Old/New Thanksgiving Food

We had many of the usual dishes on Thanksgiving: Portuguese-style turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, green beans, applesauce, pumpkin pie, etc. I did manage to insert two new twists on cranberries and sweet potatoes, which we all enjoyed.

Sprouts sells these sweet potato chips, which are delicious. I often serve them with raw tomatillo salsa, but this time found a cranberry salsa recipe in the local paper. It was a satisfying and colorful appetizer.

Spicy Cranberry Salsa

1/2 small red onion

1 tablespoon canned jalapeno slices

2 tablespoons chopped fresh cilantro

8 ounces fresh cranberries

1/2 cup dried cranberries

2 tablespoons lime juice

2 tablespoons honey, or to taste

1/2 teaspoon or more salt

1/4 teaspoon pepper

In food processor, pulse onion, jalapeno, and cilantro to chop finely. Add cranberries and pulse until coarsely chopped. Add remaining ingredients and mix lightly. Serve with chips.

Instead of the usual sweet potatoes, I made baked wedges with a yogurt dipping sauce, which we had at Zinburger recently. I got the recipe from the Bon Appetit website.

Tomatillo Time

Here’s a fresh, easy raw tomatillo salsa. It’s from Aida Gabilondo’s Mexican Family Cooking, still my favorite Mexican cookbook.

Green Green Sauce

1 pound tomatillos

2 fresh jalapenos

1/4 cup chopped green onions

1 cup cilantro leaves

Salt

1 teaspoon sugar

Remove the husks from the tomatillos and rinse. Pulse all ingredients together in food processor or blender, leaving a little chunkiness in the texture if desired. You may add a clove of garlic if you want.

Not Yet Assembled Breakfast Burritos

I've been having intense cravings for breakfast burritos all week. I don't know why. On Monday they were quite strong, so I made some tortillas, but like all my tortillas they were too small for a big serious burrito and too thick to wrap happily around a bunch of filling.

This was my compromise: a plate of burrito fillings served with a basket of small tortillas.

The beans are just canned beans cooked down with a little olive oil, some chopped cilantro, a smashed garlic clove -- I cooked them until they were less wet. The potatoes were cubed, microwaved for about 5 minutes, and then sauteed in olive oil and salted. The eggs were soft-scrambled. The avocado and lime were sliced. And I served some habanero-carrot salsa on the side.

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.

Salsa, Hiking, and Lentil Soup

We hiked on the Arizona Trail with friends yesterday and saw many wildflowers, including this, which I think is called a Mariposa Lily. We started from Kentucky Camp, an old mining camp in the Coronado Forest--it is within a few miles of the place where we scattered Grandpa's ashes.

Then we went to Patagonia for lunch and Santos Cafe is gone! In its place is Mercedes Restaurant, which served Mexican seafood and other things. It was pretty good, but not AS good. At least they didn't fancy the place up at all.

That evening I made lentil soup, cornbread, and a sliced tomato and herb salad. The real reason for this post, though, is to communicate my tomatillo salsa recipe to Sam. We got to talking about salsa while hiking.

Jack Bishop's Roasted Tomatillo Salsa

1 dried red chile (about 4 inches long)

3 cloves garlic, unpeeled

1 pound tomatillos, husked

1 tablespoon minced cilantro

Salt

Preheat broiler. Broil red chile for a couple of minutes to toast. Remove.

Place garlic and tomatillos on a broiler pan and broil, turning occasionally, until they start to blacken, 8 minutes or so.

Seed the chile and cut in pieces. Place chile, garlic, and tomatillos in food processor and puree. Add cilantro and salt to taste.

Two Holiday Breakfasts

All these holiday food posts are just now trickling in as I sort through photos and return to normal life. Here are two breakfasts I wish I could eat every week, but instead end up eating about once a year.

On Christmas we intended to have huevos rancheros, but we never got around to making salsa, so we had French toast instead. I used the rest of the Italian bread I'd made for Christmas Eve dinner with Lawson's family. The recipe was pretty standard -- just milk, eggs, vanilla, and a little sugar, sauteed in butter -- but since the bread was so substantial I was able to soak it for a while -- about half an hour to get it really full of flavor.

Unlike pancakes, which I like with yogurt, jam, peanut butter, and various combinations thereof, French toast requires syrup and butter. So maybe it's good I don't eat it too often.

We had huevos rancheros the day after Christmas. Lawson made the salsa, which was pretty impressive for containing winter grocery store tomatoes. I believe he used cherry tomatoes, black beans, lime juice, cilantro, a can of Herdez salsa verde, an an onion. The Anasazi beans cooked on low for almost two days in the crockpot, so they were outstanding. I fried the tortillas and the eggs in olive oil.

Fancy Quesadillas

A few weeks ago I made quesadillas filled with some odds and ends we needed to use up -- cilantro, arugula, roasted pork, monterey jack cheese, queso anejo, and whole wheat tortillas -- and was pleased to find that they tasted wonderful, much more than the sum of their parts. Arugula and cilantro together produce a whole new flavor. Since then we have also made them with thinly sliced lean beef, marinated in lime juice, oregano, and garlic and then sauteed. I think the pork was better, though -- more subtle.

We eat them with this habanero-carrot sauce Lawson makes (yeah, I know, it looks like nacho cheese). The carrots allow the sauce to have big habanero flavor without being inedibly spicy. It's a Belizean recipe. I have been known to eat it straight from the jar with a spoon.

Salsa and Quesadillas

The other night we made two salsas and ate them with quesadillas and salad.

On days I have a big, meat-containing lunch, I often want a very minimal dinner like this. The quesadillas were simple -- cheddar, jack, and a tiny bit of queso anejo inside, sauteed in a pan with a touch of olive oil. Queso anejo is wonderful -- have you tried it? It's the feta of Mexico, all salty and chewy and weird.

Lawson makes a carrot-habanero salsa from Belize that blows my mind and lasts all year in the fridge. The carrots keep it from being unbearably hot, but it's still quite tasty. It is neon orange. He made the first batch of the year the other night.

I made a classic tomatillo salsa: boiled tomatillos, chopped fresh green chiles, lime, salt, garlic, onion, and cilantro. It tasted fresh and well balanced but ultimately not enough better than a can of Herdez salsa verde for me to make it again.

Kris is out of town, by the way, for those of you who are wondering. She and my Dad are visiting family in Massachusetts and will no doubt return with tales of scrod and kelp.

Grilled Catfish with Peach and Black Bean Salsa

Here's a mostly local meal: U.S. farm-raised catfish fillets marinated in lime juice, cumin, and coriander seed and then grilled; a salsa made of South Carolina peaches and red peppers, black beans, and a can of Herdez salsa verde; and red romaine lettuce. For a second course, Lawson made zucchini soup with zucchini that he grew, chicken stock, a Vidalia onion, coriander seed, sherry, and a little cream.

The catfish was odd: the hind half of each fillet was flaky and tender and delicious, while the front half had big gristly bands of fat and general nasty toughness. I like the idea of locally farmed catfish -- it's sustainable, it's an economic boon to the rural South, it's not from China -- and was really ready to love it. I just wish the whole fillet had been like the back half.

Herdez salsa verde is the ultimate secret ingredient. We keep no fewer than five cans on hand at all times.

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.