Chili verdirojo burrito, old school tortillas

What do you call it when you replace the tomatillos in a chili verde with red tomatoes, but leave the green chilies? It's not really chili verde, since in addition to be sin tomatillos, the other spices are different - no cilantro, for example. Nor is it chili colorado since no dried peppers are used. Whatever it is, it tastes good.

My idea came from a restaurant that makes this stuff, but they call it chili verde. Theirs is more chili anaranjado than verde, thanks to the tomatoes. 

The nice thing is that I didn't have to sneak into their kitchen disguised as a giant piñata to pilfer their secret recipe. They pretty much gave away their process on a food show, right in front of the camera. Then I thought of some tweaks. Cook the meat differently. Use frozen Hatch chilis instead of canned, play with the seasonings...

Now, if I'm ever tempted to open a Mexican restaurant I've got a good, scalable recipe that will work for any color of chili.

Since I'd fussed around making the meat, I decided to go whole hog and make a burrito from scratch. That meant tortillas, too. Old school tortillas, the kind they used to make before people became more afraid of rendered fat than chemical additives*.

Yes, old school. Unbleached enriched wheat flour, salt, baking powder, pork fat.

I don't really get the hypocrisy about tortillas and pork fat. Somehow, it's healthy if there's no pork fat in the tortilla, even if it's wrapped around fatty morsels of carnitas. So, the pork fat is OK when it's in the meat, but put it in the tortilla and it's taboo?

These are my tortillas, from scratch, my way. No canola oil here! I just took the fat that rendered out of the meat during cooking and set it aside. When it was time to make the tortillas, it was cooled down and ready to go. Mix salt and baking powder with flour, cut in the fat, add enough water to create some non-sticky dough, give it a rest, and it's ready to go.

So, the verdict? Was there a flavor payoff? Yes. There really is nothing like slow-cooked pork wrapped in a porky tortilla accented with savory avocado slices. The white rice was there to soak up the sauce, and because I wanted to highlight the flavor of the meat with something neutral.

* commercial flour tortilla ingredient lists can be long and difficult to pronounce: enriched bleached wheat flour, water, salt, palm oil and fractions with BHT, BHA and TBHQ (preservatives), rice flour, mono & diglycerides, fumaric acid, calcium propionate, potassium sorbet (preservatives again), methyl and propyl paraben (preservatives again), sodium meta bisulfite. Oops, that's potassium sorbate. Good. That would have made a horrible dessert.

Red beans & rice

What's good and cheap, has a complete set of amino acids... Rice and beans! Well, any grain plus a legume will work, so whole wheat bread and lentil soup would have done the trick, too.

What about red beans and rice? It's always tasted good when I've tried it, and it might be a fun thing to make. Let's see... should take about three hours, mostly unattended simmering at low heat on the stove.

So, off I went into cyberspace, in search of some ideas. Aha! Alton Brown has a recipe, so I can just stop right there. Yep, I've got the beans, herbs... check, check, check... pickled pork? What? It takes pickled pork? Three days to pickle? Three whole days? No! I said three hours, not three days! So, time to look under the hood and see what I can pull out yet have the dish still function.

Out went the pickled pork (so much for authenticity). I didn't have three days before dinner, but I did have bacon. There may have been some chicken in the freezer, but nothing resembling pickled pork, nohow, noway.

So, what makes pickled pork pickled? Vinegar, salt, spices... I have all that. Pork and three more days, well, that part will have to change. Bacon plus those spices and a few dashes of vinegar should be interesting, even if won't be as meaty as the pickled pork...

Three hour red beans & rice

Instant pickled bacon

ingredients

• Kosher salt
• Yellow mustard seeds
• Black pepper
• Bay leaves, fresh
• Garlic, minced
• Brown sugar
• Sriracha (or other) hot sauce
• Aleppo pepper flakes (or Cayenne)
• Bacon, chopped. Preferably uncured.
• Apple cider vinegar - enough to just cover the other ingredients

Mix all this stuff together in a bowl and let it sit while you prep the beans.

The beans

Ingredients

• Mirepoix (celery, onion, carrot, diced). This would be green bell peppers, celery, onion if it were summer and I was really being authentic. Since its' winter, I used French mirepoix instead.
• vegetable oil for sautéing
• Chopped/minced garlic
• bay leaf
• black pepper
• Aleppo chili flakes
• cumin
• black cumin (kala jeera) - just a bit since this can get bitter very quickly
• water
• red beans, picked over and cleaned of rocks, sticks, etc.
• dried thyme

Instructions

1. Sauté the mirepoix in the vegetable oil until it's translucent
2. Add the garlic
3. Add the bay leaf, black pepper, chili flakes, cumins and stir to mix well and heat.
4. Add the bacon mixture, vinegar and all. Just pour it in.
5. Add the beans
6. Pour in enough water to cover everything, but not too much. The idea is to have just enough water to completely cook the beans but not much more.
7. Add the dried thyme.
8. Bring almost to a boil on high heat, then reduce heat to simmer. 
9. After 90 minutes, check the beans. If they're almost done, start the rice.

The rice

Ingredients

• Rice, long grain preferred but short grain sticky holds together well (not authentic, though, but at this point it's already moved so far from authenticity that it's moot)
• Butter, unsalted
• Kosher salt, just a bit
• 2x more water than rice, boiling

Instructions

1. Melt some butter at low heat in a separate pot
2. When the butter has melted, add the rice and salt. Stir to coat, and keep stirring to keep from burning.
3. When the rice is a bit translucent, SLOWLY pour in the boiling water. It will steam sizzle and look pretty volcanic. If you were to add the water all at once, it would erupt. 
4. Reduce the heat to very low and simmer the rice about 20 minutes. 

Once the rice is done, check the beans. If you're using long grain rice,  gently fluff it up a bit with a fork before serving. The rice can sit, covered, a bit if the beans need more time.

When the beans are done, you can thicken the sauce by puréeing some beans in the broth with a blender, then add it back to the pot.

Just place some rice in a warmed plate, ladle some beans over it, garnish with cilantro (if you really don't care about being authentic) and enjoy.

This is a great meal for the Great Recession, since it's cheap even by Scrooge's standards, and filling enough so you won't wake up at 3:00 am craving a snack.

Thanksgiving!

So, you were expecting photos of roast bird and apple pie? The bird looks like a big, skin-covered sausage when it comes out of the oven. Sliced, it's tender slabs of meat veined with green flavor-enhancing herbs. There was no cranberry sauce - the berries went into the rice, and were very happy there. No stuffing, either. Just tangy, sweet-sour yams that complimented the turkey and rice to perfection.

A thanksgiving menu

Food
Cranberry rice medley
Citrus-baked yams
Boneless turkey breast roast
Tangerine Dream cake
Sweet Potato Pie
Whole wheat country loaf au levain

Wine
Pinot Gris Reserve | Jean Albrecht '10
Grüner Veltliner | hugl '10

The turkey

• Bone the turkey, separating the breasts from the tenders. Reserve the drumsticks, use the thighs and wings for sausage meat, make stock with the neck & bones. Save as much skin as possible.
• Brine the turkey breasts with some rosemary sprigs overnight.
• Puree celery and parsley. Add lemon juice. Add room temperature butter and puree until you have a gooey mess with butter and herbs. Place this in a bowl and rub all over the turkey breasts and tenders.
• Place the reserved skin on a cutting board, place the breasts & tenders on top, pull the skin around over the meat and truss. We didn't have enough skin to completely cover the meat, but it's not a problem as long since the exposed meat will be placed on the bottom in the braising liquid.
• Place in a ceramic or other non-reactive baking dish, add whatever liquid is left from the celery/parsley/lemon mixture, then add some turkey stock made from the bones.
• Roast at 360° for about 90 minutes.
• Let rest, then carve. Done. Serve with some of the braising liquid and pomegranate seeds as a garnish.

The Rice
Simple. Salt. Brown rice. Wild rice. Fresh whole cranberries. Unsalted turkey stock.
Put all this in a pan and simmer for about an hour on very low heat. We used brown basmati. Don't use white rice since it needs a lot less time to cook than wild rice and will turn to mush.

The yams...
I'm not sure what's in these, except lemon juice and simple syrup flavored with nutmeg, lemon juice and zest. They're steamed, mashed, the syrup goes over the top and they're baked.

Tangerine Dream cake
The base is a dark chocolate wafer, then orange marmelade, then tangerine genoise flavored with simple syrup infused with pureed tangerine, orange and vanilla extract. Then tangerine Bavarian cream. Then another layer of the genoise. Cover the whole thing with chocolate Swiss meringue buttercream and garnish with tangerine wedges.

I didn't make the sweet potato pie (a friend brought it), so I can't say much about it except that it was excellent.