Southwestern kolokethokeftaide

I didn't intend to make kolokethokeftaide. I hadn't heard of them until a moment ago. I just improvised some squash fritters and ended up making kolokethokeftaide accidentally. This Greek recipe isn't far off from the Turkish kabak mucveri I made three years ago but since I wasn't actually making it intentionally, I ended up with a Southwestern flavor profile which moves it a bit farther away.

I apologize for the quality of the pictures; I ran out of AA batteries for my camera and have had to fall back on my phone's crappy camera. Also, I didn't expect to write this up, as I was just throwing stuff together, so I don't have any process pics to share. Or many measurements.

So, anyway, I grated the two CSA summer squashes, salted them, let them sit a few minutes and then squeezed out an enormous amount of water. I ended up with no more than a cup and a half of squished squash.

To that I added about half a cup of pepper jack cheese, a dollop of caramelized onion confit (really just the caramelized onion I made last week mixed with a good bit of olive oil), a minced hot pepper, a dash of chili powder, one egg and enough breadcrumbs to make a dough that held together but wasn't wet.

I heated my oil and made little Tablespoon-volume patties. Those got fried at just over medium-high heat until just over golden brown. More of a brazen brown.


Tasty stuff. And it tastes mainly of squash, not dough with a bit of squash in it like most fritter recipes make. A nice chewy/creamy texture inside and crisp outside too. Maybe they could use a dipping sauce just to mix the flavors up a little bit, but I didn't bother with one.

Southwestern corn and squash bake

Looking at the vegetables I have on hand this week, I knew I wanted to pair the squash and corn. I had a fair amount of Southwestern flavorings left over to work with and a chunk of mild white cheddar that was close enough to monterey jack. No real plan here; I just threw it all together in some vaguely sensible manner.

Ingredients:
1 Tablespoon butter
1 Tablespoon olive oil
1 onion, chopped
1 jalapeno, chopped
2 smallish yellow peppers, chopped
1/2 summer squash, thinly sliced
3 ears corn, stripped from their cobs
2 chipotles in adobo, chopped
equal amount of pickled jalapeños, chopped
6 ounces pulled brisket in faux barbecue sauce
1 handful cilantro, chopped
2 eggs
1/2 cup milk
1/2 cup heavy cream
1 cup double-cream white cheddar cheese, shredded
parmesan and bread crumbs to cover
salt and pepper and chili powder and cumin and oregano and hot sauce and such to taste

I heated the butter and olive oil in a dutch oven over medium heat until the the butter melted, sizzled and settled down. Then I threw in the onion and peppers with a pinch of salt and sweated them until they softened the the onion turned translucent. Then I added the squash with some spices and let it cook down while I harvested the corn from the cobs. After a few minutes I added the corn, turned the heat up a little and cooked for five minutes until the corn was just turning tender.

Then I took the pot off the heat and added the chipotle and pickled jalapeño, brisket (with its sauce) and cilantro, mixed well and poured out into an 8"x8" baking dish. After it had cooled a bit, I mixed in the cheddar and the eggs whisked into the milk and cream, adjusted the spices, topped with the mixed breadcrumbs and parmesan, covered with foil and baked at 350 degrees for a half hour, removed the foil and baked for 15 minutes more and then gave it five more minutes under the broiler.

Here's the result:
The structural integrity isn't quite where I'd like it; Next time, I'm mixing the bread crumbs in. But even if it falls apart into a bowlful of creamed corn, it's nicely rich and full of flavor. The corn is tender but still has a bit of crunch to it. It's sweetness, surprisingly pronounced, contrasts with the several different sorts of spiciness and the savory brisket. The acid from the pickled jalapeno (and the hot sauce) cuts through the richness. Kind of trashy I admit, but really pretty tasty. Could use more squash, though. And, I just now realized that I've got a can of black beans that I should have thrown it. That would have been pretty good too.

Southwestern pulled brisket sandwiches with Mesa Grill potato salad

This post combines both of my rather modest goals for the summer: cooking new things in my slow cooker (new to me, anyway) and using the produce from the Buying Club in summery ways.

My previous summers in Miami I pretty much ignored the climate and made whatever looked interesting, but I guess I'm just in a different mood this year. Running the oven in a 90 degree kitchen just doesn't sound appealing. So I'm keeping an eye out for dishes both served cold and requiring less cooking. Certainly I'll be making exceptions, but I do want to shift the majority in that direction.

I found both of these recipes on the Food Network's website. The Mesa Grill recipe is Bobby Flay's obviously. The brisket is from a 2004 episode of a show called Making It Easy that I don't think I've ever encountered. I'm no expert in either slow cooker cooking or Southwestern cuisine so I didn't make any significant changes in either recipe. I hope you don't mind a bit of cutting and pasting from the original sources as they both had quite a few ingredients and I don't see any particular reason to rewrite a scrupulously followed recipe.

Pulled brisket ingredients:
3 pounds beef brisket
Kosher salt
Freshly ground black pepper
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
5 cloves garlic, peeled and smashed
1 Spanish onion, halved and thinly sliced
1 tablespoon chili powder
2 teaspoons ground coriander
2 teaspoons ground cumin
1/4 cup apple cider vinegar
1 1/2 cups water
1 (14 1/2-ounce) can whole peeled tomatoes, with their juices
2 whole canned chipotle chiles en adobo
2 bay leaves
3 tablespoons molasses
Soft sandwich buns
Pickled jalapeños [sweet pickles are just as good. The results aren't really all that Southwestern]

1. Season the beef generously with salt and pepper, to taste. Heat a large, heavy skillet over medium-high heat. Add the oil and heat just until beginning to smoke. Add the meat and cook, turning once, until browned on both sides, about 10 minutes total. Transfer the meat to the slow cooker; leave the skillet on the heat.

2. Add garlic, onion, chili powder, coriander, and cumin to drippings in the skillet and stir until fragrant, about 1 minute. Add vinegar and boil until it's almost gone, scraping the bottom of the pan with a wooden spoon. Stir in water and pour the mixture over the brisket. Crush the tomatoes through your fingers into the slow cooker; add the tomato juices, chipotles, bay leaves, and molasses. Cover the cooker, set it on LOW, and cook the brisket until it pulls apart easily with a fork, about 8 hours.

3. [The original recipe calls for just pulling the meat apart in the cooker and serving, but I wanted a thicker sauce which requires a few more steps.] Remove meat and bay leaves from the slow cooker. Turn off the slow cooker or remove the cooking vessel from the heater or pour out the sauce into a large bowl. Discard the bay leaves and let the brisket and sauce cool a bit.

4. When it's cool enough to handle, pour the sauce into a food processor or blender and blend smooth. Return to slow cooker if it has a High setting that's pretty high or pour into a pot on the stovetop. [I tried the former first but switched to the latter.] Cook the sauce down until it's thick enough to splatter when it bubbles.

5. Meanwhile, pull the brisket apart with forks and/or tongs. When the sauce is to your ideal thickness, mix it with the meat.

Serve on buns or in tortillas with the pickled jalapeños on top. Over egg noodles or rice wouldn't be bad either.


Ingredients for Mesa Grill potato salad:
[I halved these amounts. If I had known how poorly potato salad freezes, I would have quartered them. Instead, I've been eating potato salad way too many meals in a row. It's good but I've got my limits.]
1 1/2 cups prepared mayonnaise
1/4 cup Dijon mustard
2 tablespoons fresh lime juice
2 tablespoons chipotle pepper puree [or one chipotle en adobo chopped fine]
1 large ripe tomato, seeded and diced
1/4 cup chopped cilantro leaves
3 scallions, chopped, white and green parts
1 medium red onion, thinly sliced
1/2 teaspoon cayenne
4 cloves garlic, finely chopped
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
16 new potatoes, about 3 to 4 pounds

1. Heat a large pot of water. Cut potatoes into large, similarly-sized pieces. When water comes to a boil, add potatoes and a generous amount of salt. Lower heat to medium-low. Simmer until potatoes are tender. Remove to cutting board, let cool until you can handle them and slice into 1/2-inch thick slices.

2. Combine all the ingredients, except the potatoes, in a medium bowl and season with salt and pepper, to taste. Mix in potatoes. Check seasoning and serve warm.


I cooked the sauce down more after this first sandwich but this picture isn't too far off from the final version. The sauce tasted a bit muddy at first, but the flavors clarified after a night in the refrigerator with more of the spices unique character coming through instead of just a general heat. The small amount of vinegar in the sauce isn't enough to balance on its own; the pickles (of whatever sort) are important to cut through the rich meaty flavors. And I'm pleased that there is some meaty flavor left in the meat. Often it's all leached out after 8-9 hours of cooking.

As for the potato salad, I can't recall ever having better. Just the lack of chunks of raw celery is a huge plus. Beyond that, large tender slices of potato are an improvement over chunks. There's a freshness from the scallion and cilantro that balances against the creaminess, slight tartness and gentle heat. Nicely complex and a lovely pairing with the the brisket. The only possible issue is that the sauce to potato ratio is pretty high so it might be better to put the potatoes in a large bowl and add the sauce to taste.

Southwestern ham and shrimp potstickers

I can't really explain how this dish came to exist. I started with a recipe for corn and prawn fritters, tweaked it a bit, tweaked it some more and ended up making something else entirely. I haven't really got a recipe; I just threw things together that seemed to make sense.

The potsticker filling has two components: solid bits and a creamy medium for them to float in.

For the solid bits I used finely chopped ham (actually Canadian bacon browned to get the best flavor), scallions, cilantro, hot pepper and corn. About a half cup of each.




For the medium I used half a small Florida avocado, five extra large shrimp, one egg, salt, pepper, chili powder and cumin blended until smooth.


After I mixed them together I got concerned about how the texture would react to heat so I decided I needed to add some cheese as an extra binder. Monterey Jack would have been the proper choice, but havarti was the only melty cheese I had on hand so it sufficed.

Dollops went into potsticker wrappers (store bought even though I could probably make them without much trouble now that I've got a well-functioning pasta machine). Because the texture was a little loose I had trouble using a full Tablespoon as I could with a traditional meat-paste filling. I ended using about half that most of the time and still having trouble keeping it all in.

Practice makes passable, so I managed. They aren't the prettiest potstickers around, but they'll do. And they cooked up fine in the traditional reverse-braise method.



Here's a look inside:

You can see how the filling's solidified nicely. Better than I had hoped. And now to try one...not bad at all. A little eggier in flavor than you'd expect and a bit noodly where the dough's separated from the filling, neither of which are really bad things. Otherwise, the Southwestern flavors come through with the corn and ham up front, some herb and spice, and maybe just a hint of the shrimp. Tasty and not nearly as fusion-cuisine weird as I feared. Could use a dip, though. A fresh tomato salsa or a remoulade would be just the thing. I'll have to remember that for when I cook up the rest.

I just did a little research and found that Southwestern potstickers are not an unheard of bar food, but, from what I can see, they're just tradional meaty potstickers with different spices. My conconction is a different thing entirely. Well, good. Maybe I should give them a different name, though.

Pork and tomatillo stew

Most foodies, looking at that subject, will expect a recipe for chile verde. This certainly isn't a traditional version. It seems to have mutated through a chili-cooking competition, possibly in Brazil. Any chili recipe you find with "award-winning" in the description is bound to have a half dozen random ingredients added to the standard meat, chiles, onions and tomatoes. I've seen weirder additions than what's in here. I found this recipe in my files while looking for a more standard one that I was sure I had. From what's on the front of the sheet of paper it's written on the back of, it looks like I found it on-line around 1994. I've found it again on the Web but that doesn't really help. This site says it comes from a restaurant where Ruth Reichl, editor in chief of Gourmet, used to waitress. This one says its from the L.A. Times. I suppose both could be true and I'm making some changes so it probably doesn't matter much. Here's my version:


Ingredients:
1 bottle dark beer
12 ounces orange juice
1 pound tomatillos, quartered
1/4 cup vegetable oil
1 head garlic, peeled, crushed and roughly chopped
2 pounds pork butt, cut in 1/2 inch cubes

3 medium onions, sliced
2 jalapeño peppers, chopped
salt
pepper
1 teaspoon ancho chile powder
1 teaspoon Mexican oregano
1 teaspoon cumin

4 10 oz cans Ro-tel tomatoes with peppers
1 14-ounce can black beans or same amount of soaked dried beans
1/4 cup corn meal (masa if you've got it)
1 bunch cilantro, chopped


lime
sour cream
avocado
flour tortillas and/or rice


1. In a dutch oven, bring beer and orange juice to a boil. Add tomatillos, reduce heat and simmer for 20 minutes. Remove from heat but keep near the stove. Preheat oven to 300 degrees F.

2. Heat oil in a 12-inch cast iron pan on medium high heat. Add garlic and cook two minutes. Turn heat up to high and begin browning pork in batches. Remember to season the pork now or it'll be bland at the end. Remove each batch to the dutch oven. I had four batches and, as the pot warmed up I got progressively better browning, but the garlic got progressively closer to burning. I removed some garlic with each batch so I got a range of flavors and textures of both. Probably a better idea to just remove the garlic, turn the heat up, wait a minute or two and then start browning the pork.

3. Drain oil from pan if you want, but that's garlic-infused pork fat so I certainly didn't. Turn heat down to medium and add onions, peppers and seasonings. Cook until softened. Try to get some browning, but if you're using chili powder you won't be able to tell by looking. When ready, remove to dutch oven.

4. Drain two of the cans of tomatoes, but keep the liquid from the other two. Add tomatoes (and the juice from two cans) and half the cilantro to dutch oven. Stir and put in oven. Cook for two hours.

5. Add beans and corn meal. Because the heat is low the sauce won't have cooked down at all. Judge if you want to add any of the bean liquid. Cook for another half hour.
6. Theoretically that should finish the dish, but you'll notice that the sauce is quite thin and the vegetables haven't really broken down. So enough of this newfangled stew cooking methods and onto the stove for a half hour of uncovered high simmering (with occasional stirring).

That certainly helped the texture a good deal, thickening the sauce into more of a gravy. And generous extra helpings of spice and salt helped the flavor along. But despite all that, I still can't call this dish a winner. It's fine, but the tomat(ill)o to everything else ratio is just too high for a really good flavor balance. Maybe fresh tomatoes would have helped, but Ro-tel canned are a standard ingredient in many fine chilis so it wasn't an unheard of change to the recipe. Some reviews of other versions of this dish complained about the orange juice, but I thought it added some interesting notes. It could have asserted itself a bit more, really, as could have the beer. I may have just chosen poorly in that regard, though. But my previous chilis and southwestern stews have improved while sitting in the freezer so there's every chance this stew will too. And also on the plus side, it turns out that the low slow cooking in the oven immunizes meat from toughening up during boiling. That's good to know.

Next time, though, I've really got to get back to basics and make a proper chile verde with just pork, chiles, onions and tomatillos.

Southwestern black bean hominy stew

My original plan was to make a traditional pozole--a stew of just hominy, peppers and pork--but things got a bit out of hand.

Well, backing up a bit, the origin of this dish is the tiny ethnic food isle in the local Whole Foods. They've got a rack of various southwestern peppers and herbs packaged by a company called Los Chileros out of New Mexico. They also sell dried hominy. I had no idea there was such a thing. Hominy is made by soaking dried corn in lye- or lime-water and I figured once it was soaked it was soaked and I had only ever seen it in cans. So I was intrigued and determined to try it out.

I also had on hand some dried black beans and some fresh corn on the cob that seemed like good additions. And, since I wanted something fire roasted in there and don't have ready access to fire, a can of fire roasted crushed tomatoes seemed like a good addition.

All that plus the pork--I think I accidentally made chili. It's nothing like a real bowl of red, mind you, but chili is such a degraded term these days I think this is somewhere under that broad umbrella.

Anyway, it went like this (keeping in mind that I didn't actually measure anything at the time):

ingredients:
1 cup dried black beans
1 cup dried hominy
1 Tablespoon olive oil
2 cups finely chopped onion (I used red and white as I had those available)
1 cup finely chopped green bell pepper (only because I had no fresh hot peppers handy)
1 Tablespoon Mexican oregano
1 Tablespoon epazote (epazote supposedly reduces gas, but best to use the beano anyway)
1 Tablespoon ancho chili powder
1 Tablespoon ground cumin (whole cumin would have been nice but I seem to be out)
2 dried casabel chiles
2 dried chipotle chiles
1 lb pork roast (not stew pork as that does best when the stew never reaches a boil, but you've got to boil to cook the beans and hominy), chopped in 1 inch cubes
kernels cut from 1 small ear of corn, including the milk if you've got any. Mine didn't.
14 ounces crushed fire roasted tomatoes
1 cup chicken broth
vinegar hot pepper sauce

garnishes:
lime
white onion, finely sliced
green cabbage, finely sliced
tortillas

1. Soak beans and hominy separately overnight

2. Heat oil in dutch oven on medium heat. Add any whole spices you're using, cook until aromatic, add onions and peppers, sweat onion and pepper until soft but not browned. Stir in oregano, epazote, chili powder and cumin and cook until aromatic.

3. Add hominy, black beans and enough hominy soaking water to cover by 1 inch. Crumble, crush or chop peppers and add to pot. Simmer on low heat until hominy and beans are just getting tender, around 1 1/2 hours.

4. Add corn, tomatoes, enough chicken broth to thin out the stew to your preference and salt to taste. Simmer for another 1/2 hour.

5. At some point during that half hour add the pork. Exactly when depends on your cut of meat and how large the pieces are. Use your judgment. I added mine with the corn and tomatoes and it ended up a bit overdone. Ten minutes would have been sufficient.

6. Taste and adjust seasoning. I found mine a bit muddy so I added a vinegar based hot sauce, specifically Urban Chefs hotlicious pepper sauce which is a micro-brand out of Columbus, Ohio. Tabasco or Cholula would do fine, but Urban Chefs has a fruitier character that I like a lot.

7. Serve garnished with onion, cabbage, strips of tortilla and a squeeze of lime.


The end result is pretty good. Looking at it you expect chili pretty much, but the strong corn element in the broth (and the fact that it's actually soupy) is pretty distinctive and interestingly tasty. I like the variety of textures in the chewy hominy, creamy beans, firmly tender corn, not too overdone pork and crisp garnishes. Tasting the dish today, I found the tomato a little forward and the chiles a bit mild and dissociated from the other flavors. These sorts of stews always taste better and usually spicier the second day after the flavors had time to meld. It's actually tasting better every time I try it as it cools. I'll add a note tomorrow when I have a final result.

OK, it's tomorrow. I'm a little disappointed. The flavors did meld nicely but the broth turned into a chili-style sauce and the flavors all mellowed a bit so the end result is kind of undistinguished. I was hoping for something with more pizazz. Still, a couple shots of hot sauce and it's perfectly palatable.

I might try a different mix of peppers next time; I picked what I used fairly randomly. It's easy to find out how hot each pepper is, but its the other flavors they have that are important and that's much harder to learn so you just have to try them and see. Wow, I just found myself respecting Bobby Flay for a moment there. What an odd sensation.