Author: foodnerd

blogrific DIY quickie mexican

Well, I’m an idjit and forgot that the foodsluts are in New Zealand for three weeks (except a few days in Fiji, which apparently have resulted in appalling meals, awkward sleep, and potential tapeworm — they’re *very* happy to be heading to the land of good tea and honey-yogurt breakfasts), so i had to eat the tamales by myself. Tallasiandude and I ate 6 for dinner the other night, accompanied by a quick salsa and a batch of this recipe for spicy chocolate black beans from 101 Cookbooks, adapted somewhat by me. It was awesome. The tamales were fabulous, I wish we had a better source for them here; I will have to scout around.
But what was somehow more satisfying, probably because of its total serendipitousness, was the lunch I had the next day. In the midst of a total crisis at work, no less, so it had to be fast and filling and joy-inducing, no small challenge given the state of my fridge. Two small corn tortillas, spread with the last of the beans, topped with slices of cheese (regular old sandwich cheddar slices) and microwaved for a minute, then topped with the salsa & some sour cream. Holy god it was yummy.
Salsa = 2-3 fresh diced ripe tomatoes, minced onion, minced serrano, juice of 3 limes, cilantro for those that like it. Very limey and tangy, nice against the sweet thick beans.
Beans = 1/2 onion & 1/2 red bell pepper, diced & sauteed in a tiny bit of olive oil with a couple cloves thin sliced garlic added once things soften. Salt, cumin, cinnamon, cayenne, allspice to taste, and fry a bit more till dry. Then add about a third of a bottle of beer – i used IPA because it was all I had, and it lent a bitter note I didn’t totally appreciate, so I’d probably recommend something else, like, I dunno, Negro Modelo. *wink* Add water to thin down the beer, add a drained can of black beans, and smash the beans roughly with your spoon as they cook. Adjust spices as it cooks down. When it looks & tastes like nice spicy chunky refried beans, add 1/2 a disk of Ibarra Mexican chocolate and let it melt in and blend. You could probably use any decent dark chocolate and to be extra diligent you could add a bit extra sugar & cinnamon to get the same effect. It ends up earthy, sweet, and spicy, kind of mole-like in flavor, awesome against corn tortillas & lime-y salsa.

turn about is fair play

So foodnerd has returned from Chicago (to a kitchen full of formerly-green tomatoes now about to expire of ripe redness, yikes), and turns out tallasiandude has been all resourceful about feeding himself in my absence and turned to the foodbloggers for inspiration. Cheers to dave at weber_cam for pasta with raw tomato sauce… and we may do it again tonight, lest the bounty be wasted. Thanks, dave!

maxwell street market

New Maxwell Street Market. Canal St between Taylor & 15th St, Sundays 7-3. Why, oh why can we not have mexican food like this at home? My favorite new discovery is birria – a hot soup of goat, broth, tomato, chilis, clove, cinnamon, cilantro… etc. Served with a pile of thin warm tortillas. Delicious, very spicy, filling, totally soul-satisfying – kind of like chinese spicy beef noodle soup only without the noodles and with tomatoes and cilantro. (here is a vaguely approximate recipe, based on my taste memories)
When you see a jostling crowd of mexican people jammed into a food stall, it’s a decent guess the food is worthwhile… so we snagged a first course of tacos from the far 15th st side of the market — carne asada with great texture and flavor, chorizo also good, and fabulous green tomatillo hotsauce. Starving so these were just utterly wonderful.
H talked me into a mexican coke — not as sweet, and really good, but my bottle claimed to have high fructose corn syrup — weird since the whole point is that in mexico they still use cane sugar. H’s said sugar, so who knows.
Dessert course started with a hot chocolatey drink – champurrado. Chocolate, cinnamon, corn – creamy soft chewy mouthfeel. Terrific on a blustery fall day. Then we found the truck with the lady selling fresh fried churros – we got ours with gooey vanilla filling. How can you not love a dessert that is crunchy and fried? Good contrast of textures and flavors, with the crunchy sugary outside, the soft warm doughy inside, and the gooey filling, but i suspect I might agree with J and prefer it without the filling. However, filling your churro offers the opportunity to see the *hilarious* machine used to fill them — a skinny nozzle like used to steam & froth milk for cappucino, but with a little lever that causes it to extrude flavored pudding when stuck into the tiny hole in the churro.
I was saving my known quantity for last, and so I was stuffed already by the time we got to the cocktel mixto — but of course that didn’t stop me. It’s still awesome. Not quite as transcendent as I remembered, which is sad, but nevertheless satisfyingly tangy, cool & spicy. Ate the leftovers for breakfast in the airport after having a meltdown dealing with boneheaded United Airlines staff who couldn’t figure out how to check a bag after going through security. (Note to self: don’t buy letter openers on vacation, or if you do, check the damned thing. Duh.) I kind of wonder whether it would be doable at home — the shrimp isn’t too hard, it’s the octopus that’d be the trick to get right. The texture is so good, soft and meaty without being too chewy. The rest is just water (from poaching the seafood, it looks like), ketchup, lime juice, hot sauce, onion & cilantro. And saltines. Mmmmmmmm.
H had some canela – hot cinnamon tea which smelled great, though I didn’t try any b/c I was utterly stuffed to the eyeballs. Speaking of eyeballs, we all passed on the eyeball tacos available at one stand. (I have a strong stomach and an adventurous palate, but *shudder*.) J had a huarache – flat corn oval filled with black bean, topped with meat and cotija and onion and cilantro, which I remember from last time as being delish. We were all too full for grilled corn with cheese & chili powder, or potato chips drenched in hot sauce, or milk caramel lollipops, or atole. Our horchata was good but way too watery — that’s what we get for buying it at 3pm after all the ice melted in it. And H bought 3 pounds of gorgeous glossy orange habaneros, with which she intends to make the winter’s batch of hotsauce — the girl likes the spicy. I’ve never seen such pretty peppers; it would’ve made a great photo, if only I’d had the camera.
Update on the green & red tamales to follow once the foodsluts and I get to eat a few.
I really have got to work on my basic conversational and culinary spanish — i was totally at sea. Thank god for J being all cool & bilingual and stuff.

miscellaneous chicago treats

I’ve been eating a lot of late-night crap meals because I’m out late dancing, but a few things have crossed my path:

  • Garrett’s popcorn, cheese flavor & caramel flavor. Wow.
  • All pickle relish is apparently neon green here.
  • Bosnian food is what happens when Turkish & Slavic food interbreed: I had a sandwich of spiced ground meat kabob & barbecued chicken liver on grilled turkish-style bread.
  • There are plenty of restaurants open all night here. That’s my kinda town.
  • Beef chow foon is a reliable sketchy-chinese-restaurant standby for all occasions. And I have learned the characters for pan fried, for bean, and for fish. Yay me!

chicago italian beef

*drool* H&J took me to Johnny’s Italian Beef out in some distant western suburb (Lake Forest? Forest Park? Lakewood? take two nature words, stick ’em together, and you’ve got a Chicago neighborhood — i can’t keep ’em straight) for lunch today. Italian beef turns out to be roast beef au jus on steroids: thin slices of beef, on a french sub roll, with giardiniera (pickled peppers — either sweet or hot) and thin gravy. It’s the gravy that’s the key; it’s kind of like beef broth with lots of salt & basil & oregano. You can get them dry, so they keep their sandwichy form, or you can get them wet, or extra wet, in which case they submerge the sandwich in lots of the yummy gravy so that what you’re actually eating is a smushy, gooey mess of pickly beefy goodness. Readers of this blog know how I am about sauce, so you know i got my sammie extra wet. French fries serve as a condiment, and homemade lemon italian ice cuts the grease. Bliss.

foodnerd’s in chicago

I just love Chicago. In particular I love the architecture (and the real estate prices, oy), and the fact that it’s just like NYC but with lots of nice midwestern people in it. And the midcentury modern stuff everywhere, it’s like I’ve died and gone to heaven. But none of this has distracted me from my first love. Last night we had Turkish takeout from down the street, one of two in the immediate neighborhood (*swoon*)… bean salads and kebabs and fabulous tomato sauces. And for lunch today we went to the Swedish deli, but on the way we ran into a White Castle, and because I was heretofore a slider virgin, we had a little burger amuse-bouche. Harold & Kumar were on to something good, damn. At the deli we got herring in mustard-dill sauce, and pickled herring, and sweet pickled cucumbers, and potato lefse, which is an astonishingly tasty, very potatoey flat soft bread. I also got some fishy products in squeezable tubes as presents for the other foodsluts (cod roe spread with dill, etc. — i love the scandinavians). My friend lives in Andersonville, where the last vestiges of the Swedish community linger on. She also reviews restaurants, so for dinner we got a truckload of free sushi, most of it good, some of it kind of blah… but we have learned that white tuna is a creamy melt in your mouth tasty treat.
Stay tuned for further adventures… I intend to get down to the Maxwell St. Market for some more seafood cocktail and other mexitreats, and we are planning an outing for something called Italian beef. The place with the duck fat french fries is still closed (there was a fire some months ago, apparently) so I am just going to have to come back for that some other time. Sigh.

grandma’s chili sauce

A good thing to do with the last of the red garden tomatoes that are about to rot, and a diced green pepper someone brought over for a salad and no one ate (of course not, because green peppers are gross). It’s an old-skool yankee new england thing — my mom and grandma would make this when I was a kid, and I thought it was the most revolting thing this side of raw green peppers, but somehow in my 30s I figured out that it’s delicious: tangy, sweet, savory. Great with roast meats, on sandwiches, with cheese & crackers. And also great mixed into sweet boston-style baked beans.
6 ripe tomatoes (2.5 lbs, or 2 pint cans)
2 peppers (1 will do)
1 onion
1/2 cup cider vinegar (you may want to use 2/3 cup)
scant 1/2 tbsp salt
1/2 cup sugar (you may want to use 2/3 cup)
Peel the tomatoes if you are industrious, or do what I do and put them in the saucepan in really big chunks and when they’ve cooked a little, fish the chunks out and pull off the skins. Chop the peppers and onion into a fairly fine dice, or to your liking for a condiment. Add them to tomatoes, along with the vinegar, salt & sugar. Let it cook down over a slow heat. Break up the tomatoes as they soften. If you think it needs more vinegar or sugar after it’s cooked down enough to blend flavors, add a bit more so you’re using the 2/3 cup quantity. Keep boiling it down, stirring as needed to prevent burning, until it’s as thick a sauce as you want. Mine cooked slowly for most of the afternoon, and is still a bit loose. If you really get it thick, it’ll be quite sweet, like a tangy jam, or you can leave it looser and it’ll be more vegetal and saucy. I give mine a couple of zaps with the immersion blender to even out the texture a bit, though it’s still chunky. Pour it into a clean jar and keep in the fridge. This recipe makes about 1.5 pints. If you like canning, you can do a batch of 5 pints (7.5 lbs tomato, 1.5 lb peppers, .75 lb onion, 2.5 c vinegar, 1 tbsp salt, 2 c sugar) and put them up the proper way… but as previously stated on this blog, I am lazy, so I skip the canning part and rely on the fridge.

grape ape! grape ape!

My mom gave me a bunch of concord grapes this weekend, a few red ones from the backyard and a bigger pile of black ones from somewhere in the woods. You can’t eat ’em, because they’re pretty tart and have a very weird texture, kind of like a juicy eyeball inside a tough leather shell. But you can most definitely make jelly out of ’em. We did it last year (with moderate success) and were all fired up to do it this year.
One thing I have learned is that the black concords are WAY better than the red. The reds are good, but the black have that intense ur-grape flavor we know from Welch’s fine products, and they also have the most gorgeous purple color when cooked, while the red ones get kind of drab, as you can see in the picture below. (Watch out — the gorgeous purple stains in a flash, so don’t get any on the counter or porous surfaces.)
I use the jelly recipe in the old (1975) edition of The Joy of Cooking. Annoyingly, the new edition has jettisoned the jam & jelly section entirely, which i find extra-bizarre given the popularity of Martha-type activities these days. Anyway, you crush or slice the fruit and cook it down with a tiny bit of water till it releases juice and gets all soft. The house will be permeated with the most intoxicatingly wonderful grape smell, like walking past a ripe grapevine in the woods, only ten times better. Then you strain it through a cheesecloth, just letting it sit there and drip, resisting the intense urge to squeeze the cloth to get the last precious bits of juice, because if you do, the jelly will be (*gasp* the horror!) cloudy.


Of course this makes me insane, because A) i am impatient, and B) i am greedy, and I hate the idea of wasting that lovely fruit pulp. I had the additional excuse of having only a wisp of cheesecloth left in the house the night I cooked up the fruit, so I decided to try making grape JAM instead of jelly. I scraped the pulp through a fine sieve, getting all the juice & pulp out and leaving just a pasty mess of skin & seeds. Kind of looked like I’d been mistreating a poor defenseless pomegranate.
Then back to the jelly-making procedure: I cooked the goo with a cup of sugar (uh, not enough, but also the only sugar left in the house — i plan ahead good, eh?) until it got thickish, like jam would be if you melted it over heat. This is an improvement over last year, where I couldn’t get that concept through my head and I kept waiting for it to get thicker, and in the end had jelly that was completely solid, like stiff grape jello. (I had to cut it into chunks and mix it into plain yogurt, which was actually really delicious.)
It came out pretty nice, the texture of a thick apple butter. It’s got a bit of a bitterish undertaste, which I suppose is because of all the solids I forced into it. Sigh. Those old timers knew what they were doing, as usual. But it still tastes *good*, with that musky concord grapey goodness, and is certainly less sweet than most preserves, which is quite to my liking. And I’m going to make granita out of that little pool of red grape juice tomorrow.