Black bean and potato tacos. ¡Órale!

Hey there, a real post with food!
I don't know where this idea comes from.  It's probably not original but I've been wanting to do it for a while.  Part of the reasoning is that ever since I became a vegetarian, potatoes took on a totally new role for me, almost even replacing meat.  Don't ask me how, but they can be really satisfying. 
There's no standard recipe for what I did here, but hopefully I'll have something slightly more specific in the future once this is perfected.  So yeah, this isn't a recipe per se, but I'll give some tips as to how to make these (I'm hearing the voice of Donald Kaufman in Adpatation - "Not rules, Charlie, principles"). 

Step one: beans
I start out with my standard bean recipe which I will make forever and ever.  I love it.  It's the basis for refried beans, chili, you name it. 
2 cups of black beans, rinsed, picked through.
1 onion, quartered
3 garlic cloves, sliced
1 bay leave

Put all ingredients into a large pot.  Add 8 cups water and one bottle of beer.  I had some skunky beer lying around which did me just fine.  Bring to boil and then put to a low simmer for about 5 hours.

Step two: potato.  In the meantime, cook a potato.  My microwave potatoes generally end up like shriveled little lumps but it turns out the microwave actually has a potato function.  Who knew?  Anyway, you want a cooked potato.  Get there however you like.

Step three:  Refried beans.  Whenever you have beans that you are ready to work with, take a good three cups of beans and add a cup of broth.  I like better than bouillon beef, but be sparing with the flavor (a scant teaspoon can go a long way).  Mash over the stove and cook on a low heat until liquid has been absorbed.  Season with salt, pepper, oregano, and something spicy (I used powdered chipotle).  Okay, how is chipotle not in bloggers spell-check?  Come on...

Step four: Saute potato and mix everything.  When the potato is cool, cube it, and then saute it in butter seasoning with salt, pepper and oregano.  Mix it well into beans.  The mixture should be thick and stick together pretty well.  

We garnished our tacos (soft shells with corn tortillas heated on the comal), with salsa, vegan sour cream, and avocado.  Pretty awesome. 

Queue mariachi song end 'duh-duh-DUH, duh-duh'.

Vegetarian Posole

I love posole.  The thick rich spicy soup broth, the hominy (nixtamal in Spanish, or technically Nahuatl), and of course the additions.  Cilantro, shredded cabbage, radish, avocado, lime juice, baked tortilla strips, and on and on.  The beautiful thing about the stock is the introduction of ancho chiles (dried poblanos) that are reconstituted and pureed in the blender.  It makes for a complex and spicy broth.  Of course posole normally has pork or in some cases chicken and so the broths are normally a little heartier.  I honestly thought it would be impossible to make a vegetarian version but this comes so close to the real thing I can't say I missed the meat at all.  I can't say how happy I was that this worked. 

In place of chicken, I used dried shitake mushrooms.  They take a while to soften so if they only sit for a couple of hours in the soup, they'll still be a little chewy (which I was okay with because it reminded me of posole's cousin 'menudo', but for reasons I won't get into).  By the second day they were much softer and oh so good.  The broth was hearty and spicy and everything was perfectly balanced. 

This recipe is for the Souper Sunday blog hop hosted by Kahakai Kitchen.  Soup... what a great theme.  I'm relatively new to making posole so I got my help from girlichef, an excellent blogging chef for all things Mexican (and otherwise) and Bobby Flay.  See their recipes here and here.  I like girlichef's addition of tomatoes and onion to the blender with the anchos and then cooking them on the stove.  It's definitely my new method - I just added a little oregano to the mix because it's one of my favorite flavors in Mexican cooking.

For the base, start with three ancho chiles.  Put them in a small bowl (put small cuts in the chiles so they don't float) and cover them with boiling water.  After twenty minutes, remove chiles from water (saving the water) and pull the stems out.  I like to save a few seeds for the heat.  Place chiles in a blender with 1/2 cup of the reserved chile water and the following items:
1 medium sized onion, chopped
1 tomato, chopped
3 garlic cloves, smashed
2 t. fresh oregano leaves

Blend for a couple of minutes, pausing to scrape sides of the blender down with a rubber spatula.  Heat one tablespoon oil in large soup pot and add chile puree.  Cook for about 10 minutes, letting mixture thicken.  Add six cups of vegetable broth and heat through, bringing to a boil.  Add:

1 28-ounce can of hominy (don't drain, include all the liquid in the can)
2 cups (loosely packed) of dried shitake mushrooms. 

Simmer for about 20 minutes and add two tablespoons of chopped cilantro.  Continue to simmer for another 10 minutes or so.  Garnish with any (or all!) of the following.

Freshly chopped cilantro, green onions
Quartered lime wedges
Chopped or grated radishes
Shredded cabbage
Dried oregano
Avocado slices

Enjoy!  I'm going to be making this again and again!

Zucchini Crust Pizza: Real Food

My wife discovered this recipe in search of something to do with our zucchini and wow, what a find.  Who would've thought that zucchini could be grated and baked into a flatbread.  We stay pretty faithful to the crust recipe (originally a Moosewood recipe, but find another version at this great blog here), and our own gluten-free sympathies have moved us toward to finely-ground polenta.  And let me just say, with cheese mixed into the zucchini, this is amazing - and smells really good as it bakes.  I would say, based on the criteria of the challenge, this satisfies the soul (as well as the waist-line) and I think it's got a complex flavor while helping you get a couple servings of your veggies at the same time.  It's been a good year for zucchini (from the farm share - I got one zucchini and then little pests attacked my plant) and tomatoes, so this is perfect. 

You can top it anyway you like.  We used a homemade tomato sauce made from cherry tomatoes, tomato paste, fresh garlic, basil, oregano and thyme.  We had so many fresh cherry tomatoes that we ended up using it again for eggplant parmesan a couple days later. 

Finally, we topped it with some grated mozarella and paremsan and there you have it.  Here's the recipe:

2 cups grated zucchini
2 eggs
1/4 cup finely ground corn meal (plus some more for the pan)
1/2 cup grated mozarella
1/2 cup grated parmesan
1-2 tablespoons of Italian seasoning
1 tablespoon olive oil

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.  Butter and flour a cookie sheet.  Mix together all the ingredients and spread out into pan.  Bake until golden brown, about 40 minutes.  Brush with olive oil at about 20 minutes.  Remove from the oven and let cool for about ten minutes.  Work on loosening the crust from the pan with a large spatula.  Top as desired and place back into the oven until cheese has browned. 

Enjoy!

Tostadas and a dissertation on cultural relativity

Okay, not a dissertation in the sense of the doctoral dissertation I'm not writing but one none the less, just shorter.  But first tostadas.  Tostadas are one of my wife's favorite foods.  I grew up eating them pretty frequently and they never excited me that much.  I don't make them too differently these days, but Rosie's excitement must've been contagious because they are now one of my favorite meals.  For one, they are a healthy dinner.  Baked corn tortillas, homemade refried beans and all the lettuce, tomato, avocado (and homemade salsa) you can pile on.  And they're incredibly satisfying.  What's not to like?  They're also very leftover friendly.  If you wanted to use up some leftover chicken, just chop it up and throw it on.  Also, if you want the extra protein and want to make them a little heavier add a fried egg.  Awesome...

So what is a tostada?  Tostada means 'toasted' in Spanish but here it's a noun, not an adjective (since it's feminine, it's probably referring back to tortilla - 'the toasted tortilla/the thing that is toasted').  I've just finished teaching a 2 month long course on Spanish grammar for non-Spanish speakers (grad students who need to fulfill a language requirement who learn how to translate academic articles) and as a result my mind is stuck in the intricacies of the Spanish language.  So back to that big what is a tostada question, and my whole thing.  Cultural relativity is the kind of thing I think about when I'm writing about European colonization of the "New" World.  So when I frequently hear that a tostada is an "open-faced sandwich", I have to disagree.  An open-faced sandwich is an open-faced sandwich, a tostada is a tostada.  Or, instead of submitting a culturally distinct cuisine to our own culinary standards, we could say that a tostada is like an open-faced sandwich.  An obsession with political correctness?  Maybe.  But at the same time, why not let terms have their own referents?  By the way, did you know that the pineapple, indigenous to the Americas, so astounded 16th century Spanish historian and 'ethnographer' Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo that he found himself unable to describe it?  So astounding and original was its flavor that Oviedo could find no European referents, no equivalents and literally no words to describe it.  Face to face with something so foreign (okay, so the Indians were much more foreign to him and he was a pretty ignorant dude), Oviedo named the fruit based on its appearance - piña, because it looked like a pine cone.  Imagine, he could have named it 'artichoke fruit' because he also thought it looked like an artichoke.  Wow, okay.  Tostadas are tostadas, enough.  Maybe Gertrude Stein would say a tostada is a tostada is a tostada.  Hah hah...
Let's get on with the recipe!

Tostada Shells:
We bake our corn tortillas to cut back on the oil from frying while keeping the nice crispy texture.  Set the oven on 400 degrees, and lightly brush tortillas with some vegetable oil.  Place tortillas on a flat baking sheet.  To avoid tortillas curling, I put an upside down cooling rack over the tortillas while they bake.  It keeps them nice and flat.  Bake for 15 minutes, remove from oven, turn tortillas over and bake for another 8-10 minutes until brown and crisp.

When crisp, top with any of the following ingredients (pay attention to the order!)
Refried Beans
Salsa
Sour cream
Sliced avocado
Grated cheese of your choice
Chopped lettuce

Rosie has the system all figured out.  Forget the picture you see in the post, salsa and sour cream on top only cause messy tostadas and fingers.  Put your runny stuff down first and then the loose ingredients.  Rosie's good at figuring these things out, although she has to remind me about her system every time we have them.

Buen provecho!

Banana Oatmeal Pancakes

A brief rest from Mexican food today.  One of my favorite blogs is Ameet Maturu's Rice of Life.  He comes up with really creative, healthy and mostly gluten-free recipes.  While he doesn't post too often, it's always quality when he does. 

This recipe comes from Ameet's Oatmeal Kefir Pancake recipe.  Kefir is like yogurt although thinner and with a slightly sour flavor.  But, it's got tons more probiotics than yogurt.  Forget Activia, this is the stuff (and it doesn't have the artificial sweeteners).   Normally we make smoothies with it, adding bananas, strawberries or any other fruit.  Most recently, we've been making whole milk kefir smoothies with peaches and bananas.  They're great and keep you full for a while. I found the recipe last Spring when I was searching for gluten-free pancakes that might use kefir.  Ameet makes the very good observation that kefir has a buttermilk-like quality to it which makes it great for pancakes.  I was sold on his recipe and I've made it so many times since that I realized it has to show up here.  When Rosie and I first started thinking about cutting back on wheat, gluten etc, I thought I wouldn't be able to stop eating pancakes.  There's something really wonderful about pancakes for breakfast, and yet I'm not all that thrilled about loading up on flour for breakfast.  So these pancakes, which are predominately oats (and in this case almond meal), are full of protein and fiber and a great way to start the day. 

Don't be turned off by the kefir in this recipe.  If you don't make it, or want to buy it, yogurt should work pretty well.  Because I make so many smoothies with it, I decided to try using kefir smoothie in place of the kefir.  I love banana pancakes so banana-kefir smoothie was the logical choice.  I was right, these were great.  Topped with some toasted walnuts or blueberries, this is an awesome breakfast. 

Ingredients
1 cup of whole milk kefir/yogurt
1 banana
3/4 cup rolled oats
1 egg
1 T. vegetable oil
1 T. agave nectar or other sweetener (honey, maple syrup)
1 t. vanilla extract

1/4 cup almond meal (I use Trader Joe's brand ground almond meal)
1 t. baking soda
1 t. salt
1/8 t. nutmeg
1/8 t. cinnamon
chopped toasted walnuts for garnish

Blend kefir and banana until smooth.  Since Ameet's recipe calls for a cup of kefir (and you end up with a little more after the addition of fruit), measure out just a cup (you can always drink the rest).  Put the oats in a bowl with kefir and let sit for 20 minutes.  Beat egg, oil, agave and vanilla in a small bowl and add to oats. 

Combine almond meal, baking soda, salt and spices in a small bowl with a fork.  Add to wet ingredients and mix well. 

Spoon onto the griddle.  Cook over medium-low heat until bubbles begin to open.  (Note: these pancakes are a little harder to turn than wheat pancakes so keep your eye on them.  I'm used to the difficulty of pancakes with a gas stove).  Top with chopped walnuts and or blueberries and real maple syrup.

Enjoy!

Mexican Rice

I love Mexican rice.  It is the perfect all-purpose side dish.   The flavors in this work together really nicely and make for a well-textured, flavorful rice.  An added benefit is that it freezes really well, making a nice, re-heatable portion of rice when you need it.

Ingredients:
2 cups long-grain white rice
1 8 oz. can tomato sauce
1 small onion, chopped finely
4 cups low sodium chicken broth
3 T. vegetable oil

Saute rice and onions in vegetable oil over medium heat until rice begins to brown.  Add tomato sauce and stir to evenly coat rice (be careful adding tomato sauce to hot pan, try to avoid putting sauce onto dry pan which will end up in a lot of steam, and cover the rice first).

Add broth to rice and bring to boil.  Turn the heat down to low and cook for 20-25 minutes or until liquid is absorbed.

Enjoy!   

Tamale Pie

This is a great recipe that comes from a friend of mine who brought it to a pot luck at our place a month or so ago.  The flavors went really well together and I had to try it.  I made it for Rosie's Macedonian class, which came to our place last Friday for dinner.  I served it with Mexican rice, which was a pretty good compliment. 

My change to the recipe was to make it vegetarian.  It's excellent with shredded, seasoned chicken, but a nice alternate is braised artichoke hearts, tossed with a little red chile sauce. It was a great meal (one we're still enjoying!).  Otherwise, I stayed pretty faithful to the recipe.

Tamale Pie
Ingredients:
2 cups dry polenta
3 cups cheese (I used monterey jack) 
1 cup canned corn, drained
1 can black beans, drained
1 can green chiles, drained
2 cans artichoke hearts, drained
5 T. butter 
1/4 cup red chile sauce for artichokes

Directions:

Over medium heat, saute artichokes in 2 T. of butter until brown.  You can break them up a little as they cook.  Once cooked well through, toss in about 1/4 of sauce.
Bring 6 cups water to a boil.  Add polenta, decrease heat, and stir frequently for about 15 minutes. 
Remove polenta from heat.  Add the butter, beans, corn, chiles and 1 cup of the cheese.  Stir until well-mixed.
Scrape half of the mixture into a 9x13 baking dish and smooth out.  Add artichokes; spread evenly.  Scrape the remaining mixture over the top of artichokes and smooth out.  Refrigerate for at least 4 hours until firm.
After chilling, add the remaining cheese to the top and bake at 450 until the cheese is bubbly, about 15 minutes. 

Enjoy!

Chilaquiles

I think my wife discovered chilaquiles on our honeymoon in Puebla, MX.  We were at a hotel that had been a convent back in the colonial period (probably for some really rich nuns because the place was very impressive).  They had a great breakfast buffet and we had our choice of different types of the dish almost every morning.  While I had never thought much about them before, my wife was so excited, I think she ate them for every breakfast.  So of course they show up every once in a while around our house!

Chilaquiles (chee-lah-key-les) are small, corn chip sized pieces of corn tortillas that are lightly fried and served with a chile sauce and cheese.  In a sense, it's like a tasty casserole that can be eaten either for breakfast or as a regular meal.  The sauces can vary from red to green chile or mole sauce.    

Instead of frying the corn tortilla pieces, I prefer to bake them, brushed with a little vegetable oil.  They crisp nicely and don't soak up all the oil that the traditional method does.

For corn chips:
12 corn tortillas.
1 T. vegetable oil

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.  Brush both sides of the tortillas with oil and cut into eighths to make chips.  Spread out on a baking pan and bake for 12 to 15 minutes (stirring/turning the chips at about 7 minutes).

For chilaquiles:
3 cups red chile sauce
1 cup grated cheese
cilantro and green onion for garnish

Place corn chips into a greased casserole dish and toss with half of the cheese.  Add sauce and stir slightly to coat the chips evenly.  Toss the rest of the cheese on top and bake (350 degrees) for 15 minutes or until cheese has begun to brown.

Buen provecho!

'Tis the season: Cooked Salsa #1

One of the first good and mildly original recipes I learned was my dad's salsa recipe.  I have great memories of weekends back home when my dad would make salsa.  It wasn't something he always did, I seem to remember that at one point, he just started and the salsa was always great.  I often helped with the chopping and lucky me, I learned how to make a great salsa.
I like all kinds of salsas, whether they are raw, cooked, fruit-based or tomatillo.  Of course the fresher the ingredients, the better.  But my all time favorite salsa is a cooked salsa.  Whether for nostalgic reasons or for the fact that cooked salsas are, in fact, complex 'sauces', they are my favorite.  Although I've tinkered with my dad's recipe, adding different ingredients and modifying the cooking technique, I rarely stray from my favorite ingredients: tomatoes, green chiles (anaheim most often), green onions, and cilantro.  Even without jalapeños, you can make a great salsa with just those ingredients. 

So, I've had a few years to play around with my dad's recipe and good incentive.  Here in Bloomington, our Farmers' Market has an annual salsa contest.  The categories are cooked, raw, and more recently 'specialty' (which often means a lot of fruit salsas).  I've entered in the past and depending on the year, the competition can be stiff.  Two years ago, I placed first with this recipe.  I think that this one came out so well particularly because of the heirloom tomatoes and the mild smoky flavor given by putting a couple of soaked mesquite wood chips on the grill while I roasted the tomatoes.  I named the salsa after my favorite chopper and taster.


Ramblin' Rosie's Smoky Roasted Salsa 

15  (to 18) assorted tomatoes (Roma, heirloom) 
18  cherry tomatoes 
1  red bell pepper 
3  Anaheim chilies 
2  jalapeños 
1/2  red onion 
1 1/2 can(s) tomato sauce 
3  green onions, chopped 
1/4 cup(s) chopped cilantro
Juice of 1 lime
Salt, to taste
Oregano, to taste

---

Directions

1. Halve tomatoes and skewer cherry tomatoes.
2. Quarter and seed bell pepper.
3. Brush tomatoes, pepper, chilies, and red onion with vegetable oil.
4. Wrap onion in foil.
5. Place vegetables on grill with 2 mesquite wood chips that have soaked in water for an hour.
6. Cook until skins easily fall off.
7. Chop all cooked ingredients and place in bowl (alternatively, you can put all of the cooked ingredients into a saucepan and cook on a low temperature to reduce the mix and increase the flavor of the salsa).
8. Let cool and add tomato sauce. Stir to combine.
9. Add green onion, cilantro, and lime juice, and season to taste 

Enchilada Sauce

A nice and spicy red sauce is a great thing. There are a variety of recipes out there, most of which involve dried chiles and a blender. I like those recipes, but I'm often too lazy to toast chiles and I always hate washing the blender. So in searching for an easy enchilada sauce that could replace canned sauces (which always have too much salt and often MSG- which can trigger migraines for those who suffer), I found Emeril's Easy Enchilada Sauce Recipe.

It's a nice recipe that's hard to mess up and very fun to adapt. If you make it, don't make the same mistake I did. I don't use 'chili powder' so I instead used 'red chile (in a powder form).' The former is a blend of spices while the latter, well, is pure chile. My wife and I love spice so we ate it (with a lot of sour cream), but I wouldn't advise it.

There are a lot of benefits to using dried chile. The major one for me is that you have a lot of control over each element and it's easy to blend flavors. We are lucky enough to be a short walk from a great local grocery store that specializes in mostly Asian foods. Their wall of spices is pretty great. So if you're lucky enough to have access to more than just cayenne or 'chili powder', I would encourage some experimenting.

One final note has to do with adding wine to the sauce. I frequently add dry white wine to my enchilada and tomato sauces. It adds a nice flavor and helps you cut down significantly on the amount of salt that's needed. This was a great discovery and I do it all the time now.

Ingredients:
2 1/2 T. guajillo chile powder
1 1/2 T. ancho chile powder
1 t. cayenne chile powder
(You can substitute other chile powders but keep in mind that different chile powders have different heat levels so it's necessary to modify to your tastes).
1/2 T. cumin
1/2 T. black pepper
2 t. oregano (crushed finely)
1 t. coriander
1 t. garlic powder
1 t. onion powder
1/4 t. cinnamon

2 T. cornstarch
1/4 c. vegetable oil
1 small can tomato paste

4 c. chicken broth
1/2 cup dry white wine
Salt to taste

Whisk dry spices together in a small bowl. Heat oil in a large sauce pan or tall skillet. Add cornstarch and stir for about a minute. Add dry chile mix and cook for 3o sec - 1 minute (watch your nose!). The longer you let the chile powder cook, the more aromatic the sauce becomes, just be careful not to burn.

Add tomato paste and broth and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat and cook for 15-20 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the sauce has thickened.
With about five minutes left, add white wine and stir well. Add salt as desired. If you start with a chicken broth made from bouillon, which is often pretty salty, you may not need any extra salt. If you're using a home-made chicken stock, extra salt will be necessary.

Mixed Green Enchiladas

I didn't eat a whole lot of enchiladas growing up, but my Nana would make them and they were always a treat. Most often she made them from shredded roasted or boiled chicken, a nice thin and spicy red sauce, and a little cheese. They were always served with the best rice and beans imaginable.
This summer my wife and I are members of a CSA (community sponsored agriculture) program which we pick up at our local Farmer's Market here in Bloomington, IN. Between the greens we get in our share each week and that sold by local farmers at the market, we are eating greens pretty frequently. Greens like kale, collards, chard, etc are relatively new to me and now I can't imagine living without them. My wife is a kale fanatic so we have it pretty frequently. But we've discovered that beet and radish greens make a great filling for enchiladas. So, having picked up a nice bunch of beets, we decided to add the greens to our swiss chard and make enchiladas. It was a great bunch of greens.
Side note: In an effort to cut down on the oil, I heat my corn tortillas over a comal, but you can use any household frying pan. Most people lightly brown the tortillas in vegetable oil before dipping them in the sauce and rolling. That method works but it's also a bit messy. I've found that heating them on the stove in a dry pan sufficiently hardens the tortillas while cutting back on the oil.

Recipe: (serves 2-3)
3 cups enchilada sauce
6 corn tortillas
1 bunch beet greens
1 small bunch swiss chard
1/3 cup+ your favorite cheese (we used monterey jack but I tend to prefer other mexican cheeses


Rinse the greens and steam them for 3 minutes (it's nice for them to be a little harder than what you'd normally eat since they're baking anyway). When cool, chop finely.
Ladle some of the enchilada sauce into a casserole dish - enough to cover the bottom. Heat tortillas on both sides over the stove until lightly brown but still pliable. Dip tortillas into pot/bowl of enchilada sauce and place into casserole dish. How you fill them is up to you. Sometimes we fill them completely with greens and leave the cheese for the top, while other times we do a mix. A mix of greens and cheese helps fill out the enchiladas a bit better. Add a small handful of greens to the tortilla, top with cheese if desired and roll the tortilla as tight as possible. Our dish fits 6 perfectly, but if I'm doubling the recipe, I'll use a glass 9x13 dish. Ladle remaining sauce over enchiladas and top with cheese. Bake at 375 degrees for 20 minutes.
Enjoy!