Anniversary Dinner

I suggested to James that perhaps as a treat for our 33rd anniversary we could place an order for carry out or delivery since we had not taken advantage of either of those options during our eight weeks of pandemic stay-at-home orders.He pointed out that we would likely be disappointed in anything that we would be able to get here on the south shore of Massachusetts, and we'd be lucky if it were even served at the proper temperature. I had to concede on all points. So instead we decided to prepare some dishes that we knew we liked.

James made a trip to our favorite fishmonger Kyler's Catch and picked up a salmon filet from which I prepared salmon with blueberry sauce based on this recipe from The New York Times. I used blueberry vinegar from L.O.V. E. (our favorite oil and vinegar emporium) instead of white wine vinegar. I prepared rice with lemon and almonds as a side dish.

This paired perfectly with the Peach Bellini we've been waiting to enjoy

For dessert I reprised the sensual Grapes Rolled in Almonds and Ginger from our Intercourses Cookbook.

Both of these have been featured on this blog before. The salmon is from earlier this year and the grapes from this July 2013 post.

A new twist on an old favorite

A favorite comfort food for our family is Crusty Mexican Bean Bake which comes from the More-With-Less Cookbook. It is essentially sloppy joes baked in a casserole on a simple crust. We typically make it with ground turkey and kidney beans, but we had some unused sausage so I browned that in lieu of the turkey. As would be expected it made for a much spicier dinner. It was good, but I prefer the old way. The other change I made was in place of the 6 oz. can of tomato paste called for in the recipe I used some jarred tomato sauce from Johnny Macaroni's restaurant. We almost never buy pre-made jarred sauce. We typically buy canned tomato sauce in bulk at Costco and add our own ingredients if we want to make pasta sauce or pizza. James found the sauce on his most recent grocery run though, and since Johnny Macaroni's (a local Italian joint where James and I occasionally eat) is closed except for carry out during the pandemic he decided it was a way to give a local business some business.

The original recipe, from our well used cookbook, is shown below.

Brownie Sundaes

On Saturday we planned a picnic dinner to take to the Westport Rivers Sunset Music concert. We reprised a favorite from last summer - Ham and Havarti Sanwiches with Peach-Mustard spread and had stopped at the Huttleston Marketplace in Fairhaven beforehand in hopes of buying some good bulkie rolls from Cyd's Kitchen. Alas, they had no rolls, but the proprietors did manage to talk us into buying some sweets for dessert - brownies and "brookies" (a combo brownie/chocolate chip cookie bar - which was divine)!

We still had two brownies left on Monday, and I (Pam) realized that we had some vanilla ice cream in the freezer. All we needed was some chocolate sauce in order to make brownie sundaes for a special Labor Day treat. I knew we had some cocoa powder in the cupboard, so I checked online for a simple chocolate syrup recipe. Allrecipes came through with an easy recipe that included only ingredients I already owned.

A perfect treat for a hot end of summer day. So glad I thought of it!

The Sequel Was Better

A very Good Read

Having had a romantic holiday last week, we turned to the romance portion of our cookbook cabinet, where I found a new recipe idea. Or so I thought: we had tried the avocado and sun-dried tomato fettuccine recipe from Intercourses just after said holiday four years ago, but I had forgotten.

Pam noticed the repeat this morning, as she continues to review all of our entries for our new especialidad de la casa tag.  She is adding that tag to every recipe we post that is either completely original to us or such a major modification that we consider it our own. I am glad we had forgotten this one, because the 2014 review suggests a dish we would not have made for a special occasion (which our 33rd Valentine's Day together most certainly was).

I did the same recipe that Pam had done earlier, with just a couple of changes. First, I think I used some basil, and a bit more of the scallions. The sun-dried tomatoes I used were not packed in oil. I think I did add a bit of oil. A much more important difference is that I blended the ingredients in the bowl with a spoon, not a blender. So it was a medley, not a sauce.

Finally I did not include any cheese, but I did top this with plenty well-cooked, crumbly bacon. I think we substituted parm the first time because our vegetarian kid was dining with us. As I made this, I realized that this might succeed as a vegan dish with the use of a good bacon substitute.

Aztec Lasagna

Lovers Iztaccíhuatl and Popocatepetl in front of the mountains that bear their names. These mountains divide the Valley of Mexico (City) from the Valley of Puebla. Read the romantic legend at Inside Mexico. My first encounter with mole was on the flanks of Popo in 1989.

We recently revisited a favorite recipe for friends we had not yet cooked for. We could tell they were a bit trepidatious about champandongo -- a dish that has meat, hot peppers, and cocoa, among other ingredients. But they were brave, so we took the opportunity to prepare one of my favorite weekend (i.e., long prep time) dishes.

Champandongo  is one of the lesser-known menu items in Like Water for Chocolate, in part perhaps because its preparation is not detailed in the movie version, nor is it associated with any magic realism, as are so many of Tita's other creations throughout the story.

As we've reported on this blog, mole (pronounced MOH-lay, not like the rodent) can be prepared in quite a variety of ways. I used the champandongo recipe found and followed by Pam's students in 2011 as a starting point, modifying only the way the sauce itself is prepared. I used ordinary tomato sauce in place of the tomato soup, and of course roasted my own poblano peppers, rather than using canned green chiles. I used poblanos because both this recipe and the peppers originate in Puebla, where Pam and I spent a memorable summer in 1989, and it is where we discovered mole -- a taste I enjoyed right away, and that Pam acquired over time.

Champandongo kit: meat filling, tortillas, mole. 

In place of the cocoa powder called for in the recipe, I used a package (2 disks) of dark chocolate from Taza. I would have used one of the other varieties with chili, but the regular dark was fine. I simply powdered it with a cheese grater. I then used ALL of the mole I prepared. I am not quite sure why the recipe calls for making a lot of mole and using only a small amount. The more, the better!

Don't skimp on the Manchego cheese!

The result was quite good, especially served with a bordeaux, which I had read as a recommendation with another mole recipe, and with Negra Modelo, a brown beer that I first encountered during that Puebla summer. Our friends enjoyed their first mole encounter, though their reaction to its spiciness suggests that I could have skipped the cayenne or the jalapeno that I had slipped into the sauce.

After preparing this and bragging about its Aztec roots -- the first people who prepared this for me, after all, did not even speak Spanish, only Nahuatl -- it occurs to me that flour tortillas are quite a departure. True Aztec lasagna probably needs corn tortillas. Perhaps next time I'll try them, at least in one side of the dish.

Lagniappe

Since we were serving this at our seaside Whaling House, our friends brought us a whale cake to share. It was delicious! (And no whales were harmed.)

Champan-Hayes-Boh

For a small honors seminar this semester, I decided to hold the final exam as a discussion over food at Casa Hayes-Boh. I decided to make champandongo the main course, as I have been thinking about this mole-based (MOH-lay) dish ever since we had it here with a group of Pam's students here three years ago.

In that case, Pam had made the food of Coma Agua Para Chocolate a major theme of her Spanish course, and had secured an undergraduate research grant to facilitate having the class make most of the dishes from Laura Esquivel's book (see my posts on its revolutionary context and on Latin American films).

We have cooked several of the dishes from Esquivel's work before -- most notably chicken based on her quail-and-rose-petal recipe, but Pam's class project was far more ambitious, especially since it involved students, many of whom had little if any cooking experience. Working in pairs, students created both a fabulous meal and a permanent record of their culinary efforts. Each post on the CAPCR blog explains how a dish was prepared and how it is connected to the story. All of the dishes were shared at our house during this 8:00 a.m. class. Most were then served again -- either remade or thawed from leftovers -- at an undergraduate research colloquium open to the entire campus.

I must admit that I know the movie far better than the book, and so was unaware of champandongo prior to this adventure with the students. I have been a huge fan of mole -- a complex chocolate-chile sauce usually associated with poultry -- since Pam and I spent the summer of 1989 in Puebla, Mexico. The sauce is properly known as mole poblano, meaning "sauce of Puebla" and represents one of the several ways cacao was used for centuries before people thought of it as a candy. Its use in this lasagna-style dish was simply amazing, and it is hard to believe I have not yet attempted it myself.

In planning my own version, I of course began with the description by Sullivan and Laura. (Incidentally, Sullivan is the only student in this class who I knew previously, both as a student and a long-time family friend.) As complex as the dish was, however, I knew that authentic mole is much more complicated: Campbell's soup, for instance, was rarely available to the ancient Aztecs. I turned to the Hispanic Kitchen blog for more authentic versions, and quickly found an impressive recipe for chicken mole.

Revisiting my first recipe

It has been three years since we started this blog. We've been generally consistent about posting "one new recipe a week" (and not fretting about it when we don't). Yesterday, in honor of my first "recipe" I re-made the Classic Italian Soup in Reverse. I had to make some substitutions as I am also still working on my "what's in my refrigerator?" project. So, this time, I cut up a roll that was left over from the office holiday party in lieu of the sourdough bread, and used red wine instead of white, as we did have some red cooking wine in the 'fridge, but no white wine to be had anywhere. Once again, I used tomatoes that I had frozen over the summer, rather than canned, and this time I used some garlic salt, and added the half onion I found in the refrigerator. I also used water and a teaspoon of "Better than Bouillon" instead of chicken stock. It was a good soup. I do recall liking it better when made with white wine, though.

Flavors from summer's bounty

On Maryland day this year I made basil-corn muffins from a recipe in the cookbook Dishing Up Maryland, explaining at the time that I did not have the fresh corn kernels that the recipe called for, and I would try them again in late summer when such would be available. Since our farm box this week included four ears of corn on the cob, and we still had some fresh basil from the previous week, it seemed the time was right for a do over. The corn was exceptionally sweet and made for some delightfully moist and tasty muffins. Also in this week's farm box were some of those most ubiquitous of summer veggies - zucchini, and it so happened that on the opposite page of the cookbook from the corn muffins I noticed a recipe for zucchini fritters. This was a simple recipe that complemented the muffins well for a wonderful dinner. I started by shredding and draining 2 medium zucchini. While that drained I mixed 3/4 c. flour with 1 t. baking powder. To this I added 2 beaten eggs and 1/4 c. milk. The recipe called for fresh thyme, but I used parsley, basil, and cilantro instead, since that was what was in my herb bundle from the farm. Once the herbs were added, also threw in 1 t. of pepper flakes. Once this was ready I added the zucchini and mixed well. I heated our indispensable cast-iron griddle and poured some vegetable oil onto it. The batter was dropped onto the griddle and then cooked on each side for 4-5 minutes. The hot peppers gave these an unexpected kick.

Dippy Signature

Readers of this space know that we love to cook all kinds of things, some of which are quite fancy. It is a bit funny, then, that my signature dish is just a dip. I had not made it for quite a while, but brought some to a party recently, to rave reviews. When looking up the recipe -- James' Killer Queso Dip -- on my web site, I was reminded that this dip actually brought me temporary fame in the online recipe world, as it made me the Featured Chef on FastRecipes.com for a week or so several years ago. I had not heard of the site, but its managers found my dip and liked it!

Pam and I cannot remember where we originally found the recipe, but we know I have been making it since our Texas days in the mid 90s, if not before. The original recipe called for one cup of salsa, leading me to make the double recipe my standard dose, since salsa usually comes in a 16-ounce jar. The real key to the dip's success, though, is that I do not use ordinary salsa -- I always get something a bit more complex and smoky, usually a chipotle salsa, and usually as local as I can find.

This weekend I have made the dip twice, with a new variation. Rather than using roasted red pepper from a jar, I roasted my own. After years of being intimidated by this process, I tried it about a year ago (as I describe in detail in Busy Kitchen). It is actually easy and quite rewarding. For the dip, I used a very large, mild red pepper that was being sold as a red bell pepper but was deep red and shaped more like an oversized poblano. I charred, sweated, peeled, seeded and chopped it, stirring it gently into the dip. (I use a silicon scraper rather than a spoon, with low heat to get this dip smooth.)

The roasted pepper is not only better flavor, but it avoids the use of a glass jar, so this is a "greener" red pepper. Realizing that the dip might benefit from the residual oil in which peppers are packed, I added a tablespoon or two of my own. We are way beyond ordinary olive oils at Casa Hayes-Boh, though, so I used some oil infused with Persian lime. I think this moved the dip to a whole new level!

All this use of lime-infused oil created a potential crisis. Next week, the comestibles for Pam's birthday will be lime-themed, so I called our friends at Lebherz to ship us some more, along with some chipotle-infused oil, which might be added the next time!

Lagniappe
(December 16, 2016)

We forgot to mention beverage pairings! At my department meeting yesterday, fellow geographers enjoyed this with freshly roasted coffee from Jinotega, Nicaragua. (Incidentally, if six professional geographers bring lunch together, it is going to be varied and delicious!)

For adult-beverage pairings, we recommend Malbec or a pale ale.

Even Better Leek & Potato Soup

A month ago, Pam made a leek and potato soup that we both enjoyed, though I enjoyed it more than she did. Even the cookbook author had deemed it "meager," and Pam agreed. We both decided that we would try it again "some time" and we had some ideas to, well, soup it up a bit.

To the sauteing leeks and potatoes at the early stage of the recipe, I added about half of a small, very hot pepper, finely minced (from Colchester Neighborhood Farm, as were the potatoes and leeks). For the liquid, I used three cups of commercial vegetable stock and four cups of local, organic, low-fat milk from Crescent Ridge.

These small changes made for a truly delicious and satisfying meal on this cool evening. The mildly piquant soup was perfectly paired with "liquid bread" in the form of home-brewed IPA.