Yum--Roasted Okra!

This is a new way of preparing okra for me.  It's better than candy, I swear.  I asked to borrow Susan's copy of The Roasted Vegetable by Andrea Chesman and she GAVE it to me.  I plan to try many more of the recipes.

Roasted Okra

1 pound okra pods
2 tablespoons olive oil
Coarse salt

Preheat oven to 450 degrees.  Oil a large shallow roasting pan.

Toss okra with oil and spread in pan.

Roast for 15 minutes, shaking pan occasionally to turn, until pods are well browned.

Serve sprinkled with salt.

Condiglione: Fresh Tuna Salad

I used some leftover pan-broiled albacore to make this dish, which is loosely based on the recipe in La Place and Kleiman's Cucina Fresca.

I broke up the albacore and mixed it with 3 cloves minced garlic, slivered red bell peppers, chopped green onions, halved cherry tomatoes, and chopped fresh basil.  I dressed it with liberal olive oil, lemon juice, salt, and pepper and garnished it with hard-boiled eggs and black olives.  It was a perfect cold supper for a hot day.

Sonoran Hot Dogs

Green chiles! Hatch green chiles! The Fresh Market was roasting and selling Hatch chiles a few weeks ago, and though the staff didn't seem to quite know how to roast them (they were quite underdone), it was no problem at all for me to brown them a bit further in a dry cast iron skillet. Also the guy roasting them was wearing a sombrero and serape, like exactly nobody in New Mexico, but I'll take what I can get. The movement of green chiles eastward is a good thing.

We had people over to watch football last night. I made posole, and Will made Sonoran hot dogs, so it was quite a Southwestern feast.

The posole recipe I've evolved is very, very similar to yours — boneless pork, onion, garlic, green chiles, hominy, oregano. But I don't use any tomatoes, and I add carrots and bay leaves and a little cumin. Sometimes it needs a touch of lime juice at the end. For yesterday's batch, I tossed in some pork bones and a Maggi chicken cube as well. Very tasty. Even with mild green chiles, it was too spicy for the French guests, but they liked it anyway. For the Americans it was just right.

Will is very adept at wrapping hot dogs in bacon. This time he used two presoaked toothpicks in each dog, which seemed to keep things neat.

The Sonoran hot dog fixins:

• mayo mixed with sriracha 
• sour cream
• beans
• onions
• tomatoes
• grated cheese
• pickled jalapenos
• cilantro

We forgot to buy radishes, but I do like thin slices of radish in there, too. And I eat small fresh chiles alongside. Delicious.

At some point, someone spiral-cut one of my aribibi gusano chiles and put it in a half-bottle of Jameson, which actually ended up tasting pretty good. It was that kind of night, I guess.

Whacking Brussels Sprouts

In San Diego last week I had a fabulous lunch of the world's freshest swordfish accompanied by Flash-Fried Brussels Sprouts.  They were so delicious I vowed to make them as soon as I got home.

Further research revealed that they had most likely been deep-fried, which is something I do not do.  It's a mess, and it makes my missing gall bladder uneasy.  So I decided to fry them in about a quarter inch of canola oil, which worked out fine.  Heat the oil really, really hot and let them get good and brown, even a little crispy around the edges.  Mine took about seven minutes.

It looked like the restaurant ones had been halved and flattened, so I whacked mine with a rubber mallet.  It was fun and provided a nice release.  I think it make them cook faster.  I drained them on paper towels and seasoned them with salt, pepper, and a little ground cumin.