Tag: mexico

Categories
Fish and Shellfish The Book

189. Shrimp in Adobo Sauce p.322

I can’t find a recipe for this one online.

Anyone following The Project for any length of time knows that I have a bit of a smoked pepper fetish. I get a little weak in the knees when I see the words “ancho chiles” in a recipe. You start this recipe by searing and soaking anchos, then puréeing them with garlic, onion, oregano, and dash of water. The paste is then fried and thinned with white wine, white vinegar, sugar, and salt. It’s simmered until it’s quite thick, and shrimp are mixed in and cooked. You serve the dish with rice, avocados, and cilantro.

The Good: I’m a sucker for spicy seafood dishes, and this was a lovely way of doing it. It tasted like an actual Mexican dish, and very little like the pathetic excuse for Mexican food you can find in Montreal (with a very few exceptions). I’m an enormous fan of adobo sauces like this because they combine heat, smoky depth, acid, sweetness, and aromatics in one cohesive sauce. It hits all the buttons there are to hit, and leaves me very very satisfied.

The Bad: I’m getting pickier about my adobo sauces, and while this was generally good, I’ve had and made better. My main issue was that there was too much ancho flavour, without enough else to balance it. The smokiness of anchos is wonderful, but it can be overwhelming if it’s too concentrated. I also object to the use of white vinegar, there’s nothing wrong with it, but it’s a missed opportunity, lemon or lime juice would have added another dimension, and white wine vinegar could have been a nice choice too. Similarly, white sugar is just fine, but honey, molasses, or brown sugar could have been more interesting.

While it’s not in any way the recipe’s fault, I decided to get clever and messed this dish up. It annoys me that most recipes call for peeling and deveining shrimp. The 21-25 shrimp called for in this recipe are small enough that eating the vein doesn’t really bother me, getting rid of it is a nice touch, but it’s not strictly necessary like it is with larger shrimp. What really kills me is getting rid of the shells. A huge amount of the flavour in shellfish is in their shells, and throwing it away is just no fun. I usually try to find a way to simmer the shells in some liquid going into the dish to boost the shrimp flavour. In this case I decided that my dining companion and I would just peel our shrimp after cooking. That was incredibly dumb, they were extremely messy, and we ended up losing a lot of the sauce along with the shells.

The Verdict: My love for all things in adobo continues, this wasn’t my favourite example but it worked fairly well, and it’s a good basis to start experimenting from. It took a little while, but no step was too frustrating. The final plate was lovely and colourful, and the cilantro and avocado were excellent compliments to the shrimp. I’ll absolutely make dishes very much like this one again, but I don’t think I’ll be following this recipe letter for letter again.

Categories
Cookies, Bars, and Confections The Book

171. Mexican Tea Cakes p.673


The recipe

While there’s nothing particularly Mexican about these tea cakes, they’re an international favorite for good reason. I’ve always heard these cookies called Russian Tea Cakes, and they mostly seem to be made by older eastern European women at bake sales and Christmas fairs. As children, these were the cookies that we ignored on the big cookie platter, preferring the triple chocolate and jam puddle options. Conveniently the adults in the room weren’t too interested in those ultra sweet and sticky confections, and seemed to prefer the tea cakes. I didn’t get it, the nuts made them taste suspiciously healthy, and they were far too dry. Now nut based cookies are some of my favorites, and I realize what a joy dry cookies are with tea or coffee.

The cookies take a little bit of forethought, but they’re well worth it. You start by making the dough (cream together butter and confectioners sugar, add vanilla, flour, finely chopped pecans, and salt, mix until just combined), and refrigerating it for 6 hours. You then roll the dough into balls, and bake. The hot cookies go directly from the baking sheet to a bowl  of confectioners sugar. The heat of the cookies melts the sugar and ices them for you. Once the cookies have had a chance to cool they go back to the sugar bowl to get a final layer of powdered sugar.

By far the best thing about these cookies is that they keep forever. The recipe says they keep at room temperature for up to three weeks, but I kept mine for more than a month and the last one was almost as good as the first. The pecans are both the prominent flavour and texture of these cookies, and that’s a very good thing. They’re quite dry and a bit crumbly, but their sugar coating keeps them from completely drying out or becoming brittle.

Before making this recipe I’d never realized how cookies like this got so evenly glazed, the hot cookies in sugar method was a real revelation for me. I’m adding these cookies to my repertoire. They’re delicious but not at all showy, can be made well in advance, they work year round, and they  fill out a cookie tray nicely. Having cookies like these in your arsenal is a very smart move.

Categories
Beef, Veal, Pork, and Lamb The Book

129. Posole: Pork and Hominy Stew p.486


Epicurious doesn’t have a recipe for this one, but one of the posole recipes I found on there looks great, and might address some of my concerns with this dish.

I was really excited to make this. My dining companion came home raving about the posole at Le Jolifou, a great Montreal restaurant which specializes in Mexican inspired Québécois dishes. A couple of weeks later we looked through The Book, and tried its take on posole. I can safely say that this recipe didn’t live up to Le Jolifou’s exacting standards.

Posole is a Mexican stew, which usually features pork and chiles and always features hominy (confusingly also called posole). This was my first experience with hominy, which are corn kernels that have had the outer hull removed by soaking in an alkaline solution. This is a really cool example of ancient food chemistry. At some point someone decided to boil their corn with a handful of ashes from the fireplace, and found that the corn tasted better and the family was healthier. The treatment makes the corn kernels more digestible, more nutrients become available, and it’s nutritionally complete enough to be a staple food. Without this process people surviving on corn will become malnourished and develop pellagra. Europeans brought maize back from the new world, but didn’t treat it, and pellagra became widespread. I’ve idly wondered what the difference between polenta and grits was for a while, and now I know. Polenta is made from untreated corn meal, while grits are made with treated corn meal, simple, but it wasn’t obvious. If you’re looking to geek out on more food science check out the Wikipedia page on this process, called nixtamalization.

Despite my affection for hominy, this posole wasn’t great. It’s simple to make, just soak pasilla and guajillo chiles in water, then run them through the blender with oregano, salt, cumin seeds, pepper, garlic, tomato, and onion. You then simmer cubed pork shoulder in this sauce for an hour, add canned hominy, and continue to simmer for half an hour more. The stew is served with any combination of radishes, onion, cilantro, lettuce, chiles, lime wedges, and tortillas or tortilla chips.

The sauce has some very nice flavours to it, and I love pork braised with chiles, but the texture wasn’t great. I’m not really sure what happened, but my pork cubes ended up tough and dry, swimming in a thin sauce, with a huge amount of hominy. I would have preferred a thicker chunkier sauce, perhaps leaving the tomato and onion out of the blender, or mashing some of the hominy would have helped to thicken it up. I also would have preferred to shred the pork into the sauce. I found the chunks too big, and not amazingly flavorful. The recipe calls for three 15 oz cans of hominy, which should really be reduced to two. The other recipe I linked calls for 26 cloves of garlic, the version in The Book calls for only one. I’m not sure if I’d up the garlic quite so drastically, but I’d seek out a happy middle. The hominy itself was really interesting, it has a very unique chewy texture, which I liked. I’m not sure I’d really want to eat a whole lot of it at one sitting, it reminded me a bit of the tapioca balls in bubble tea.

As with most stews the posole improved with age. By day three the pork had soaked in more flavour, and softened, and the whole dish was more cohesive. It was perfectly edible, and even enjoyable, but my dining companion’s stellar dinner out had really built up my expectations for this posole, it just couldn’t live up to them.

Categories
Poultry The Book

121. Duck Breasts with Orange Ancho Chile Sauce p.396


The recipe

This recipe was a show stopper. It’s the only recipe for duck breast in the book, and that’s a real shame. Magret de canard is one of the staples of the Québécois culinary scene, a distinctive take on the seared duck breast is de rigueur for any restaurant interested in cuisine de terroir. Fusion may have been the dining buzz-word of the 90’s, but it’s certainly alive and well. It would seem that every third restaurant to open in the city has a _________ inspired menu playing on Québécois classics, most likely in tiny, tapas style portions. This Mexican influenced magret would fit in beautifully.

The duck breast is seasoned with salt and pepper, and simply seared. The skin renders enough fat that oil isn’t necessary. The sauce is made with a purée of Ancho chiles, and garlic which is added to a caramel of orange and lime juices, then finished with butter. The sauce had a lovely balance of sweet, acid, and heat, which complimented the powerful flavour of the duck. Duck does wonderfully with a slightly sweet sauce, and the orange caramel fit the bill, the rounded smoky Ancho flavour tempered the sweetness and played up the depth and body of the duck.

Lots of people think they don’t like duck, and avoid it, or have only ever encountered it in Chinese preparations. A simply seared duck breast might be a revelation for them. My dining companion’s mother told us over dinner about her childhood experiences of eating duck. Apparently her family got it’s duck from local hunters, and they risked a mouthfull of buckshot with every bite. She recalls that it was too gamy and intense to be enjoyable, so she avoided it for the next twenty years, but these days she’s a fan. The duck we get today is raised on farms much like chickens, and the flavour appears to have mellowed. People deplore the fact that pork doesn’t taste like pork anymore, but no one complains that duck has lost its muskiness. I’ve never had duck from a hunter, but I’d like to compare some time.

Looking at that beautifully pink duck breast is making my mouth water. It occurs to me though, that duck is the only poultry you’d ever consider cooking to less than well done. A medium-rare chicken breast brings on gasps of revusion, not delight. Duck really does taste best when pink though.

If you’ve never tried a magret de canard I absolutely encourage you to, and the sauce The Book has paired with this one is a wonderful compliment. I loved that the sauce showed off everything I enjoy about duck breast, without trying to show it up. Duck Breasts with Orange Ancho Chile Sauce you’ve earned your five mushroom rating.

Categories
Sauces and Salsas The Book

89. Fresh Tomato Salsa p.896


The recipe

I’m pleased to inaugurate the Sauces and Salsas section of The Book with this recipe. This tomato salsa is about as minimalist as salsa can be. It focuses on clean flavours, but left me wishing for a bit more complexity. It’s comprised of diced plum tomatoes, white onion, serrano chiles, cilantro, salt, and water. It’s perhaps more notable for what it lacks. No garlic, no oil, and no lime juice. The garlic is entirely optional, it’s only a standard salsa ingredient for me because I have an unhealthy infatuation with the stinking rose. In fact I didn’t particularly miss it here, and leaving it out does make the dish taste lighter and cleaner.

The lime juice is a crime against humanity though. I suppose the thinking is that tomatoes are fairly acidic, and can stand up on their own without a hit of citrus. I agree that white vinegar would have been out of place, but lime juice adds a mild acidity and a linchpin of flavour. I imagine cilantro, chiles, and lime juice as a perfectly balanced triangle. They’re the mirepoix of Latin cuisine. I hate celery, but if you leave it out of the mirepoix I’m going to notice, and resent you for it.

The salsa felt like exactly the sum of it’s parts, without melding into a comprehensive dish. I usually add lime juice and a bit of olive oil, i.e. a very simple vinaigrette, which I find ties the salsa together, and provides a medium for the flavours to mingle in.

The instructions for this recipe read

Finely chop tomatoes.

Transfer to a bowl, along with any juices.

Stir in remaining ingredients.

It’s got a haiku like simplicity, but the ingredient list doesn’t have the balance those poems strive for. There’s nothing really wrong with this recipe, but a few little additions would make it much more appealing.

Categories
Hors D'Oeuvres & First Courses The Book

88. Jicama and Cucumber Chili Spears p.27


The recipe

Jicama isn’t the easiest thing to find in Montreal. I went to every grocery store, fruiterie, and Latin themed shop I could think of. In the end I tracked one down at a Mexican grocery store about a block from my place. I had no idea it was there. For all the effort that went into finding it, I wasn’t overly impressed. Jicama looks cool, kind of like a gigantic radish, but I didn’t like the flavour much. It’s a bit sweet, but also very raw potato starchy. It left me with an unpleasant tingling in the back of my throat and a slightly numb tongue. I’ve never had jicama before, and I don’t know anything about it. Perhaps I ate it under-ripe? Or maybe that’s just what jicama tastes like? My dining companion has tried it, and says she preferred it cut up into little matchsticks tossed into a salad. The big spears were a bit overwhelming. I remember Harold on the first season of Top Chef was obsessed with the stuff, so I was happy to try it, even if I don’t see what he was going on about.

I find it hard to rate this recipe, because it’s principal ingredient is so unfamiliar. Luckily this dish also included cucumber spears tossed in lime juice, chili powder, cayenne, and salt. I thought this treatment worked pretty well for the cucumber, and made them a fairly addictive little snack. It did little to improve the jicama in my mind.

I appreciate the simplicity of this dish, the lime, chili powder, cayenne, salt dressing packed a big flavorful punch, and the dish can be put together i well under 10 minutes. I think I’d put the cucumber spears out at a summer garden party, but I’d drop the jicama.

Categories
Soups The Book

87. Tortilla Soup with Crisp Tortillas and Avocado Relish p.95

The recipe

This soup was a revelation for me. A few days ago I mentioned that I was falling for dried chiles this year. This dish was phase one of the seduction. In this recipe a pretty standard soup base (stock water, onion, tomato, garlic, oregano, salt and pepper) is transfigured into one of the more delicious things I’ve ever tasted with the addition of two ancho chiles, and two guajillos. The soup becomes rich and thick when corn toritllas are fried crisp, and crumbled into the soup. This dish would be delicious if you stopped here, but it gets so much better with the addition of the avocado relish. This relish is a much better guacamole than The Book’s official guacamole recipe, and it compliments the soup perfectly. Everything that is deep sultry and comforting and warm in the soup is bright, clean, shining and crisp in the relish. The soup has a satisfyingly hearty texture, which is mirrored in the relish. A few fried tortilla strips added just before serving give a nice crunchy counterpoint.

The recipe suggests that you fry your own corn tortillas, but as the tortilla place in my neighborhood does this on site I just bought a bag of their fresh made tortilla strips, and saved myself the trouble.

This recipe came together easily, and was completely delicious. I thought the final presentation was very attractive, and the dish just made me happy. This soup absolutely earned its five mushroom rating.

Categories
Hors D'Oeuvres & First Courses The Book

73. Sherried Mushroom Empanaditas p.38

The recipe is a combination of this one for full sized Sherried Mushroom Empanadas, and yesterday’s tuna empanaditas. Of course the full sized empanada makes way too much filling, so you’d need to cut it down.

I made these for the same party as the tuna empanaditas. They use the same puff pastry wrapping, and have the same baking directions. The filling however is quite different, and I thought it worked much better than the tuna. The filling is made of sautéed onion, mushroom, and red bell pepper with sherry, prosciutto, parsley, and bread crumbs. The flavour combination worked really well, I though the sweetness of the sherry might be a bit strange but it melded nicely with the other flavours, particularly the mushrooms and prosciutto.

The main advantage this filling had over the tuna was moisture. You can see in the photo that I drastically overcooked them, and there were a few that got completely dehydrated inside. The larger ones managed to remain creamy, with a crisp exterior making for a very nice contrast.

The recipe calls for Serrano ham, which is very much like prosciutto, but a bit tougher in texture, more flavorful, and a bit less fatty. I couldn’t find any for this dish, or any of the other times I’ve looked. It must be available in Montreal, because it’s on the menu at tapas bars, but I don’t know what their source is. The recipe gives prosciutto as an acceptable substitute though.

I was in Spain a few years ago, and fell in love with Serrano ham. The bocadillo de jamon was my preferred lunch, or tapas treat. I had 40 Euros worth of it taken away from my be American customs officials on my way home. The injustice still rankles me. I was only connecting through Newark, my ham and I never left the airport, but they still took it away from me. I would have had to sneak it past Canadian customs to get it home, but losing it to them was a risk I was willing to take. Now whenever I go through the post 9/11 security theatre lines at an American airport I shake my head at the futility of taking my shoes off, and damn them for taking away my precious jamon.

This recipe suffered from the same baking issues as yesterday’s tuna, but I think a bit more monitoring could solve that problem. The flavour combinations were really good, creamy mushrooms, a bit of crunch from the peppers, salty chewy prosciutto, the smooth sweet flavours of the sherry, and even a little freshness from the parsley. The overcooking was a serious problem, so I can’t give it full marks, but there are a lot of things going for this recipe.

Categories
Hors D'Oeuvres & First Courses The Book

72. Tuna Empanaditas p.37

The recipe

These bite sized party favours are built with the duct tape of the home entertaining wold: puff pastry. A filling of oil-packed tuna, pimientos, capers, and onion is added to rounds of puff pastry, which are folded into semicircles and crimped. They can be frozen at this point, and baked whenever your heart desires.

The filling was very salty, and didn’t really taste like tuna. As I mentioned yesterday I don’t have much love in my heart for pimiento-stuffed olives, and they failed to impress me again here. The capers were really the saving grace, they contributed to the salt problem, but they brought a lot of flavour along with them. With more tuna, and better olives I think this could have worked out really well though. The ideas are sound, but I get the feeling they tried to make the dish too easy. Asking us to pit a quarter cup of olives isn’t an unreasonable demand, and they certainly don’t shy away from it in other sections of The Book.

The puff pastry section of the recipe was trickier than I would have guessed. The recipe calls for a round cookie cutter in the special equipment section. I didn’t have one and tried to make do with the edge of a wine glass. This isn’t a good idea, both because my glass couldn’t cut through and it took forever to go around the edges with a pairing knife, and because using a blunt instrument on puff pastry interferes with the puff. Puff pastry is made by layering butter and pastry, and when it hits the heat the water in the butter creates steam, thus puffing the pastry. Smooshing the pastry too much can compress the pastry layers, and displace butter messing with the puffing. In any case, this recipe makes 50 hors d’oeuvres, and the cutting, folding, crimping process takes quite a while. The recipe suggests it should take one hour active time, but I’m sure it took me two. I was quite late to the dinner party I was bringing them to, which is pretty bad form when you’re bringing the appetizers.

Before you’re ready to serve the empanaditas are baked on a cookie sheet at 400 degrees. The recipe says this should take 20 to 25 minutes. Mine were overcooked and dry within 15. As I was cooking these at a party, I had no way of checking that the temperature I set the oven to was really the temperature inside the box, but that’s a pretty big discrepancy.

In the end these didn’t come out too well. A few changes to the lineup in the filling, and more attentive baking on my part might have improved them dramatically. As is, mine were dried out and heavily salted. I like the concept of an empanadita, people might feel sheepish admitting it, but everyone likes mini versions of regular sized food. In this case the execution left something to be desired though.

Categories
Hors D'Oeuvres & First Courses The Book

26. Guacamole p.9

No linked recipe this time, but this one is so simple I don’t mind retyping it.

4 ripe California avocados, halved, pitted, and peeled
1/2 cup finely chopped white onion
3-4 serrano chiles, minced including seeds
2 1/2 tablespoons fresh lime juice, or to taste
1 1/4 teaspoons kosher salt, or to taste

Combine ingredients in a bowl, mash with a fork until avocado is mashed but still somewhat chunky. Stir until blended.

This guacamole was absolutely minimalist, and not in a good way. No garlic, no cilantro, no tomatoes, no nothing. The avocado relish meant to accompany Tortilla Soup With Crisp Tortillas and Avocado Relish on page 96 is by far the superior guacamole (I’ll get to writing that up in a few months, I’m way way behind).

To be fair, the book does offer this version of the guacamole up as a base for several interesting variations: Guacamole with tomato, radish and cilantro guacamole, fall-winter fruit guacamole, and summer fruit guacamole. The radish and cilantro sounds particularly interesting. I’m adding radishes to the list of under appreciated vegetables, relegated to being picked around on crudité plates and otherwise ignored.

The central flaw with this recipe in all it’s variations is the omission of garlic. I don’t think I’ve ever had a guacamole without garlic, and I don’t think I care to ever again. I’m not sure if this this no garlic business is the traditional method and my readers in Oaxaca are exchanging sly glances about the stupid Canadian, but this is my stance and I’m sticking to it. Maybe if this was the first time I’d ever had guacamole I wouldn’t have missed the garlic, but theres no going back once you know the wonders of the avocado-lime-garlic trifecta.

Overall this was fine, but could have been so much more. The other variations may have worked out better than the base recipe, but as it was it was just dull.

N.B. I’ll do my best to push that nasty picture of the fajitas off the main page as quickly as possible. Sorry.