Posts Tagged ‘seasoning paste’

28 Feb

Roasted Vegetable Harissa

Posted by wooddogs3 in Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , , , , .

Anyone who enjoys the foods of northern Africa is familiar with harissa, the chile-based condiment that often accompanies the meal. It comes in innumerable variations, from a chile-hot thick “broth” ladled into soup or over couscous to a thick paste of chiles (either toasted or not,) vegetables (cooked or not,) seasonings, and oil.

This particular iteration is rather like a thick, textured mayonnaise with the emulsion based on roasted vegetables instead of egg. It‘s a variation on the recipe for Mo’s Harissa in Wild Flavors by Didi Emmons, but Ms. Emmons’s version just dries out the vegetables in a warm oven for a little while, while I like them actually roasted. 
For the hot element, I dip into a small canning jar kept in my refrigerator in which I keep one large or two small cans of chipotles in adobo that have been put through the blender with just enough olive oil to keep the blades turning. It adds a mildly smoky garlicky hot element that makes the harissa taste as if the vegetables were roasted over a wood fire. But you can also use a few toasted ground Guajillo chiles, or a couple of fresh jalapeño chiles roasted with the peppers, or even a heaping spoonful of Kashmiri chile flakes.

I make this in larger batches because we eat a lot of it and I give some away, but you can cut the recipe in half easily.

First, put a teaspoon of cumin seed and half a teaspoon of caraway seed in a small skillet and toast briefly over a medium flame just until the scent comes up. They shouldn’t darken more than a shade. Grind in a spice/coffee grinder or pound thoroughly in a mortar and pestle. Set aside.

Coarsely chop 3-4 cloves of garlic, and chop the stems of a bunch of cilantro. Save the leaves. Set aside.

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Then, start with your bell peppers. While making a run through a big box store I picked up a bag of six bell peppers, two each of red, orange, and yellow. You can use any combination of these colors that you want, and you can substitute a green bell pepper for one of the ripe ones if you want to. Wash the peppers, seed and core them, and cut them in chunks. Put them on a baking sheet. If you want to use fresh jalapeños for the hot element, seed and core one or two, cut in chunks, and add to the bell peppers. If you line the baking sheet with baking parchment, it will make your life easier later on. Roast at 325° for 30 minutes, then put the chopped garlic and chopped cilantro stems on the sheet too and continue roasting to your preferred degree of doneness, which for me is when they have a definitely roasted look as shown below. Keep the garlic by itself so that you can take it off the sheet if it’s browning too fast. Be sure not to let the garlic turn brown or burn.

Now put the roasted peppers, cilantro stems, and garlic in a food processor and process to a chunky paste. Add 2 tablespoons of lemon juice or a chopped quarter of a preserved lemon and a teaspoon of salt, more or less. Add your chipotle paste or toasted ground chiles if you didn’t use jalapeños. With the processor running, pour in very good olive oil in a slow stream until the texture is the way you want it. It’s hard to say how much oil you will use. Have at least a cup handy, and if you use less, no harm done. I aim for a smooth but textured gloppiness as shown in the top photo, but you could also make it in a blender instead of a food processor and blend it completely smooth if you wanted. Add the ground spices and taste for heat and salt. Adjust if needed. Scrape into a bowl and start putting it on stuff. 
I love cilantro leaves chopped over the top but don’t like the leaves blended into the harissa at all; it makes the texture odd and it doesn’t keep as long. But suit yourself.


I think this harissa has a particular affinity for eggs, and we recently made a quick meal of scrambled eggs and hot buttered basmati rice in a bowl with a lavish amount of harissa and chopped cilantro leaves. Delicious. I also like to make a spicy egg salad with hard-boiled eggs and harissa and pile it on a chunk of good baguette. 

Put a good spoonful alongside a greens borek or on top of horta. Or nearly anywhere else.

22 Jan

The Winter Kitchen: Pipian Verde

Posted by wooddogs3 in cooking, fish and seafood, greens, herbs, home food production, Ketogenic diet, Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , .


My recent Mexican cooking binge began with darker richer flavors but a spell of warmer weather got me thinking about pipian verde, which is complex but fresher and more spring-like in flavor. I became determined to develop a paste for it so that I could have it on short notice.  Pipian verde is a highly variable sauce based on herbs and thickened with ground seeds, often pumpkin seeds. It’s simpler than the more complicated mole verde but can be surprisingly similar to it. When I first ate it in Oaxaca more than a decade ago it had a flavor that I have not come across before, and which I later identified as hoja santa. This is a fascinating large perennial which grows well in warmer parts of our country, and in fact I noticed it growing wild near San Antonio, but my mountain area is too cold for it. The dried leaves are readily available but are a pale shadow of the taste of the fresh leaves, which resembles authentic sarsaparilla. Ebay came to the rescue, and I found a seller who sent me eight of the large leaves impeccably wrapped up in damp paper towels so that they arrived in perfect condition. There are as many pipian verde recipes as there are cooks in Mexico, so I can’t say that yours has to contain the special leaf, just that mine does. I also think that fresh epazote is necessary, and it’s available at my local Mexican grocery. Again, don’t use dried.
This makes a lot of seasoning paste. It’s concentrated and will be diluted in the final dish. It freezes well. You’ll need a blender.

My ingredients (study some recipes online and your ingredients may vary):

5 fresh poblano peppers

2 fresh jalapeño chiles, only if your poblanos are mild or you love fire

1 cup raw pumpkin seeds

9 medium-sized tomatillos

1 medium onion, peeled and sliced

5 cloves garlic, peeled and chopped

stems (just cut the washed bunch in half vertically) of one bunch cilantro, chopped

1 cup steamed spinach or other mild greens (I used foraged lambsquarters)

1 fresh hoja santa  leaf about 8” long

1 bunch fresh epazote, about 1/2 cup chopped

1/2 teaspoon dried oregano

1/4 cup home-rendered lard or avocado oil

Roast the poblanos (and jalapeños if using) under the broiler, turning frequently, until blistered all over.

Use tongs to transfer into a plastic bag, wrap in towels, let “sweat” for about 20 minutes, then peel off the skins, remove and discard stems, veins, and seeds, and set the peeled flesh aside.

The tomatillos can be roasted under the broiler until cooked through (requires close attention) or cooked in a heavy saucepan over medium heat, turning frequently, until they have a few dark spots. Then add enough water to prevent burning and cook until soft. Set aside.

Toast the raw pumpkin seeds in a heavy skillet over medium heat, stirring continuously, until they swell and darken a bit but don’t let them brown, which ruins the flavor. As soon as they’re ready, pour them out of the hot skillet into a bowl to cool.

Chop up the various fresh leaves and stems into small pieces, crumble the oregano a bit, chop the steamed spinach or similar if not already chopped.

Put the cooled pumpkin seeds in the blender and blend to the fine-crumbs stage but don’t let them turn to butter. Add all other ingredients except the lard or oil and blend, adding a little water if needed to keep the blades turning. I like to keep some texture in mine.

Now, the final step that makes everything meld. Heat a large saucepan or a wok with the lard (more authentic) or oil (more readily obtainable) over high heat and pour in the seasoning paste to “sear.” Careful, it spatters furiously. Cook over high heat, stirring and scraping constantly, for a few minutes until the entire potful is boiling hard. Turn off the heat and (cautiously) taste and add salt to taste. Let cool, and package in suitably sized containers for refrigeration or freezing.

Now it can be used to sauce pork, chicken, or fish, diluting to the right consistency with good broth appropriate to the meat or seafood and adjusting the salt as needed. Roasted salted pumpkin seeds and/or some fresh cilantro leaves make a good garnish.  It’s great in a soft taco or sope  with a slice of fresh panela cheese and a crumbling of the far more intense cotija cheese on top.  My favorite use for it is shown at the top of this post: pan-grill some very good shrimp with salt and garlic, add a cup of pipian paste and 1/2 cup of shrimp broth per pound of shrimp and cook briefly until the sauce comes together, adjust seasoning as needed but keep the sauce very thick, and serve with an endless supply of good hot fresh tortillas.


For lunch in 10 minutes, use pipian verde paste diluted half and half with broth, bring to a boil to thicken, and adjust seasoning. Heat tortillas. Scramble two or three eggs with a little salt to taste until fairly firm. Cover a plate with the sauce, heap the eggs in the middle, sprinkle with chopped cilantro and a handful of roasted salted pumpkin seeds (darker squash seeds here,) and add a red dash of salsa macha. Eat with soft tortillas. Yum.

About those tortillas: in general I stick to a low carbohydrate diet, but when in a Mexican phase I don’t. Simple as that. Without rice, beans, and the endlessly creative uses of masa, it isn’t real Mexican food as far as I’m concerned. So I watch my portion sizes, eat one main meal a day and some light snacks, and try not to stay in a Mexican phase for too long. But it’s worth it.

9 Oct

The Turn of the Wheel

Posted by wooddogs3 in farmers market, home food production, mushrooms, Uncategorized, wild food. Tagged: , , , , , .

 

This summer, more than usual, I ran a bit adrift when it came to blog-writing. There were many reasons, but the main reason was that it was so damned hot that I couldn’t bear to work in the garden and nothing would grow. July and August are always warm in New Mexico, but this year those months were beastly. A lot of my plants died because it was so hot that I couldn’t supply enough water to keep them alive. Or maybe I could have, but with the freezer already full to bursting it didn’t seem practical. I concentrated my efforts on watering the things that I like for fresh use.

But last week piles of pumpkins and squash started to show up outside the local grocery stores, and everything started to change. The wheel of the year has turned. Days are breezy and nights verge on chilly. The glorious scent of chiles  roasting can be picked up near every grocer and market stand. The plants that survived the heat got a new lease on life. Cottonwoods started to turn gold.

 

Some of my mushroom bags, desiccated over the summer, imbibed water and started to fruit. They took me by surprise and I didn’t notice the new mushrooms until they were cracking at the outer edges. But they’re just fine for kitchen use. Sautéed or grilled or roasted, oyster mushrooms are pretty much the perfect all-around mushroom, mild and meaty and appealing to nearly everyone.

The tough stem bases that were trimmed off for cooking can be thoroughly dehydrated and ground into oyster flour. It’s perfect for thickening mushroom soup or sauces.

This year I made a mixed mushroom flavoring paste and froze it in ice cube trays to use for sauces and soups. I can’t give you an exact recipe  but can convey the general idea, and no doubt you can improve on it. I  used an assortment of five wild mushroom species from a foraging trip as well as the oysters, but you can use cultivated mushrooms. The last time I was in Whole Foods I saw seven varieties of cultivated mushrooms, and dried mushrooms are also available commercially, so anybody can get  enough to try. My favorite source for bulk dried mushrooms is Oregon Mushrooms.

This formula can be endlessly adapted to any kind and any amount of edible mushrooms, although I don’t recommend lobster mushrooms because they don’t have much flavor to contribute.

Start with about three pounds of clean fresh mushrooms, at least a few different kinds, or about a pound of assorted dried mushrooms. I used oysters, hawkswing, agaricus, hen of the woods, lion’s mane, and cultivated shiitakes.  If dried, soak them for an hour in enough hot water to cover them. Drain, strain any dirt out of the liquid with a fine strainer, and save the water. Pick over the mushrooms for any debris, then chop. This can be done in a food processor if you’re careful not to chop them to mush. Chop one large or two small onions and five cloves of garlic. Sauté the onions and garlic slowly in butter or good olive oil. When translucent and cooked but not browned, add the chopped mushrooms and sauté over medium heat until the mushrooms are somewhat cooked and exuding liquid.

Now add the mushroom soaking liquid if you used dried mushrooms, half a bottle of good red wine, a quarter cup of soy sauce or coconut aminos, six anchovy fillets,  three or four good-sized sprigs of thyme,  and any dried mushroom powder that you wish to add. I used some oyster powder and porcini powder,  and also added about a cup of broken pieces of dried morels from a bag that I had finished up.

Cook the mixture over medium heat.  Let it boil, because you want to concentrate down the fluid. When the fluid only just covers the mushrooms,  remove the thyme stems and purée  the mixture in the blender or food processor or right in the sauce pan with a stick blender.

Now you have a thick gloppy mixture looking something like this:

Cook over low heat until it gets really thick, stirring frequently to prevent burning.  Add a quarter cup of best quality red wine vinegar and keep cooking.  When the paste is dark and thick, taste it and add salt if needed. It should taste pretty intense. After all, it is a seasoning, not a food. When it is done to your satisfaction, smooth the paste into ice cube trays, cover, and freeze.

It will then lurk in your freezer, ready to add a deep taste of the forest to nearly anything where a mushroom flavor would be appropriate. After pan-grilling beef or game, toss a cube into the pan with some wine or broth and deglaze, boiling furiously, add a pat of butter, and boil a little more until it comes together as a pan gravy. Melt a cube into mushroom soup to enhance its flavor. Add a cube and some heavy cream  to sautéed mushrooms that seem a little bland.  Melt a cube, mix into an equal amount of soft butter, and use it as a finishing butter for meat or almost any kind of vegetable, or toss with hot pasta and some good Parmesan. Spread on hot buttered toast or stir into scrambled eggs.

Every time you use it, you’ll be reminded of the fascinating fifth kingdom that helps keep our planet alive.