Enchiladas Verde

So, I had delicious leftover pinto beans.

And I found tomatillos at the market.

A farmer had a bunch of poblanos and Anaheim chiles.

And avocados are in season. (Well, not here in Ohio–they are never in season here. But they are all over the grocery stores in various stages of wonderful.)

What does all of this mean?

Well, it may mean nothing to some people, but what it means to me is it is time to cook me up a batch of salsa verde and then drag out the tortilla press and comal and get cracking on the tortilla making, because it is enchiladas time.

But first, lets talk about enchiladas a little bit, because there is something I want to make clear here.

Enchiladas suck to make just for two people, especially if you mean to do all the stuff from scratch. Well, not all the stuff. I still don’t make my own cheese, but I do make the salsa, the tortillas and the shredded meat filling, as well as refried beans, so that is a hell of a lot of effort for just two people to have dinner.

The alternative is to use jarred salsa, premade tortillas and just cook the meat and beans (I refuse to used canned beans–they are foul), but then, neither Zak nor I like the enchiladas and will not eat much of them.

My solution: call up friends and order them to come to my house and eat Mexican food.

Okay, not order, but ask. It is nicer if you ask.

Though, I suspect that if I did call up friends and say, “Get your a– on over here, we are having us some enchiladas,” they’d probably pile into the car and come anyway, no matter that I was being rude.

So, that is what I did. Actually, I originally invited Dan, who is on his own while Heather is in Lebanon, but by the time he got there and I was looking at the pile of beans I was mashing, I handed him the phone and asked him to call Bry and Judi up and extend our warmest wishes that they arrive for dinner at some point in the near future.

Which they did, even though Judi has just had oral surgery this week. Which is fine–enchiladas and beans are soft.

Bry and Dan and Zak lended hands to the operation, and Judi kept the cats out of our hair and eventually, we had a fine dinner to share, with only -enough- leftovers for one more meal, as opposed to say, enough leftovers to feed the Mongol hordes. (But would the Mongol hordes have liked enchiladas? That is a question for the ages….)

My enchiladas verde begin with salsa verde, surprisingly enough. The basis for said sauce are tomatillas and green chile peppers.

Tomatillos are odd little fruits. For all that thier Spanish name means, “little tomato,” the Physalis ixocarpa is not related to tomatoes at all. As you can see in the illustration the little fruits (usually not much bigger than a small plum) are enclosed with a papery husk. On the plant, the husks look like little Chinese lanterns, dangling down from languid stems. The plants sprawl if given no support–in tomato cages, however, the prolific crop of fruits looks like a harvest of tiny lanterns set out for a festival or wedding banquet.

After you peel off the husks, you have to wash them in warm water–they exude a sticky resinous juice that is unpleasant to have on your fingers, as it makes them stick together and to other stuff. The juice isn’t harmful, just annoying.

Most people say that you “must” cook tomatillos, but that is not my experience. I have made a salsa cruda out of them raw for years. I chop them up with fresh mint and cilantro, purple onions, lime zest, lime juice and chiles, and use that with grilled meats or as a dip, and people have a hard time identifying the main ingredients. Raw, the tart juice takes on a pineapple flavor and the texture is somewhat like a crisp apple crossed with a green grape. It is quite pleasant.

But, salsa cruda aside, verde sauce is always cooked. The first recipe that I used was from Rick Bayless, who advocates roasting the chiles, and peeling off the burned skins, and then boiling the tomatillos. This is the standard method of making the sauce, and it makes a very good, tart, spicy, balanced sauce.

But one day, when I didn’t feel like building a charcoal fire and I only had an electric stove, I decided to roast the chiles under the broiler. And as I set them on a rack over a baking pan, I looked at the onions, garlic and tomatillos, and looked at the pan. And on a whim, I threw those in the bottom of the pan, under the rack, and poured some olive oil over the onions and garlic to keep them moist.

It was an inspired choice. The roasting caramelized the sugars in the tomatillos, onions and garlic and gave a depth to their flavor that is hard to match with any other method. In addition, the juices to the tomatillos gathered in the bottom of the roasting pan and thickened to a dark syrup, enhancing the flavor of the finished sauce further and also reducing the need for much in the way of thickening to give it body.

Most interestingly, I was able to remove the skins of the tomatillos; instead of chopping them up, I let them cool until I could handle them, picked them up from the roasting pan, held the fruits over the saucepan, and gently squeezed the pulp and juice out of the skin into the pot. The roasting had already started the process of cooking down the fruits, and eliminated the step of chopping them and the need to watch the pot over the fire for as long of a period of time.

Ever since that time, I have made my verde sauce by the roasting method and it makes a delicious pan of enchiladas. I usually make them with pork shoulder or butt that I have braised and then shredded, but yesterday, it turned out what had been in the freezer was an English roast from Bluescreek Farm’s Belgian Blue cattle. I was worried that the beef would be too strong a flavor for the sauce, but it turned out just fine. The way to make either the shredded beef or pork is simple–I have never written the recipe down–I just do it.

You brown the meat in a pot with olive oil or bacon drippings, and then add thinly sliced onions and brown them as well. Then, you add minced up garlic, roasted red pepper, chipotle en adobo and maybe a fresh chile or two as well as a couple of bay leaves. If you have some fresh thyme or Mexican oregano, that goes in as well. Then, I deglaze with either beer or sherry, and when the alcohol boils off, I add a can of Muir Glen Fire Roasted Crushed Tomatoes. Then some beef broth or stock and I cook it until it is falling apart tender. Last night, to save time, I did this in the pressure cooker–it took about forty minutes of full pressure cooking, and twenty minutes off heat for the pressure to release naturally for the meat to become sweetly tender little shreds full of flavor.

I saved the liquid and used some of it in frying the beans when they got a bit dry. The rest of it went into the freezer to become the basis of soup or chili or beans or red rice at a later date. It would be a crime to throw out so much good tasting liquid! (The old farm girl in me never dies, she just saves every last scrap of food and turns it into something else–I have a whole passel of chicken bones in my freezer awaiting a cool autumn day so I can make up a pot of stock.)

The next time I make tortillas or anything with masa, I will be sure and record it photographically. By the time tortilla making and enchilada rolling came about last night, we had four sets of hands in the kitchen working together and no hands to work the camera. If you know how to make them, fresh tortillas make these enchiladas better. If not–the ones from the store aren’t so bad. If you don’t know how to make them and want to try–Diana Kennedy will walk you through the process in her excellent My Mexican Kitchen, or you can follow the recipe on the side of the masa harina bag.

Whatever you do–don’t be afraid to try to work with masa–it really isn’t so hard as all of that–it just takes time and effort. It is only dough, after all, and it isn’t even that finicky of a dough to work with. Pie crust is much harder, believe me–I could make tortillas before I could make good pie dough, and I grew up with the latter, not the former. If I can do it, so can you.
Enchiladas Verde

Ingredients for the Salsa Verde

2-3 pounds ripe tomatillos
3 small onions
6 garlic cloves
4 Anaheim chiles, roasted and skins removed
3 poblano chiles, roasted and skins removed
1 cup chicken broth
1 tablespoon cornstarch dissolved in two tablespoons cold water
ground cumin to taste
salt and pepper to taste
fresh cilantro, minced as a garnish

Method:

Preheat broiler.

Peel off papery husks of tomatillos, wash in warm water. Dry thoroughly and place in a rimmed baking sheet or pan. Cut the root and stem ends off the onions and halve across the equator of the bulbs. Lay cut side down on the baking pan, and cluster the unpeeled garlic cloves around the onions. Drizzle onions and garlic with olive oil.

Place baking pan under broiler and broil until tomatillos are browned and collapsing, with thick juice escaping into the pan, the garlic is golden and the onion skins are browned and the flesh is transluscent.

While tomatillos, garlic and onions cook, remove and discard stems from chiles and seeds. Chop up roughly.

When tomatillos, garlic and onions are done, remove pan and cool on wire rack. When cool enough to handle, squeeze garlic pulp from skins into 2 quart saucepan. Add chiles. Chop onions roughly and add to saucepan. Squeeze pulp from tomatillo skins into the saucepan. Pour out juices accumulated on pan, scraping it all into the saucepan with a rubber spatula if needed.

Add chicken broth and bring to a simmer over low heat. When it is time to assemble enchiladas, thicken if needed with cornstarch slurry. After it is thick, remove it from the heat.

Ingredients for Enchiladas Verde:

shredded pork, beef or chicken
shredded sharp white cheddar and jack cheese
corn tortillas, fresh or storebought
verde sauce
canola oil spray

Method:

Spray canola oil spray over surface of baking pan. Pour a ladle full of sauce into pan and swirl around to coat bottom.

If you use freshly made tortillas, use them hot from the griddle. Fill with about a tablespoon or so of meat and cheese (here you can add shreds of scallion or onion or minced cilantro, but we didn’t do any of this last night) and either roll them into thick cigar shapes, or fold them over into half moon shapes. (Or, you can stack them into piles of three tortillas with meat and cheese between each stack. )

If you use store bought tortillas, you have to warm them in order to make them pliable enough to roll. Heat up a cast iron pan or griddle, and put the tortillas into the pan, one by one, and swish them around in the pan to heat up. (I use tongs for this operation.) You will see them visibly soften after about twenty seconds or so. Flip it over and do the second side about ten seconds, and then roll up an enchilada quickly before the tortilla cools down and stiffens again.

It is easiest if you have one person cooking or heating the tortillas and one person rolling them.

After the pan is full, pour enough salsa verde over the tops to keep them from drying out, but not enough to drown them. You want to be able to taste the corn, the meat and cheese, too. Sprinkle with shredded cheese on top and bake in a 375 degree oven for about twenty minutes, or until all the cheese is bubbly and melty and everything smells good.

Garnish with minced cilantro, if desired.

Serve with home-made refried beans, freshly made quacamole and sour cream.

Aubergine Rhapsody

Eggplant is a sexy vegetable.

Voluptuously curvaceous, with a deliciously fecund heft, the typical European eggplant seduces with its glossy violet-black skin capped by a perky green stem. It looks mysterious, and very little like an egg, though apparently, the first ones were small, ovoid and white, which makes the North American common name much more understandable.

The French name, “aubergine,” is my favored nomenclature for the eggplant, though I seldom drop that word in normal conversation. I just love the way it sounds, and will draw it out, drawling the soft “g” sound into a purr. If you whisper it against a lover’s ear, it sounds deliciously naughty and sensual.

According to Alan Davidson’s mighty tome of culinary knowledge, The Oxford Companion to Food, the word, “aubergine” has its roots in the ancient Sanskrit “vatin gana.” The Sanskrit term entered the Persian language as “badingen,” which the Arabs derived as “albadingen;” this the Spaniards translated as “albadingena,” which thus entered the French language as “aubergine.”

Interestingly, tracing the linguistic path of the word aubergine also gives the food historian clues to its travels as a treasured culinary fruit. It is believed to be of Indian origin, though the Chinese can claim the first literary mention of it in a treatise on agriculture in the 5th century CE, which tells of its spread eastward througout Asia. Eggplants are very popular throughout Asia and are used in many exquisite dishes which I will recount in the future; for now, I want to deal with the spread of the aubergine to the West.

The Persians are said to have brought the aubergine back from India, and into the Arab cultures of the Middle East. From here, it entered Europe by way of the Moorish conquest of Spain and the Italian trading contacts with the Arabs. Many fine eggplant dishes such as the Provencal ratatouille and the Italian melanzane parmigiana, came about, though truly, at first the Europeans were reluctant to eat the fruits, probably because aubergines are a member of the Solanum family–a group which includes not only tomatoes, potatoes and peppers, but deadly nightshade.

In my opinion, the finest aubergine dishes in the world come from the eastern Mediterranean and the area around the Fertile Crescent in the region we now call the Middle East. Greek cuisine makes great use of the fruits in moussaka, a casserole dish made of layers of fried eggplant slices, potato slices and seasoned lamb topped with a rich, cheese-kissed bechamel sauce. Imam bayildi, which translates as “the Imam (a priest or prayer leader in the Islamic faith) fainted,” is a delicious dish of Turkish descent, though it is popular throughout the region, probably owing to the great pervasiveness of the Ottoman empire. Imam bayildi involves small aubergine stuffed with onions, tomatoes and sometimes pinenuts cooked in a great deal of fruity olive oil. It is said that the name came about either because the Imam fainted because it tasted so delightful, or because he found out how much costly oil his wife had used in the dish.

My favorite dish utilizing aubergine happens to also be one of the simplest.

Baba ganoush, or as the Turks call it, patlacan salatasi, is a dish of roasted aubergine, mashed to a somewhat lumpy puree, into which sesame seed paste (tahini), lemon juice, salt and crushed garlic are beaten. It is often garnished with extra virgin olive oil and minced flat leaf parsley, and is served with pita bread, or sometimes falafel.

Though I usually follow the Turkish recipe which includes just the ingredients listed above, and which results in a delicately flavored, slightly smoky spread, I was intrigued to read about Lebanese versions which replace the lemon juice with pomegranate molasses and often include a sprinkling of fresh pomegranate seeds over the puree as a garnish.

Though pomegranate seeds are out of season, and thus are not an option, I do have a supply of pomegranate molasses on hand, as I use it for Persian cookery and to make a hauntingly addictive salad dressing for summer greens and fruits. Since my friend Heather is in Lebanon learning Arabic this summer, and has been regaling us with tales of the amazing foods she is encountering and since I promised to start learning Lebanese and Turkish foods so we can have fun recreating the dishes she has eaten both at Turkish friends’ homes and in Lebanon, I figured I would use my first two large aubergine of the season to make Lebanese style baba ganoush. It is quite a simple dish, really, and is easily made. I like to roast the fruits on a charcoal grill, usually on a fire that is going out after cooking whatever main course we are having for dinner one night. I will simply toss the aubergine onto the grill, close the cover and go eat dinner. (In fact, I will also use the last of the fire for roasting ears of corn and chile peppers in the same way–there is no sense in wasting that lovely smoky heat.) (In the winter, I roast the eggplant int the oven or directly on the burner to make this–the burner method gets the right smoky taste, but the oven is easier and cleaner.)

I come back after dinner and turn the eggplants, peppers and what all else, and close the lid and go away and do the dishes. By the time the dishes are done, the fruits are all roasted, and I can put them into bowls, cover them and allow them to steam so that the skins pull away from the flesh of the fruit.

If you roast an aubergine fully, it will collapse, juice will escape and the skin will completely char and pull away from the flesh. I let them sit in a bowl covered by plastic wrap until they completely cool, then go on with the recipe.

Lebanese Style Baba Ganoush

Ingredients:

2 medium-large dark purple aubergine
2 tablespoons tahini, well stirred
2 small cloves garlic, minced very finely
2 teaspoons pomegranate molasses
salt to taste
a sprinkle of ground sumac (optional, for garnish)
1 tablespoon minced mint leaves, for garnish

Method:

Roast aubergine as directed and allow to cool completely in a bowl covered with plastic wrap. A lot of juice will drain out of the fruit; discard this.

Place a fine sieve over the bowl you used to cool the fruits. Using your fingers, peel the fruit, picking the charred skin off of the flesh–this will be very easy. Cut off the cap and stem, and put flesh into the sieve, and with a fork, mash it roughly, letting the juice drain out into the bowl. Discard the juice. Scrape the flesh into a serving bowl.

Add the tahini, garlic, pomegranate molasses and salt, and beat to combine. Taste and adjust seasoning to suit you and your guests.

Using the back of a spoon, sculpt the puree into an attractive mounded shape. Sprinkle with sumac, if desired and mint, and set triangles cut from pita bread around.

Notes:

It is generally eaten by scooping up on pita bread. Freshly baked pita is best, but I have never had a complaint from serving good pita bought in a store. You can eat it from a spoon, but only if no one else is eating from the bowl.

I have eaten it from my fingers before, but again, only if no one else was there.

You can use fresh lemon juice to taste instead of the pomegranate molasses, but really, I like the slightly more complex fruity flavor of the Lebanese version. You can also use minced flatleaf parsley instead of the mint, but I think the mint is more refreshing. You can drizzle good olive oil on top, but I don’t think it is necessary.

Gussied-Up Appalachian Classic

There are certain dishes that call me back to the hills and hollows, that recall the trickle of banjo and dulcimer music wafting on a sultry mountain breeze. The wail of a fiddle breaking fancy, the cry of crows flying low over a newly planted field of warm red clay, the smell of newly cut hay and the soft lowing of cows in the barn.

All of these sights, sounds and smells come home to roost in my psyche when I cook pinto beans and cornbread.

We ate lots of dried beans when I was growing up, in part because they were cheap and filling, but also because we loved them. Buff colored navy beans with pink flecks of ham, or creamy baby lima beans cooked with bacon were favorites, but the beans that everyone acknowledged as being a classic on the West Virginia table were savory cedar-brown pinto beans.

And pinto beans -always- were served with cornbread.

It was a necessity, to have cornbread with pinto beans.

And everybody cooked their beans a little bit differently, but there was one rule that everyone followed: pork had to be in the beans for them to be any good.

Some people used fatback. Others used jowl bacon. Some used pork belly or pig neckbones. I knew of some families who used trotters in their beans, and some folks just threw in some plain old breakfast bacon. Hambones were popular, though I dare say more folks threw those in with navy beans to make Bean and Ham Soup.

The poorest folks put in bacon grease that they’d saved up for however long.

We almost always used ham hocks, though Dad did like his with jowl bacon when he cooked up a pot of beans.

Ham hocks are cheap as anything–they are the part of the ham that is the shankbone with just some meat, skin and lots of fat on it. They are salty and smokey and make a really rich pot of beans, whether you cook them on the stove or in the slow cooker all day or you cook them for an hour or so in the pressure cooker. You cook them until the meat falls off the bones and the fat starts to dissolve into the bean broth, and there is nothing better than getting a little piece of the ham in a spoonful of beans. It was like a grace note at the end of a fiddle solo, a little fillip, a pretty extra bit that made your tongue want to get up and sing.

Other than pork, some folks put onions in their beans while they cooked. Onions and sometimes some peppers. I don’t know anyone who used garlic except my Aunt Nancy who’d sneak it in on account of her being Syrian, and a great believer in garlic. But she used a light hand and sneaked it in–pretty much the only other seasoning most folks would use was salt and pepper, maybe some onion and now and again, someone would get extra daring and throw in a bay leaf.

Oh, but none of us really cared, because the pork, beans, salt and pepper were so tasty on their own.

And even if you didn’t season them much when you cooked them, we often put diced up raw onions on top of the soupy beans before we ate them. The crunchy raw onions gave a contrasting texture and their sharp flavor complemented the rich, earthy flavor of the beans. And of course, when ramps were in season, we sliced them up and put them on top.

Some folks, like my Dad, ate the beans dry, drained of their thick, rich juices, but a lot of folks preferred to eat them out of a bowl, swimming in broth. I am one of the latter folks–I reckon people called pinto beans “soup beans” for a reason. Besides–the juice was full of flavor–I always thought of drained beans as being somehow naked and very bland without thier rich clothing of smokey broth.

I think that dried beans came into the Appalachian tradition from the Native Americans, most like the Cherokee Nation, who had a whole passel of recipes using them in ways that went beyond soups and stews. They made bean dumplings, fritters and breads that were very popular and which became traditions among some white families who had married into the Nation or who were decendants of the Cherokee.

How exactly cornbread came to be partnered with pinto beans in West Virginian cuisine, I am not rightly certain. Part of it had no doubt to do with the fact that cornbread was the default bread of much of southern Applachian hillfolk–folk grew and ground their own corn, but had to pay cash money for wheat flour, and sometimes they couldn’t afford it.

Another possibility is that it might have been the Cherokee influence at work again. Beans and corn are both New World natives and just as the Cherokee had lots of imaginative recipes featuring beans, they cooked even more dishes with corn and its derivative products such as cornmeal and hominy grits. It is possible that the white settlers picked up the idea of eating soup beans with cornbread from the Cherokee.

What I do know is this–whether the settlers or the Native Americans knew it, the combination of corn with beans is a highly nutritious one that creates a complete protein. That means that all the essential amino acids that are necessary for human life are present in that combination of foods. No one plant product contains all the amino acids that are the building blocks of muscle in our bodies–only animal protein has them all in one place.

So, while the folks, brown, white and red, who lived in the Applachian mountains may not have known all about amino acids and how to combine plantstuffs in order to have a balanced diet, they were doing it anyway, probably because the food was easily grown, cheap, filling, and was seen to be nutritious. I say seen to be nutritious because generation after generation of people ate it with no ill effect–which of course, is how traditional staple foods come to be that way. If something isn’t nutritious enough to sustain life, people don’t pass it down to the next generation, generally because they don’t live long enough to have some kids to pass it down to.

But, for whatever reason, pinto beans and cornbread have been passed down through the years to become a classic in the West Virginia Appalachian cuisine that exists today, and now and again, when I hanker for a taste of home, I go and cook up some.

Except, since it is my kitchen, and I don’t feel the need to stick completely with tradition, I gussy my beans and cornbread up a little bit. Since pinto beans are such a tradition in the Southwestern desert regions, and since I like chiles and spices, I tend to cook my beans less like a hillbilly and more like a cowgirl. Because I like the way beer tastes with beans, I add that to the cooking liquid, and of course, I throw in chiles and cumin and garlic and onion, too. I have never known chiles, onions or garlic to make any bean taste bad, and cumin improves everything except coffee and dessert.

Oh, and breakfast cereal. It doesn’t taste too good in that, either.

As for my cornbread, I like to bake it in cast iron cornstick pans, just like my Mom and Grandma did. That is the end of the similarity, though–I add extra goodies to my cornsticks, too. Like cinnamon, extra sugar, chiles and roasted corn kernels.

And I have yet to have a complaint.

So, that is what we had for dinner tonight–I woke up this morning with crows and dulcimers in my dreams and the scent of damp clay in my memory, and I knew I had to cook us up a pot of beans.

Which I did, though I did have one thought as I poured the beer into the pot just before I put the beans in–
will God strike me down for using kosher beer brewed by very nice Jewish boys in New York in a dish that not only has bacon grease in it but a ham hock? Will the Almighty smite me, or just shake His head and say, “Oy–leave it to a shicksa?”

Fancified Cowgirl Pinto Beans

Ingredients:
2 tablespoons bacon drippings or olive oil
1 large onion, or 3 small ones, sliced thinly
5 large cloves garlic, minced
1 teaspoon cumin seeds
2 bay leaves
pinch of dried Mexican or regular oregano
black pepper to taste
1 whole chipotle en adobo
1 bottle lager beer
1 smoked ham hock (or if you want to be healthy, some smoked turkey wings will do)
1 1/2 pounds dried pinto beans picked over, rinsed and drained
1 quart vegetable broth or water
1/2 quart chicken broth or stock or water
salt to taste
diced yellow onion or sliced scallion for garnish

Method:

Melt bacon drippings (or heat olive oil) over medium heat in the bottom of your pot or pressure cooker. Add onions and cook, stirring, until they are a medium golden brown. Add garlic, cumin, bay leaves, oregano, black pepper, and chipotle, and keep stirring, until the garlic is golden, the onions are a rich brown and everything smells really nice.

Pour in the beer, and allow most of the alcohol to boil off. Add the ham hock, beans and the broths or water and bring to a boil.

If you are using a regular pot and intend to cook this all day, turn the heat down to low, cover the pot and go off and read a book, wash your dog, write an essay, weed the garden or clean the house. Check back every hour or so and stir the beans. If the liquid runs low, add more water or beer. If you want to reduce the liquid, partially uncover the pot.

If you are using a pressure cooker, bring the beans to a boil, close and lock the lid, bring it up to full pressure, and turn the heat down to medium low to low. Adjust heat to keep the pressure up and the lid locked, and cook it under full pressure for about 22-25 minutes. You can either allow the pressure to gradually release on its own–in my experience, this leads to a thicker, richer broth–or you can quick release the pressure following the manufacturer’s guidelines for your pressure cooker.

Taste your beans, and make certain they are done. They should be soft, but still whole. Salt to taste; with the ham hock and bacon drippings, you probably will not need to add much salt. If you want the beans to be spicier than they are, smash up the chipotle into the broth.

Before serving, fish out the ham hock and the bay leaves. If you want, you can shred the meat from the hock and put it back into the beans. Or, you can be your dog’s best friend and give her the hock.

Serve with diced yellow onion (Vidalias are quite popularly used for this these days, though my Dad prefers plain old sharp yellow onions on his) or sliced scallions on top.

Hip Hick Cornsticks

Ingredients:

1 cup stoneground yellow cornmeal
1 1/4 cup flour
¾ cup raw sugar
2 teaspoon. baking powder
1 chipotle en adobo, minced
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
dried ground chipotle to taste (start with 1/8 teaspoon)
the kernels from one ear roasted corn
2 eggs, lightly beaten
1/4 cup peanut oil
1 1/4 cups milk
2 cast iron cornstick pans
canola oil spray

Method:

Preheat oven to 450 degrees F. Put your clean, dry cornstick pans into the oven to preheat.

Mix together dry ingredients including the chipotle en adobo and corn kernels, which yes, I know, are not technically dry. But they are not liquid, so work with me.

Mix together your liquid ingredients, including the egg.

When your oven is preheated and the cornstick pans are hot, stir the liquid ingredients into the dry ingredients to make a thick batter.

Using oven mitts, take out your cornstick pans, and spray them lightly with canola oil. Do not skip this step if you want your cornsticks to come out whole.

Using a ladle, pour batter into the cornstick pans almost up to the rims of the corn-shaped depressions. The pans should sizzle–this is making a crisp crust on your cornsticks.

Put them into the oven and bake for about 8-10 minutes, or until your cornsticks are puffy and browned.

Remove from oven and with a thin spatula or table knife, flip the sticks out of the pan, and wrap them in a towel to keep warm. If you have any batter left, reheat a pan, spray it and repeat the process until all batter is used up.

This will make around 21 cornsticks, which is enough for 4-6 people, depending on how much they eat. With my friends, I double the recipe.

They swear I put crack in these, but as you can see, I do not.

Notes:

If you want, you can add fresh chiles to this recipe as well. I like to use fresh Thai or serrano chiles mixed with the chipotle. This really adds a serious kick to them.

You can also slip about a teaspoon of vanilla extract into the batter–it goes well with the chile flavor.

For the roasted corn–I used a leftover ear of corn we cooked on the grill. It had lots of nice browned kernels. You can broil corn on the cob, too. And if you don’t have any grilled corn laying in your fridge, make some! The next time you grill, throw some ears of corn on the fire. We shuck them completely, and baste them with melted butter then throw them on with whatever else we are cooking. Zak turns them a few times and might baste them once or twice and takes them off after they are nice and toasty brown. If you do extras, then you have leftovers, which means you can cut the kernels off and use them in cornsticks. Or salsa. Or salads or chowder or whatever sounds good to you at that moment.

If you don’t have cornstick pans, you should, but I understand if you don’t. This is also good baked in a cast iron skillet–follow the same procedure with preheating it to make a nice crispy crust, and spray it lightly with canola oil. Pour in all the batter, and bake between 20-30 minutes until brown on top and a broomstraw inserted into the middle comes out clean.

Now–you can serve these with butter–and that is really good, especially when they are hot. But when you eat them with pinto beans, the way to do it is to spoon up some beans and broth, and take them, then have a bite of cornstick. And then use the cornstick to sop up some bean broth, then repeat the following procedure as many times as you need to until you aren’t hungry anymore.

The Cook Next Door

A meme! I have been tapped for a meme! How can that be?

I thought no one would -ever- ask.

But, Kate, the fine lady whose wit entertains me every day at Accidental Hedonist, did tap me for the Cook Next Door Meme, and so here I am, joining the crowd, answering the questions, and hopefully entertaining everyone with a few kernels of information about how I came to be the food-obsessed kitchen tantrika I am today.

What is your first memory of baking/cooking on your own?

I suppose that the numerous batches of pretend cookies I made on Gram’s kitchen floor with her mixing bowls, measuring cups and wooden spoons wouldn’t count for this, would they? It is a shame that they don’t count, because honestly, those are among my earliest memories at all. I used to sit under the kitchen table and play while Gram, Mom and my aunts were cooking.

At Grandma’s house, I got to stay in the kitchen, too, in my high chair next to the counter, so I could “help” cook. She’d have every burner on the stove up on high, with pots boiling and bubbling, filling the air with good smells, the oven would be going, and she’d be rolling out pie crust or kneading bread dough on that counter, and I’d have a finger in everything that came into reach.

The first things I made alone, though with supervision, were some cakes in my Easy Bake oven. The first was a two layer yellow cake with chocolate icing. I am sure it was awful (how good can a cake mix that bakes by the heat of a light bulb be?), but I gave it to my Dad and he ate every crumb. That was when I was about six.

After that, I think the first things I made on my own were batches of real, not imaginary, cookies–snickerdoodles, to be precise–around the age of ten or so. Snickerdoodles are fun, because you roll the dough into balls and roll them in cinnamon sugar, then bake them. I am pretty sure I was ten, because it was in the second house we lived in and we moved there when I was nine or so.

By the time I was twelve, I did the majority of the Christmas baking. By the time I was fourteen, I did all of it.

Who had the most influence on your cooking?

I had a lot of influences growing up. Grandma and Gram were probably my biggest influences of all; I spent the most time in their kitchens. My mother was an influence on my cooking, but not a particularly good one–she never really liked cooking the way both grandmothers did, so while she was good at it, she took no joy from it. Besides, she didn’t like to clean up if I helped her, while my grandmothers enjoyed teaching me.

Gram taught me how to be frugal, and how to take my time with the task at hand. She taught me to use my hands, not just to manipulate ingredients, but to feel them–to sense them and know how they should come together. She told me that my nose, fingers, and ears could tell me just as much as my eyes and tongue did, if I only learned to use them properly. She was absolutely right; I can tell by the smell of the seasoned metal if my wok is hot enough; the feel of bread dough tells me when it is kneaded enough, and the ptch of the escaping steam in my pressure cooker tells me if I need to raise the heat on the stove.

Grandma taught me to love the ingredients as themselves, and to cook with the freshest produce I could get my hands on. She taught me to treat food animals with the utmost respect and care, and to love them every day of thier lives, so that they were happy on the earth while they lived. She said it made a difference, and I believe she was right. She taught me to laugh in the kitchen, and to cook with a cool head and with love in my heart, because to do otherwise would result bad food. Whether I forgot to turn down the beans and so burned them because I was too angry to think straight, or whether people could simply taste the bitterness of my mood in whatever I cooked didn’t matter. The why of it was of no importance to her. The result of bad food, which not only is a waste of ingredients, but an insult to those you are feeding, was what she was getting at.

And really–Grandma’s mystical theories about love in the kitchen have also proven to be correct. I still don’t know if it has to do with simply being careful and paying attention, or if there really is a subtle energy that people can pick up in food that was cooked in a less than loving manner, but I agree with Grandma. The why of it doesn’t much matter–what matters is that I cook with mindfulness, with an openness to love and respect, for the ingredients, the techniques and those who will eat my food.

For all of the inspiration I reaped from both of my grandmothers, I have to admit that they both cooked very standard southern Appalachian foods, which are highly dependant upon salt, onions, and pork fat for flavor and not a lot else. It was all good stick-to-the-ribs stuff, and there were Germanic touches in Gram’s kitchen and British and Hungarian dishes appeared on Grandma’s table, but I never got my penchant for ethnic cooking from either of them.

My love of ethnic cuisines came from Aunt Nancy and Aunt Judy.

Aunt Nancy is of Syrian and Portuguese descent, and grew up in an Italian neighborhood in Providence, Rhode Island. She married Mom’s brother George, and came to West Virginia to live–talk about culture shock! But it was in her kitchen and under her tutelage that I learned about dolmas, yogurt, eggplant, moussakha, kibbe and baklava. And she made the best spaghetti and meatballs in the world, in huge vats it seemed. But the wonderful smell of the garlic and oregano and wine with the sausage and tomatoes was intoxicating at her house.

I remember the first time I made ravioli from scratch, with a very herb-heavy marinara, I made certain she stopped by to taste it. I grew my own garlic, oregano, basil and rosemary for it all summer, and had Dad buy me red wine to put in the sauce, so it was all very fragrant.

Aunt Nancy’s first words when she came into the house were, “Oh, my God, girl, you got it right! I could smell it down the street–and it almost made me cry, ’cause it smelled like my old neighborhood in Providence!”

She tucked in and ate a good plateful, her eyes rolling in the back of her head. “You used the garlic just right–cooked it golden and didn’t burn it.” I remember her lopsided grin. “I guess studying cookbooks turns out pretty well after all, doesn’t it?”

Aunt Judy cooked French food for us; she was sworn handmaiden to Julia Child. She was known for dirtying every dish in Gram’s kitchen when she came to visit, but no one really gave a damned, because everything she made was fantastic. She gave me my first taste of chocolate mousse and taught me to make quiche Lorraine. She taught me how to go hunting down ingredients and to be utterly fearless in the kitchen.

“Have you ever made quenelle before?” I remember asking, as Aunt Judy gamely massaged the minced meat mixture. “No, honey, but I have the recipe and I saw Julia making it on the TV, so I reckon it will turn out fine.”

“Do you know what it is supposed to taste like?” I asked as I watched her shape the meat with two tablespoons into little ovoid meatballs which she then dropped into a golden broth that she had simmered from stock the day before.

“It is supposed to taste good.”

Not only did she give the confidence to take up a cookbook from a cuisine I had never tasted and charge forth into the fray without fear of failure, she got me hooked on Julia Child and MFK Fisher.

Do you have an old photo as evidence of an early exposure to the culinary world and would you like to share it?

Personally, I have no photographs of me from childhood; those all reside at my mother’s home. However, the next time I visit her, I will see what I can abscond with and bring back to scan, so we will have to take a raincheck on this question for a while.

Mageiricophobia – do you suffer from any cooking phobia, a dish that makes your palms sweat?

Pastry dough and pie crusts used to terrify me. Over the past year or so, I have worked diligently to get over my phobia and start making good pies. At this point, I have discovered that not only do I make very flavorful, flaky pie crusts (I use half lard and half butter, in case you are wondering, and absolutely no icktastic artificially hydrogenated vegetable shortening), but that I can do so by rubbing the flour and fat together by hand, with my fingertips. This blows me away, as I used to have a touch with pastry that was as deft as a bull stomping a bullfighter under his hooves. And, not only is the pastry dough behaving decently, and tasting good, the pies are really starting to look very nice, too. I’ll have to post about them sometime, because, well, I seem to have gotten over my phobia.

Which means, I need to take on something else that I thought was too hard for me. Probably, I will work on cakes. Or maybe I will take up making real smoked barbeque. Or I will tackle sushi.

But I think it is good for me to fear something in the kitchen or at least respect it enough to hold it in awe. It keeps me humble and keeps me from being insufferably cocky.

What would be your most valued or used kitchen gadgets and/or what was the biggest letdown?

Okay, I promise not to write about the Sumeet. Scout’s honor. (Yes, I was a Girl Scout. Yes, it was fun, but I hated the cooking classes we did–they were lame.)

Other than the Sumeet, my favorite kitchen item is my Kuhn Rikon pressure cooker. How can I not love something which enables me to produce a stew or chili or pot of beans that tastes like it has cooked the entire day within an hour or so? I mean, between it and the Sumeet, I can cook any ethnic comfort food dish on the spur of the moment. That is an amazing thing.

I can also make stock in the thing.

And when I get a bigger one, I will be able to can salsa and jelly and other fine things.

The biggest letdown–hm. I think it would have to be my Kitchenaid blender. It is really kind of lame, and I should probably get rid of the thing. In fact, I am not certain why I still have it except I like to make Irish Cream shakes now and again.

Name some funny or weird food combinations/dishes you really like – and probably no one else!

There is no question about this one–I love a hot bologna sandwich, meaning, that I like thick slices of good beef bologna (kosher is best), fried in a skillet (you have to slit the slices on the radius to keep them lying flat), sometimes with onions, until it is crispy. Then, you douse it in hot sauce, and then you serve it on a bun, sometimes with mayonaisse and the cooked onions or with raw sliced onions, and a fresh tomato.

This is a West Virginia thing. I admit it openly and I figure that folks can be grossed out by it all they damned well please. Zak makes faces every time I wax poetic about it, but dammit, he can’t talk, he eats canned tuna mixed with mayonnaise and applesauce which is messed up because while there is no dairy product in it, it tastes like cheese. Damned freak.

But anyway, if you start out with good bologna (and yes, such a critter does indeed exist), and a good bun and good hot sauce (Louisana Red Hot was the kind I grew up with) it is fantastic. The browned bits of the bologna get a lace of crispiness on them, and the meat is rich and greasy, and the onions (I prefer them raw) add a scintillating top note. The hot sauce binds it together, the mayo cools things down and a good not-mushy bun makes it all perfect. And if you have a big old homegrown beefsteak tomato slice–that is the be-all and end-all of redneck cuisine goodness.

It makes my toes curl just to think about it.

What are the three eatables or dishes you simply don?t want to live without?

The Holy Trinity of the East: garlic, ginger and scallions.

Any question you missed in this meme, that you would have loved to answer? Well then, feel free to add one!

Three quickies:
Your favorite ice-cream?

Mocha. A mixture of chocolate and coffee. How can anyone even ask me that without knowing?

You will probably never eat?

I will have to agree with Zarah Maria on this one and answer: brains. Prions do not give me a thrill.

Your own signature dish?

I reckon the Cakes of Aphrodite have gotten me the most fame, though I do have a couple of brownie recipes which have gotten me offers of marriage, adultery, kept womanhood and other things too risque to mention. And then, there is the Whorehouse Spaghetti, which is ersatz puttanesca–I am known by the name of that dish and not my own name by at least a handful of people. And, of course, there is my Chicken with Garlic Sauce–that is pretty famous, though not infamous, like the other dishes. And my hot and sour soup is pretty unique, too.

Oh, and lasagne. People ask me for the recipe and I have an awful time remembering which version they ate, so I can give them the recipe. But depending on what I make–roasted vegetable lasagne with gorgonzola bechamel, or lamb sausage and pesto lasagne–I can always give approximate recipes. But it is a dish that changes with the season, with what I have in the fridge and who is going to be eating it.

So, I am allowed to add a question, because, well, the meme says so. So what will I add to this fine bunch of thoughts?

How about this? Who do you think are the top five chefs/authors and educators who have changed the face of American cuisine and food habits?

Listed in no particular order, I would have to say James Beard, Julia Child, Alice Waters, Fanny Farmer and unfortunately, Ray Kroc. And yes, I know he is not a chef or an author or a food educator, however, with the success of McDonald’s, which he largely engineered, he has probably, more than anyone else in the past century, changed the way in which Americans, and now, the rest of the world, eats.

And not for the better, I might add.

Pass this meme on to three other food bloggers:

Christina at The Thorngrove Table
Dagmar at A Cat in the Kitchen
Owen at Tomatilla

Now, Owen is on vacation, so I don’t expect he will jump right on this–in fact, I figure everyone has plenty of summery things to do, but I am terribly curious about what these three splendid cooks and writers have to tell us about their backgrounds in the kitchen.

Alice Waters Goes to Washington

Alice Waters, chef owner of Chez Panisse in Berkley, doyenne of the New California Cuisine with its emphasis on fresh, local ingredients, and an outspoken proponent of sustainable agriculture, grew a vegetable garden on the National Mall as part of her presentations at the Folklife Festival which just ended on July 4th.

I knew she was presenting, but I had no idea that she had planned to grow an organic garden on the bone-dry sward in the center of Washington. Apparently, there were some issues in the production of the garden, but eventually, they panned out and she was able to serve Senators, agriculture department secretaries and other Important Government Officials (tm, patent pending) meals in the honeysuckle-strewn gazebo next to the kitchen garden that were made from produce grown right there in downtown Washington.

Apparently, she has been trying for ten years to get an organic kitchen garden started on the White House grounds, as a means to raise awareness among American citizens of sustainable agriculture while getting our presidents into the idea that local food is good food. This garden on the Mall is as close as she has managed to get, but she wasted no time while in Washington whining–she not only spoke to the public, but to every politico she could corner on her ideas of how to get kids to eat healthier as a means to fight obesity, and how to get Americans more involved in the production of local, fresh foods.

One thing that she trumpeted while in Washington was her pilot program that has transformed the school lunch program at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in Berkeley. She calls it, “The Edible Schoolyard,” and it basically involves kitchen gardens on school grounds that the children tend from seed to harvest. The produce that results from this garden is then prepared by the students in the school kitchen, and made into lunches that are a far cry from the grey “mystery meat” and cardboard pizza drek that most American kids are served in school cafeterias.

It is a fascinating program, which can teach kids botany, biology, nutrition, ecology, math, cookery and economics all in one go, and Waters seeks to spread it across the country.

Similar programs are the new trend on college campuses, which seek to lure students with organic foods. University administrators and food service companies are seeing that students are more ecologically aware and informed about the health and economic benefits of organic foods, and so are beginning the process of offering more organic, sustainable foods on campus.

Yale University has the Sustainable Food Project, also started four years ago by Waters when her daughter Emily started attending the Berkley College there. There are gardens, a composting project and a cafeteria that features food grown in the gardens supplemented by locally produced grass fed meats and free trade coffee. The food is so good there, students who are not enrolled at the Berkley college try to sneak in, and there are rumblings among the students to spread the sustainable menu to all the other cafeterias on campus.

The popularity of these two projects started by Waters means that similar projects may crop up in other parts of the country. All it would take are some dedicated individuals to study Waters’ methods, and figure out how to impliment them in their own local areas.

It is certainly something to think about.