We finally have a good supply of Sangre de Toro beans available. These are part of the Rancho Gordo-Xoxoc Project and are ideal for New Orleans Red Beans and Rice recipes.
Martha Stewart’s Everyday Food has a simple but solid recipe for Red Beans and Andouille Sausage. (People give Martha a lot of flack but I have to say I’d rather cook from her books than Rachel Ray. I don’t have anything against Ray, but I do think Martha Stewart has better taste in almost everything. )
I’m lucky enough to have a few friends who forage for wild mushrooms. They tell me this has been an incredible year for chantrelles and they seem to be right!
I think the secret with mushrooms is that you need to cook them very high or very low. I took these and fried them on high with garlic and olive oil. Then I dusted them with our own Mexican oregano.
Then I reheated some of the new crop of Good Mother Stallard beans. They used to be a favorite but I’ve been so busy and I’ve made due without them for so long (we ran out of them right after the book came out and then we had crop failure), it was like meeting an old friend again. Gosh, but they’re good! The texture is silky and the bean broth is famous for its deliciousness.
I used the same skillet I used for the mushrooms in case there was a smoodge of goodness left over.
Tossing them together, I crumbled a very little queso fresco and sat down to a bowl of perfect happiness, improved only by a few drops of good olive oil and an afternoon with not much to do.
To be honest, I think almost any bean would be good in a similar setting, especially the big bold ones like Christmas Limas and all of the runner beans.
We have some great workers here at Rancho Gordo from Napa Valley Support Services. They help with the bean weighing, bagging and general production. The program also has an arts project, the Brown Street Gallery, and for our opening a few weeks ago, they produced this amazing portrait of Our Lady of Guadalupe using Rancho Gordo beans!
You could have knocked me over with a feather when I saw it. It's just beautiful and it's impossible not to appreciate how many hours of work went into it.
It's going to the frame shop next week so it'll be out of commission for part of January but I hope you come by and see it in person sooner than later. We've learned that florescent lights and UV rays make the beans darker so the sooner we get this into a protected frame, the better!
I was going to post about the tradition of making a posole for Christmas Eve. For me, it’s easy, delicious and a nice contrast to the inevitably debauched feast that awaits us the next day. An article on Serious Eats sidetracked me.
The posole recipe looks great but the ingredient list contains “1 pound dried white flint corn” with no other instructions for treating the corn. Posole is hominy, pure and simple. The corn has been treated by soaking it in cal and then rinsed. In the southwest, there is a dried flint corn that has been treated like this and in English, we call it Prepared Hominy and in Mexico it’s known as nixtamal. We sell Prepared Hominy.
My recipe for Posole Verde is here.
Just to confuse things, in America, the corn and the finished dish are called posole. In Mexico, only the finished dish is called pozole.
In the southwest, you can buy posole dried (as I describe above), frozen or canned. You can also buy friend flint corn but you’ll need to treat it, which isn’t hard. In Mexico, the dried, treated hominy (or nixtamal) isn’t available, or at least I’ve never seen it.
My guess is that the author isn’t aware of how regional the prepared hominy is or maybe she’s not even aware that she’s using it. Regarding making nixtamal, she writes, “Doing this is more important for making tamales and tortillas by hand,
but not so much for corn soups. I don’t find that the skin makes an
unpleasant addition to the texture, and the kernels do bloom by
themselves with stewing.” If you look at the photo of the corn, it’s clearly nixtamal, without the skin.
It’s all may seem a little confusing but it’s nothing compared to grits in the south. You get some great debates on that subject. Is it simply coarse polenta or is it hominy?
One of my favorite books is Frank X. Tolbert's A Bowl of Red,
a tribute to Texas chili. He of course insists on bean-less chili. I
understand but I still like a few mixed in. It doesn't need to be that
thick mass like the mess you find in cans. But to each his own.
Despite
his chili stance, Señor Tolbert is a huge pinto bean fan. In fact, he
has a recipe of sorts for Honey beans. He says you should cook the
pintos as normal, trading two or three spoonfuls of honey for salt
pork. You cook until tender and serve with hot buttered corn bread, and
covered with more honey.
I would have thought that the honey would harden the beans but maybe I'm wrong.
Another sweet bean treat was the pinto bean pie from the now defunct Your Black Muslim Bakery. I wish I had the recipe.
You probably know, but I wanted to remind you that we have Good Mother Stallards back. With maybe the exception of Runner Cannellini, their absence from our stock has been the most painful.
They’re great for so many reasons but I think it’s their “pot likker” that gets me the most.
Ever since my first taste of xoconostle in Guanajuato many years ago, I've been a little sad that I haven't been able to grow or find them here in California. I tried to grow them but it didn't work. I'd almost given up.
Then one day, the heavens decided to smile on me and introduced me to my new food friend, Noel, and with very little sleuthing, he discovered them here in Napa.
When Noel brought me my stash, I quickly fainted. When I came to, I ran from work and went home and tried to recreate a salsa my friends in Mexico had taught me. First the xoconostle were roasted in their skin. I may have gone too far but the charring never reached the flesh of the fruit. I also roasted garlic and briefly toasted some guajillo chiles, all on the comal. I reconstituted the chiles in water and then blended all of the ingredients with some salt in the blender, adding a little water to help the blades move.
It made a delicious salsa. The xoconostle adds a meaty fruitiness that can't be replicated without them. First job for the sauce was to doctor up a poached egg on beans. It worked!
Not long ago I bought an interesting and beautiful book called La Vainilla Mexicana (Mexican Vanilla). One of the more interesting soups involved shrimp and vanilla and as soon as I read about it I knew I had to make it.
I didn’t have time to translate the directions so I just made a soup using the ingredients and it was a thing of glory.
I sauteed onion and garlic in olive oil and then added a chopped bunch of epazote, one rehydrated dried chipotle chile, and 1 chopped tomato. After they were cooked, I blended them in the blender with a little water and then returned the liquid to a soup pot (clay, natch). I added some chicken stock and when it was hot, I added about a pound of shrimp and a capful of our own Mexican vanilla extract. The shrimp cooked within minutes and I have to say it was a really wonderful dish.
Remember that our vanilla was sourced by vanilla guru Patricia Rain and contains no funny business, as some Mexican extracts can. Vanilla is a Mexican orchid so it’s fitting that the best should come from New Spain.
I’m all ears if you have other savory ideas for vanilla. This was inspiring.
This weekend's harvest. Just because!
A little love, a little sun, a little water and next thing you know you have a prickly pear cactus that's so heavy with fruit, the paddles start breaking.
Rather than throw them into the compost pile, I saved them to see if the fruits would continue to ripen, and they did!