Posts Tagged ‘Santa Fe School of Cooking’

Seeing red

November 15, 2020

Turkey enchiladas in red chile after somebody’s been at ’em.

Even though we’ve mostly been steering clear of restaurants since March because, well, y’know, PLAGUE, an’ stuff, we eat quite a bit of Mexican food.

It’s not pro Mexican food, mind you. Category 3 at best. I missed my start time and will never catch the likes of Lucy Martinez, the enchilada-slinging mother of my old hermanos Larry and Jim.

Lucy could whip up a few platillos de comida mexicana in less time than it takes me to remember where I left my spatula. And while holding up her end of a rambling chat with a kitchen full of stuporous pendejos fresh from an long night of questionable behavior, too.

I may be slow, but I do get there, eventually. My green chile sauce is serviceable (as far as Irish green goes, anyway), but my red sauce is still hit and miss. The recipe I’ve been most successful with is this one, from the Santa Fe School of Cooking.

Last night I had a bunch of filling that didn’t get used in the previous evening’s turkey tacos, but I didn’t feel like a second round of tacos. So, boom, enchiladas it was.

I started with a 50-50 mix of Hatch chile powders (hot and mild), and recalling that I undersimmered my last batch of sauce, leaving it a little thin, I oversimmered it this time and had to add a little water to loosen it up a tad. Live and learn, they say. Riiiiiiight.

After the foil-covered Pyrex spent 20 minutes in the oven at 350° I topped the enchiladas with grated Kellygold Skellig, and gave ’em a few minutes under the broiler. Yum, yum, gimme some. Sides included potatoes roasted in red chile (another Santa Fe School of Cooking recipe) and a green salad.

The best part? Leftovers.

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Posted in Cooking, Food | 9 Comments »

Cantina del Perro Loco

March 19, 2020

Careful, señores … hot plate!

We’ve eaten our way through the oven-roasted chicken-and-taters. Likewise the chili con carne (based on me sainted ma’s recipe from our days in Texas). The other day we settled for a simple repast of smoked oysters, cheese, crackers, and salad.

What to cook next?

Mexican, of course.

Herself harvests her latest crop of sprouts.

There were no dried pinto beans to be had on our last hunter-gatherer expedition to Sprouts (gracias, hoarders).

But I found a 2-pound sack stashed away in a cupboard from a months-ago trip to Keller’s. So I cooked up a pound a la Santa Fe School of Cooking, with onion, garlic, chipotle chile, oregano, epazote, cumin, coriander, salt, bay leaf, and chicken broth.

This takes the better part of quite some time, but it’s not as though we’re up to our nalgas in other chores around here.

Flour tortillas we already had. So, burritos, yeah? Claro que si, hombre.

But burritos without green chile sauce are like a day without sunshine. So I thawed some frozen Hatch chile and got after that.

Also, beans without rice? What are you, high? Rick Bayless has a no-frills recipe for red rice in his “Mexican Everyday,” and even a gabacho can make that drunk with one foot in a bucket, or, in my case, sober with one foot in a lace-up ankle brace.

Herself whipped up a couple simple side salads and that was that. Now we have leftovers for a couple days. And then, we’ll switch focus from Mexican to Italian.

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Posted in Cooking | 10 Comments »

Eat it and heat it

November 21, 2013
A delicious pot of pintos with chipotle and other good stuff, including (of course) bacon.

A delicious pot of pintos with chipotle and other good stuff, including (of course) bacon.

Cold weather sends me straight to the kitchen, every time.

This afternoon, as the temps dipped into the teens, I whipped up some bacon-potato cakes from “The Feed Zone Cookbook.” This evening it was a big pot of pintos with chipotle from “The Santa Fe School of Cooking Cookbook.” Herself contributed a large, cast-iron skillet full of cornbread and a green salad.

Meanwhile, a couple Ziplocs of frozen Anaheim and New Mexico chiles are thawing in the fridge, and we may just have to have some bean-and-potato burritos smothered in green chile tomorrow.

That should help keep the hawk out there in the wind where he belongs.

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Posted in Cooking, Fall, Snow | 6 Comments »

Satiated sirens

June 12, 2010
Herself, Mary and Kelli are smiling because they're full of posole and rosé.

Herself, Mary and Kelli are smiling because they're full of posole and rosé.

We had an old pal from Weirdcliffe pop in for a two-day visit beginning Thursday, and she brought her mom along, so I was required to cook. They’re all smiling in the picture at right, so I must not have poisoned anyone this time around.

The dinner menu was, of course, New Mexican — chicken quesadillas with salsa fresca and jalapeño-stuffed olives on Thursday, and posole with salsa verde on Friday. I was going to whip up some guacamole, too, but spaced it out, which means we can have that tonight with the leftovers.

Wines came from Spain, Portugal and France, including a delicious 2008 Château Miraval Côtes de Provence rosé called “Pink Floyd” that Kelli’s mom, Mary, bought for us. The 2009 iteration placed fourth in a top-10 ranking in a recent Wines of the Times piece by Eric Asimov.

Kelli had requested the posole, which I used to make all the time when we all still lived in Weirdcliffe, so I reprised my old recipe instead of the one I’ve been using from The Santa Fe School of Cooking Cookbook. Posole v1.0 uses plain water instead of chicken stock, canned white hominy and a tad less garlic, plus I don’t sauté the onions and garlic — I just chuck ’em into the pot with all the other ingredients.

It’s a lazy man’s posole, but Mary liked it enough to ask for the recipe. If you’d like it, too, here it is:

Lazy Man’s Posole

1 29-ounce can of white hominy

1.5 pounds lean pork, diced

2-4 dried New Mexican red chile pods

2 cups chopped onion

3 cloves garlic

2 tsp. Mexican oregano

1 tsp. freshly ground cumin seed

6 cups water

Salt to taste

Remove the stems and seeds from the chile pods and chop with the onions in a food processor. Mince the garlic. Throw the whole shootin’ match into a pot, bring to a boil and then simmer for 2-3 hours until the pork is tender. Add water as necessary. Serve with warm flour tortillas and small bowls of various garnishes — I usually chop up a few jalapeños, radishes and scallions for folks to add to the posole as they please. Coarsely chopped cilantro is nice, too.

This serves about six light eaters or three to four bicycle types, so I usually double up on it to be assured of leftovers.

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Posted in Cookery | 7 Comments »