Chicken Tortilla Soup

I don't think I've ever made tortilla soup. I looked at some recipes but didn't end up using any except to learn how to handle the tortillas.

The biggest surprise for me was that the tortillas end up being an integral part of the flavor and consistency of the soup. After they've sat in there for a few minutes, they thicken the soup slightly and pull all the flavors together.

Next time I roast a chicken again I will make this with the leftovers again.

Here's how I made it.

• 6 corn tortillas
• 1 small onion, diced
• 3 carrots, peeled and cut into 3/4" cubes
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 1/4 cup sherry
• green chiles. I used one can whole, diced up, but fresh would be better
• chicken broth -- I used half homemade and half high-quality carton stock
• hot sauce or other heat adjuster -- I happened to use homemade Tabasco sauce
• fresh lime juice
• salt
• pepper
• a few cups cooked chicken, shredded

Cut corn tortillas into strips and pan-fry them until golden/brown in a little peanut oil. Drain on paper towels. Set aside.

Saute onion lightly in olive oil. Add carrots, then garlic, and saute just until you can smell the garlic. Add sherry and cook it off, then broth and green chiles.

Simmer 15 minutes or so, until flavors blend.

Add salt, pepper, lime juice, and hot sauce to taste.

Add chicken and bring back to a simmer.

Put a handful of fried tortilla strips in each bowl and ladle the soup on top. Let sit for a few minutes. Serve with avocado slices and lime wedges.

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.

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.

Bad Cookbooks

There are some bad cookbooks out there. Grilling cookbooks are probably the worst overall, but tonight I finally made dinner from a Filipino cookbook (whose author shall remain nameless) that I got for Christmas a few years ago. Now, I’ve had excellent Filipino food in Hawaii--especially lumpia, those wonderful little fried taco things served with vinegar and chile sauce—but these recipes were surely written by a non-cook. I suspected it, and I should have trusted my instincts. The pictures were beautiful.

First, there was Fish Adobo, basically poached in garlic, vinegar, and bay leaf. This combination managed to make a mild Mexican snapper taste really fishy. Then a noodle dish very similar to Pad Thai, but inexpertly explained: the snow peas went in the skillet long before the carrots, so they were pretty slimy by the time everything else was done. The only seasonings were salt, pepper, and soy sauce.

Dad liked the meal well enough (that’s the kind of audience a cook needs—ultra-appreciative but not ultra-critical), but I was mad at myself for trusting the cookbook.

On a much happier note, I made Sonoran Enchiladas last night. We had tried them at two Mexican restaurants, and it made me curious. Instead of a corn tortilla, you make a plump masa cake and bake it on a griddle, and then cover with good red chile sauce, cheese, and green onion, and put it in the oven just long enough to melt the cheese. Mmmm.

It dropped below seventy degrees by the cocktail hour tonight, so we fired up our new chiminea.