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.

A Watermelon by any other color...

J'ai planté six grains vers le fin d'avril, qui sont devenu deux plantes. Qui ont donné deux pastèques. Beaucoup d'effort pour peu de mangeailles.

Mais, ces pastèques sont d'un type assez rare, avec leur char jaune-orange. C'était beaucoup plus orange dans le photo sur le paquet de graines, mais c'est quand même plus couleur soleil levant que le rouge-rose typique.

Peut-être ces fruits doivent être plus grande, comme ceux vendus dans le supermarché, que nécessitent presque une grue pour les lever.

Le gout? Assez sucré, mais avec peut-être moins de profondeur d'un pastèque rouge foncé cultivé par un fermier expert dans les subtilités des pastèques biologiques.

____

Six seeds in April. Two plants in May. Two watermelons in September. A lot of effort for not too many victuals.

But, these are rare watermelons. Orange flesh. A lot more orange on the seed package, but still more dawn yellow than the typical rosy red.

Perhaps they should be larger, like in the supermarket where you almost need a crane to lift them out of their bin.

What about the taste? Sweet enough, but perhaps with less depth than a deep red watermelon raised under the expert care of an organic farmer well-versed in the subtleties of watermelons.

Frites à l'ARC

We had to sacrifice potatoes to the knife today. Julienne. Bâtonnet. This dice. That dice. So, the result is lots of potatoes in different cuts.

Serving different cuts of the same vegetable is taboo in chefdom. Chef Teresa once graded me down for exactly this kind of sin against the Gods of Gastronomy. It's just not correct. It shouldn't be done.

Yet, here I am with all these potatoes. They're sitting there in the refrigerator, soaking in water and hopefully losing starch minute by minute. It's either offend the Gods by mixing cuts, or offend them by wasting food. A real dilemma.

In the end, the ingrained adage "don't waste food" won out. I remember when they used to say, "think of all those starving people in China. Eat your broccoli". I wonder if the Chinese now say, "think of all those --- big noses in America. Finish your char siu!". Not that I ever had any problems finishing my char siu, considering that all those people in China would surely disapprove of my throwing it, uneaten, into a landfill.

So, here it is, apologies to Chef Teresa for my indiscretion. It is definitely more trouble, since three different cuts all have different cooking times. Definitely not economically logical for a restaurant, but I'm at home with nothing better to do than finish projects, study, do homework, answer e-mails, deal with cat/rat issues, try to tame a half-wild cat who might want to adopt us but isn't quite sure, bake some bread and cook the rest of the pork.

This pork is a great example of fat is flavor. Almost enough to make me want to get that tattoo for real. Oh, I never posted it...

Fat is Flavor

 There it is. Chefs have lots of tattoos. It's all the rage to work 16 hours a day then go under a buzzing needle to have something ridiculous engraved on your flesh that you can watch blur, sag and uglify as you grow older. Still, sometimes it's tempting to sheep out, join the crowd, jettison one's individuality for the sake of group fashion and nonconforming conformity. Back to the pork.

The pork is just some ingredients and lots of time. Pork shoulder, cut into 3" cubes, white wine, fresh thyme, fresh marjoram (or oregano, but the marjoram needed trimming). Bay leaves, onions, garlic, more garlic, red, ripe tomatoes that it was really time to use, Yolo Wonder peppers, salt and black pepper. Throw it all in a pot and let it simmer for about three hours until the pork is meltingly tender and imbued with all the flavors floating around it. Unlike carnitas, I don't take fry the chunks in their rendered fat. The acidity of the tomatoes and the flavors of the other vegetables just seems to make any caramelization superfluous.

Meanwhile, about those potatoes. They should have soaked overnight, since every good plate has something that requires preparing a day ahead. But since I'm breaking the rules, a few hours will have to do.

Take the potatoes out of the water, dry them. Heat some oil. Fry the three types of potatoes separately, just to where they begin to take on color. Put them on a plate and do something else for an hour or so. Just before serving time, re-heat the oil and fry the three cuts separately until they just begin to show some color. If they overcook, they'll turn bitter and that would not reflect well on ARC, especially as it's an added sin over and above mixing cuts.

Toss the potatoes with some smoked salt, maybe a bit of Maldon sea salt for big flakes, a bit of fresh ground pepper, plate with the pork and serve. Eat the shoestring (julienne) and diced potatoes first and be hasty. Once you've polished them off, your sins are extirpated and you may continue your meal at a leisurely pace, sipping some Vinho Verde to keep Bacchus happy. Might as well have one happy god on your side, right?

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.

Heirloom tomato burgers

bun, lettuce, patty, egg, pimentón aioli...

...tomato, more tomato, a bit more...

... more tomato, lettuce, bun

How much tomato is too much? Well, when they're fresh-sliced summer heirlooms, I really don't know. The slices were about an inch thick, but the burger didn't taste over-tomatoed. It did pour juice like a tropical storm hitting a mountain range, a deluge that filled the bottom of the plate.

These patties were a premium frozen brand. Lots of flavor, but nothing beats a hand-formed patty for thickness and browning without succumbing to dryness. With a half pound of meat (before cooking) beefiness was assured. Cooked medium, since I didn't grind the meat myself and thanks to my food safety class I know just what can live in the depths of ground beef.

Here's what went into these towering tomatoey treats:


The bun
Baguette dough using pâte fermentée, sesame seeds. Nothing on the buns, so they could better absorb the juice coming off the burger and tomatoes. They were formed flat so that with a bit of squeezing it would be possible to eat this like nature intended: with your hands.

The sauce
Pimentón agridulce powder, garlic, red wine vinegar, chopped green olives (paste, really), egg yolk, lots of olive oil. Kind of an aioli with benefits.

The tomatoes
Cherokee Purple and Brandywine, lightly salted and peppered after slicing.

The meat
Simply seasoned with salt and pepper. The aioli was there to add more spice and flavor, so the meat could be simple and pure.

How could this be improved? Maybe a bit of bacon, home-ground beef that's thicker and more seasoned, maybe broil the tomatoes to intensify their flavor and reduce moisture content, a touch more salt. I could have added fresh basil but that would have dominated the tomatoes, and the goal was to let their flavor come through to accompany the meat. I left off the cheese for the same reason, but it could have had a bit of goat, blue, dry white cheddar or Alsatian muenster for more richness (and calories).

Could it have had more tomatoes? Probably. Tomatoes smash down quite well, allowing the burger to be eaten despite its impressive initial height. At some point, still undetermined, the tomatoes would simply flow out under pressure like aa lava, ending up in a somewhat chunky pile on the plate.