The Mija Chronicles

Mexican food and culture, on both sides of the border

Recipes

Smoky, spicy chile mora salsa

by

One of my new favorite smells is the chile mora. It’s a smoked, dried jalapeño, and therefore classified as a chipotle. But it’s a bit sweeter and more raisin-like than the brown chipotles you see in the markets. It’s also not as hot. (The chile morita, a cousin, is much spicier.)

Chile moras smell so intoxicating — a heady mix of chocolate, raisins, herbs and smoke — that I was almost tempted to leave the batch I bought on my kitchen counter as an air freshener. But I bought them to make a salsa, so that’s what I was going to do. If I didn’t eat the chiles raw first.

Tomatoes and onions, after they've been roasted on the comal

Decided to use the molcajete, and I used the same technique as in other molcajete salsas I’ve posted on this blog — first grind the salt and aromatics, then the chiles, then the tomatoes. Each ingredient is added a little bit at a time to ensure the proper consistency.

My problem was that the chiles just wouldn’t break down. I’d gotten a few tough ones in my batch from the market, and their skin didn’t soften even after 20 minutes in hot water. Plus this time I was envisioning a thin table salsa — something that you could spoon into a taco, or over eggs.

So I broke out the immersion blender.

(You: “You did?”)

Yes, I did. A few quick pulses and a chorrito de agua and boom. I had what I wanted — a salsa that had the consistency of a thick soup or porridge, with bits of chile seeds still visible.

It should be noted that I still don’t trust myself with a blender to make salsas. Of the two batches of salsa I made, the second one came out looking like pureed tomato sauce. (Still tasty, but the texture was, as Mexicans say, equis. Meaning mediocre and nothing special.) My preferred salsa texture veers toward the heftier side.

Because the chile moras are so smoky, this salsa tastes good on just about anything. I liked it especially on sweet vegetables, which played off the mora’s raisiny notes. Layered it on a corn tortilla between roasted onions and red peppers, and it was just about perfect.
…

Read More

The great huauzontle wrap-up. Or, alternately… all huauzontle’d out.

by

I really, really wanted to close out The Week of Huauzontles with a spectacular new recipe. But then the weekend came around, and our friends Julie and John had a despedida, and then I got stomach sick, and then our friend Justin came to town for a few days. And next thing I know it was Tuesday.

My original point with TWOH was to enlighten a few folks out there about this scruffy, nutritious vegetable. As the week wore on and I was eating The Huauz every day — leftover from the massive one-kilo bunch I bought at the tianguis — I ended up learning a fair bit myself. You can really eat huauzontles in just about anything — salsa, queso, scrambled eggs. You can stuff it inside a chicken breast, roll it up and cover it with mole sauce, and it’ll be pretty fantastic. (Also, anything tastes good with mole.)

You can add it to rice and chicken broth, to soothe a delicate stomach.

And it freezes beautifully, a fact I figured out on accident, because my fridge has some frozen-spot issues.

Those bitter huauzontle stems that I used to fear would ruin any dish really don’t taste so bitter after all. Well, some of them do, but not the ones near the fluffy buds.

I’ll close out with a simple little recipe I found on the Internet, for huauzontle-stuffed chicken breasts blanketed in mole. It’s perfect for when you have an extra cup of huauzontles lying around and a bag of mole in the freezer. (Two things that are quite probable if you live and cook in Mexico.)
…

Read More

Salsa de tomate verde (tomatillo salsa) with huauzontles

by

Even after almost two years in Mexico, I still like to buy salsa out of a jar. (Hey, it’s convenient.) But because this is the Week of Huauzontles, and the huauz requires so much care, I figured it’d be worth it to make a salsa molcajeteada — a salsa where you grind everything in a molcajete, and the ingredients come together because of your own strength and patience.

Mixing huauzontles and tomatillos was not entirely my idea. Yuri whipped it up in cooking class a few weeks ago, using huauzontles leftover from a soup we were preparing. He boiled tomatillos and serrano chiles and ground them up in a blender, and then stirred in the huauz. The result was so good that I slathered it inside a tortilla and ate it alone as a taco.

You might be asking: but can’t I just use a blender to make this salsa, too? Yuri did!

Yuri has magic blending powers, because when I tried to make a similar salsa in my own blender, it was watery and too acidic. The molcajete allowed me much more control over the texture. I kept a few pieces of tomatillo cáscara, and added roasted onion and garlic to mellow out the flavor a bit. An allspice berry, known in Spanish at pimienta gorda (literally, “fat peppercorn”) gave it just a whisper of a curry-like, cumin-cinnamon taste.

A typical tomatillo salsa has a well-balanced mix of acid and heat, and the huauzontles here don’t mess with that. They do add one key element, however: texture. The little flowery buds provide heartiness, and an almost artichoke-broccoli-like chewiness. It’s like eating a really good, spicy pasta sauce.

I served this over tortillas sandwiched together with refried beans, topped with a fried egg. Today I’ll probably eat the leftovers in a taco.

Recipe below.
…

Read More

Mex-Tex queso with huauzontle and chorizo verde

by

It may look like guac in the photo, but I promise you it's queso. And yes, that is a Texas-shaped bowl in the background.

I’m not as knowledgeable as some people in the Tex-Mex cuisine cannon, but eight years in Texas did teach me the importance of one thing: queso. (That’s pronounced KAY-so.)

Queso is basically a jazzed-up melted cheese sauce, consisting of Velveeta, tomatoes, onions, jalapeños and maybe crumbly bits of ground beef. You eat it with tortilla chips. And beer. Preferably on game day. Or during happy hour. Ok, you pretty much eat it whenever the mood strikes.

I’d been hankering for some queso since we moved to Mexico, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. Chili’s had it (score!) but then they took it off their menu (lame). Crayton and I suffered through our queso-less lives in silence until a few weekends ago when he said, “You know what sounds really good right now? Queso.” And I said, “Yeah, I agree. Why don’t I make some?”

Until that point, I hadn’t thought about making queso from scratch because it requires Velveeta. Velveeta is sold at Costco, and I couldn’t justify a $10 cab ride solely to buy processed cheese product.

But what if I used real cheese?

At that point, I think I might’ve heard the universe crackle.

I thought avoiding Velveeta was queso blasphemy, but it turns out there are a few real-cheese queso recipes on the Internet. I used a a Homesick Texan recipe as my inspiration, and piled together an assortment of items that I had in my fridge — Mexican manchego because it melted well, huauzontles because they’re vegetables and I like those; tomatoes, a jalapeño, carrots in escabeche.

My Mex-Tex queso was so good that I made it again the following weekend, this time for the Bears vs. Cowboys game. I added chorizo verde (pretty much because it rocks, and it kept the green theme) and I put the queso in our fondue pot to keep it saucy and hot. Alice and Nick, both of whom are Texans, came over. They practically swooned when the saw the pot of cheese.

We scooped it with homemade totopos, carrots, cucumbers. There wasn’t much talking going on.

You don’t need the huauzontles to make this dish a success — a pile of grated cheese will do that on its own.

However, the huauz did add a pleasant grit and chewiness, similar to a spinach-artichoke dip, or a broccoli-cheese soup. And I mean that in the most natural, comforting way possible, not in a chain-restaurant kind of way. I promise you, this stuff is good.

Recipe below.
…

Read More

Introducing… The Week of Huauzontles

by

Huauzontles and I didn’t have the most auspicious beginning. Last fall, if you recall, I bought a bunch solely because I liked the way they looked. (A bushy green amaranth plant is hard to resist.)

I didn’t know that you weren’t supposed to eat the stems, and so I threw in a mess of raw huauzontles, with stems, into a pan of roasted butternut squash. The result reminded me of the weeds my mom used to make me pull as a kid.

Lately, huauzontles have become one of my favorite ingredients, precisely because they’re so finicky. This is a vegetable that makes you work for its love. You have to shape it, prune it, peel off its bitter leaves and spongy flower pods. At the end, if you’ve done your work correctly, you’ve got a pile of flower pods that feel like soft, airy sand. They taste like a milder version of broccoli.

Crayton prepares the huauzontle for its bike-ride home, after buying it at the tianguis

You might be thinking: Am I really going to do all this work for something that tastes like broccoli?

Shouldn’t it taste… better?

Here’s the thing about huauzontles: it’s not just about the taste. It’s about the transformation, and being close to your food. Huauzontles require human interaction. Because of your hard work, it’s you who transforms this grassy, wild stalk into a pile of airy crumbs that can suit just about anything. I’ve eaten huauzontles in pasta sauce and tomatillo salsa, and shaped into fluffy, small croquettes; later this week, I’m going to stuff it inside a chicken breast, just to see what happens.

Because I want more people to appreciate this strange-but-lovable vegetable, I’m launching the Week of Huauzontles on The Mija Chronicles, which is a series of posts dedicated to The Huauz. (As I’m now calling it, affectionately.) First up is a step-by-step guide on how to clean and prepare the huauzontle for cooking. Later this week I’ll post some recipes, including the truly awesome huauzontle queso dip with chorizo verde.

Even if you’re not a huauz fan, I hope you at least appreciate the versatility of this tree-like vegetable.

More coming tomorrow!

Agua de tuna (prickly-pear agua fresca) with lime and chia

by

When I was a baby, my mom used to sing me a song about the moon eating a prickly-pear cactus fruit, and throwing the skins into a lagoon.

Ahí viene la luna
comiendo la tuna
tirando las cáscaras
a la laguna!

(Note: after the word “laguna,” you’re supposed to tickle the baby’s stomach.)

Growing up, I knew the word “tuna” meant prickly-pear cactus fruit. But I had no desire to try them, because the idea of eating a cactus fruit seemed too weird. Even when I started to get more serious about food, I ignored them. Funny what moving to Mexico does — this summer, surrounded by an abundance of tunas because of the rainy season, I realized that I’d misjudged them.

Tunas are some of the juiciest, most naturally sweet fruits around. They have the wet, porous flesh of a watermelon, speckled with tiny hard seeds. In fact, an agua de tuna — the juice of the tuna, mixed with water and sugar — is one of the sweetest aguas frescas. Sometimes the drink can verge on cloying.

Yesterday at the tianguis, I found a vendor who was practically giving his tunas away. His sign said as much:

These tunas cost 12 pesos for two kilos' worth. That's about 4 1/2 pounds for less than $1.

I bought a kilo, peeled…

What tunas look like naked

…and decided to make an agua fresca de tuna that’s less sweet than the ones I’ve tried. Mine would have lime and chia seeds to tone things down. Well, actually, the chia wouldn’t really affect the sweetness factor, but it would add a healthy boost.

The agua turned out even better than I hoped. It was a pretty pistachio color, and the taste was kind of like a melon-lemonade. I drank a glass after finishing up a tennis game (I’m taking classes, so this was my first game ever), and I couldn’t have asked for a more refreshing drink. This agua was way better than Gatorade.

Recipe below.
…

Read More

Tacos de rajas with queso cotija

by

Last week we had a guest instructor in cooking class, and he gave us a list of dishes to prepare over three hours: chiles rellenos, salsa de chile pasilla, fish wrapped in hoja santa and banana leaves, jalapeños en escabeche and rajas con queso cotija.

Out of all of them, the rajas were probably the least exciting. I love rajas (pronounced RAH-has) but what more can you learn about roasting, deveining and peeling poblano peppers, and then cutting them into strips? I’d already done it several times at home.

Instead, I chose to spend the class — where else — in front of the molcajete, grinding the chile pasilla salsa. I roasted my chiles and rehydrated them in boiling water, and then ground them to bits. (The key there: the chiles must be completely pliable. You can’t remove them from the water too soon.) I plopped one tomatillo after the other into the bowl and smooshed each one to death, while also trying to shield my apron from the splatter. (If you’re wondering why I used a partner’s molcajete instead of my own, it’s because I was too worried about a possible pumice aftertaste. I still haven’t seasoned the damn thing correctly.)

At the end of class, everyone got to take home a chile, one fish filet and the rajas in little plastic baggies. Back at our apartment, Crayton and I sat in front of the TV with a couple of beers and dug in.

I love to share with my husband, but the rajas were so good I wanted them all to myself. They had the sweetness of a roasted root vegetable, while the cheese gave the dish these bursts of saltiness, and a kind of sour, pastoral tang. Cotija is hard, crumbly cow’s-milk cheese that’s named after a town in Michoacán, where it’s manufactured; it is characteristically salty and slightly acidic.

The dish seemed hearty enough to work on its own as a taco filling. So I invited my friend Daniel over for dinner a few days ago and decided to make the rajas again. Right before he came over, I momentarily panicked: Was this going to work? Were the rajas too strong to serve on their own, with a few crumbly bits of cheese?

I made brown rice at the last minute, just in case we needed something bland. But everything turned out fine. The peppers were as sweet as I remembered, and I think the cheese actually helped mellow the dish out. I served the tacos with some of my leftover chile pasilla salsa and they were a hit.

Recipe below.
…

Read More

Guacamole de molcajete, and how to make it without fear

by

I’ve always wanted to be an expert at making guacamole.

In my deep-seeded dreams for myself, I am that woman who throws a lovely, Mexican-food dinner party, featuring a simple batch of guacamole that blows everyone’s minds.

I could not make this dream come true, though, because I was too scared to make any. When I lived in Texas, I was on this guacamole high horse and didn’t want to use a recipe. So twice I made batches that were actually bad — one had too much lime juice; the other, too much onion. In Mexico City, I started making a kind of fast-food version of guac that combined avocados and Herdez salsa verde. It’s actually pretty good, but I felt a little ashamed to serve fast-food guac with something like homemade hibiscus-flower quesadillas.

Then about a month ago, I took a class on how to prepare salsas. We learned that the base of all guac is a pico de gallo — the combo of onion, cilantro, tomato and serrano chiles. You grind these things together in the molcajete and then add avocados. Top the whole thing with a few squirts of lime juice. That’s it. Doneskis.

I still didn’t have enough confidence to try it on my own, however, until I spent two hours seasoning my metate. Using just my two hands and a grinding stone, I had turned dried corn and beans into dust. Making guacamole? Pffft. That’s puny work.

About three weeks ago, with absolutely no nervousness at all, I used the ratios from my cooking class and whipped up a batch to accompany some quesadillas. The result was the best guacamole I’d ever made: buttery and creamy and evenly balanced, with a tang from the tomatoes. And I had made the entire thing myself. No Herdez.

I’ve since this a few more times, including at a party attended by some French tourists. They kept coming up to me and saying, “This is so good!” It was not exactly my dinner-party vision come to life, but close enough. I felt really proud.

Recipe below.
…

Read More

Homemade barbecue pork buns, rigged for Mexico

by

Some of my fellow bloggers have opined recently about the lack of good Asian food here in Mexico City. It’s true: if you want good Asian food, with a few exceptions, you’re pretty much going to have to make it yourself.

Alice recently came back from a trip to the States, where she ate homemade barbecue pork buns (known as char siu bao) at her mom’s house every day. She was dying for more, but they’re not easy to find here. So she decided to make her own.

She called me and mentioned she was doing this, so I invited myself over to hang out and take pictures. I don’t know much about buns, but I do know a good photo-and-cooking opportunity when I see one.

…

Read More

Improvised tilapia pibil

by

My husband is not a fan of seafood. Usually when I tell people that, they say, “Anything? He doesn’t eat any seafood?” And I say, “No. Nothing.” And then they persist: “Not even shrimp?” And I say no, not even shrimp.

Slowly, slooowly, I’ve been trying to introduce fish, because of its health benefits. But it’s been hard to find a fish that’s not overly fishy-tasting. (And it pains me to say that, because I love fish that’s overly fishy tasting.) A while back when we lived in Texas, I asked him if he wouldn’t mind tasting some tilapia. He agreed, and so I baked it in parchment and drizzled on some olive oil and lemon juice.

To my shock, he actually ate the whole thing. And he didn’t grimace, which is what he usually does when he doesn’t like a certain food. (The funny part is that he doesn’t know he’s grimacing. It’s pretty cute.)

We haven’t eaten fish in awhile, so yesterday I bought a few tilapia filets and decided to cook them in Yucatecan pibil-style spices. Pibil comes from the Mayan word “pib,” which means “cooked in an earthen oven.” The term generally refers to meat that’s been marinated in a mix of achiote, sour orange juice, garlic and spices. It’s wrapped in banana leaves and baked — traditionally in an underground pit — on low heat, until the meat is falling-apart tender. Cochinita pibil is perhaps the most famous dish made this way.

The pibil spices aren’t hot, in terms of chile peppers. The marinade is a combination of subtle flavors, with a zesty kick from the sour orange juice. It’s also pretty easy to throw together. If you don’t have sour orange juice, you can use half white vinegar and half regular orange juice.

I’m calling this “improvised” tilapia pibil because I baked it in aluminum foil, not banana leaves. (Not because I eschew banana leaves — I just didn’t have any on hand.) It worked fine. I need to keep banana leaves in the freezer though, because they impart a certain aroma that you don’t get with regular old foil or parchment paper.

By the way, Crayton enjoyed this. He ate the whole thing, again, with no grimaces. So we’re tilapia 2 for 2.

Recipe below.
…

Read More