Wednesday my brother and I went around to various markets to get everything on our grocery list at the best possible price. We went to the Mexican market, the Asian market, and the super market. And eventually we got everything we needed. Plus a few treats. My brother and I both have a love for inexpensive Asian cookies, we feel it's what proves our Asian heritage. So here is what we found:
For some reason the sweet on the left looks like a chocolate ex-lax equivalent, probably because of the "ex" part of the name. It was good, but not my favorite. The Stikko is pretty good, but between the vanilla sweets I much prefer the Tahitian Vanilla Pocky. It smelled more like real vanilla and doesn't break like the stikkos do.
Anyway, back to the actual food cooking and preparing. My brother and I do non traditional Thanksgiving. He is a vegetarian and we are both the types of people who will make stuffing or mashed potatoes or whatever any time of year, so we don't need to get our fix at Thanksgiving. Plus it's more interesting this way. So this year we're having a three day Mexican Thanksgiving! Mexican because we were born in California and good fairly authentic Mexican food is a big part of what we're about. And three days because we couldn't decide what to make and it is just the two of us, so it would be a little excessive to make everything one day.
So day one. We made Red Chile Rice and Chile Rellenos. All of the recipes we use are from a Rick Bayless cook book, I highly encourage all of you to go out and buy one of his books if you like real Mexican food. Everything has about a thousand steps, but it all turns out well. Since I'm making two things over three days I'll give you one recipe a day and pictures of the other dish.
First I made the Red Chile Rice. First you will need to make Chef Bayless' "Essential Sweet and Spicy Ancho Seasoning Paste", for any of you deathly afraid of heat I wouldn't worry, I didn't find the rice to hot. However, since I apparently can tolerate spicy foods I would suggest cutting back on the amount of paste you ultimately use, or serve it with sour cream or avocado.
First in a pan over medium heat (the suggested equipment is an ungreased griddle or a heavy skillet), I used a frying pan as my brother has three pieces of stove top equipment- a wok, a giant soup pot, and a frying pan. You want to roast 8 cloves of garlic, unpeeled. Just toss them onto one side of your heating surface. Then (you will probably need to do this in shifts) toast 8 medium dried ancho chiles, stemmed and seeded. Now as I'm looking over the recipe I will admit I did not stem or seed them. O well. Now the garlic will blacken and you want to turn it to make sure it doesn't ignite or completely turn black, you just want to roast them until soft. The chiles are going to toast quickly, only a few seconds on either side while applying pressure. There will be popping noises and perhaps a little smoke, don't worry you're still doing it correctly. Or at least the way I did it... and lets just ignore that little bit about me not stemming or seeding the chiles... Your kitchen will start smelling sweet as the sugars in the garlic caramelize and the chiles toast. They will start to smell like really fragrant dried fruit- like raisins or prunes.
Put the toasted chiles in a bowl full of warm water so that they can sorta come back to life. I put a saucer in the bowl to keep them from floating up. They can just sit there for a half hour while you get on with other things. Like this would be a good time to let the garlic cool and then slip the skins off of them.
In a food processor blend the chiles, garlic, 2/3 cup water or broth, 1.5 tsp oregano, 0.5 tsp ground black pepper, 1/8 tsp ground cumin, and a scant 1/4 tsp ground cloves. Blend this into a puree. (I feel I should tell you that we did take the stems off... we just didn't take the seeds out at this point.) It is suggested that you strain the mixture. I don't think we did that either (at the blending point I let my brother take over). Actually I'm positive we didn't strain it. Well, it won't kill you if you don't strain it. It may ruin your credibility as someone who can either a. cook or b. read. Now season with some salt, keep in mind that you will later be adding this to some stock (with varying levels of sodium) so season accordingly.
Now you will not need to use all of this mixture. You can either halve it from the get go (since I apparently can't read I will not be doing the math for you), or you can reserve the rest and follow the suggestion of Chef Bayless- use it as a marinade. I imagine this could be very tasty on some pork or chicken that you could grill up to have a long with your rice.
In a large pot heat 1 T. vegetable oil over medium heat. Add 1 cup rice (medium grain is suggested) and 1 small white onion that has been diced. In another pot (or wok) heat 1 2/3 cups water or broth with 5 T. of the ancho paste. In the rice pot you want to push it around a little and let the onion soften and the rice turn whiter/chalky. In the broth pot you want it to come up to a boil. Once both have gotten to their individual destinations add the broth pot contents to the rice pot and stir to make sure all the rice is in the liquid then cover and turn the heat down slightly to medium low.
We cooked it for about 15 minutes and then I checked it and it was almost there and still a little while till we would finish the rellenos, so I took it off the heat and kept it covered. A little while later it was perfect. Feel free to serve it with sour cream, salsa, cilantro, queso, etc.
Now for Chiles Rellenos...
Jalapenos simmering in a pot of water, brown sugar, and a pinch of salt. On some of them you may be able to see the special T shaped cut.
And now an uber blurry photo of the filling which included tomatoes, garlic, green olives, cheese, and onion.
I was just really proud of myself for being able to whip egg whites into somewhat stiff peaks by hand, and pretty quickly if I do say so myself. So yeah, be amazed.
Frozen, floured jalapenos with the filling in the background.
Again, frozen, floured jalapenos, but this time with the batter in the background (egg whites, yolks, a dash of flour and a pinch of salt).
Glorious Chile Rellenos.
Happy Thanksgiving everyone, and stayed tuned for Day Two of a Mexican Thanksgiving! Adios!
P.S. The formatting of this post got wonky, I don't really know what happened and it won't let me fix it... so I'm sorry that it looks crazy. I guess the holidays do this to all of us.
Tamales waiting to get steamed, don't they look happy and cute?
These were filled with a mixture of onion, chiles, tomatoes, and mushrooms. And they were so good that the next day we made more (some were roasted poblanos, queso, onions; cilantro, onions, queso; mushrooms with roasted garlic and queso). In fact, I doubled the recipe so my brother could stash them in his freezer. A couple days later when I talked to him he admitted that they were gone...
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