Thanksgiving with a touch of the Southwest

Turkey and dressing again this year for Thanksgiving, I ask?  Yes, and sweet potatoes, green beans, rolls, cranberry sauce and both pumpkin and pecan pies, my family replies.  Not much room for innovation here.

But I'm going to sneak in a Southwest appetizer - Pico de Gallo.  The literal translation is "Rooster's Beak." Maybe the name comes from the 'pecking' you get from the jalapeño peppers in this fresh salsa.

Pico de Gallo is one of the few dishes I can prepare without slavishly following a recipe. So, it's hard to share the recipe, but I'm going to give it a try.

Here are the ingredients.

fresh jalapeño peppers

roasted and peeled green chile peppers

fresh tomatoes

red onion

garlic

fresh cilantro

salt and pepper

fresh lime juice

You may notice that there are several fresh items on the list.   The first step is a trip to the grocery store. Fresh cilantro only lasts a couple of days in the refrigerator.  (I've even tried cutting the stems a bit and putting the bunch of cilantro in a glass of water in the fridge.)  But if you have to make the trip for cilantro, you might as well buy other items as fresh as possible also.

Then there is the decision about amounts. It's all about personal choice.  Do you like your salsa fiery?  We do at my house. I put on plastic gloves, deseed and devein the jalapeños, and chop them and the green chiles very fine.  If chopping the chiles is making my eyes water, I add fewer.  Another idea is to add some of the chiles to the mixture, taste the sauce, and add more if you want to. It works better that way than to try to fish out those green specks as your guests are breaking out in perspiration from the chile heat.

Finely chopped tomatoes, finely chopped red onion, finely chopped garlic, finely chopped cilantro go in next. Once again, personal taste for amounts reigns here.  The finishing touches are salt, pepper and fresh lime juice.

The dish is ready to eat immediately or chill in the fridge until guests arrive.  Pico de Gallo is very tasty, very healthy, and very easy to make.  My dilemma comes with the dipper.  Traditional tostadas are probably the best dipper, but they don't make anyone's list of healthy foods.  What I do sometimes, if I am feeling particularly righteous about my eating habits, is steam small corn tortillas in the microwave or on a comal (griddle). The calories are still there, but at least I can control the salt and oil.

Another idea is to sauté the mixture above (minus the cilantro), add a little white cheese, and make chile con queso.  This dip won't give you the food guilts like the chile con queso make with (horrors)  processed cheese spread.

Now, if I could just locate a healthy dipper.  Somehow pico de gallo on a celery stick just doesn't get it.   Any ideas?

 

Brrr. It's time to prepare the Official State Dish of Texas

It's not this cold in El Paso today,  thankfully.

Yes, the cold front blew in last night, just like the weathercasters predicted. Gone were my hopes for a southwestern Indian summer lasting forever.  With highs predicted today only in the 50's (that translates to "really cold" to a southwesterner), I found myself craving a warm bowl of chile con carne.  (It has been the official Texas state dish since 1977.)

Let's get the nitpicking over with first.  "Chile" or "chili"?  My vote is for the first, but sometimes the automatic spell checker doesn't approve of that choice.  There are also other important decisions to be made before making chile con carne.  Beans or no beans?  And just how much chile should be used in chile con carne?

Which brings up another point.  When I use the word "chile" in culinary discussions with friends who are not from the southwest, I generally mean the green or red vegetable.  We eat "chile" in some form almost every day at our house.  But when people without a chile habit say “chile”, they generally mean “chile con carne.”  So when I go into raptures about stuffed “chiles,” I get some strange looks.  I’ll use the shortened name for the dish here. Now that those important points are settled, let’s explore how to make a great bowl of chile. 

Let me confess that my former attempts to produce a bowl of chile that tastes like the restaurant variety have not succeeded.  I think I have discovered the reason.  A recipe in Texas Home Cooking by Cheryl Alters Jamison and Bill Jamison, listed as “Sam Perdergrast’s Old-Time Texas Restaurant Chili” (pp. 125-126), sheds some light on the topic.  They explain that the unflattering term “greasy spoon” to describe an eatery of dubious quality originated from the chile con carne that was served which had “enough grease to lubricate a Model T.”  What an image!

My goal as a home cook is to prepare healthy dishes that are also tasty.  I chose three Texas cookbooks from the kitchen shelf to research chile recipes. And there are many of them!  They appear to have these ingredients in common:

Ground meat

Onions and garlic

Spices like cumin (comino), oregano, salt and pepper

Something tomatoey – tomato sauce or canned tomatoes

Some kind of hot chile – from dried chile pods reconstituted in hot water and blended to chile powder to Tabasco sauce

Cornmeal or masa flour to thicken

Other suggested additions were cooked beans, red or green bell peppers, and even a bar of milk chocolate candy. I have the impression from reading a variety of recipes that there is much room for innovation and individualization of chile con carne recipes.   

So that’s what I’m going to do - experiment with making a healthy but delectable bowl of chile.  I’ll check the kitchen for supplies (it’s way too cold and windy to venture out to the grocery store) and see what I come up with.  If my chile con carne is a success, I’ll feature it in my next blog post.  If not, well, you can guess the result.

Holiday Recipes - Southwestern Style

San Marcos brand chiles are ready to go.

Do you have a cherished family holiday recipe?   Remembering my grandmother’s pound cake, my aunt’s thumbprint cookies, and my mother’s pumpkin chiffon pie gives me warm feelings. 

I decided to start my legacy early by recording favorite holiday dishes.  I’m only going to include dishes with a Southwestern flair, which of course means chiles must be featured.  This is a modified version of a recipe I found on bonappetit.com several years ago.  It’s really easy!  Here’s what you do.

 Chipotle Cranberry Sauce (makes about two cups)

Buy a 12-ounce package of fresh cranberries. They can be purchased early and frozen in the bag. 

Combine cranberries, three-fourths cup Splenda sugar blend (or one and a third cups sugar), two chipotle chiles in adobo finely chopped, and three tablespoons lime juice in a medium saucepan and stir over medium heat until sugar dissolves.  Continue cooking about five minutes, stirring occasionally.  Cranberries will begin to pop.

Add one small chopped garlic clove, one-fourth heaping teaspoon of ground cinnamon, one-fourth heaping teaspoon ground comino (cumin) and cook about five minutes longer on simmer.  Sauce will begin to thicken.  Keep chilled.  And a great feature is that the sauce can be made up to one week ahead of time.

This recipe has helped me wean my traditionalist husband off of canned jellied cranberry sauce. Not an easy task!

Stuffed Jalapeños

Buy an eight ounce can of jalapeños, wash and cut in half lengthwise, and place in ice water.  (Did you know that washing and soaking jalapeños reduces their ability to set your mouth on fire?)

Cream an eight-ounce package cream cheese, a small jar of processed cheese spread, one tablespoon grated onion, and one tablespoon half and half.  Add a dash each of Tabasco sauce and Worcestershire sauce.

Drain jalapeños and fill cavities with cheese mixture.  Can top with pimentos for holiday garnish.  Refrigerate.

My recipe for this dish is so ancient that it is written on a half sheet of a Big Chief writing table in my large handwriting from schoolgirl days and is dotted with brown splashes. Stuffed jalapeños will liven up a traditional holiday meal for sure!

If you try these recipes, let me know how they work for you.  And send me recipes for your favorite Southwestern holiday dishes.  I"ll be sure to include them on the next post.  Happy cooking!

Do we dare host another tamalada?

Can Thanksgiving holidays be only a few weeks away?  I am becoming concerned about how to entertain out of town guests.  A typical groaning board of Thanksgiving treats and marathon hours of TV football games will keep everyone engaged on Thursday.  But how about Friday?  “Do we dare try another tamalada (tamale making)?”  I wondered.  

Bittersweet memories of our last tamalada several years ago come to mind. We had decided to streamline the traditional process.  My chuck wagon cook husband Wayne always has a cooked brisket or two in the freezer, so we substituted the typical pork for beef.   I usually spend an afternoon making sauce by hand from the dried red chile pods, but this time I used a package of freeze dried chile and reconstituted it.

We had seven people in an assembly line in the kitchen, with my husband as head chef, barking out orders about how thick to spread masa (dough) on the husks, and our son Clayton as sous chef, demonstrating the best husk rolling and folding technique.  I was relegated to selecting wide, sturdy husks and draining them in the sink (truly an art form!).  Guests were allowed to do whatever job they felt comfortable doing.  Soon the little tamale packages were stacked in the pot and placed on the stove.

Now, how long before we could eat tamales?   The chile con queso that I had prepared to tide the guests over had long since disappeared, and the jar of jamaica (hibiscus flower water) was almost gone.  My various recipes and notes gave a range for cooking tamales from 30 minutes to 90 minutes.  Checking the tamales meant reaching into a steam-filled pot and unwrapping a tamal (the singular form of the word in Spanish) to see if the husk would pull away from the masa, not a job for the faint-hearted.  Finally, “ten more minutes” announced my husband to the expectant guests.  About two dozen tamales were consumed in a matter of minutes, most of them pulled directly from the pot and consumed standing by the stove.

After our guests departed, tamale husks littered the kitchen, red chile sauce spotted the kitchen counters and stained the blender, and leftover tamales cooled in every conceivable spot.  We stuffed the tamales into freezer bags, labeled them, and put them in the freezer for future feasts.  “Do you think everyone had a good time?”  Wayne asked me as we wearily climbed the stairs to bed.  

Now the big decision is whether we want to host a tamalada this year.  I'll keep you posted!  Do you have tamale making experiences to share?

                                                                                                                                                                                           

Autumn- A Bittersweet Season

I think autumn is a bittersweet season. It's the comfort of harvest abundance tinged with more serious thoughts of the season to follow.   In the US Southwest, an occasional cool breeze in late September brings relief from the scorching temperatures of summer.  But the leisurely pace of summer is beginning to fade away.  It’s time to get on with life – school, work, house projects, holiday plans.

Farmers' Market, Halifax, Nova Scotia

Southwesterners often have “see the colors change” on their bucket list, and my husband and I were no exception.  In the desert southwest, I have to search for signs of autumn- one lone tree turning yellow or red or a few pumpkins piled up for sale at supermarkets.On a recent trip to Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada, I experienced what a full blown autumn season can look and feel like.




But in Cape Breton, there was no doubt that the fall season had arrived.  There were miles upon miles of dazzling colors, light orange, golden yellow, deep red (my favorite), all on a contrasting background of brilliant green.  We drove the Cabot Trail and lost ourselves in those wonderful palettes.

Can you spot the fly fisherman?

Warm days and cooler nights greeted us in the Canadian Maritime province.  Everyone, almost without fail, commented on the (unusual) temperate weather and abundant sunshine.  “Nice weather we’re having, eh?”  seemed innocuous enough, but I caught a faint reminder that soon winter would be closing in.

On our travels around Cape Breton, I saw giant woodpiles stacked by neat cottages.  The marquee at an automotive shop reminded car owners to be sure to winterize their vehicles  (a task I could put off in El Paso, Texas, but not in Nova Scotia).

 

Wayne and I shared a porch dining area at the Dancing Goat Bakery and Café in Margaree NS with a foursome who were trying to convince each other that they really did enjoy the winter season.  I think it was just tough talk to dispel the specter of autumn abundance giving way to a chilly, snow-covered landscape.

Another group at a fish and chips restaurant in Truro, NS, was discussing the upcoming winter season.  “Are you going away for the winter?”  one elderly gentleman asked another.  Interesting, I mused.  In the desert Southwest, we dream about escaping the dog days of summer or the gale force winds of spring, but we would never leave our cold but sunshiny days of the winter season.

I loved the experience of a picture book autumn in Nova Scotia and returned home to El Paso wanting to pile up mounds of orange and white pumpkins on the front porch (I have three lone pumpkins to date), stock wood for the fireplaces, and prepare harvest dishes.

One idea I got at the Rusty Anchor Restaurant in Pleasant Bay, Nova Scotia was so simple that I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it myself.  Being a fan of meatless dishes, I ordered a grilled sandwich made with cheese and sliced apples.  Apples are crisp and abundant everywhere in fall.  And their nutritious addition to the sandwich gives me a momentary relief from the guilt of enjoying a calorie-laden grilled cheese sandwich.

I also picked up a recipe for a cranberry pie.  If I make it successfully, I’ll include it in the next blog. 

Do you have a favorite fall recipe to share?