cook: camarones en pipián rojo

When I was in Palm Springs for spring break, I ate my new favorite Mexican dish, Shrimp in Pipián Sauce, at the restaurant El Mirasol at Los Arboles, a boutique hotel. And I wanted to re-create it at home. When I looked online for the recipe, all seemed to refer to Pati Jinich's Mexican Table: The Secrets of Real Mexican Homecooking, which I went to the trouble of checking out from the public library.      

I thought wrongly that the ancho and guajillo chilies Jinich use are fresh, and so I further sought on the internet the same recipe but using dried peppers. But I pretty much followed Jinich's recipe for Sunday dinner.  When I read the recipe again, I realized, no the chilies in the recipe are likely dried. While at the store, I did see guajillo but didn't see ancho peppers and googled what could substitute and so bought Pasilla peppers though there were other peppers like Californian Seco and New Mexico Arbol chilies. I guessed that the Guajillo were the milder peppers and pulled the stems, seeds and membranes off three of them and the same from one of the Pasilla chilies and then charred them on my hot cast iron for 15 to 20 seconds until fragrant.  They smelled really pleasant--floral and savory.               

Then I covered the fragrant and toasted chilies with water and simmered for 10 minutes. Next I toasted the pepitas or pumpkin seeds.

 

But I needed to have toasted more pepitas and so added more along with sesame seeds, which I toasted for 3 to 4 minutes. They audibly popped on the pan or later in the cooling bowl.

 

I reserved the toasted pumpkin and sesame seeds with a quarter cup of dry roasted peanuts. Then it was time to char the aromatics and tomatoes. I don't have a comal and so used the same cast iron for toasting nuts and seeds for also searing a few Roma tomatoes and one small heritage tomato, a thick slice of red onion and couple cloves of garlic, not peeled.

Oh! I had forgotten to toast for 15 to 20 seconds, a couple cloves and so added them to the cast iron along with the charring vegetables. Once all the ingredients were toasted and charred, they went into the Vitamix blender along with the cooking liquid of the peppers and a bit more water, a sprinkling of cinnamon, a tablespoon of apple cider vinegar and a few teaspoons of brown sugar.

 

I tasted the pipián paste, and oh was it tasty. This sauce was not that much harder than enchilada sauce, and it definitely tasted complex and delicious. I bought shrimp in their shells, which I then peeled.

 

I put all the shrimp shells into a pot with water to cover and simmered for 20 minutes before straining and reserving.

 

I then put much of the pipián paste into a fry pan with a tablespoon of vegetable oil and fried for a few minutes.

I then poured my simmering seafood stock into the frypan of pipián sauce, stirring and scraping bits off the bottom of the pan, and then put the shrimp into the sauce to cook for 3 minutes.

 

It smelled terrific, and luckily I had made Mexican rice and beans a week prior.

 

I did not serve the meal with tortillas, but the tortillas....

....would have been good for sopping up that delicious pipián.

bake: strawberry puffs

I'd had puff pastry in my freezer and was longing to bake some kind of dessert with it. I also had a pint of strawberries that I couldn't finish in time before them spoiling. Eureka! Homemade strawberry pop-tarts, and if that's a trademarked name, then strawberry puffs. There was no time last weekend to actually bake, and so I put the puff pastry back and the macerated (meaning broken down or mashed into smaller chunks with a bit of sugar) and cooked strawberries into the refrigerator to make the next weekend.

Enter Sunday morning. I made an egg wash, meaning I stirred one egg with a little bit of water, and also took out the cooked strawberries, thawed puff pastry, and just in case, a jar of strawberry preserves.  I brushed the edges of two slices of puff pastry with the egg wash and then spooned the cooked strawberries in the middle of one slice of puff pastry.

And then place the top of the egg washed puff pastry without strawberry filling over the puff pastry slice with filling. Then crimp the edges together with a fork and cut slits (I cut a cross) in the top for steam to escape.

I also turned over the raw pop tarts to crimp the edges on the other side. I noticed that I had a lot of strawberry filling for the rest of the puff pastry and thought I'd better increase the amount of strawberry filling I was putting inside the puffs.

For shits and giggles, I cut two slices of puff pastry into four smaller squares. Yeah I was a messy baker this morning.

I laid all the unbaked strawberry puffs onto a sheet pan lined with parchment paper and baked in a 400 degree oven, but realized 5 minutes into the baking that it should be a 375 degree oven. I lowered the temp and set the timer for 15 minutes. However, the undersides were not golden brown crusts, and so I flipped the pastries over and baked another 5 minutes.                           

I likey! And never mind the last one which I overfilled because I didn't want to waste--that pastry will be mine. There was also instructions for icing. Again I made this a no-recipe recipe. I put maybe a scant half cup of powdered sugar and a tablespoon of milk and one eighth of a teaspoon of almond extract into my mixing cup. And then just stirred.       

I should have used less liquid in the icing.

But the neighbors declared them scrumptious.

clay: more test tiles of speckled buff for j.b. brown and toshi brown glazes

Two of my colleagues had invited me to happy hour and told me to bring my tarot cards. I told them both to think of a question as we were shuffling and mixing all the cards on the table top and that I turn to tarot not so much for predicting the future but for guiding me on my gut and that draws can read in so many ways within the one card, just like astrology, you can take what you want and leave what you don't. Jasmine was freaked out at how much the card she drew indicated what was happening in her personal orbit. Cybil, not so much as she wanted an answer to her love life, but I've a feeling that she knew what she wanted in an answer. I was sort of a psychoanalyst when she told me the situation with her boyfriend and said I could empathize and only be concerned that there would be resentment if one partner grew too dependent on the other. We read the guidebook to their draws, and I encouraged them to tap into their intuition to make of the card as they wanted. 

I was relieved that Jasmine and Cybil both drew cards from the Minor Arcana--which reflect the day to day activities in our lives. I'm thinking of separating them out from the Major Arcana cards--which reflect key archetypes or spiritual lessons in our lives. I think I'll bring my Mystic Mondays to Kat's house. Meral and I are driving to Tracy, going to the farmers market there, cooking and eating a Jamaican feast, making and drinking cocktails, and just catching up. 

This past week was one of intellectual heavy lifting where I was writing reflections for an expedited evaluation at work. Unlike a full evaluation, I don't have to produce as much evidence, but I'd already been deciding that I want to be a more active librarian after two years of pandemic and to flex more of my teaching muscles. In the meantime, clay took a little bit of a backseat. However, I can never keep my hands completely off mud, and so in the seventy-five minutes I allotted myself on each of the two days of clay this week, I made a planter pot, two test bowls from Speckled Buff, and rolled a few slabs of what I think is Obsidian.

I need to remember when rolling slabs for bowls made on a hump mold to make the slab bigger in circumference to be able to drape completely over the plaster. I think I like these rims. But I'll try some bowls with thinner rims with my pinch marks. I'll be glazing the interior and the rims of these bowls with Coyote glazes, but I've learned my lesson I hope from making bigger pots, not to glaze them unless I can predict how the glaze will look on the clay body.

These little test bowls can be salt and pepper bowls, and I'll start making deeper ones but with the same circumference to use the cork lids I have. I'd like to make a crock that has two cubbies side by side to hold salt and pepper in one bowl. I'll practice pinching that wall from a ball sliced in half and add a coil on the edge to be the higher wall into which the cork lid can fit.

cook: thai red curry

I had half a kabocha squash and then some, leftover from Japanese tempura, and I knew I wanted to cook a Thai red curry rather than green (which was in my pantry) with the rest of it. Luckily when I went to Safeway to get cooking oil for my tempura, I also bought a small jar of the prik gaeng or vegan curry paste of red chilies (the prik), shallots, and spices like galangal(ginger)and herbs like lemongrass made for Western palates called fittingly Thai Red Curry. Besides the tiny jar of red curry paste, my mise en place included coconut oil, Thai purple and Italian basil, a jar of shitake mushrooms, colanders of red bell pepper, cauliflower, broccoli and kabocha squash cut into bite-sized pieces, chicken thighs also cut into bite-sized pieces, kaffir lime leaves, palm sugar, a can of coconut milk, chicken broth (just in case I wanted the curry to have a lighter consistency), fish sauce and lemon grass.        

I've come a long way from the days of cooking a Thai curry from only a can of curry paste, coconut milk and brown sugar (because I think the fish sauce was already in the curry paste or maybe cooked without that salty umami), summer squash and cut-up chicken breast. I made myself a cocktail of gin and juice or passionfruit ginger beer and gin with a hefty squeeze of fresh lime juice. Luckily I already had the jasmine rice cooked, leftover from the Japanese meal of tempura and karaage.

I sautéed the red curry paste in coconut oil, followed in a quick succession by the chicken and kabocha squash to sauté longer and absorb the flavors of the curry paste. And then the coconut milk, fish sauce and palm sugar. I planned to add the fresh basil at the very end of the cooking.

 

I let the chicken and the squash simmer in the flavored coconut milk for some 40 minutes (wish I had thought to add the fresh Birdseye chilies too in the fridge which I'll have to remember to throw in the freezer with the rest of the kaffir lime leaves)before adding the bell pepper and broccoli and cauliflower, which I knew would only take 5 minutes to get tender over the medium high heat.

When all the vegetables were tender but still vibrant in color, I turned off the stove and sprinkled the basil into the curry to wilt in the residual heat.

 

I don't normally cook on a Monday night, but Patrick suggested I take a day off from the gym and do laundry instead, which I suppose is a minor workout.

The Thai red curry was delicious. The sauce had a nice consistency, not too thin and not too thick, and flavored the rice well. Next time though I'll need to add the Birdseye chilies because I would've liked the sauce a lot more spicy.

cook: marcella hazan’s tomato sauce with onion and butter

I didn’t let Patrick give our neighbors some of the last of our tomato harvest: a few heirlooms and some romas scavenged from our neighbor, Joe Italiano. I kept insisting that I would use them. And I did. Marcella Hazan had this super simple recipe of a tomato sauce with just butter and onion. But I hate waste and don't follow her recipe exactly. I whirred in my Vitamix all the tomatoes left and a medium red onion until it was pulverized and then threw it into my stockpot with a big knob of Irish butter and a scattering of salt.

While my sauce simmered away for 45 minutes, I washed and refilled my salt crock. For everyday cooking, I combine sea salt and kosher salt, but because neither contains iodine, I also add iodized salt. And I don't use iodized salt alone because it's too salty as the crystals are much finer. And I think from now on, I'll use the iodized salt only for boiling pasta and my sea and kosher salts as finishing salts.

While my sauce was simmering, I sipped Chardonnay and prepped the garlic bread to go in the oven before our carb heavy Sunday supper.

 

I supposed I could have left the spaghetti sauce well enough alone, but I had to add the beef meatballs in the freezer to the marinara and it's de rigueur to add parmesan to the pasta and sauce.

The pasta took only 9 minutes to boil to al dente, and I had hubs spoon his own sauce over his spaghetti.

 

Fucking delicious. One of the most simple and our favorite meal of all time. And it was okay to not have a green vegetable like a salad with our meal. I'll make a Caesar when we eat the leftover pasta bake this week.