The Good Read Tortilla

James is adding some old favorites to his Good Reads profile; this is the first cookbook to be included.


The Well-Filled Tortilla Cookbook by Victoria Wise
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

We purchased this book more than 20 years ago, when we lived in Tucson -- where these things are decided. We do not traffic in "wraps" -- just tortillas. As hard as decent tortillas are to find in New England, this book allows us to put them to good use when we do.

Many of the recipes in this book have become comfort food in our home, but we still open it to a new page fairly often. Anyone who loves to cook will find plenty to enjoy in this book. On our recipe blog, we probably cite this book more than any other -- http://nuevareceta.blogspot.com/searc...

Enjoy!

View all my reviews

Sizzlin' Sesame

Among the most important things Pam and I still have from our four years in Arizona (1990-1994) are an ability to wrap tortillas and a copy of The Well-Filled Tortilla by Victoria Wise and Susanna Hoffman. Frequent readers of this blog will know that we continue to find new treasures in its pages; the latest is a simple recipe we finally got to just last night.

Spicy Sesame Chicken Fajitas begins with flattening chicken breasts with a mallet (or other implement) between layers of waxed paper or plastic wrap, until it is one-half inch thick. This is what makes  allows for rapid, even cooking, and is what makes this a fajita dish. Strictly speaking, fajita is a particular, thin cut of beef, but it has evolved to refer to other meats prepared in a similar way.

I then sprinkled both sides with sesame seeds, cayenne pepper, and salt. Actually, I only put salt on one side of each, as we all have enough salt in our lives. And the little shaker lid was missing from our cayenne, so it was more of a rub than a sprinkle. Fortunately, a love of heat is something else we retain from Arizona days!

I heated a bit of oil in our indispensable cast-iron skillet and added the chicken once the oil was hot and almost smoking. This allowed them to cook pretty quickly, though I noticed one area that I had not hammered quite thin enough was still a bit pink. So rather than waiting to transfer them to a cutting board, I cut them into strips right in the pan so they finished up quickly. (Do not try this with ordinary cookware!)

I heated some tortillas (we wrap in wax paper in the microwave for 30 seconds) and then we assembled the chicken strips with some avocado slices, plain Greek yogurt (the recipe calls for sour cream, but this is just as good), and Newman's Own mango salsa. This Well-Filled Tortilla includes many excellent salsa recipes, but we knew that this shortcut would be good, and was reasonably close to the mango-jalapeño salsa recommended for this dish. The book also suggests lettuce for this and similar dishes, and as we often do, we skipped that part.

This is a simple dish with many sweet and hot notes, and the fats in the yogurt and avocado provide cooling to offset the cayenne. A variety of wines would pair well with this; we chose the mildly sweet Riesling (not cloyingly sweet like most of this variety) from our friends Westport Rivers, and it seemed to love the mango salsa in particular!

Pam's one-word review came at the beginning of the meal: ¡yummmmmm! And our common question about this page in the book - ¿Where have you been all our lives? (Or at least the 20 years we've had this book on our shelves.)

Quesadillas de Rajas

I'm leaving the photo for this dinner to the professionals, in this case Fred Thompson, who took most of the photos in this lushly illustrated cookbook.
Our quesadillas tasted great, but did not look quite like this.

I was about to start this post with a few street-food memories, but discovered that I have already told most of those tales when we first purchased Latin American Street Food, in a post I titled Calle to Mesa.

Wanting a quick dinner and knowing that we had plenty of tortillas on hand, I picked two books from the shelf -- the old standby Well-filled Tortilla and this newer volume. We have already mined the Well-filled volume for most of its easy dishes, so I opened Street Food first. Its index listings for "tortilla" pointed mostly to detailed articles on the tortilla itself; it was the "quesadilla" listing that took me to Poblano and Cheese Quesadillas, a title that seems a bit redundant, but that had my attention because I love Pueblo and its namesake chile.

This was simple to prepare. I did some kitchen math to modify the ingredient list, which is indicated for serving 8:

4 roasted poblano peppers, peeled, seeded, deveined, and sliced into strips
8 (8-inch) flour tortillas
12 ounces Muenster cheese, thinly sliced (ours was thick; still worked great)
8 ounces soft goat cheese, crumbled
1/4 cup thinly sliced green onions
vegetable oil
Mexican crema (optional)

Gutierrez begins with a nice description of quesadillas in general and the role of poblanos in particular. She writes that the poblano is "not too spice, although some can be hotter than others." One of the most memorable things I read in preparing for our 1989 visit to Puebla is that the poblano can vary tremendously from mild to hot. When visiting a local student's home for dinner, his mother reminded us of this, and I assured her I would be fine, as I really liked hot food. Of course, I drew the extremely hot one, and could only eat the filling! Modern agriculture has rendered the poblano much more uniform and less interesting.

From a previous post: I've done this exact thing before,
and I have essentially stopped buying roasted peppers.

Alas, I knew that our local grocery was only about 25-percent likely to have poblanos on any given day, so I compromised by buying a red bell pepper and a jalepeño, promising myself I'll go to another store before I retry this dish. I brought them home and roasted both directly on the front burner of our stove, turning frequently with our indispensable kitchen tongs. Once thoroughly charred, I placed them in a tightly-covered bowl; a plastic bag also works. After ten minutes, the peppers were ready to be peeled (most of the charry outer bits removed), cored,  and sliced.

While the peppers were sweating (in the covered bowl), I started assembling the quesadillas -- on one half of each large tortilla (we had the 12-inch kind, so only needed one each), I placed several slices of Muenster, then liberally covered them with peppers, and topped with goat cheese and scallions. I then folded them, brushed on olive oil, and placed on the cast-iron griddle. I had the heat a bit too high -- medium heat would have allowed for more even browning, rather than charring!

Still, our results were quite good, and we topped with sour cream instead of Mexican crema for two reasons: we had the sour cream on hand (from our regional dairy cooperative) and I knew our local grocery would not have it.

It was only on reading the recipe page more carefully that I learned Gutierrez makes several salsa recommendations, including a tomatillo salsa that I could have made with ingredients on hand. Something to remember the next time I make these scrumptious quesadillas!

Lagniappe

In 2016, taco trucks became a political buzzword, as a presidential candidate invoked them in a tirade against immigration. His "nightmare" vision of a taco truck on every corner seemed like a dream to me!

Enjoying fish tacos at a family geography night program.

Tostadas Mayoníficas

This recipe puts the mayo in Cinco de Mayo.

We are still catching up from the culinary bounty of two weeks ago, when three feasts in a row preceded a flurry of academic work. We did blog about the delicious tartlets that we made for my attainment day on Saturday the 3rd.

We did not blog separately about my birthday feast on Sunday the 4th, -- which was a re-enactment of the first meal I prepared for Pam -- because the recipe is already on my web site. I prepared the main course as described, noticing a few problems with the ingredients lists in the process; I'll update those soon. This remains a major endeavor, and one worth undertaking at least once a year. I will add that our ability to pair wines has greatly improved over the past thirty years, with Westport Rivers far outshining Paul Masson. Aside from cooking, I spent my birthday reflecting on the day itself, and ending the day by indulging in a movie starring the most famous person to share my birthday.

All of this was prelude to a very nice dinner with friends on Monday the 5th, Mexican Independence Day.

JUST KIDDING! As Latin Americanists who have spent a lot of time in or near Mexico, we know that Mexico's Independence Day is on September 16 and celebrates Miguel Hidalgo's famous Grito de Dolores in 1810. May the 5th, in fact, marks neither Mexican independence nor any other date significant to the entire country. Rather, it is a local holiday in Puebla, akin to Bunker Hill Day in Boston. The holiday celebrates the defeat of French invaders in Puebla on May 5, 1862, and because Pam and I spent the summer of 1989 in that city, we have taken an interest in the holiday, and I have included some information about the battle and about Puebla more generally on my geography blog for kids.

It was shortly after our summer in Puebla that marketing geniuses at a San Antonio beer importer decided to start promoting the holiday throughout the United States. Clearly they were on to something, as our country suspends its 364-day-a-year antipathy to celebrate Mexico, or at least the excessive consumption of Mexican beverages. Thus has May 5 has become, for us, a date to celebrate Mexico, but as far as possible from Mexican restaurants!

To make this happen, we invited over a couple of friends and turned to our old standby The Well-Filled Tortilla, in which Pam found a tostada recipe entitled "crab, watermelon, and breaded chili strips." This is another of those recipe titles that includes have the ingredients, from bottom to top, this recipe is simple:

• tostada shell (this is like a giant, round tortilla chip)
• lettuce
• watermelon cubes
• breaded chili strips
• lump crab meat
• tomatillo mayonaise
• abundant cilantro

Since I never liked watermelon much, we substituted a chilled honeydew melon, which was a perfect compliment to the crunchy, savory ingredients. A single large melon also left plenty to be used in fruit salads and smoothies for the rest of the week.

The recipe -- like several in this book -- is a sort of Russian nesting doll, in that some of the "ingredients" are actually other recipes. The first of these is the chili strips. I wondered how slices of chili would hold batter, and it turns out that the answer is "not well" so that in this instance "breaded" was more like "fried with corn meal." This was not a bad thing, though, and this layer added crunch and a lot of flavor.

The recipe calls for lump crab meat to be picked from whole crabs. This is not really possible this far from Maryland, but I hoped to find some lump meat in local fish markets. What I found was simply imported, canned crab, but since we were fairly well committed to this recipe, I bought some. And since I had no idea how much crab we would actually use, I bought two, one-pound cans, one of which turned out to be plenty for for adults to enjoy this meal.

The tomatillo mayo is an even better example of a nested recipe, as it calls for combining mayonnaise with salsa verde and a few other ingredients, and of course salsa verde is an entirely separate recipe. It was well worth the effort, though, to make a cool, tangy mayo that allowed for the weak pun at the top of this article! More importantly, it was a fabulous topping for this recipe and held up well in the fridge as a more flavorful substitute for mayo all week.

4Matic Crab

This dinner far exceeded the 20 to 40 minutes indicated for preparation time, and was messy both on the plate and in the kitchen as a whole. It was delicious and highly satisfying, however, and paired well with both Negra Modelo (one of those beers at the center of reinventing the holiday) and margaritas.

We are likely to try it again some day, but for the remaining can of crab in our fridge, we are mostly likely going to "Crispy Crab and Breaded Chili Strips" recipe -- another of the nesting-doll variety. It calls for cooking the crab with some wine and garlic, and placing it in a soft tortilla with the same chili strips as those used above.

Shrimp Taco

As Pam mentioned in recent posts, this has been a week of returning to the original mission of this blog: delving into our ample collection of cookbooks! As readers will notice, we sometimes simply search a few popular recipe sites (I'm loving Hispanic Kitchen, and All Recipes never fails to match available ingredients), rather than using the books. Not that there is anything wrong with it!

Still, going beyond one or two well-worn pages in our existing books is part of the project, and we've been rewarded with a couple of good meals recently, and tonight we continued that trend, dipping into one of the first cook books we purchased, The Well-Filled Tortilla.  As a search of the word tortilla on this blog reveals, we have hardly neglected this family friend, but we did find something new in its pages this week. It was about a year ago -- in my Landlubber Arrives post -- that I decided not to be intimidated by seafood.

Tonight's dish (well, last night at this point) was so easy -- despite having to make a few judgment calls -- that I really could have tried it years ago. The title on page 195 is practically an ingredient list for a dish that I prepared in less time than it has taken me to write about it -- Shrimp with Lemon-Chili Cream Sauce. I will describe it as made, which is with smaller portions and a couple of slight adjustments to the recipe. I did prepare all of the chopping of things ahead of time, because this is cooked so fast that the sauce and the filling need to be ready at about the same time.

For the sauce: Into a saucepan (aptly named), I put 1 cup of light cream (instead of heavy), a half of a finely minced Hungarian hot pepper (in place of a yellow wax chili pepper), the juice of half a lemon, a dash of salt, and a tablespoon or so of chili powder. I then had this handy to heat up and whisk with one hand as I cooked the shrimps with the other.

Preparing the tortillas: I rolled two large, store-bought tortillas in a sheet of  waxed paper and microwaved them for 30 seconds. This is our default method for softening tortillas, and it works really well. I also sliced half of a yellow bell pepper into thin strips, and then cut the strips in half. I skipped the shredded lettuce.

The shrimp: Here was the judgment call. First of all, we love shrimp but know a bit too much about the damage done in harvesting them, so I regret not finding a better source than the large bag of frozen shrimp in the freezer. We had about a pound of already cooked shrimp, and the recipe called for raw shrimp. So I was really just heating them. I thawed them first, of course, removed the tails, and drained them. Then I heated Canola oil in our indispensable cast-iron skillet, as I also started heating the sauce (above). I tossed the shrimp in with some salt, and stirred until they were hot. If I were starting from raw shrimp, I would have cooked them until they were opaque, but they started out that way. In either case, it takes no more than 3-5 minutes to cook shrimp.

I removed the shrimp from the heat and continued whisking the sauce. We noticed that it was pretty thin, so added a sprinkle of corn starch, which thickened it right up. We then divided the shrimp and sliced peppers between the two tortillas, spooned over the sauce, and folded them up in the expert fashion of former Arizonans. Still, the sauce oozed out a bit.

This was, I have to say, spectacular. The magic was in this sauce, which authors developed specifically for shrimp (so as not to overwhelm its delicate flavors), but which they recommend for other shellfish, pork, chicken, lamb, turkey, duck, and even blanched vegetables. I can certainly see this easy sauce complimenting a nice fish fillet.

We paired these tacos with the some 2006 Brut RJR from Westport Rivers, a "91" and a Gold Medal winner. Rather than wait for a special occasion for champagne-style wines, we keep them on hand, and turn good meals into special occasions when the pairing seems ideal. Beer is a natural choice for a dish like this, but sparkling wines also go quite well with Mexican or Mexican-inspired fare.

Dessert: We do not usually have dessert, but we had something handy that was well paired with the bubbly. A friend who now lives on the Left Coast brought us an assortment of excellent chocolates today (in recognition of our upcoming chocolate course), and we opened the first one this evening. The Cherry & Chili Dark Chocolate Bar from Theo and the PPC Farmland Trust was an obvious choice, and we were slaked with 1/4 each of the three-ounce bar. With the Brut, of course!

Green Chicken

Regular readers will know that The Well-Filled Tortilla is a well-worn cookbook in Casa Hayes-Boh.  This volume by Victoria Wise and Susanna Hoffman is one of the first cookbooks we purchased, at a wonderful independent book store in Tucson over 20 years ago.

The contents are as varied as the taco genre itself. Some recipes -- such as one featuring squid and olives -- are never likely to emerge from our kitchen, but this book remains one that allows us to carry out the original mission of this blog: using the many unused pages of cookbooks that were already on our shelves.

Noticing that I had both a bit of spare time and a few tortillas available, I thumbed through this familiar volume and found a title I had not read carefully before: Red or Green Chicken.

¿Qué?

It turns out, the colors do not refer to the chicken, nor to nautical channel markings. Rather, the authors refer to salsa options within the recipe. I chose green, in the form of a commercial tomatillo salsa, because a decent homemade salsa verde is way out of season around here.

This was a fairly simple, if messy, recipe. I opted for working with boneless, skinless chicken, which I simply boiled until cooked through and then shredded. (To shred chicken Mexican-restaurant style, simpy place it in a bowl and tear at it with two ordinary forks until it is course or fine strands.) Meanwhile, I chopped a couple of onions and cooked them -- in our indispensable cast-iron skillet -- in olive oil with plenty of oregano and a little salt until soft and translucent. I then mixed in the shredded chicken thoroughly over low heat.

I then rolled about 1/3 cup of this mix into each tortilla. I followed the recipe's instruction to soften teach tortilla with a little oil on the griddle first. This made rolling them up rather more messy than need be, and a little painful. In future I'll revert to one of two other methods we use for softening tortillas: microwaving for 30 seconds while loosely wrapped in a paper towel or heating for a few seconds on a hot but dry griddle.

In any case, I placed the rolled-up tortillas (now known as enchiladas) into a baking pan. Six of them fit nicely. I then covered with a cup of the aforementioned salsa verde, followed by a generous cup (maybe close to two) of shredded cheese. I used (Monterrey) pepper jack with a little sharp cheddar, both from our favorite farmer-owned cheese company.  I baked at 350F for 12 minutes.

The result: mildly piquant, slightly complex, creamy, filling, and delicious. Not photogenic, but delicious. We will definitely be making this again!

Fried Sweet Potato, Chili, and Cream Cheese Melt

It has actually been over two weeks since I made this dish, a variation on a favorite potato cheese melt from the Well-Filled Tortilla. Generally busy-ness, as well a trip to Nicaragua prevented me from posting earlier. A quick and easy dish I started by peeling and dicing a large sweet potato and used my indispensable cast-iron skillet to fry them. The recipe called for frying in peanut oil, but I used chipotle-infused olive oil instead. I heated the potatoes until they were soft, then I chopped and added a jalapeño pepper. Four ounces of cream cheese was dolloped on top and melted. We filled two warm tortilla shells with the potato/cream cheese mix and topped them with salsa and cilantro leaves.

Coming Out of the Cold

As mentioned in the "Cada Mes" post last week, our summer has been blessed with everything but at-home leisure, putting us well behind our usual pace of a new recipe each week. Well behind. As we get back on track, today's post is not only a specific recipe, but some of what we have learned about how to plan meals.

It began with Pam making a list of today's goals that included a freezer inventory. After a morning row and some extreme yard work, we got together at the freezer door and used a cooler so that we could take everything out and put it on a list. We threw out one or two items that were of miniscule quantity or unknown provenance, but otherwise made a detailed list of everything in the freezer before returning it there. (I did generously volunteer to save space by finishing off a small quantity of vanilla ice cream.)

With the inventory in hand, we each grabbed a cookbook to look for something that would be new to us, interesting, and most importantly that would use something from the inventory. Pam found a chicken salad that we will prepare at the end of the week for our weekly vineyard outing -- details to follow.

Because I knew we had a fresh package of tortillas in the fridge, I turned to our bible, a.k.a. The Well-Filled Tortilla. I have to admit I was doubtful. After all, we have used this book many times over the past 20 years, and much of what remains is either grandiose (even for us) or uses ingredients on the no-go list (olives, tripe). But we had a half-bag of lentils ("half" being the most common word on our freezer inventory), so I checked the index for that word.

On page 221 is a recipe entitled "Indian-style lentils." We were prepared to use the second half of our Sunday for something more complicated, but this worked out very well indeed. We went to our local farm stand at Hanson Farms after deciding the recipe, so that we could get the needed tomatoes there. We planned a grocery-store run for after the farm stand, for any items that would not be there. This is always a good order to shop -- home inventory then farm stand, then grocery.

The rest came from our shelf, fridge, or modest garden. (Actually, mint is not a "garden" item. It is something that the previous owner of our house planted, and which we can now retrieve from random spots all over our property.)

Preparation was incredibly simple, halving the recipe as printed. I put 3 cups of chicken stock (could have been any stock) in a stock pot, along with 1/2 pound of lentils and three medium potatoes, diced to 1/2-inch.  I then added plenty of turmeric, cilantro (in place of coriander), ground clove, chili powder, cumin, and cayenne. I heated to a boil and then simmered for 20 minutes.

I then added a generous splash of lime juice (from a bottle in this case). We then diced tomatoes, tore up some mint, and spooned up a little sour cream that was in the fridge. The only thing missing was something the recipe calls "pickled carrots, optional."

The result; Delicious! I had been skeptical of a dish calling for both lentil and potato, but they worked well together in this case. These tacos paired beautifully with a 2013 Wild Oats Pinot Noir from from San Luis Obispo, California. This is a complex wine with dark fruit flavors and just a bit of spice.

Local Tostadas

They were not nearly from scratch, but this evening's tostadas were immensely satisfying, and I do think that the extra care taken is partly responsible, along with many local or regional ingredients. Previous tostada efforts have begun with store-bought corn tostadas, which are usually available in little bags of about a dozen, stacked in a rather fragile pile in the "international" section of the larger grocery stores. These are not bad, but they are not a great beginning.

Here is what I did this evening, drawing very loosely on the introduction to the tostada section of The Bible, also known as The Well-Filled Tortilla. Yes, it has an entire tostada section, which is yet another reason that you should go get a copy if you have been putting this off.

I started by boiling a couple of chicken breasts that were in the freezer. While they boiled -- which did take a while -- I chopped a small onion, a couple cloves of garlic, an Italian pepper, and one red-hot serrano pepper, all from this week's farm-box share at Colchester Neighborhood Farm. Once the chicken was very tender, I lifted the pieces into a medium bowl, where I used two forks to shred them. I then heated the last remnants of a bottle of Persian lime-infused olive oil from Lebherz (time to re-order!) in an indispensable cast-iron saucepan. I then browned the chicken in the oil, and added the aromatics, cooking until all of this just looked and smelled wonderful.

Meanwhile, I heated some refried beans (Trader Joe's Salsa Style) in a small, indispensable cast-iron skillet. Then I stirred a bit more EVOO and some chili powder into the chicken mixture. I turned both pans to very low heat and heated a goodly amount of EVOO (about a 1/4-inch deep; we never do this) in our large, indispensable cast-iron skillet. I then placed a store-bought, eight-inch, flour tortilla in the pan and heated it until the edges began to brown. I turned it over with tongs (our friend Rob insists this is the most important tool in the kitchen, and today he was right), cooked for another minute or so, and then placed it on a plate. I repeated with a second tortilla, being careful not to allow the oil to smoke, and to allow the tostadas (the first I've ever made!) to drain just a bit. When they got a bit puffy, the tongs proved useful in bringing them down to size.

With everything done at the same time (one of the toughest parts of cooking, in my book), we assembled by spreading the beans on each tostada and topping with a generous helping of the chicken. We then topped it with sliced, luscious tomato (also from Colchester), plain Stonyfield yogurt (healthier than sour cream), and a chipotle salsa from Green Mountain Gringo.

What could be better than all this, besides delightful company? The perfect pairing with Original Recipe Pale Ale from our friends in Westport.

UPDATE: The panic about Persian lime-infused olive oil was premature. Pam remembers an additional bottle, purchased for our Lime Jubilee in May. I know readers were worried!

Tamale-Style Beef

The decision of what to prepare on February 14 could not be taken lightly. As former Arizonans we were acutely aware that this year marked the Valentine State's centennial. The meal had to have a southwest theme, and be worthy of two souls whose love transcends any Hallmark drivel, and be easy to prepare after working all day. The solution was found in The Well-Filled Tortilla byVictoria Wise and Susanna Hoffman. The recipe? Tamale-Style Beef. As Wise and Hoffman point out "making a tamale is an arduous task" and is traditionally done only at Christmas time. The tamale-style beef tortilla is an-easy-to-prepare meal, that can turn any day into a fiesta. We began by sauteeing onions and garlic rabe in our indespensible cast-iron skillet. Then added one chopped cubano pepper, and chopped steak which had marinated in Cachaça. (The recipe actually called for ground beef, but I read it wrong, and simply put "beef chuck" on the list, which James couldn't find in any case, so he just bought a steak and cut it up, which we agreed probably made the dish way better.) Next we added one chopped tomato, 1 cup of corn kernels, a bit of fresh oregano, and a dash of red pepper flakes, and 1/2 cup red wine. This was cooked until the liquid evaporated. The filling was wrapped in a whole wheat tortilla shell along with some of the Crema Mexicana we still had left from our ajiaco recipe. This was the perfect blend of sweet, spicy, and creamy (what could be more sexy?). It was paired perfectly with a peppery Savignon Franc from Sakonnet Vineyards. See James' post on Loving Coffee to find out how our dessert went. That Intercourses cookbook does not fail!

If you really couldn't think of anything more creative than candy, flowers, and dinner in a crowded restaurant to celebrate Valentine's Day you didn't deserve to get laid. Start planning now for next year.

Another Ish Turkey Dish

Earlier this week, Pam made one of our comfort foods, known as Crusty Mexican Bean Bake. It is essentially a Sloppy Joe casserole on a biscuit-like base. Sometimes we make it with just beans, but since #1 Daughter was enjoying the Big Apple without us, we splurged and used a half-pound of ground turkey along with the kidney beans in that recipe.

Which left us with the second half-pound and several options on Wednesday night. On the short list was Turkish Turkey Taco, a favorite from The Well-Filled Tortilla that is emblematic of the situation that gave rise to this Nueva Receta project in the first place: at least 50 percent of our use of the book was that one recipe. Because we had all we needed for that recipe except tortillas (we've found somewhat reasonable tortillas for sale locally) and a jalapeño, we were about to follow that tried-and-true path again, when Pam decided to open the trusty tortilla tome in search of something a little different.

She found Spanish-style Ground Beef and Pork on pages 84-85, the name similarly connoting a dish that is probably as Spanish-ish as its precursor is Turkish-ish. No matter, it seemed -- and turned out to be -- both simple and delicious.

One adjustment I made was to heat olive oil infused with Persian lime, in place of ordinary olive oil, simmering onion, bell pepper (we used a frozen medley of this), pine nuts (the real deal this time), orange zest and thyme. I then added the ground turkey and a small amount of frozen breakfast sausage to get some of the mix intended in the recipe without buying more meat. Of course this was all browned in our indispensable cast-iron skillet, after which I added a generous pour-over of our home-vinted Chardonnay.

The result: warm and delicious! The next time I try this, I would avoid pre-cooked sausage, though I managed to chop it in pretty well. I would either use just turkey or perhaps a mix of ground turkey and Italian-style turkey sausage.

Oh, Currant!

This recipe is another favorite from The Well-Filled Tortilla. It is very tolerant of variation. We have used raisins instead of currants, for example, and look forward to doing it “right” for the first time with the currants in this week’s share from our CSA at Colchester Neighborhood Farm.

The currants were beautiful during cooking; they eventually merged
with the overall grayness of the filling.

We do not know how authentically Turkish this is, but it has been a favorite recipe of ours for many years. Note that the recipe calls for 2-1/2 pounds of ground turkey; we usually use 1 pound and diminish all other ingredients accordingly. 
Turkish-Style Ground Turkey

3 T peanut or olive oil
2 large onions, finely chopped
¾ cup slivered almonds
2/3 Cup currants I separated the currants from their stems, which was somewhat tedious and perhaps not necessary, as the stems were very fine and the currants essentially disappeared into the mix.)
2-1/2 pounds ground turkey
¾ teaspoon ground cumin
¾ teaspoon salt (we usually skip)
2/3 cup dry red wine
18 corn or 12 flour tortillas, warmed just before serving (We often roll in waxed paper and heat in the microwave, and we just start with however many we need for the first round to be served.)

TOPPINGS – optional

1 cup sliced jalapeño chili peppers – preferably fresh (In recent years, commercially-available jalapeños have become larger and milder; the ones we purchased for this recipe were an exception, and I am still regretting that I did not take more precautions while slicing -- the capsaicin still stings!)
4 cups shredded lettuce (we usually skip)
2 cups sour cream (we usually use plain yogurt)
1 cup thinly shredded mint

Heat oil and add onions, almonds, and currants until onions are wilted and almonds browned; stir in turkey cumin salt, and red wine, cooking until most liquid is absorbed. Assemble with about 1/3 cup turkey in the middle of each warmed tortilla; add toppings, fold over, and serve

Good with beer or the rest of the red wine! Yesterday we used a very modest Pinot Noir, which worked well with the filling, but the piquant peppers would have gone better with a highly-hopped IPA.

Salsa Two-Fer

Perhaps it was because we are soon to be taking our first trip to Puerto Rico, which we have hoped to do for many years. More likely, it is simply because I was craving one of my favorites from our recipe shelf -- Puerto Rican Chicken Fajita. I have no idea how common this actually is in Puerto Rico, but we love it in our house -- chicken breasts hammered thin and charred hot with chopped walnuts (or pine nuts), along with unripe banana slices is wrapped in a big flour tortilla with onion-orange salsa, and sour cream. This recipe allows The Well-Filled Tortilla to earn its title, as well as a prominent spot on our recipe shelves.

One of the major Testaments in our kitchen

I'll digress for a moment to share one recent finding in the "cooking for two" department. When serving flour tortillas, I have had a habit of rolling them up in wax paper and briefly softening them in the microwave. I recently discovered that if I am using our indispensable cast-iron skillet, I can just toss the tortillas into the pan -- as if they were a soft lid -- a half minute before the meal is ready to serve. If I'm serving two tortillas, I put them both in, and then flip them together after a half-minute. This puts the damp sides out, so I invert them for serving. Just try it -- it is easier than it sounds.

For the "Puerto Rican" fajitas, I was careful with proportions, which meant I wasted no chicken, but I had a significant amount of salsa (onion/orange/jalapeno) left over.

Librarian to the rescue! When it came time to use the rest of the salsa, Pam put her information-literacy skills to effective use, searching for the salsa in the cookbook's index to see if the publisher linked it to any other recipes. Oddly, the index item for this salsa does not include the dish from which we first learned of it. The index does list two options: a squid-olive concoction or a fajita with turkey and bacon. Pam has a famously strong aversion to olives and we are both indifferent (at best) to squid. Plus we had chicken left over from the previous effort, which could do for turkey in a pinch. That only left the question of bacon. Let's see.... Yes, bacon!

This recipe required cutting the bacon into small pieces and cooking it slowly, essentially making high-end baco-bits. I prepared these and set them aside. I then cut the chicken breasts into about four "cutlets" each and marinated them in a mixture of diced jalapeno (left over from salsa preparation), tequila, and lime juice. I then seared these on high heat in a bit of olive oil, and we wrapped them in tortillas (warmed as above) with the salsa and sour cream.

The verdict: so delicious it is not even fair to other tacos. We will definitely be making this "leftover" dish again!

Cooking with Wine

This post is a two-fer. This week I found two recipes from two different recipe books that called for wine, and prepared them over two days. One was from a cookbook called Cooking Seafood and Poultry with Wine, so I was certainly not surprised by the use of the ingredient. 

The recipe actually calls for Vermouth. I knew we had a bottle of such at our beach house, and since that is where we generally prepare any kind of seafood, this recipe for Salmon Steaks seemed like a good one to try. We bought a pound of fresh, wild-caught salmon from our favorite fish-monger Kyler's Catch in New Bedford, Massachusetts  and assembled the rest of the ingredients. Then I read the instructions, which said to marinade for four hours. It was already six o'clock p.m. and we were not going to wait until after ten to eat, so I made an adjustment and put all the ingredients into a pan making the following variations - I used scallions instead of chives, and also added lime juice, and a few red pepper flakes. Once the liquid was simmering I added the salmon, turned down the heat and covered the pan for about 12 minutes (turning once about half-way through). The fish was perfectly cooked, and the flavors were all evident. I've learned a lot about cooking since I started this blog. The most important thing I've learned is that just about any recipe can be adapted to just about any situation.

The other wine recipe came from an old favorite cookbook - The Well-Filled Tortilla. This may very well be my favorite cookbook. We prepare many of our favorite recipes from it, and still find new ones to try even after two decades of use. I don't know how we never noticed the "Good and Plenty Wine-Simmered Vegetables" before. This was easy, and relatively quick and made for perhaps the best veggie wrap I've ever had. The recipe calls for a dry white wine, so I used a Sauvignon Blanc. I used about 1/2 cup to start and added 2 chopped potatoes, a small chopped yellow squash, one chopped tomato, one sliced jalapeno, and a half of a chopped onion. The recipe also called for frozen lima beans, in lieu of which I put in a small amount of mystery beans from a CSA that I found in the freezer labeled simply "Beans 8/14" in my own handwriting. They were fine and I was glad to finally use them. I also added a bit of dry oregano and some garlic salt. Once everything was in the pan, I splashed a bit more wine in and simmered for about 20 minutes. When the potatoes were soft I declared it done and warmed two tortillas on the stove top. We filled the tortillas with the vegetables and added some fresh cilantro and sour cream. Quite delicious and easily made vegan by skipping the sour cream.

Loving Coffee

This is a bit of a departure for the Nueva Receta blog -- discussing a recipe a few days before we try it. The reason is simple: this recipe is for Valentine's day, and we think that some of our readers and friends might benefit (ahem) from having this post ahead of the holiday. As regular readers know, the purpose of this blog is more fully to employ the many books on our well-laden shelf. For this particular holiday, thoughts go immediately to Intercourses, a wonderful book we mentioned in Valentine's and anniversary posts last year.

Because Valentine's Day is also Arizona Day -- and this in fact is Arizona's centennial -- Tuesday's main course will be taken from a The Well-filled Tortilla, a book that somehow became our family bible when we lived in Tucson. While Pam searched out a recipe there -- check in Tuesday or Wednesday to read about that -- I perused the dessert "sexion" of Intercourses, with a special focus on coffee.

We chose "espresso cream" from page 32, for its simplicity and the promise of something a bit different than the usual. We will drain 1.5 cups ricotta cheese, and beat it together with 1/4 cup cream, until smooth. We will stir in 2T freshly ground, dark-roasted coffee beans (from Selva Negra, the most romantic coffee farm I know -- it has its own wedding chapel!) and 2-3 T sugar. The recipe calls for 4 t brandy -- we will use a coffee brandy, and probably be generous with those teaspoons.

This we will chill all day, and after dinner we will divided it into romantic cups and garnish with toasted almonds, a couple of coffee beans, and some mocha beans from Hilliards. (The recipe calls for chocolate-covered beans, but Hilliards was sold out and Star**cks has discontinued them. This seems a very reasonable solution!)

Next Valentine's Day, by the way, we hope to replicate the coffee martini we enjoyed recently at Imagine Restaurant and Bar in Granada, Nicaragua. We have the key ingredients (and will be sure to have fresh Selva Negra coffee on hand when the time comes), but we will need some coaching, which we hope to get next summer when Imagine's owner visits New England.

I have written elsewhere about the perils and pleasures of combining coffee and alcohol; this recipe seems to be well inside the pleasure zone!

NOTE: We ended up being short on coffee brandy (tragedy!), so I used about a tablespoon each of coffee brandy and 43, a Spanish vanilla liqueur. I did not grind the coffee as finely as I should have, but this still turned out quite nicely, and I am recommending it to my friends at Selva Negra.

Three Sweet Words

As I wrote in the Tortilla Heaven post nearly a year ago, at the beginning of this project, The Well-Filled Tortilla is among my very favorite cookbooks. Often, when scanning our collection for a new recipe, I will grab this volume, even if I also take another from the shelf. It is organized by the main filling ingredients -- veggies, chicken, beef, seafood. This weekend, I started near the end and found a few favorites we had made recently. I was also surprised by the number of seafood entries, which I had not really noticed. I was especially surprised by the illustration of how to dissect a squid, which I found somehow unsettling.

I kept thumbing toward the middle of the book, when three words jumped out at me. Three words that I cannot believe I had not noticed together: tequila, sausage, and mole. (I always feel obligated to stipulate that mole is not a rodent in this context, but a savory, sweet sauce: mol-AY. The words were especially intriguing because we had a half jar of mole sauce left over from our recent Champadongo ecstasy.

This recipe (Tequila Sausage with Chocolate Mole Sauce, p 108) actually called for me to make sausage, but not in the gruesome way one might imagine. Rather, I simply mixed a pound of ground pork with minced garlic, rubbed sage, fennel seeds, cayenne, salt, and tequila. The recipe called for 2-1/2 pounds, but for just the two of us, a pound was more than enough. I cut back a bit on each of the other ingredients, except the tequila. Rather than prepare and cook it right away, I let it meld in the fridge overnight, so that the spices and tequila were absorbed.

Dinner this evening was then quite simple -- steam a couple soft tortillas (30 seconds in the microwave, rolled up in waxed paper), heated the mole sauce in a saucepan (though I guess a molepan would do), and then cooked the sausage with a bit of oil in a hot cast-iron skillet. I cooked the sausage until crispy, meanwhile chopping a cold tomato. The result: hot, spicy, sweet, salty, and not too heavy. Hmmmmm.

Tortilla Heaven

For this week's recipe, I dug into one of our favorite cookbooks, The Well-Filled Tortilla. by Victoria Wise and Susanna Hoffman. We purchased this book at a great little southwest book store in Tucson, Arizona -- where these things are decided. Its mix of simple and fancy, meat and veggie, savory and sweet, was just the thing for adventurous, thrifty cooking in graduate school. (A cursory look online shows that the great feminist book store Antigone and the great used book store Bookman's are both still in business, but I cannot find this southwest-themed store, whose name escapes me. Tucson readers: please tell me if it is still around. Meanwhile, it is good to know that Singing Wind in Benson is still a Mecca for readers of all things Southwestern!) Fortunately, more than 20 years after its initial publication, this celebration of the tortilla is still in print. At $10, I can think of no better cookbook bargain.

Zipf's Law, also known as the 80/20 rule, applies to many of life's distributions: 20 percent of volunteers (or employees) doing 80 percent of the work; 20 percent of a library's holdings comprising 80 percent of the circulation; 20 percent of songs taking up 80 percent of a radio's air time, and so on. For recipe books, however, Mr. Zipf's estimate is probably too conservative. We have cooked from this book hundreds of times, but I doubt we have prepared more than 5 percent of the recipes -- a 95/5 rule would be a generous estimation for this or any of our other cookbooks.

This common reality was part of Pam's motivation for the Nueva Receta project, and I am delighted. Thumbing through this volume, I commit to revisit some old favorites -- such as Turkish turkey tacos and Puerto Rican chicken fajitas -- but I disciplined myself to choose something we've never tried before. Because we have good beef in the freezer from last week's Julia Child adventure, and because of my recent interest in home brewing, I chose beef beer stew tacos (page 96) with a roasted red pepper, chili, and pine nut salsa (page 57).

This was an excuse to -- finally -- learn how to roast my own red peppers. The book includes an incredible assortment of salsa recipes, most of which are recommended to match particular fillings. I should have made more of those salsas when we lived in the Southwest, since produce in general and peppers in particular are much more limited in New England. I had made an orange/onion salsa quite a few times, but never any of the others. I have always wanted to roast red peppers, and finally got to it this time. Our oven has been acting up lately, so I almost resorted to a stove-top approach, but at the last minute I coaxed the oven into working. I roasted at 500 degrees for 25 minutes as directed, and many charred spots were beginning to appear. I will let it go a bit further next time, though, so that the outer skin will come off more easily, and by next time I hope to have a reliable oven! (These were red bell peppers, by the way, so there was no capsaicin problem working the pepper by hand.)

Confession: I simmered the beef in Mexican dark beer rather than amber, because my favorite -- Negra Modelo -- was readily available and a classic amber -- such as Dos Equis -- was not. Negra Modelo is dark for a Mexican beer, though not nearly as heavy as a dark European beer, so it seems to be within the spirit of this recipe. Also, I did not brew the beer, though a friend has given me a recipe with which I hope to clone Negra Modelo in the near future.

I shot this in-progress photo when I realized that several interesting things were on our counter at the same time. First, the counter itself: this is an ordinary, small island we purchased from Target a few years ago. We realized that we could use it as a small snack or breakfast table, if only its top were a bit wider, so we asked our friend Frank to build a new top for it. This gave us the added benefit of perhaps two more square feet of precious counter space in a kitchen that was not really designed for active cooking.

To the left of the counter is a box that I almost cropped out of the photo, but I might as well mention that it contains beer-brewing supplies. As we may have mentioned elsewhere on a blog, Pam discovered last year that National Home Brew Day is on my birthday (at least some years, it is), which has given us an excuse to add beer to the list of beverages about which we are becoming obsessive (see my recent tea post for others). We have not yet become completely obsessive, though: we are still working from kits. Eventually we hope to grow some of the ingredients ourselves and begin experimenting, but for now kits strike the right balance.

On the counter is a recipe-book holder, a gift that Pam received from my parents -- by fortunate coincidence -- just before this project began. We've tried a variety of approaches, and this is the best design we have encountered. Also in the photo are some beautiful peppers (though I'm sure my salsa will be better in the summer with local, if less photogenic, organic peppers). Some of the peppers are a lightweight mesh bag that we now use to replace the plastic produce bags at the grocery store. To the left of the peppers is a case for reading glasses -- the case itself comes from the El Chile women's weaving cooperative in Matagalpa, Nicaragua. In it we keep an old, crooked pair of glasses that is no longer suitable for reading books but works for occasional reading emergencies in the kitchen). Finally, in the background is a French press (also known as a press pot), which has nothing to do with this meal but is evidence of the near-constant presence of coffee in our lives, and of the great care we take in its preparation.

Our friends Anna, Brendan, and Amelia joined us for this small feast, and everyone seemed to enjoy it. I was grateful that Brendan brought guacamole at my request. He was raised in California, and even though Massachusetts in January is not natural habitat for avocados, he managed to provide us with a scrumptious appetizer.  The beef was exceptionally tender and savory, and the pairing with roasted red-pepper salsa was perfect. For our veggie daughter Paloma, I prepared her favorite rice-and-bean burrito. (The Nueva Receta project has begun with much more beef than we usually eat, so check this site in the near future for more vegetarian offerings!)

I was delighted that Pam prepared the table both with festive colors and with our real silver. Because washing it is a bit of an extra chore, we do not use our silver at every meal, but neither do we save it for once-a-year, formal meals. Silver helps to make any meal festive, as do fresh flowers (even if they are dyed unnatural colors).

Incidentally, using the silver with some frequency helps to prevent tarnishing.

Pepper-forward Pasta

When looking for a dinner idea yesterday, I went to the original intent of this blog -- making use of the unused pages in cookbooks we already own. I headed to our easy chair with The Well-Filled Tortilla and Jane Brody's Good Food Gourmet. Followers of this blog -- or those using the search box at the top of the screen -- will know that we have made very good use of both of these volumes (though most of our Jane Brody references are to her earlier Good Food volume.

Because I had made quesadillas (with cheese!) for lunch, I opened Brody's book first. Because I had recently purchased a few boxes of Rao's penne pasta, I looked at pasta entries in the index, rather than thumbing through the book at random. I quickly found Fusilli with Hot Sausage, and quickly decided that penne would be a very reasonable substitution -- especially since Brody grants "or similar pasta" in the ingredients list.

I followed the directions on page 224 pretty closely, except with regard to proportions. Having purchased a pound of hot italian sausage, I used it all for Brody's first step (my second; see below). I  removed the casings and crumbled the sausage as I cooked it over medium-high heat. I then put it into a bowl (it was lean, so no draining was required).

My step before Brody's first step was to roast the peppers. The recipe calls for a 6.5-ounce jar of roasted peppers. Since my adventures with Mexican mole sauces, I almost never purchase roasted peppers, preferring to cook them directly on the stove. In this case, I went a little overboard and roasted three large ones on the rarely-used oblong center burner. I had done this and placed the peppers in a sealed bowl for sweating while I worked the indispensable cast-iron skillet.

Roasting peppers, in progress. I let them get much
more charred than this.

At some point I heated a pot of water with a little oil and salt. I never rush a sauce, but it is good to have the water ready when it is time to cook the pasta.

While the peppers were sweating -- I added some olive oil to the pan, reduced the heat and slowly cooked one diced onion (I have no idea how its size compares to the called-for 1-1/3 cup) and two teaspoons of garlic.

Just kidding about that quantity of garlic:

My friend Joe has convinced me
never to measure garlic again.

After I scraped, seeded, and cored the peppers, I pureed them in a blender with a can of tomato paste (instead of 2 tablespoons) and a little olive oil. I often do this when substituting home-roasted peppers for those that are bottled in oil. At this point I started boiling the pasta.

Once the onions and garlic were softened, I returned the sausage to the skillet and added the puree along with a modest dousing of cayenne pepper and a small bag of frozen corn. Yes, frozen corn. Because Jane Brody said so. The sauce was to simmer for 10 minutes -- it was quite thick, so I added a little bit of Malbec. Never a bad idea.

Once the penne was al dente, I drained it and combined it in a bowl with the sauce and several finely-sliced scallions.

The result was more delicious than photogenic, which I expected. That is why I favored this space with in-progress photos, rather than the final dish. We will definitely be adding this to the repertoire!

A Birthday Celebration that created quite a lot of Dishes

A mid-week birthday during final exams means a low-key celebration for James as he enters his sixtieth year. James made his own birthday dinner of an old favorite: Puerto Rican Chicken Fajitas from the Well-Filled Tortilla cookbook. My role was to bake the birthday cake. When I asked James over the weekend what kind of cake he would like he said something with lemon and raspberries. The New York Times Cooking page had just what the (Ph.D.) doctor ordered! Lemon Sheet Cake with Raspberry Whipped Cream.

This recipe is a 12-step program, beginning with preparing the pan. The instructions call for use of a non-stick spray, but I used Crisco shortening. I did follow the instructions to coat the pan, then cover in parchment, and then coat the parchment, which seemed like overkill, but I must say that I have never had such an easy time removing a cake from a pan when it was time to serve. The recipe also calls for vegetable oil. I used lemon-infused olive oil, which really was the right thing to do.

The recipe also calls for an electric mixer in steps 2, 4, 5, 6, 10, and 11. Still don't have one, so a spoon, a whisk, and some strong arms were put to good use.

Lemons needed to be zested and juiced, and raspberries needed to macerate (a word I did not know before) and then strained. Cream needed to be whipped and flour sifted. We used every mixing bowl in our cabinet, one of which had to be rinsed out so it could be used again. We also used more of our utensils than we usually would with one recipe.

The result was a delicious yellow cake with a thick pink topping. This isn't very sweet, so the flavors of lemon and raspberry come through more than we expected, although neither is overwhelming. 

Photos show our sink after we'd already put round one of dishes into the dishwasher, and our "Julia Child" pegboard with lots of space as as all the utensils were being washed. Unfortunately the photograph of the cake turned out blurry, so I won't be posting it here.

So many dishes!

This is after I'd already washed the flour sifter and put it back in its place. We really did use a lot of utensils.