the SIMMER blog

chiles en nogada: the sauce

So I'm putting the sauce third in this set of three steps -- chiles, filling, sauce -- although, truth be told, they could be done in any order. And you want the sauce to sit in the fridge for a bit, although I didn't follow the recipe exactly and serve chilled sauce over warm stuffed chiles. I brought the sauce to room temp before serving.

Anyway. Getting ahead of myself. The point is, I have found a kitchen task that makes all other previously tedious kitchen tasks -- peeling fava beans! supreming clementines! -- look like a walk in the proverbial park.

Peeling walnuts. No, not shelling. Peeling.

 
Yeah, yeah, there are still bits of skin left here and there, but if you realize that it took me an HOUR to even get this far -- on a mere cup of nuts -- you might see the futility of going for 100%.

Here's what my setup looked like:

chiles en nogada: the filling

Here we are with step 2 of the chiles en nogada story: the filling. If I were going super-authentic it would be a picadillo (see the recipe I posted yesterday), but I made some edits, so "filling" is plenty appropriate.

One of our dinner guests for this meal eats chicken and fish but not beef or pork, so I went with shredded chicken thighs as the meat. Braise in a couple inches of water, remove, cool, shred, chop. (And the liquid left behind is basically chicken stock, so save that for another use.)

 

Then I mixed the meat with an oddly eclectic assortment of ingredients: onion, garlic, cinnamon, cloves, tomatoes, a pear, an apple, cranberries, and -- hold onto your hats for this one -- dried kiwi.

 
(I had the kiwi on hand anyway, believe it or not, and since the original recipe called for candied cactus, I thought it was about as close as I was going to get. Hey, at least it's green.)

That's it for the filling. Stuff into the peppers, and then you're ready for the sauce.

Oh, the sauce.

We'll talk about that tomorrow.

chiles en nogada: the beginning, and the chiles

So, I'm really white. The food of my people is Anglo-American-Eastern European food: casseroles, Cornish meat pasties, potato-and-cheese pierogi. The food of my childhood is solid American midwestern fare: Salisbury steak, ground beef spaghetti sauce, shepherd's pie. But the food I love is more exotic, with different flavors from around the world, and I end up getting excited about other people's food, and it leads to things like this molé-making class at Astor, and the resultant need to make Mexican food at home, although I am clearly about as non-Mexican as they come.

So I set out to make Mexican for a dinner party. And then I decided to make chiles en nogada, which is right up there with molés as super-authentic and complicated Mexican food (plus, and yes I noticed this, it wasn't even part of the class that I took that was my excuse for why I needed to make Mexican in the first place.)

But they are SO pretty. Finished picture first, so you can see where it's all headed:

 

Red, white, and green, which are not only the colors of the Mexican flag, but also pretty Christmas-y, so I thought it was a good season to make them. Plus, you really need pomegranate seeds, and the dead of winter is a good time to find pomegranates.

Pomegranates, like beets, are full of red stuff that wants to stain the bejeezus out of you. But there's an easy trick: fill a bowl with water, cut the pomegranate in half, and then hold the fruit underwater while you pull the seeds out of it. The seeds sink to the bottom, the white inedible pithy stuff floats to the top, and you don't get any red stuff on your clothes, your hands, or your wall. You just get these beautiful little jewels, fuss-free:

 
 

So. Chiles en nogada. The chiles in this case are poblanos, the big dark green ones, which you roast, peel, split, seed, and stuff. Nogada is a creamy walnut sauce. 

Of course I started my search for a good chiles en nogada recipe in the traditional way: I asked Twitter.

 

the secret to fab food photos

I love to take photos of my food (as should be obvious by now) but I don't have an expensive camera or studio lights or anything, so generally my process goes like this:

1. get near light
2. turn off flash
3. turn on macro
4. get near food
5. click.

But I did something accidentally the other day -- I was throwing together some post-dinner party leftovers for next-day lunch, and I wanted to take a picture of something. And I'd reheated it in the microwave. And the counter was covered with dishes and bowls, so I couldn't put it on the counter to photograph, so I just snapped it inside the hotbox itself, and I realized something:

 

neutral background. Great light. Why had I never thought of this before? And if I played things just right, I could snap something mouth-watering this way. A few attempts later, and lo and behold:

 

So tomorrow I'll tell you how these bites came about, and even if not all the pictures are this pretty, I'm pretty excited about the new discovery.

best bites in portland: a PDX top 10

So, as I mentioned at the beginning of the week, my husband and I intended to spend just a few days in Portland, Oregon, over the Christmas holidays. The plan was to come home Sunday, but then our Sunday flight got cancelled. And then our Tuesday flight got cancelled.

And then we said what the heck, and spent the rest of the week getting unabashedly fat on Portland.

We finally went home that Saturday, heavier and wiser and pretty seriously acquainted with one of America's best food cities. Yum.

Top ten things we tasted:

• chicken wings at Pok Pok. I thought I had read about this restaurant in Food & Wine ages and ages ago, but it turns out "ages and ages" was 2009 (it had to have been this article), so I'm a little unclear on the timeline. Oops. What I'm not unclear on is the sweet hot sticky perfection of these wings, and I don't even generally order wings. Everything we had at Pok Pok (boar collar, catfish on vermicelli, half a chili crab) was absolutely delicious, and this was the best of the lot. 
• crispy potatoes at Gruner. I guess they have a longer name on the menu: "fried smashed Yellow Finn potatoes, special sauce." Not sure what makes the sauce special, other than its heavy helping of awesome. But this came recommended by a local, and I might have passed it up otherwise, and thank goodness that didn't happen. Because this was a thing of joy. Joy and cardiac danger.
• bacon maple bar at Voodoo Doughnut. Yes, it's the famous maple-bacon donut. Yes, it's that good. Yes, it's totally worth it, especially if you split it with a friend. Stand in line in the rain, then walk half a block down to Stumptown. Chances are you won't be the only one there with a pink Voodoo box in hand.

11 ideas for 2011 on Intrepid Media

It's the first week of the month, and you know what that means -- my latest column is up at Intrepid Media!

This time around, it's a pop culture smorgasbord, listing things I want less of (reality shows about brides, or plastic surgery, or brides getting plastic surgery) and more of (reality TV shows that are more about the contest than the contestants!) in the coming year.

Got opinions? Sure you do. Check mine out, and share yours, over at this link.

wordless wednesday lv

 
 

positivity unboxed at WU

I'm kicking the new year off at Writer Unboxed with a post on positivity -- I try to be positive in just about every aspect of my life, but specifically in the area of writing and seeking publication, I feel like negativity brings you nothing but more negativity. And at the beginning of a new year, when we're all taking a lot at where we are and where we want to be, couldn't we all be more positive?

Check out The Power of Positivity at Writer Unboxed.

happy, happy 2011

Back from hiatus -- and what a hiatus it was! Long story short, if you ever have to be unexpectedly marooned for an entire week 3000 miles from home, I highly recommend Portland, Oregon, as the place to do it.

More soon. Hope your holidays were happy!