Mexican beans and rice

through my recent reading, I have learned that the American practice of always having beans and rice served as the sides on Mexican food plates is not traditional Mexican practice. Rather, rice and beans are often served as separate courses in their own right or one of the 2 will accompany a main dish on the same plate.

Furthermore, in Mexican cookbooks, Rice is often lumped in a section called something like "sopa seca" (dry soup).

In any event, I lump the 2 together into a single entry here.

BEANS

On separate occasions now, I have taken a stab at simmered black beans and simmered frijoles rojos (kidney beans). In both cases, mostly followed the recipe displayed in the images. I took a pound of dried beans, added some chopped up shallot or onion, about 2 tablespoons of vegetable oil, and a bit less than 2 quarts of water and brought the mixture to a simmer in my medium-sized cast-iron Dutch oven on the stove. Then, I moved the Covered pot to a oven preheated at around 250°. After simmering for several hours, I remove the beans and add about 1.5 teaspoons of salt

Notes:

• as suggested in the more recent Bayless books, I did not soak the beans ahead of time
• on both occasions, I strained off the excess liquid after removing the beans from the oven; unfortunately, I did not realize that upon cooling, the beans would soak up much of the excess liquid and end up bringing the liquid level down a little too far
• the cooking time will really very from occasion to occasion: I let my black beans simmer for 4 or 5 hours in the oven and they were still nice and well structured, whereas, with the kidney beans, after 2.5 hours in the oven, they were beginning to decompose much more than I would like
• Despite adding epazote with the kidney beans, I was unable to detect the flavor
  

RICE

In my attempts so far, I have loosely followed the procedure described in the images here. For health reasons, I have been using brown jasmine rice (1 cup). I have generally been adding at least 1 teaspoon of salt and have been adding 2 cups of water, bring to a boil and simmer in a very low heat for 45 or 50 minutes followed by a 5 or 10 minute cooling with the lid on still.

Notes

• on several occasions, I have added between 7 and 14 ounces of canned diced tomatoes. I have finally learned however, that this adds a large amount of water to the mixture; thus, the amount of water should be reduced in this version
• most recently, the Rice was still very soggy after the prescribed cooking time. I was able to largely salvage it by spreading it out flat in a baking pan and putting in a 250° oven for 10 or 20 minutes to dry out.
  

Update (3/20/2010):

I followed Bayless' recipe almost exactly this time, and the result was a disaster.  In contrast to previous attempts, the rice was extremely dry this time.  The one deviation was that I used drained, canned diced tomatoes instead of jarred salsa.  Apparently typical salsas contain much more liquid than the diced tomatoes I used.  Perhaps I will try his recipe one more time and actually use salsa...

Simple red Mole with meat, fowl and fruit: recipe

Simple red Mole with meat, fowl and fruit

After much anticipation, I took my first stab at a traditional Mexican mole dish. Taking a conservative approach, I opted for the simplest of the 7 Oaxacan moles (only requiring 1.5 hours of active prep time!).

See the recipe images in the following blog post.

Review:

• the sauce was a bit runny than I would prefer, as well as a touch oily. Perhaps I didn't simmer at high enough temperature to reduce the sauce?
• The sauce was somewhat dominated by the apple cider vinegar ingredient, in my opinion. The ancho chilies were quite mild both in spiciness and flavor intensity in comparison.
• The pork was quite satisfactory, but not falling apart tender
• all in all, satisfying and Mexican-rustic in character

Modifications

• used skinless chicken drumsticks (de-skinned myself) instead of skinless chicken breast meat. This seemed to work well; simmered for a total of 25 or 30 minutes instead of the 13 minutes recommended for breast meat.

Notes:

• Used all the pre-ground spices to save time; I wonder how much this reduced the flavor intensity?
• waited until my plantain skin was on the order of 25% black. This seemed to be plenty ripe enough in the end (the cookbooks suggested that a fully ripe plantain is almost entirely black)
• using one of my tall, medium-width pots seem to provide plenty of room during the simmering process
  

Classic tortilla soup

I mostly followed the recipe from "Authentic Mexican" by Bayless. He describes it as a "quintessentially Mexican soup". The final product received excellent reviews from my housemate Mike (as well as me).

Procedure remarks:

• in my first rendition, I forgot to include cubes of fresh cheese in the serving bowls; instead I had avocado chunks, which is just slightly less standard
• also, I forgot to serve with lime wedges, the sourness of which supposedly really bring out the flavors
• instead of using 1.5 quarts of chicken broth, I used one qt of broth and water for the remainder
• I didn't have any ready-made corn chips, so I fried sliced up, stale corn tortillas. While serving left overs the following day, I tried "oven frying" some tortilla strips by taking a tortilla, spring it on both sides of using aerosol-based olive oil and placing under an intense oven broiler for a couple of minutes. In my opinion, this worked better: the strips turned out less greasy and the cleanup was much easier than deep frying in a pot of oil. The challenge was, not over-browning them, though.
  

Roadside whole chicken

This is another recipe from Bayless that was very good, but not easily recognizable as a "Mexican" from my perspective. The heart of the seasoning mixture is the powdered ancho chile pepper. Note that this is one of the most mild peppers and so the chicken is really not that spicy.

Firstly, I didn't really have a functioning grill, so I used the oven to roast instead.

I roasted some sweet potato wedges along with the chicken after briefly soaking them in the same marinade. They turned out delicious and extremely healthy.

DIFFICULTIES:
First, I found the marinade/rub to be a little too runny. I think it would work better if it was more of a thick paste that wood not just run off of the sides of the chicken once applied. This could probably be achieved by simply adding less orange juice and vinegar. I tried mixing in a little bit of a cornstarch slurry to the marinade, but was very hesitant to add much at all.

Cooking chicken all the way through: although the recipe suggested leaving the chicken in the grill for 45 minutes (until the thigh temperature reached about 160°), I ended up going for close to 2 hours in my 325° oven and the breast had only reached 157° at that point. Unfortunately, I was trying to go off my" temperature rules" from memory.

Just now, I did some more research and Alton Brown takes his turkeys out when the breast temperature reaches 161°. Emeril takes his roast chickens out when the thigh temperature reaches 160°. On Yahoo Answers, people give a range of "take-out" temperatures from 160 to 170°. In the future, I will take-out the whole chicken once the breast temperature has just exceeded 160°.

The reason my cooking process took so long (2 hours) was because I only used an oven temperature of 325° as opposed to 400 or 450 as many other people do.

Swiss chard with tomatoes and potatoes

This recipe comes from "Authentic Mexican". Ironically, of all the Mexican dishes I have made recently, this is the one that tasted the least "Mexican" in my opinion. (That's probably due to the fact that the US has given me a very distorted perspective of true Mexican cuisine.) The book points out that Swiss chard is one of the most common greens eaten in Mexico.

The 2 truly characteristic Mexican ingredients in this dish are the Serrano chili peppers and the epazote leaves I couldn't really taste either in the final product, though.

I did follow the "suggested variant" of adding chunks of queso fresco -- this added a nice richness.

The one mistake I made was to use a wide skillet instead of a pot. This meant that during the stage of simmering the potato chunks, the potatoes were only partially covered with the liquid broth, which led to much slower and uneven cooking of the potatoes (as well as the broth evaporating off too quickly.)

In any event, the dish tasted healthy, and nourishing; certainly nothing spectacular, though.

Salad dressings: lime-cilantra, chipotle-basalmic

"Chicken Verde" with roasted poblano peppers

Thankfully, we decided to make this dish a 2nd time (with Nick and Maureen) and were able to get a  photo.

It was a huge success -- Maureen likes to call it the "green crack sauce".

I was worried that the boneless skinless chicken breasts would end up being dry and boring, but by cutting them up into thirds before cooking, I think it worked out well. The chicken was moist; the sauce was pungent and creamy and the peppers had that nice smoky flavor.

Tostadas

There is really no rocket science here. The fun part was frying my own tortillas to make the shells. Going against the cookbooks I consulted, I only used about 1/3 of an inch of oil to do the frying. It seemed to work okay, as long as I held down the tortilla to keep it mostly submerged and flat in the pot.

I made 2 versions, piling on combinations of: Mexican rice, homemade black beans, salsa Verde, avocado, hot sauce, chayote, chopped tomatoes, and crema. Easy, but incredibly satisfying to eat.

Enchiladas verdes (with chicken, spinach and mushrooms)

A very traditional dish with some (non-traditional?) additions. For the mushrooms, we used some wild chanterelles that my housemate Mike collected.

I must say, this dish was a huge hit with the crowd!

The only unsatisfying part was the "crema" that I used in the sauce. Crema is like a cross between crème fraîche, sour cream, and full cream -- but Mexican. I used the "Mexicana" brand, which included 2 types of stabilizer/emulsifier along with pure dairy.

Chalupas and Tortillas

After seeing all the highly processed tortillas being sold in Safeway for all these years, I decided that I had to try my hand at making some real ones from scratch. I bought some freshly ground masa (consisting of nothing but corn kernels and lime) from the local taqueria/tortilla factory in Redwood City.

See the images at the bottom of my homemade tortilla on the skillet. Without a tortilla press, it was definitely a challenge -- I used a skillet to push out my small ball of masa into the tortilla shaped (using Saran wrap as a protective/nonstick layer).

Chalupas:

The name sounds familiar, doesn't it? Apparently, though, I had no idea what it meant. It's basically a little boat (like a small quiche crust) made out of the same substance as tortillas (masa) and cooked in the same way (on the skillet).

I stuffed mine with left over shredded chicken, tomatillo salsa, chopped white onion, and queso fresco. Honestly, the flavor was mild, but certainly not ordinary.

Roasted tomatillo salsa

Good as expected.

With the little blender jar attachment for the immersion blender, the preparation is really easy.

The recipe says that the quality of the preparation starts to degrade within a few hours of completion. I'm not sure if I'm convinced of that, but I did notice that the spiciness level tends to fall off after day or so.