Southwestern food

I wish I could eat some Patagonia tamales! Last Christmas I made green chile and pork tamales and froze a bunch; if I have time at New Year's, I may do the same thing.

It's been a Southwestern cooking frenzy here for the past 24 hours. We had huevos rancheros for Christmas brunch. I made a surprisingly good recipeless salsa using broiled tomatillos, a few soaked New Mexican red chiles, a can of diced tomatoes, half an onion, cilantro, garlic, and lemon juice from Lawson's very bitter Meyer lemon tree. My egg-frying skills mysteriously abandoned me, but salsa is good for covering up messes like that. We had some excellent pineapple on the side.

Then, because the border foods cookbook you gave me is so inspiring and because Lawson gave me a tortilla press for Christmas, I made red chile sauce and homemade corn tortillas and assembled some stacked New Mexican sour cream enchiladas for dinner. We ate them with Anasazi beans (my last bag). The tortillas were not quite thin enough, but that was fine for stacked enchiladas. They had wonderful corn flavor.

For lunch today I made some flour tortillas, and we ate them with melted cheese and the rest of the salsa.

I love a lot of things about that Peyton cookbook, but I especially like that he confirms many of my own cooking methods. I never presoak beans, and he says most cooks he interviewed don't either. I always use the blender to puree soaked red chiles for enchilada sauce, so there are tiny flecks of chile skin in my sauces; I tried a food mill once, and it was messy and inconvenient. The book says my way is standard home technique. I use olive oil to make the roux for red chile sauce, something you taught me, and that's what he recommends as a substitute for lard in that particular instance (not all -- he says tamales require lard, and I agree). I never realized how New Mexican my cooking is -- I always figured I'd just adapted and bastardized things, but actually my red chile sauce recipe is completely identical to his.

I also like how well he describes the profound craving for Mexican food that he experienced when he moved overseas -- some need for the combination of chiles, corn, and cheese that no other cuisine can match. I felt much the same thing when I moved out to South Carolina, and it's only in my own kitchen that I can satisfy it. In no restaurant outside of New Mexico can you get proper New Mexican enchiladas.

Tonight I'm going to use my beautiful new Le Creuset casserole. The Peyton book has a recipe for rabbit stewed in red chile sauce; I think I'll use chicken parts.