Experiments in my New World Kitchen and Garden

The next time y0u have a grill handy, try grilling some cactus paddles and shrimp. They make a great taco filling.

Just give them a quick bath in some garlic and oil before hitting the flame. The nopales will take longer to cook so start them first. You can even cook the tortillas on the grill.

The more I eat Poblano chiles, the more I love them. The roasting and peeling part is a bit of a hassle but once you do it a few times, it becomes routine.  I know there are sauces using the chiles but I needed to come up with a fairly low calorie and low fat version for pasta and this is what happened:

4 poblano chiles, roasted, peeled and seeded
1/4 cup beer
1/2 an onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
small bunch fresh epazote leaves, chopped
kernels from 1 ear of corn
olive oil.

Sauté the onion and garlic in the oil.
In a blender, add the chiles and just enough beer to make the blades move and blend well.
Add the blender sauce to the onions and garlic. Add more beer of needed. Cook 10 minutes. Salt.
Add chopped epazote and corn. Heat through and toss with cooked pasta (1 pound dry).

If I were feeling slimmer, I would have replaced the beer with sour cream.
If you don’t have fresh epazote, just leave it out. The dried won’t work.

Have you noticed how many people that have spent thousands to redo their kitchens with Viking ranges, full sets of All-Clad cookware and state of the art refrigerators never cook? I’d love a great professional range but clearly it’ s not a guarantee of being a good cook or even developing an interest in cooking.

I think this P’urhépecha cook helps bring it all back into perspective. Her metate is state of the art for the task of preparing masa, in this case from blue corn, but her "range" is homemade and I’d guess the clay comal is made by hand as well. The white paste is lime, or CaL, and it’s used to make the masa (soaking the corn in lime water loosens the skins of the corn) and to keep the tortillas from sticking to the comal. Note that she’s got some tomatoes and chiles heating up on the side, probably for a salsa.

I took this photo in Uruapan, in Michoacan.

Last Spring, in the lovely town of Patzcuaro, in the state of Michoacan in Mexico, I had some great street food. Street food in Mexico is often a taco or something indulgent deep fried but this was an incredibly unique and healthy treat. The flavor almost haunts me! A young woman was serving atole de grano and when I heard it was basically a soup with corn and fennel, I quickly lost interest despite the queue of locals waiting for it.

My friends insisted that I try it and I’m so glad that I did. It was delicious, rich and seemingly complex. When we pressed the woman on how she made it, I missed most of the discussion but the essence was the corn and anisillo (which I assumed was fennel) were mashed in a metate and that this mashing, along with cooking in her beloved clay pot on an open flame, were what gave her dish its flavor. I was surprised to find she didn’t use chicken stock and I made a mental note to experiment when I returned home.

I thought I’d play around with the idea now that corn is in season. The problem of course is that currently, American corn can be substituted with pure sugar. It’s too sweet and there’s no market for starchy corn, it would seem. Never the less, I pushed on, trying to make something good, inspired by this great dish.

First I cut up half an onion and four cloves of garlic and added them to a black clay chamba pot with a little olive oil and gently started to saute the vegetables. Then, I boiled the kernels of four ears of corn and 3 chopped bulbs of fennel. The fennel cooked quickly. I strained the vegetables out and reserved the boiling liquid. Then in small batches, I ground the vegetables in my molcajete.

Even though I have a large molcajete, it’s easy to have the contents splash over the size so it really pays to work in small batches. The woman in Patzcuaro insisted that the metate was part of the key to good flavor and texture.  A metate is a larger volcanic piece commonly used to grind nixtamalized corn for masa and a molcajete isn’t the same but not having a metate, it was the next best thing in my kitchen.

I kept grinding until I had a paste. As I finished a batch, I’d add it to the onions and garlic in the clay pot, letting them fry a bit as I finished all the batches of corn and fennel.

Next, I added the reserved boiling water, which was cloudy and flavorful from the corn and fennel. I added just enough to make a soup and then stirred well. I brought the mixture to a boil and then let it simmer on low for about an hour.

The natural cornstarch in the kernels made the soup thicken, but I added a little too much of the water so I let it cook down and evaporate for another hour. After salting, the soup was ready.

To be honest, it was almost nothing like the dish the woman in Mexico had made but it was great and I wouldn’t hesitate serving it to company. A very little more research revealed that anisillo isn’t fennel at all but a green herb (actually one of four similar herbs used regionally, according to my Diccionario Enciclopedico de Gastronomia by Ricardo Zurita) in the Tagetes family, which would include Mexican marigold.

I’d probably make a big pot like this again. Even if I had chicken stock on hand, I wouldn’t have used it. It doesn’t need it. I may try and make this the next time there’s a barbecue and see if cooking outdoors, on coal or wood, improves the flavor.

I tend to fall back on this appetizer whenever there’s a summer get-together. It takes a lot of chopping but it’s easy and forgiving.

Drain a can of clams, reserving the liquid. Then chop radishes, red onions, carrot, tomatoes (if in season), cilantro, a chile or two and toss with some lime juice a bit of the reserved clam juice. Salt and toss again. Serve with good corn chips or even saltines.

I had some leftover homemade tortillas on hand that were going stale, so I deep fried them to make tostadas and piled on the ceviche.