Satisfying a Sickness

In the early 90's my former husband, Jeff, and I had the amazing opportunity to travel to the southern part of New Mexico on a business trip of his.  I had been to Arizona many times as a child, and loved the desert heat, the huge cacti and funny little road runners that would dart past just as you came around a corner with a huge ice cream cone dripping down your hand, arm, chin and shirtfront, as the sun was setting on another 100+ degree day in which you had spent 12 of the preceding 14 hours in the swimming pool perfecting your underwater distance, your swan dive and your cannon-ball.

But I had never been to New Mexico.  The first time I went I fell in love - just as I had with Arizona as an eight year old girl.  It was mid-September and the chile harvest was in full swing.  Everywhere we went the smell of roasting Hatch chiles filled the air.  The local guys who worked with my husband would end each day at a run-down bar on the outskirts of Las Cruces called Chope's.  Jeff had already discovered this little oasis on a previous trip and we made a beeline for it:  Dark and dilapidated, with cases of beer stacked in one corner because there wasn't anywhere else to store it, a trough serving the role of urinal in the men's restroom, it was packed with a loud, merry bunch of blue collar folks, college students and field workers crammed  into every booth, chair and bar stool available. We made our way to the bar and ordered margaritas and a dozen chiles rellenos - made from the chiles growing in the field behind the bar - hold the red sauce.  When they arrived - hot, smoky, sweet and spicy, cheese flowing smoothly from them with the first cut - my culinary life as I knew it was transformed.

That day we quickly determined when Chope's was open over the course of our trip and pledged to eat there every possible day (sadly, they were closed on Sunday - I have no idea what or where we ate that day).  Our addiction underway, Jeff asked around about the possibility of taking some roasted chiles home with us and learned from someone that we should seek out a man known as "El Gato" - he would have the best chiles at the best price and would sell us a 40 pound bag of roasted nirvana for $20. We would need ziploc baggies, gloves to protect our hands from the capsaicin leaking through the softened chile walls, a cooler in which to store them, surrounded by the dry ice that we would also need to locate, in order to get them home without spoiling.  The day we were leaving we followed the incomplete directions we'd received and found El Gato, then the other items we needed, and headed back to our B&B with a garbage bag full of fresh roasted Big Jims and got to work on the little balcony outside our room.

Back in the Bay Area we tried to replicate the rellenos we'd had at Chope's.  But the batter was too thick and gloppy, or the cheese didn't taste or melt the way it should.  We got close a couple of times, but just couldn't get them right.  Soon, the chiles themselves were gone and it was clear that we would need to return. We were hooked, addicted to the unique taste of roasted New Mexico chiles.  Over the course of two more trips to New Mexico, the quest for chiles rellenos became an obsession for us.  We spent one vacation in Santa Fe and Taos, trying every "acclaimed" chile relleno in those towns - and found them all lacking.  We returned to Las Cruces a few years later, determined to figure out how Chope's did it.  Until that time we had only ever eaten in the bar - shirking the kid-friendly restaurant also owned by the same family on the adjacent lot, for the rowdy mariachi party in the cantina next door.          

But on that trip we decided to try the restaurant and Jeff used his near fluent Spanish to talk our way into the kitchen, where we had the opportunity to watch as the Grandmother of the family sat hunched over a small wooden table, filling those glorious chiles with....  American Cheese.  We were stunned; we'd tried cheddar, monterey jack, and several other cheeses alone and in combination, never imagining that the lowly sliced cheese product was the oozing goodness we'd been searching for.  And the batter?  Little more than whipped egg whites, folded with a little yolk and a splash of beer, into which the stuffed chiles, dredged lightly first in seasoned flour, were dipped until well coated and then gently dropped into a bath of boiling oil.

Having long ago lost our directions for locating El Gato, we nearly ran to find the closest chile stall - 60 pounds this time, please - dropped them in the trunk of our rental car and and then promptly drove into the desert to see the famous drifting White Sands National Monument.  When we returned to the car, the smell of those roasted chiles permeated the air and our return drive to town was agony of the most enticing kind - the smell all round us but the chiles just out of reach.  When we got home with them, we immediately set to work recreating what we'd seen in that small, rustic, wonderful kitchen.  Success!  It was a sweet moment when we tried our first relleno that tasted like those we'd been seeking for years, and we were transported.

For years getting my hands on these chiles was an expensive proposition - and not entirely satisfying even when I could get them because they'd been roasted where I couldn't hand-pick the biggest, best Big Jims to render the perfect relleno, couldn't smell them releasing their intoxicating sweet-smoky aroma, and they'd been frozen for, really, who knows how long.  Imagine my joy upon finding fresh NM chiles at Berkeley Bowl a couple of years ago, JUST after Jeff had received probably the best gift a (chile addicted) man could ever receive from his wife Tracy - a personal, gas powered roaster.  I bought a box of them and headed over to their house.  Suddenly, it seems they're going to be everywhere!

Recently Jeff found the 30-pound burlap bag featured at the top of this post at Lucky's, for the whopping price of $.97/pound!  He invited me to come over and roast some chiles and the resulting photos here represent my reaffirmation and re-dedication of love.  And despite what promises to be a new ability to source these jewels of the chile world, Jeff and I also made a pact - before we die, we will return to Chope's to taste the rellenos that started our madness.  I can't wait.              

Pot Stickers! (And Dry-fried Beef with Asparagus)

I believe I've mentioned before my love of (almost) all foods Asian.  Not much has changed there, but I recently rediscovered a recipe for pot stickers that is so easy and so tasty that I'm not sure why they haven't made it into the routine line-up around here.

I originally discovered this recipe about 8 years ago, I think.  For a time I belonged to one of those cookbook clubs where you sign on initially and get something like 5 cookbooks for $1.00, then you have to buy three more at the regular club price - or something.  It was actually a pretty good deal - some great books, at deep discounts, came out of that membership.  One of the books I got was The Minimalist Cooks Dinner, by Mark Bittman (I know very little about this man, but that picture immediately conjures "smug New Yorker" in my mind.  It's probably a good thing I hadn't seen it when I selected his book.)  The book is a collection of recipes taken from his NYT column "The Minimalist" and are meant to be approachable weeknight recipes.  Seemed just right at a time when I was still newly discovering my love of cooking, but also had an 8 and 9-year old to try and feed, at least by 7:00 pm.  See - didn't they look hungry?

The recipe for pot stickers jumped out at me from the start - probably because I knew we all loved them - but I was equally certain that there was no way in hell I would ever be able to make them.  Still, I gave it a try - though I'm sure the first time was on a weekend when I could devote hours, if necessary, to getting them right.  As it turned out, this recipe delivered as promised: a short list of ingredients easily found in Bay Area grocery stores and a cooking technique that was fast and yielded excellent results.  The most challenging part of it was getting the right amount of filling into the dumpling wrappers: enough to make them plump but not so much to prevent them from sealing completely.  And Mark was right - pretty quickly you develop a rhythm and before you know it, you're done.

So when I recently decided to tackle another Chinese meal at home (looking once again to tap my newly acquired Asian cooking staples), it seemed natural, if not entirely authentic, to start with these.  

I followed them with a dish I'd never tried before, from a cookbook that claims a certain level of authenticity and that I've had for several years but amazingly, had never cooked from:  The Land of Plenty, by Fuchsia Dunlop - another apparently well-known-to-others cookbook author.  Why I haven't cooked from this book before is a (partial) mystery.  I mean, 1) it's Asian and 2) it's Sichuan! What's NOT to love?  Once I started thumbing through it, however, I remembered why:  I lacked a specific ingredient that seemed to have a regular starring role - Sichuan Pepper - because until 2005 the USDA had banned the import of this spice.

When it did become available I immediately bought a bottle of peppercorns and threw a hearty teaspoon of them into an improvised stir-fry one night.  Ack.  The flavor was overwhelming and unpleasant and very quickly my tongue had a strange tangy/numby/tingly feeling.  The jar stayed in my spice cabinet, untouched, until last month.  I had finally gained the courage - having by then read more about the spice and the need to 1) toast the peppercorns first, 2) crush them in a mortar, and 3) SPARINGLY sprinkle the powder on the dish just before serving - to try them once again.            

The recipe is recreated here.  To it, I added asparagus because a vegetable was really needed somewhere in this meal.  Mine ended up looking like this:

It was very good. But if I'm being 100% truthful, there were also lingering sensations from my first failed effort that prevented me from loving it the way I know I should.

On The 7th Day, They Baked. And It Was Good.

I don't really consider myself a baker.  I guess because I much prefer the taste of savory to sweet and in my mind baking = sweet (though of course that's an overly narrow association: see focaccia).  Natalie, however, was born with a lollipop in her mouth I think, and Jack will just plain eat everything. So, as Jack has continued his gorging ways, and as Natalie has become more interested in helping me in the kitchen and I have naturally wanted to encourage that, I've been doing a lot more baking this past year.

Take a couple of weekends ago, for example.  We started with cookies because we happened to have two partial bags of baking chips - one  chocolate and one butterscotch - that had slowly been whittled away by nibbling children in search of something sweet, and half a bag of shredded, sweetened coconut.  Inexplicably, they seemed destined to meet in a cookie.

From there we suddenly decided that a cake was needed.  For a Birthday? Dinner party? Nope.  We just needed a cake.  And for some reason it came to me that we needed my Mom's Chocolate Angel Food Cake - my favorite while growing up and the one I requested for my Birthday every year.  

In fact, the first year I was away at college my Birthday happened to coincide with a business trip that my sister Judy had in Oakland. So my Mom baked the cake the night before, frosted it that morning at about 6:00 am, and made Judy carry it on her lap on the plane so she could deliver it to me at my dorm that morning, before the meeting.  Judy was traveling with colleagues and I am certain they thought our family was nuts.  And I think they were late to the meeting.  But that was the best Birthday cake I've ever had.

The only time I had ever made this cake before was alongside my Mom when she came to town after Natalie was born and I realized that I would need that recipe some day.

One might think that would be enough.  No.  There were bananas that were just reaching their brown and rotting peak for banana bread.  This is another of Mom's recipes that I grew up with and that all of my friends throughout my school years agreed was the best banana bread they had ever had ("please don't tell my Mom I said that").  Now my kids - and their friends - know it as the perfect rendition.  Once when Nat, Jack and I were home in Tacoma for Christmas, Judy baked a loaf for us to take back to CA.  It seems my Mom's recipes are good travelers (there's another family story about the cookies - I think - that my Mom mailed to my sister in Louisiana when she was there with VISTA during the height of the civil rights movement.  I think Mom had to call the governor of LA to get them to her - for her Birthday).

Sadly - I didn't get a picture of the bread itself, but as proof that this recipe is The recipe, I share a picture of the recipe card, which clearly demonstrates the use (and abuse) it has seen since Mom gave it to me shortly after I was married.  This is easily the one thing I have made most often, though typically without the nuts that dot the loaves Mom makes.
I love the simplicity of my Mom's recipes: the ingredients, the necessary oven temperature and time, and very little else.  What this recipe lacks, for instance, is the tip that each of these ingredients can be added in succession to a food processor and mixed up in no time at all, with minimal mess.  Or that the bananas should be very ripe.

Likewise with her recipe for the cake.  Just a list of ingredients with the briefest instruction following each one.  Missing: the only thing you frost this cake with is sweetened whipping cream, which will melt if you leave it out too long.  Of course Mom wrote these down from memory - she doesn't follow a recipe that she reads, like I need to do; she just makes it.  Perfectly.  Every time.  For someone who told me later in life that she always hated cooking, Mom sure managed to put out some delicious food.      

Sigh. Are we finished yet?  No.  For some reason we were compelled to make something else that we could decorate.  We'd made cookies, a cake, and bread.  What was left?  Cupcakes!  So....

Honestly.  We didn't eat all of this ourselves.  We shared.

And then, we rested.

AMEN.