Christmas Tamales

This year I used my regular pork filling recipe, though I see now I forgot to use onion. It's missing that flavor base, for sure.

For the dough, this year I rendered my own lard instead of buying the sketchy shelf-stable hydrogenated stuff. I just put some chopped up fatback in the crockpot for a day on low; that worked pretty well. The lard was a little softer and meltier than other lard I've encountered, but mild and delicious.

With the tamales we had homemade beans and a sort of ad hoc cole slaw made from brussels sprouts, lime juice, yogurt, olive oil, salt, pepper, and toasted cumin seeds. I made a batch of classic red chile sauce to spoon over the tamales.

Sour Cream Enchiladas

My restaurant mainstay as a vegetarian child in the Southwest, sour cream enchiladas don't sound like they should work...but they do.

I'd never made them before, but we happened to have all the right ingredients around.

The filling was sour cream spiked with a little yogurt and a little Herdez salsa verde and a sprinkling of grated mozzarella.

The sauce was my regular New Mexican red chile sauce.

I used James Peyton's advice to roll the enchiladas loosely, which kept them from unrolling.

I covered them with the sauce, baked them at 375 degrees for about 10 minutes, and served them with a cilantro-red pepper-bean salad similar to the one described here and here.

Please forgive our messy table and the Old Milwaukee.

Smoked Turkey, Black Bean, and Sweet Potato Enchiladas

Lawson and I invented this dish several years ago after Thanksgiving, and now we make it every year. It's a product of our particular Thanksgiving, which usually involves a turkey smoked by Lawson's brother; we always have a bag full of leftover smoked turkey meat.

We call it Signature Dish. I take no pictures of it because it is a casserole. Instead, here are pictures of the cat trying to help me fix my speaker cabinet:


***Signature Dish***
First, you have to make a batch of classic Southwestern red chile sauce.

At the same time, you have to roast two whole sweet potatoes at 400 degrees until they soften and collapse a bit.

Then you compile the following:

Layer 1
black beans
roasted sweet potatoes, peels removed and innards gently sliced

Layer 2
a few cups smoked turkey meat
a cup of sour cream
several green onions, chopped

You will also need:
corn tortillas
a little bit of cheese for the top

Get out a pan, grease it lightly with olive oil, and pour some sauce in the bottom. Add a layer of corn tortillas. Add more sauce. Then add the beans and the sweet potatoes, evenly distributing them. More tortillas. More sauce. Then carefully spread/dab the turkey filling on for the second layer. More tortillas. More sauce. Sprinkle cheese on top.

Here, I made you a picture. s=sauce, t=tortilla, c=cheese.

|cccccccccccccccccc|
|ssssssssssssssssss|
|tttttttttttttttttt|
|222222222222222222|
|ssssssssssssssssss|
|tttttttttttttttttt|
|111111111111111111|
|ssssssssssssssssss|
|tttttttttttttttttt|
|ssssssssssssssssss|
|________pan_______|

It's more than the sum of its parts, this dish. We actually smoked a chicken once just so we could make it.

If I were trying to be fancy, I might make individual plates of stacked enchiladas, New Mexican style, but it's so good left over that I prefer to make a big cafeteria-looking pan full.

Impromptu Sonoran Enchiladas

There was a bit of leftover tamale sauce in the fridge, a mediocre, tomato-enhanced batch I made a few weeks ago to go over the last of the 2007 Christmas tamales from the freezer. I used the rest of it to make some Sonoran enchiladas. I added some of Lawson's carrot-habanero salsa (the orange stuff) for heat and brighter flavor.

Sonoran enchiladas are a good thing to know how to make: instead of making a whole bunch of corn tortillas, or dealing with the flabby bland excuses for corn tortillas available in Columbia grocery stores, you just make a few Sonoran corn cakes and you can have homemade enchiladas.

My recipe varies. Sometimes I make them partially out of grits, which I soak first to soften; sometimes they're all cornmeal or masa harina. Here's the basic recipe, adapted from James Peyton:

1 1/2 cups masa harina or cornmeal
1/2 t baking powder
1/2 t salt
1 egg
up to 1 cup water

I don't measure very carefully. These can get too wet easily, so be careful with the water.

Form into 4 cakes. Pan fry over medium-high heat until browned. Set on paper towels. Assemble enchiladas.

This particular batch was part northern New Mexico, part southern Arizona, and part Central America: I topped the Sonoran cakes with chopped white onion, leftover Anasazi beans, a fried egg (all Four Corners/New Mexico traditions) and some white cheddar. Equal parts gringo-style red chile/tomato sauce and Belizean carrot-habanero sauce made this quite the ethnic blend. It was also a pretty good finger in the eye of the idea that there's some monolithic thing called Mexican Food.

Red Chile Plate II

Here's my own attempt at recreating Santos' red chile beef plate. Like you, I boiled the beef first, then cut it up and browned it -- so strange, but it works! I made the sauce from soaking whole dried red chiles, though. I brought them to a simmer, then soaked them for about two hours until they were nice and bright red, then blended them up with the strained broth from boiling the beef. Same seasonings as you, pretty much, though I added a bay leaf, a touch of red wine vinegar, and one small minced garlic clove.

It was tasty! We ate it with corn tortillas and a salad. Homemade tortillas would have been much better, and since the beef was so much work, it would have been worth it to take that extra step.

Red Chile Plate

I did try to replicate Santos' Red Chile Plate this week. I used the Gabilondo recipe, modified of course, and it was delicious. Santos' version was a much brighter, lighter red--perhaps they didn't brown the meat after boiling it, and I don't think they made a brown roux for the chile sauce. Anyway, we loved it. I used a piece of top round and the dish was not at all fatty.

We ate it with spelt tortillas, which are quite acceptable. I made spelt bread yesterday, too, and it was like real bread! instead of the cake-like gluten-free bread we've tried.

Red Chile with Beef

3/4 pound top round steak

1/2 cup red chile powder

2 tablespoons butter

2 tablespoons olive oil

1/4 cup flour

Salt

1 teaspoon dried oregano

Boil the beef in water to cover (seasoned with salt, pepper, and a few cloves of garlic) for about an hour or until tender. Drain and reserve the broth. Cut the meat into small cubes.

Mix the red chile powder with about 1/2 cup hot water and set aside.

Heat the olive oil and butter in a skillet and brown the beef cubes. Remove the meat to a plate.

Add the flour to the fat in the pan and stir until the roux is golden brown. Add the chile paste and continue to cook, then add about 1 cup or more of the reserved broth. Add salt and oregano and simmer about 10 minutes. Add the meat to the sauce, heat, and serve.

Pescado Borracho

I made this "drunken fish" dish with previously frozen orange roughy. I like the recipe as an alternative to the popular Veracruz style I often cook. This can be pretty fiery, so I don't make it with the most delicate or expensive fish.

Pescado Borracho

6 dried red chiles

Remove stems and seeds from chiles and soak in hot water to cover for one hour. Puree in blender until smooth, using some of the soaking liquid. (Or use ground red chile soaked in hot water to make a paste).

1 pound red snapper, cut in serving pieces
Flour, salt, and pepper
1 tablespoon olive oil

Dust fish with flour, salt, and pepper. Heat oil in large skillet and brown fish lightly on both sides. Place fish in an ovenproof casserole and set aside.

1 tablespoon olive oil
1 onion, sliced
2 cloves garlic, minced
1/4 cup parsley sprigs, chopped
3 medium tomatoes, chopped
1/4 teaspoon ground cumin
1/2 teaspoon oregano

Add olive oil to same skillet and sauté onion and garlic. Add chile puree, parsley, tomatoes, cumin, oregano, and salt and pepper to taste. Cook, stirring, for five minutes.

1/2 cup pimento-stuffed green olives
2 tablespoons capers
1 cup red wine

Add olives, capers, and wine and mix well. Pour over fish in casserole. Cover and bake at 400º for 20 minutes, or until fish is done.

I modified this recipe from The Complete Book of Mexican Cooking by Elizabeth Lambert Ortiz.