Yukon Golds that I used for this one, don't hold together or brown as well, but my God, is the texture ever sublimely sexy! I would say choose starchy potatoes until you have a few pommes Anna under your belt and are comfortable with the technique, then switch to waxy potatoes.

To bake the potato cake, you will need a heavy, fairly straight-sided, oven-proof pan. I use my antique Griswold #8 cast iron frying pan. The company that makes my copper pans, Mauviel, actually still makes a $500 copper pan just for making pommes Anna, entirely overkill! If you don't have a cast iron pan, maybe this dish will convince you to get one at a thrift shop near you.

My frying pan holds about five pounds of potatoes, so I sliced five pounds of Yukon golds in the afternoon before guests arrived. One of the good things about waxy potatoes is that they don't really oxidize all that much (as compared to say russets which brown while you are peeling them) and can be prepped well in advance.

I assembled the gâteau just as we were finishing our appetizers, by arranging the potato slices in pretty rings, doused with clarified butter and sprinkled with salt every layer. I always build up the center higher than the edges because the center will sink, yielding an uneven cake. The first step is to build the cake on the stove top over medium heat. Then you cover it with foil, weight it with a very heavy pan, and bake it covered for about 25 minutes in a really hot oven, say 450F. Finally it gets uncovered and baked until it is cooked through and nicely colored, say another 25 minutes.

When it went into the oven for the initial covered bake, I went outside and fired the grill to preheat in anticipation of grilling lamb chops and asparagus for dinner. Grace, who is making her final Easter appearance with us (she has only days to live), watched the proceedings outside from the comfort of the dining room rug, looking through the French doors to the patio where all the action was.

Queen of the Dining Room

Easter Dinner

Dinner was a really simple affair. Along with the pommes Anna, we had grilled lamb chops and grilled asparagus paired with a northern Rhône, a Crozes-Hermitage rouge, always my go-to wine for lamb.

As for all simple cooking, the devil is in the details and in the quality of the ingredients. I marinated the lamb chops in red wine, garlic, rosemary, and black pepper for three days before hand. The marinade, I strained and reduced, then finished with Dijon mustard, shallots, green peppercorns, glace de viande, a splash of heavy cream, and at the end, a little cold butter swirled in, to make a refined flourless sauce poivrade for the lamb.

I found some beautiful large asparagus at the market, it being the height of asparagus season. For home cooking, I snap the stems off where they will break, assuring that they will be tender. But because this was for a special occasion, I cut the stalks all to the same length and then peeled the tough outer skin off them. If you are going to peel asparagus, you really should invest in a serrated edge peeler which will make your life so much simpler. For thick asparagus headed for the grill, I like to blanch them first. Otherwise, you risk charring the outside on the hot grill before they can cook through.

Almost Ready to Feast, Filling Water Glasses
and Lighting Candles

Pommes Anna and Grilled Asparagus

Lamb Chops: The Main Attraction

For dessert, Ann dipped cannoli shells into chocolate and made a filling of ricotta, tiny chocolate chips, and lemon zest. She also made the excess dipping chocolate into bark sprinkled with salt and toasted pistachios. Along with those, I opened a 1991 Quinta do Vesuvio Port that I bought on futures 30 years ago. At it's current state of evolution, it tastes like a warm marionberry pie and blackberry syrup.

1991 Quinta do Vesuvio Port

It really was great to get in the kitchen and cook some real food for a change, although the pile of dirty dishes at the end is always a bit of a bummer! John, Heidi, Tom, and Shanda, many thanks for your great company and for sharing a meal with us in our new home!

Seared Ahi on Mediterranean Salad

Seared Ahi on Mediterranean Salad

Tuna may be the ultimate fish (though in my book, a big slab of Striped Bass is right up there). And it would be a terrible understatement to say that I am picky about my tuna. At the restaurant, I handled a very great deal of very high quality tuna and so most of what I see at the store is several notches below what I used to serve to my customers. Every now and again, which is to say quite rarely, I see a piece of tuna at the store that looks good enough to bring home. As it did back at the end of March.

How to cook tuna is never in question for me. Like scallops, the less cooked it is, the better. If I am going to cook it at all, I will either briefly sear it or lightly grill it, just trying to cook the outer surface. Given that our weather was really cold, I decided to pan-sear this piece rather than to unbury the grill from its mantle of snow.

Here in lovely Bend, Oregon, spring is still a long ways off (with a bunch of snow in our long-range forecast) and yet I yearn for the warmer days. To help put myself in that frame of mind, I thought a really simple chopped salad might just be the ticket.

My so-called Mediterranean salad is grape tomatoes, cucumbers, thinly-sliced red onions, a touch of minced garlic, Italian parsley, and toasted pine nuts. The "dressing" is a simple squeeze of fresh lemon juice, a drizzle of olive oil, and a pinch of Kosher salt.

It's hard to imagine a better warm weather light dinner, even if it is served with snow on the ground!

Playing in the Kitchen: Chicken "Paprikash"

After many weeks of unpacking, rearranging, and repairing, we finally got our house functional enough to have people over for dinner. Ann invited our friends Kayli, Alyssa, and Alisha over for a Sunday night dinner. These three we met back in McMinnville when they were on the crew at our favorite tap house. They moved to Bend in September and we followed them in February. Kayli is now the AGM at Crux Fermentation Project while Alyssa and Alisha are on the kitchen crew at Worthy Brewing.

Ann and Kayli kibitzed while the rest of us made dinner. Alyssa and Alisha wanted to learn how to cook some Indian dishes, but I really don't yet have the spices that I need to show them any kind of ropes. There appears to be no place out here to score some of the spices that I need for any style of Indian cooking, so that meal is going to have to wait until I take a trip to Portland or Eugene to stock up.

Ann suggested that I make a version of chicken paprikash instead. Fortunately, I have some really good fresh paprika on hand, so that turned out to be a good choice. While I started forty years ago by learning the classic method and ingredients for paprikash, I have modified the dish over the years to make it mine, hence the quotation marks around the word paprikash. 

Chicken "Paprikash" on Egg Noodles

While the three of us were cooking dinner at the stove on the island, we looked up to see Kayli putting make-up on Ann's face. Not sure what was going on there as we were concentrating on cooking, but I can surely say that that is a first for me. Never before have I made dinner while anyone in the kitchen was getting a makeover!

Kayli Doing Ann's Makeup

Tada!

The Kitchen Elves

My Beer Being Photobombed

Traditionally, the chicken for paprikash would be browned in lard before heading for the oven, but it is really difficult, now that I am no longer at the restaurant doing whole-animal butchery, to find any decent fatback or kidney fat that will render into decent lard. So, I've really stopped fighting the fight and just render bacon to start my paprikash. It gives the dish a smoky flavor that while non-traditional is really delicious, especially when I amplify it by using a small amount of pimentón along with Hungarian paprika.

Non-Traditional: Bacon

After rendering the bacon, the next steps are to brown the chicken, remove it from the pan, drain most of the fat off, and cook some yellow onions with a little bit of garlic in the remaining bacon/chicken fat. Once the onions are nice and translucent, add a good amount of paprika (let's say a quarter cup) and a little bit of smoked paprika (perhaps a scant teaspoon). It's important at this point to stir the paprika into the fat extremely well so that it does not clump.

Browning Chicken in Bacon Fat

Browned Chicken Ready for Sauce and the Oven

Once the paprika is well incorporated into the onions, I put the non-traditional bacon back into the pan and add a quart to perhaps a quart and a half of double chicken stock. [To make double chicken stock, I first make a chicken stock, then using the bones from the first stock along with more raw chicken, I pour the first stock over the chicken and make the double stock.] I use a double stock to improve the mouthfeel and texture of the finished sauce, because unlike some people, I do not thicken my sauce with any flour, preferring to let the gelatin in the stock do its magic.

After lightly seasoning the sauce (some will evaporate during braising) and bringing it to a boil, I pour it over the chicken and put the chicken in a moderately hot oven, say 400F, uncovered to finish cooking. Depending on the size of the chicken (I used bone-in thighs), it will take 35 minutes to an hour. We didn't really time the chicken in the oven; we just checked it for liquid level and doneness every 15 minutes or so. It was probably in the oven 45 minutes or so.

Finished Sauce

I would typically make dumplings or spätzle on which to serve the chicken, but in the interest of simplicity, we just cooked some really wide and short, almost square, egg noodles while the chicken was resting after coming out of the oven. After having removed the chicken from the braising sauce, I finished the sauce with about a cup of sour cream and a bit of salt to taste.

To plate, toss the noodles with sauce. Put the chicken over a bed of noodles and top with more sauce.

Spring Grilling: Carne Asada

Here in beautiful Bend, Oregon, spring is starting slowly with the appearance of the first buds on trees and the advent of milder, though still cool, temperatures. The nicer weather has inspired me to get my grill cleaned up and reassembled after the move from McMinnville in February. My goal: to grill the  package of skirt steaks, labelled also in Spanish, arracheras, that I came across at the grocery store.

Tacos de Carne Asada

Skirt steak is not all that common at grocery stores here in the PNW, which is a shame, because it is the perfect cut for carne asada, thin and flavorful. No lie, it is one of my most favorite grilling cuts.

Carne asada, literally grilled meat, with beef being implied, isn't typically a meal in itself, though it can be. The grilled skirt steak is generally chopped and used in other dishes, such as tacos. In norteño culture, carne asada can also mean the event at which the meat is grilled, a barbeque in American terms.

To celebrate the coming of spring and the first barbeque in our new home, I decided to make carne asada tacos with a quick salsa roja, cilantro, raw onion, and a sprinkle of cotija cheese, pictured above.

Arracheras on the Grill

For carne asada, skirt steaks are generally marinated before grilling and a lot of people use a wet marinade. I prefer something simpler, rubbing the steaks with oil, a generous amount of salt, a bit of freshly ground cumin, minced garlic, and finely chopped cilantro stems. I left the steaks in the fridge for 3-4 days to absorb the rub, though this is certainly not necessary. I've never been a big fan of wet marinades on steaks, because I feel that the liquid inhibits the really great grill sear and char that you see in the photo below.

Grilled Skirt Steaks: Carne Asada

I also go against conventional wisdom in grilling my carne asada to medium going on medium well. Convention says that skirt steak is tough and so you want to cook it rather less than more. Having grilled thousands of skirt steaks, I have to disagree. I have found that a tough, stringy steak like a skirt steak is very hard to chew when rare to medium rare. And so I opt for medium to a bit beyond, say medium well.

Recipe: Salsa Roja (Guajillo-Chipotle)

I make all manner of salsas and keep them in the fridge to have on hand whenever I want some. In general, I don't use tomato in my red sauce, but this time, I decided to stretch my supply of dried chiles with a can of tomatoes.

Toasting Stemmed and Seeded Guajillos

Chiles After Toasting and Soaking

Finished Salsa Roja

Following is the recipe I used for this batch of mildly spicy red salsa. You can alter it as you see fit.

4 guajillo chiles, stemmed, toasted, and soaked

4 chipotles en adobo

6 cloves garlic

2 tablespoons red wine vinegar (or lime juice)

1-28 ounce can tomatoes in juice

salt to taste

Remove the stems and seeds from the dried chiles. If you are not certain how spicy the chiles are, you might want to wear gloves while doing this.

Toast the chiles in a dry pan until they start to smell good, but stop before they char. Move them around while toasting so that they do not burn.

Off heat, cover the chiles with water and let them soften. This will take an hour or so.

Drain the chiles and place them along with all the other ingredients in the blender. Blend until smooth. If the salsa is too thick, thin with water. Season to taste with salt.

Bonus Dish: "Steak and Eggs"

When grilling carne asada, it always makes sense to me to make more than I need because the leftovers are really useful for a quick meal. In this case, I made steak and eggs with the largest skirt steak. First, I cooked the leftover onions from the tacos from the night before, then added the diced skirt steak and the leftover cilantro. I just warmed the meat through, trying not to cook it any further.

Reheated Carne Asada with Onion and Cilantro

"Steak and Eggs"

The "steak and eggs" is a bowl of scrambled eggs topped with the reheated carne asada, fresh tomato, salsa verde, pimentón sauce, more cilantro, and a sprinkle of cotija cheese. Recipes for salsa verde and pimentón sauce are here.

Hummus with Sweet and Spicy Carrots

 

Hummus with Sweet and Spicy Carrots

I've got this thing for roasted carrots with dobanjang and honey going on lately. I love the texture and flavors.

Last trip to the store, I bought some chickpeas and some carrots, knowing that Ann wanted to dip carrots into a batch of hummus for a light dinner. But the weather is still cold here in Central Oregon and I wasn't really feeling such summery fare. I thought instead to roast the carrots and serve them still warm out of the oven on a bed of hummus.

Right now, it is just too much effort to come up with a recipe for the two major ingredients here, hummus and the dobanjang honey sauce in which the carrots are tossed. Both of these I make at the drop of hat in the quantities that I want, spiced like I want. It robs my cooking of all spontaneity to measure and to assign a precise ingredient list to such whimsy. In short, codifying a dish robs all my joy. Sorry. Not sorry.

The hummus is chickpeas, lemon juice, pimiento-stuffed manzanilla olives with some brine, garlic, pimentón, salt, a splash each of sriracha and sesame oil, with enough water to smooth it out to a rough paste. I'm not the biggest fan of super smooth hummus. It's great and all that, but I really do prefer more texture.

The sweet and spicy sauce could be made from anything spicy and anything sweet, but this version is about equal parts dobanjang and honey with a touch each of soy sauce and rice vinegar, to add salt and to tame the sweet a bit.

Maybe someday I will get around to codifying these two recipes, especially if I ever decide to write about creative vegan fare.

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.