Colorful, festive, spicy

Nothing beats food that's really colorful, yet comes entirely from plant and animal sources that never went near colorful artificial dyes with unpronounceable names. This is one such dish, a little-known (to gringos) wonder from Mexico called chiles en nogada. Except it isn't really, since I omit the walnuts. Maybe I should just call them chiles rellenos arco iris. 

The recipe has three parts that all come together holistically in a tricolor splash of colors looking as though they just came from a Mexican flag party. 

The chilis

I use poblanos (aka ancho or pasilla), but I suppose you could use any other type large enough to stuff. Preparation is simple: just blast the skin with a torch or blister it over a gas flame. For best flavor, do this outdoors right over hot mesquite coals - although I'm happy sacrificing convenience for flavor and remaining in my kitchen. Place the scorched peppers in a plastic bag or between two bowls to steam a bit, then scrape off the burnt skin with a knife. I don't wash the peppers, since this removes flavor. I don't mind a few charred bits of chili skin since they tend to add rusticity.

The stuffing

This is where things get more fun: diced pork shoulder, trimmed to remove excess fat gets sautéed with chopped onions, garlic, cinnamon, salt, pepper, cumin, toasted pumpkin and sesame seeds. When it's hot, add some raisins or other dried fruit, maybe even some chopped bits of apple or pear. If it's still a bit dry, add some water or stock, and taste for seasoning.

The sauce

Nothing could be simpler. Just combine heavy cream (or milk, if you must), soft goat cheese and a bit of mozzarella to thicken. This remains cold, poured over the hot chilis at the last minute just before serving.

Assembly

You have two options: chili lover's and milder. For chili lovers, slit the peppers down one side and spoon in the stuffing, leaving the seeds in place. Everyone else might thank you for carefully removing the seeds before stuffing in the filling. Place the stuffed chilis in a 350° oven with a bit of water in their pan for about 30 minutes, until everything is hot.

Place a hot chili on a warmed plate and immediately spoon on the white sauce, top with pomegranate seeds and rush to the table. Ideally, the first mouthfuls will be a mixture of hot pepper and stuffing coated with cool white sauce.

Chilis vary in heat, even when they're all the same variety. Some vary from pepper to pepper. You may find one underwhelmingly wimpy, while others are hot enough to make you drink hot sauce to cool your mouth. If potential heat issues loom, taste a small piece of the peppers when you slice them for stuffing.

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.

¡Tortas!

Sometimes inspiration comes from several places, all hitting you within the space of a few short days. The Oak Cafe at school is doing a Mexican street food menu this week. I've been sort of craving tortas. I was curious about making a version of bolillos, the rolls used for this sandwich. Then, a Mexican friend tried some bread that I'd made and said it tasted like the bolillos she had as a child in Mexico.

My bread was sourdough, so I started thinking. Maybe bolillos, like most food in Mexico, taste different than our version. Maybe they've got more flavor, more complexity. So, why not use a light sourdough formula from a poolish and see what happens?

The other ingredients - carnitas and chile colorado - are simple enough to make if you have time.

For the carnitas, I cut some pork shoulder into 2" cubes, added a quartered lime, some salt and some garlic and braised it for about three hours. The fat slowly renders out as the water evaporates, so in the end the meat can fry a bit and brown in its own fat. You can also take the meat out, increase the heat to high and boil away the water. When you're down to the fat, reduce the heat and brown the meat. Done.

The chili colorado was a bit different. I thought I had a great stash of chilis, but only had cascabels, moritas and some hot New Mexico Hatch peppers I'd dried last summer. Chiles negros, anchos and guajillos are now on my shopping list, so I can get more chili flavor without the heat. I had all the other ingredients: brown stock, fresh garlic, a bit of ripe canned tomatoes, salt, black pepper, onion, celery, carrot, cumin and coriander seeds.

The chilis get seeded, then sautéed in a bit of vegetable oil after the spices, onions, carrots and celery. The trick is to heat them up without scorching them, to release their flavor. Then the chopped garlic, and finally the stock and tomato to cool things down. After that, a bit of simmering and into the blender for a quick purée. The sauce gets returned to the pan, and dosed with red wine vinegar according to how tart you like things. Finally, adjust the salt and everything is ready to go. One local restaurant goes fairly heavy on the vinegar, but it's safer to add in increments while tasting to find the level you prefer.

When everything's ready, cut a bolillo in half, toast it lightly, add a layer of salsa, some carnitas, some more salsa or cilantro and sliced avocado. I never get enough avocado in restaurants, so this transforms the torta into a real luxury.

You can serve tortas open faced, covered or wet. If you like them wet, completely drowned in salsa, make the salsa more liquid, almost soupy, by adding more stock.

Chili

I'm not taking that class in regional American cooking. It's expensive - more than buying some cookbooks and learning on my own. Then, there's that part about certain regional American cuisines that I'd either never make or transform into something healthier and above all tastier. Chili, however, is not one of these things.

A great bowl of chili is a meal in itself. There's enough heat to wake things up without going so far as to inflict pain - but chili heat is an individual thing. One person's wonderbowl could be another's gut burning instrument of torture.

People really get passionate about the stuff, like they generally don't about, say, meatloaf. Here in California and the West, chili cookoffs are big events. People argue over which peppers to use, beans vs no beans, how herbal, should coffee and chocolate be ingredients, should the meat be ground or chopped... luckily there's no one definitive chili recipe.

I made white chili a few months ago, using fresh Hatch peppers from New Mexico. Now, in the midst of winter, it's time for the more traditional red version. I like meat and beans, several kinds of chili and quite a bit of herbs. Tomatoes, onions, garlic, a bit of celery and stop. Nothing else is necessary.

The peppers bring so much flavor and complexity that adding all kinds of secret ingredients would just be overkill. Sweet-hot, smoky, fruity... it's all there ready to be coaxed out.

So, here it is: my entry into the chili Hall of Fame. Or just a good bowl of red. The Hall of Fame can go elsewhere, since this started as simple cowboy food and all that highfalootin' nonsense just gets between a man and his food.


Ingredients

• Chili cascabel, dried (Not too many. Substitute ancho if you want things sweeter)
• Chili morita, dried (You could use chipotles, but these are better. Careful! Hot!)
• Chili Hatch, dried - New Mexico, hot.
• Chili Hatch, dried - New Mexico, mild

• Pinto beans

• Garlic, peeled and roughly chopped

• Salt
• Black pepper

• Roast cumin, roast coriander seeds
• Sage (fresh or dried)
• Oregano, dried (or Mexican oregano)
• Bay leaf, if you feel like it

• Onion, dice
• Celery, diced
• A strip or two of bacon, roasted in the broiler

• Flame-roasted tomato (canned).
• Beef chuck roast, diced and browned in the broiler. If you're going more cowboy and have a bigger budget, use buffalo meat and add a bit more sage.

Process

1. Soak the beans for a few hours. Some people soak overnight, but I can't really tell a difference.
2. Get the broiler hot in the oven.
3. Place the diced vegetables on a parchment-lined sheet pan and broil them until they start to brown a bit, even burn a bit on the edges. Reserve.
4. Place the meat on the sheet pan and broil until brown, turning to get lots of caramelization. Reserve.
5. Do the same with the bacon. Reserve.
6. Slice the chili pods so they don't hold air and place them in boiling water. After about 10 minutes of boiling, they should be soft. Take them out to cool - and don't throw away that chili water!
7. When everything is browned, place it in a pot and add cold water.
8. Drain off the water from the beans and add them to the pot.
9. Remove the veins and seeds from the chilis, place them in a blender and add some strained chili water - just enough so you can blend everything together. Save any excess chili water. This also works with an immersion blender and it's easier to clean up.
10. Add the puréed chilis to the pot.
11. Put the garlic in the blender, add some strained chili water and purée it. You can't have too much garlic - even a whole bulb is not too much.
12. Add the herbs and pepper, but not the salt.
13. Start with high heat to get the water hot, then reduce to a mere simmer.
14. Taste to see if you need more herbs. If it's too hot, well... oops. Too late now.  Chilis are supposed to be good for you, so enjoy the burn. The only thing you can do is rinse more beans and add them along with more water. You could also add meat - but at some point you'll have a huge amount of chili and if you're a wimp it might still be too hot. Next time, make meatloaf instead - or add the chilis a little at a time, tasting for heat in between. All chilis are different so this is the only safe method. You can also eliminate the hot New Mexico peppers in favor of milder varieties.
15. When the beans are just about cooked, add the salt. This supposedly gives you tenderer beans, but there's really no consensus on this at all.
16. Skim off any scum that forms on the surface of the water.
17. Keep simmering until the beans and meat are tender - probably about three hours. The goal is to use low heat to gently melt all that connective tissue in the meat, and get those proteins into the liquid where they'll do interesting things. 
18. Once everything is tender, adjust the salt to your taste and eat. 

Don't eat too much. Chili is never at its best the day it's cooked. If your intestinal system permits, have another bowl tomorrow. And the next day. By then, you'll start to know just how the cowboys felt.

Pork chops, avocado, fancy salsa

Today I ripped out most of my tomatillo plants to make way for the winter garden. There were more tomatillos than I'd expected, so now I'm up to my ears in chili verde sauce.

Not to worry, though. Reduced, strained and lightly monté au beurre it becomes positively snooty, far from that stuff served in little plastic cups all over California.

Here's how the acid balance worked out: Neutral/acid pork chop, slightly sweet avocado, sour sauce, sweet carrot/potato/onion. Dark beer to stand up to the bit of morita chili that's in the salsa. Not that it's hot. Just a tingle of heat to keep things interesting.

I still have about a pinto of chili verde, unstrained, that I can use for something else. Maybe those schweinschnitzel left over from dinner with my uncle. Maybe some kind of torta milanesa. That could really hit the spot on a fall Sunday.

A lot of hamburger!

Yesterday was Annette's art show. We decided to eat dinner with a friend after the show, but nobody wanted to go out. So, our friend said he'd bring some ground beef. He did. Three pounds of it. We already had one pound. The expiration date on this stuff comes up fast, so it's time to be creative.

Today after running errands, I checked the expiration date on one pack of ground beef. Sell by today. Joy! Hamburger again! No time to make buns, since we were already hungry. So what if I made an arepa heavily spiced with pimentón pepper and a bit of salt... fry it off, slice it in two and use it instead of a bun. Then some of that Australian blue cheese, some uncured bacon, some sautéd onions, a bit of arugula from the garden. The result: something thinner and easier to eat than a bun, with a great crunch factor. Lots of umami richness from the cheese, smokiness from the bacon and pimentón and a bitter counterpoint from the arugula.

We were more or less traditional yesterday with our friend. 140g patties made into maxi-sliders, with sesame seed mini-buns, garlic aioli, fresh tomato relish, lettuce. The meat was really a tower of beef mixed with bacon and garlic and char-grilled. The buns got sliced in thirds, the burgers in half, the tomato and aioli sauces slathered on, everything stacked and held together somewhat tenuously with toothpicks.

Now we only have about 1-1/2 pounds left to go. This pack has a later sell-by date, so it looks like we'll be able to take a burger break and eat something else. Not that I'm getting really tired of burgers... yet.

Chicken breasts with Hatch chili verde and Colombian arepas

Mesquite. Just repeat this word. Mesquite. Chunks of Mesquite. Glowing hot coals, sparks, smoke. This is how Hatch chilies should be blistered. As their skin blisters, cracks and darkens the smoke filters in, permeating the flesh. Bringing a hint of the wild, another level of flavor, the song of coyotes singing in the moonlight.

Now imagine chili verde made with this manna. A dash of heat, a soupçon of smoke, the tang of tomatillos, essences of herbs and garlic. A desert chorus like the smell of sage and flowers wafting across the desert on the night wind. Then a new element, perhaps an herbal bite of cilantro. A crispy, cheesy arepa lightly coated in green. Neutral white rice that carries the other flavors around your palate in a celebratory tango.

The Chicken.
Very simple. The chicken doesn't get, need or want any special treatment. It's just there as a meaty foil for the sauce.

• Boneless chicken breast
• Salt
• A bit of oil for a quick saute.

1. Pre-heat the oven to 425°. Ready a baking pan and a sheet of parchment paper.
2. Salt the chicken, then sauté it, skin side down in hot oil.
3. Once the chicken has browned a bit, flip it over briefly to sear the other side, then slide it onto the parchment paper and pop the sheet in the oven for about twenty minutes, depending on how thick the breast is and if you decided to pound it before cooking (I didn't).
4. When it's done, put it aside in a bowl to cool a bit.

The Sauce.
Get some Hatch chilis, straight from New Mexico. This year, they showed up stacked in a pile at the supermarket. Buy a case. Like chili verde? Buy more. They'll cook down, or you can make a few ristras for decoration and chili powder.

• Blister the chilis over mesquite, let them steam a bit. Peel, seed and core them. Chop them up.
• Pick some tomatillos from your garden where they're growing with mad abandon
• Chop up some onion
• Chop and paste some garlic
• Add some kosher salt
• Have some chicken stock on hand (or pork stock, if you're doing a piggy version)

1. Throw the onions in a pan to sauté. Add the garlic, the chopped chilis and the salt. Let it simmer a bit. 
2. Drop the mixture in something tall that holds hot sauce and blend it smooth.
3. Add the juice that sweated out of the chicken as it sat, blend it in. Check for saltiness, adjust. Set aside.

The Arepas
Don't use masa harina for arepas. They have their own kind of flour: pre-cooked corn flour that's not nixtamalized like masa harina. So, it's not as good for you, because nixtamalization uses lime to eat away part of the corn kernels and free up vitamins somehow. Of course, that lime also changes the flavor, and you don't want that corn tortilla taste here.

1. The formula is simple: 1/3 arepa flour, 1/3 water, 1/3 grated mozzarella. Plus an additional dose of grated pecorino romano cheese just for fun. A bit of salt, but be careful since the cheese is already salty.
2. Mix all this stuff together until it forms a sort of pasty dough. Set it aside a bit to equalize the moisture content.
3. Scoop out enough to make a small ball, about 1-1/2 inches in diameter, then smoosh the ball down into a flattish disc. Smooth the edges as you go.
4. Pop the discs into hot oil, brown one side. Flip. Brown the other. Place on a parchment paper lined baking sheet, and when it's full into the oven it goes for about 15 minutes at 425°F. 
5. The arepas should be crispy on the outside, light and a bit chewy on the inside. They should have a light cheese flavor backed with a subtle hint of corn.

If you've timed everything right, the sauce was ready first. Then the rice. Then the chicken. Then the arepas. That way, you get chicken juice to add to the sauce at the end and the arepas are red hot. Garnish with some cilantro and serve.

The Hatch is back in town

They come from New Mexico. They're green. They're hot. They might cause you to act strangely, especially if you just fry some up and eat them straight. You probably won't glow in the dark, but then some things are found out after the fact.

Sorry to disappoint, but I'm talking about chilis, not LGMs. They're grown about 218 miles from Roswell, a drive that would take the average human a bit over four hours. The average ET could probably do a lot better than this, if he/she/it existed. Unlikely that an escaped alien from Epsilon Eridani 3 would bother heading toward Hatch when it could head West, sell movie rights for megabucks in Hollywood, retire in Zzyx, start a pedigreed targ ranch and live happily ever after.

You get a choice with these peppers. Hot, medium or mild. Choose hot. The others are wimpier. If you want a mild chili, you can always eat a bell pepper. Heat is part of life; bite into it, savor the burn, note how well it works with an icy cold beer.

There's not a lot of sweet in a Hatch chili. More an earthy, acid bite with a lot of chili flavor. They're easy to sear and freeze, or you can make ristras and be festive all year. Dried, they have a fruity aroma while frozen peppers maintain their acid.

Don't limit yourself to chile verde, just because these are chilis and they happen to be green (unless you dry them). They can be pre-cooked and put on pizza or in calzones with some goat cheese and garlic. The photo above is a variation of chile verde used as a pan sauce where the meat is braised, removed, the sauce reduced, butter added and the meat returned. I might try chiles en nogada, swapping pasillas for Hatch peppers. Probably less heat with the Hatches, too. Then there's Hatch tempura, salmon with chili sauce, chili-marinated chicken, pan-fried chili with shrimp... Good thing they sell the things by the case. Too bad that like that special offer on late-night TV, they're here for a limited time and then they're gone for another year.