How Green Was My Salsa

Salsa verde is one of my favorite things to make for weekend snacking, and it's becoming a favorite thing to take as a party contribution. 

I would like to apologize in advance for the vagueness of this recipe. But it always turns out well for me. It's spicy and herbaceous and fresh and garlicky and smooth and (if you add avocado) creamy. Fabulous stuff. Great as a dip for chips or veggies, and I've used it as a sauce for frozen burritos.

Ingredients
Fresh poblano and Anaheim chiles, roasted (see below)
1 bunch of fresh cilantro (maybe a cup total? Not sure)
1 lb tomatillos, husks removed, washed, cut in half (quarter any a lot bigger than the others)
1/2 a large onion, cut into several large pieces
2 cloves garlic, peeled
Salt, to taste (start at 1/2 tsp, maybe?)
Flesh of 1 avocado (optional)
1 small packet artificial sweetener (optional)

Prepping the chiles
I can't really tell you how much to use: that's going to be determined by your own taste. Last time I made this (and it was described by one person who had it as "amazing") I used two Anaheim chiles and half of a poblano.

I prep the chiles for roasting by cutting them in half lengthwise, removing the stem and seeds, and removing the pale ribs that the seeds hang into. Some people say that the chile's heat is in the seed and some say it is in the ribs. By removing both, you're taming much (not all!) of the heat while retaining flavor.

There appear to be a number of good methods for roasting chiles, one of which is described here. I confess, however, that for the "char" step described in the link I just throw 'em in a hot oven with the tomatillos. I don't usually get all that much of the skin off, but don't find it to be a problem in this application.

IMPORTANT NOTE: The oil that makes chiles hot is a fairly powerful irritant. If I'm going to be working with a lot or with the hotter varieties, I like to wear latex gloves. Regardless, wash your hands thoroughly when you're done and DO NOT TOUCH YOUR EYES before the washing.

Instructions
1. Put the prepped chiles and tomatillos on a baking sheet lined with aluminum foil and roast them at 425 degrees until the chiles are blistered and the tomatillos are soft.  Allow the chiles to cool in a plastic bag and then remove the skin that comes off easily.

2. Put all ingredients except the sweetener in a food processor and process until smooth.

3. Taste the mix. Add more salt if needed, and add the sweetener if you wish. I find that the tomatillos are just too sour without the sweetener, but that's me.

Serve chilled or at room temperature.

Note: My one unhappiness with this recipe is that the rawness of the fresh garlic is a little too aggressive to my taste. Next time I do this, I'm tempted to wrap my cloves in a little aluminum foil and roast them with the chiles and tomatillos. It may also be that I should be using granulated garlic rather than fresh.

Tamale's Another Day: A Tale of Failure and Redemption

I was scheduled to go to a small party Wednesday night, and I volunteered to make tamales. I'd made tamales once before, and it's a lot of work, but I had a plan to spread out the labor and felt reasonably confident.

The Filling

I chose to make the filling for my tamales from this recipe. Since I wanted some tamales for my freezer beyond what I needed for the party, so I decided to make four dozen. I'd need quite a bit of chicken, so I cooked it according to the "chicken and broth" method here. I cooked up five pounds of chicken breasts (well more than I'd have needed, but I wasn't sure how to estimate). After I removed the chicken from the cooking liquid, I made my firtst mistake, which was to forget about the liquid. I'd intended to use the reserved broth in making the dough, but I let it sit on the stovetop for way too long to be sure of safety.

Also that night, I shredded two ponds of cheese and roasted and over a dozen chiles for the filling and the salsa verse I intended to serve on the side. (Mistake #2 was not wearing gloves when working with the chiles -- poblanos and anaheims don't usually bother me, but that was a lot of pepper, and my hands were fairly uncomfortable when I went to bed.

Finally, I chopped the chiles and made the salsa verse, which I'll detail in a separate post.

The Husks

Tuesday night, I had to bus to a market a few miles from my apartment to get the dried husks for the tamales. After a wasted hour and a half upon my return, a quick web search taught me that the husks don't need to be unrolled from the little bundles they're sold in.

Masa and Disaster

My source for both the masa recipe and the overall procedure is Simply Mexican by Lourdes Castro, a book I really like. Though I'd made this recipe successfully before, doubling the amount proved to be the death of my cheap hand mixer. This might have been okay, since I'd worked it for nearly long enough anyway, but then I killed the thing by misreading the recipe and adding triple the amount of baking powder.  (I steamed a little of the dough, to see if I could use it anyway, but it tasted really salty.)

I thought about restarting the dough, but I was tired and had rattled nerves and just couldn't face it. Nor could I summon enthusiasm for the alternatives I could think of. Finally, in a stroke of culinary genius, I walked to a local restaurant and BOUGHT two dozen tamales. (No, I didn't tell people at the party that I'd made them.)

Redemption Casserole

This afternoon, I summoned nerve to do something with all that filling I'd made. I had put the mix in a casserole dish, and I topped it with the cornmeal mix from this recipe and shoved it in a 350 degree oven for half an hour. It was pretty good. It wasn't really redemption, put it was pretty good.


I'd love to be able to say that I'd drawn big lessons from this experience, but I really didn't. Stuff is going to happen, and I'm going to make mistakes. Though I was temporarily shaken, I think I'll recover quickly and try again soon.

After all, there's always tamale.

A Cutlet Above the Rest

Unless I'm doing Big Protein (such as a roast), I prefer to do most of my meat on the stovetop rather than the oven. Watching a cooking show recently, I saw the host make "chicken cutlets" by slicing breasts horizontally. This produces two pieces that will not only cook more quickly but also more evenly.

The show host accomplished this by laying the breast flat on a cutting board. She put her non-knife-holding hand on top of the meat to steady it, and made a cut through the meat parallel to the cutting board. This should be done carefully, both to produce reasonably even slices and to avoid cutting yourself. The pictures here show a slightly different method of doing it, but should help you get the idea.

Chicken cutlets can also be made by placing the breast between two pieces of plastic wrap or wax paper and pounding it thin. I've done this, but found the horizontal slicing to be easier and gave better results for me.

Despite my concern that my rudimentary knife skills, I decided to give it a try.  I was quite pleased - it was easier to make the cut than I expected, and the resulting cuts cooked up quite satisfactorily.

Pickled Roasted Red Peppers

Peter Piper, Mother Goose tells us, packed a peck of pickled peppers.

Food-wise, that Peter Piper knew what he was about.

Here's why YOU should pack some pickled (red bell) peppers: they're fabulous little flavor bombs. They are savory, a little bit sweet, a little bit spicy, and a little bit pucker-y all at once. They can be used to add deliciousness to salads, cooked vegetables, and other foods. They are entirely non-fat. I think these pickled peppers are the first thing I made for myself that had me literally stomping my foot.

These little beauties are a type of "quick pickle". Quick pickles don't have the shelf life as their refrigerated cousins, but they're fast, easy, and delicious. And roasted red bell peppers are a wonderful candidate for this method.

Roasting bell pepper (and other chiles) is really straightforward. (It's also the entry point to a world of homemade salsas.) Putting the brine together is easy. So why wouldn't you do it?


The recipe I've used is here. The only change I make is to increase the amount of pickling spices to more like a teaspoon.

Notes:
1. I have successfully made quick pickles with sugar substitute. However, my understanding is that preserved pickles, the kind that can be stored at room temperature, can NOT be made with sugar substitute because the sugar is part of the preservation.
2. If you don't have pickling spice blend, or don't find them in your store, there are any number of recipes around. I've made my own blend, but prefer the convenience of the pre-made blend.
3. Yes, you can purchase roasted red peppers, and I assume they're good. But at the stores and delis where I've seen them, you might have to sell off your relatives to afford them.

The Culinary Institute of YouTube

A number of months ago, I decided that I was going to learn how to cut up a whole chicken, and I did an Internet search for instructions. My search turned up a YouTube video. I went and watched that, then saw that there were a number of other videos demonstrating the same skill. I spent an hour or more watching videos from different sources, each with a slightly different spin on the process. The next day, I purchased a whole chicken, watched my favorite video one more time, and then cut my chicken up quite successfully.

It turns out that there are MANY YouTube videos demonstrating a cooking task or recipe. From YouTube, I have learned not only chicken disassembly but also how to make homemade mayonnaise in my blender and an unfussy approach to sweet potato gnocchi. Just this morning, I watched a video on tempering chocolate and dipping truffles.

Not all the videos are good, of course, or fit the way I want to cook. But for someone like me who's trying to pick up these skills on my own, YouTube can be a big help.

Learning My ABCs

I've only been working seriously on my cooking skills for about a year. And, other than a quarter of Home Economics in high school and watching a lot of cooking shows, I haven't had any real cooking instruction. So, it's to be expected that there are plenty of pretty basic things that I don't know.

I ran into one of these holes tonight. I was making a sauce in which I would be tossing some chicken drumsticks. The recipe called for reducing the mixture "until it coats the back of a spoon".

The trouble, you see, is that I've never actually made a reduction sauce before. And I had no idea about what the back of the spoon thing meant. But, I forged onward, figuring that I'd recognize that stage when I got there. I let my mixture simmer for about the suggested time, stuck a spoon into it, and looked at the spoon's back.

The spoon's back was wet. Of course it was wet: my sauce was not so volatile as to dry in the second or two I was staring at it. This is when it occurred to me that I had no idea how to tell "coated" from "wet". And, I gave up too soon. Thus, my drumsticks were less "glazed" than "damp". Bobby Flay would not have been begging me to come be his sous chef.

After talking to a friend on Twitter, I did an web search and came up with this link. Having read it, the finger part of the test rang a bell - I've seen this done on TV.  It makes sense. That is, it makes sense NOW, sitting at my computer instead of standing at the stove.

I truly don't feel badly about this - it's just something else I needed to learn, albeit something that I could have best learned standing at the elbow of a more experienced cook.

Sometime over the next few days, I'm going to make myself up some dark-colored liquid with some honey in it and reduce it. I'll test it every few minutes until it clearly passes the "back of the spoon" standard to get some actual experience with it and it actually becomes part of my skill set. And I'll be that little bit closer to being able to make myself some dinner.I

I Have Truffles of My Own

Every so often, I watch somebody on a cooking show make chocolate ganache and then make it into truffles. After a while, I developed an urge to try it for myself.

1. The Ganache

Ganache sounds incredibly fancy, but it isn't hard. The recipe I followed, from the iPad app of Mark Bittman's "How to Cook Everything", just had me heat heavy cream and pouring it over chopped bittersweet chocolate and stirring until melted. I needed to give my mixture about 20 seconds in the microwave for a bit of reheating in order to get it smooth.

2. Forming the Truffles

The ganache has to get solid in the refrigerator in order to be formed into truffles. My recipe said this would take an hour or two: I just left it in there over night.

The ganache not only has to GET cold, it has to STAY cold: I was amazed at how little it took to get it too soft to form. I wore latex gloves (purchased for working with fresh chile peppers) as I worked. After my third scoop of ganache turned out too soft to work with, I also wound up putting my bowl of ganache into a larger bowl with ice water to keep it solid: this actually worked quite well.

To form the truffles, I scooped about a tablespoon of the ganache and quickly rolled it between my gloved hands until it was kind of ball-shaped. As you can see, my truffles are perfectly round and uniform in size:

*ahem* Or not.

3. Coatings

I chose to follow three suggestions for coatings in which to roll my poor naked truffles. I chopped some mixed nuts, and I also used some sweetened coconut I have at the moment and unsweetened cocoa powder.  

(I also tried adding about one part of ancho chile powder to about four parts of cocoa powder, but a pinch of that was WAY too strong. I still like the idea, but that's an experiment for another day.)

4. Assembly

While I prepped the coatings, I had my truffles getting chilled again in the refrigerator. While I think this was a good plan, I also think I might let them sit out for just a couple of minutes before I began rolling. I think it works better when they're a little bit soft.

I found it very easy to coat the truffles with the cocoa, reasonably easy with the chopped nuts, and a bit of a challenge with the coconut.

Here are the final truffles:

They look pretty good, I think, and they're delicious.

These truffles will obviously take no time at all at room temperature to become too soft too eat neatly. I'll keep them refrigerated, and I'm glad I don't have to transport them in August.  I wonder if a different formulation of ganache would be just a little more solid.

I found these REALLY easy to make, actually, and much easier than cooked sugar candies. (For those of you scoring it home, the tally is currently Cooked Candy 4, Pedersen 1. But I will have success eventually.)
If you have any interested

Pirate Queen Zucchini

This is my very favorite kind of recipe. This is for two reasons:

1. It's delicious.
2. It's what I call a "template recipe" -- easy, infinitely variable, no cookbook required. If I ever lose interest in continuing to develop as a cook, recipes like this will still keep me fed.

I originally got it from my friend Kelly, who blogs at Diabetesaliciousness, and is the person for whom I named it. (Why is Kelly the "Pirate Queen"? That's not really my story to tell. But Kelly's amazing: smart, funny, courageous, demanding, and compassionate. They world needs Kellys much more than it needs Kardashians. Just sayin'.)

I've rung so many changes on this recipe, I no longer remember exactly what Kelly taught me. But I think this is the core of it:

• zucchini, diced
• lots of garlic, minced
• lots of grated Parmesan cheese
• salt and pepper
• a little cooking oil

Heat the oil in the pan. Throw in the zucchini and the garlic and cook, stirring periodically, until the zucchini is tender.  Salt and pepper to taste.  Put the cooked zucchini in your serving bowl with LOTS of cheese -- seriously, folks, the cheese in this recipe is an INGREDIENT, not a seasoning.

Stir until the cheese is melty, resisting the urge to bury your face in it. Serve.

I've done all sorts of veggies in this dish, either with or instead of the zucchini: summer squash, chayote squash, eggplant, onion, tomato. I think you'd want to use a vegetable soft enough to produce a bit of liquid as it cooks so the garlic won't burn, but that's an amateur's guess.

A note on zucchini: it's said that zucchini loses flavor as it matures, and that the baseball bats people haul out of their gardens have no flavor at all. I don't like to buy them much bigger than a Polish sausage.

Go cook it, ye swabs. Aaarr!

The Thin Line Between Challenge and Chore

This weekend, when planning out my dinners for the week, I picked a casserole of broccoli, spinach, and goat cheese for Monday. It sounded tasty and different.

Sunday, when I intended to cook it, I realized I'd left a key ingredient off the weekend shopping list. I picked it up after work on Monday, but rather than making my casserole that evening I failed to make fudge and ate leftovers. Last night, I was bushed and ate leftovers. Tonight, I ate at a Mexican restaurant rather than cook my casserole.

It's time to be honest with myself. When I wrote that casserole on my meal plan, I thought I wanted to make it. But I don't want to make it. And the surest way to kill my own joy is to try to stick to a plan I've lost enthusiasm for.

There are two lessons for my meal planning:
1) Try to more accurately gauge my actual interest in a given recipe.
2) Include in my meal plan an "emergency substitute" that can be made out of pantry ingredients.

A Truly Luscious Salad

OK, this recipe probably ought to be posted in the summer, but it's really yummy, and I think it would make a nice lunch salad even in winter. I'm sure many people have made this salad, but I got it out of my imagination rather than out of a book.

Ingredients:
Roughly equal amounts of:

• avocado
• fresh tomato
• fresh mozzerella (by which I mean, the stuff sold in balls, often soaking in milk

Bottled Italian dressing or a homemade equivelent*
Salt and pepper

1. Cut the avocado(s) in half, remove the pit(s), scoop out the flesh, and roughly cube it. The size is up to you: my version is pretty chunky
2. Cut the tomato(s) in half, scoop out the seeds, and cube to more-or-less the same size as the avocado.
3. Cube the cheese to more-or-less the same size as the avocado and the tomato.

Drizzle with the dressing and season to taste. If you're using a bottled dressing, you're probably getting more than enough salt from that.

* Homemade vinaigrette is really easy and extremely versatile. (Here's one cook's take on it.) However, I've yet to really incorporate them into my daily life, in part because I don't eat much green salad, especially at home. If I want a green salad, I'm just as happy to let a restaurant do the chopping for me.

Fudge Fail

I had most of the day off work today, and decided to try making fudge. My candy-making experience has not been a happy one. I have made three efforts to make nut brittle, with results ranging from the mildly disappointing to the awful. I did do a pretty successful toffee last week, however.

My problem came because I let the mixture get too hot - the temperature seemed to climb very rapidly in the last few minutes of cooking - and by the time it was cool enough to even think about adding the vanilla it was WAY too stiff to do so. When cool, it was very hard, almost as much so as hard candy.

On the bright side, it was a pretty easy recipe to put together, so I'm not really hesitant to try again another day.

Cheater's Avocado Salsa

I like making salsa verde. I like roasting tomatillos and chiles, I like chopping garlic, onion and cilantro. I like buzzing the whole mess up in my food processor and adding salt and a bit of sweetener. I especially like eating my salsa verde.

What I like even better, though, is the thin, spicy avocado salsa they have at a local Mexican restaurant. My initial efforts to reproduce it produced this easy, tasty, dip.

Ingredients:

One (or more) ripe avocado

Canned or bottled salsa verde

1. Cut the avocado in half, remove the pit, and scoop the flesh into a bowl. Mash the flesh.
2. Add enough of the salsa verde to reach a consistency you like. I like it fairly thin, a little thicker than a tomato sauce, certainly thinner than what I think of as avocado.

I eat this with tortilla chips, but I can easily see using it as a sauce for any number of things. It's not yet what I was aiming for, but it's quite tasty.