CSA week 14 - Camarones verdes

I found this recipe on the New York Times website with lots of basil with a bit of mint and tarragon substituted in to try to simulate the flavor of hoja santa. Well, no need for that for us lucky few. I traced it back to what looks like the original, from whence I got the Spanish name. It was buried on the third page of a Google search that ought to have popped it right up; Weird. Anyway, that page says it was published in the Dallas Morning News in 1998 as a preview of Diana Kennedy's cookbook: My Mexico. The NYT version only credits Martha Schulman, the author of the piece, but she did make some changes. For one, she broils the tomatillos rather than simmering them which seems an improvement to me. My version will mostly follow the NYT procedure with the big change of swapping out half the shrimp for potatoes, partially because the dish could use both a higher veg to meat ratio and partially because that's what I've got.

Ingredients:
1/2 pound tomatillos
3-4 hoja santa leaves
2 smallish hot chilies, de-stemmed but not de-seeded
1 pinch anise seeds [substituting for maybe-poisonous avocado leaves]
1/4 cup water
5 large garlic cloves, crushed
1 large pinch salt
2 Tablespoons olive oil
1/2 pound medium shrimp, peeled and de-veined
1/2 pound something else like potatoes or zucchini or more shrimp

1. Broil the tomatillos on a baking pan for 3-5 minutes on one side until charred [they'll start popping audibly at this point which is helpful], flip them over and broil 3-5 minutes more until that side is charred too. Remove to a blender or food processor making sure to keep the released juices.

2. Tear hoja santa, leaving the bigger veins behind [pretty easy actually]. Chop the chilies. Add both, the anise seeds and water, to the tomatillos. [Note from after the fact: also add one canned or dried-and-reconstituted chipotle pepper] Blend until smooth. Taste and season conservatively. Set aside.

3. Cook your something else until almost done [unless it's more shrimp].

4. Put garlic and salt in a mortar. Crush. Add olive oil and crush some more until you form a paste.

5. Add some more olive oil to a large pan and heat over medium-high heat. Add your something else if you want to get a bit of color on it. Season the shrimp then add it to the pan and cook about 2 minutes until not quite done. Remove both to a bowl.

6. Add garlic mixture to the pan and cook 30 seconds until aromatic. Add tomatillo mixture, bring to a boil, turn heat down to medium low, and cook around 5 minutes until the 1/4 cup of water has boiled out and the sauce has thickened slightly. Return the other ingredients and cook a few minutes more until everything is cooked through and the sauce coats the chunky bits.

Serve with tortillas if your something else wasn't starchy.



The sauce has the same tart, oddly herbal/medicinal flavor that I had a hard time describing the last time I made something using the combination. I doesn't pair particularly well with either the shrimp or the potatoes, but it doesn't actively clash either. You taste it, then you taste the shrimp but there's kind of a disconnect between.

Last year, I suggested adding some chipotle so I'm going to try that now to see if that helps matters... Yeah, it helps a whole lot. It lays a foundation for the tartness of the tomatillo and rounds out the hoja santa. It even makes the flavors blend with the shrimp. I can now honestly recommend making this dish if you add a chipotle or maybe some pimenton back in step two.

Green tomato hoja santa galette

I vacillated for a long time over whether to follow through with my plan to use hoja santa in this. The other elements--green tomatoes, onions, bacon and goat cheese--are easy to see together (if you've been reading a bunch of savory green tomato pie recipes anyway) and there was a fair chance of ruining the whole thing with a wild card like hoja santa. If I only had to answer to myself and didn't need material for the blog, I probably would have backed down and just thrown in a little oregano instead. But that wouldn't be worth writing about would it? So, in that spirit, here goes...

Ingredients:
2 thick slices bacon, chopped
2 green tomatoes, thinly sliced
1/2 medium onion, thinly sliced
3 ounces fresh goat cheese, crumbled
2 leaves hoja santa, deveined and chopped
salt and pepper

Crust ingredients:
1 cup flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
6 Tablespoons cold unsalted butter, cut into chunks
2-4 Tablespoons cold water

1. Blend flour and salt in a food processor. Add butter and process until incorporated and the mixture has a crumbly texture. Blend in water until the dough just comes together.

2. Dump dough out onto a work surface. Form it into a ball, split into two, flatten and put into refrigerator to chill for 30 minutes. Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

3. Meanwhile, put bacon in a medium cast iron pan and cook over medium heat until well rendered, browned and crispy (stirring as necessary). Remove bacon to a paper towel.

4. Add green tomato and onion to bacon fat in pan. Salt lightly to draw out juices and cook until tomato starts to soften and onion becomes translucent. Add hoja santa and cook briefly to wilt and blend flavors. There's plenty of cooking later so don't overdo it now. Remove to a bowl and chill in the refrigerator until the dough is finished chilling.

5. Mix cheese and bacon into tomato mixture.

6. Take one of the dough rounds out of the refrigerator and, on a well-floured surface, roll out into 9-10 inches diameter circle. Drape the dough into a pie plate, optionally, to make it easier to fill. Fill with tomato mixture and fold excess dough over top. Spray exposed dough with olive oil and bake for 40 minutes until tomatoes have dissolved, the cheese has melted and the crust is golden brown. Cool for 10 minutes and serve.


The flavors here have pulled together nicely. Bacon and onions are a natural pairing. Goat cheese makes perfect sense with them. The green tomatoes add an almost citrusy tartness and the hoja santa an odd herbal aromaticity. It strikes an odd note just through its unfamiliarity. I'm still trying to decide if I like it. It's not bad, but is it an improvement over, say, oregano? ... Upon consideration, I think that when there's just a hint, it blends nicely with the green tomato flavor and counterpoints the smokiness. When there's a lot, it's weird and distracting. It's good, but I should have used less. One leaf would have done it. Two did seem like a lot, but with ten in the pack, I thought maybe I could use it more as a vegetable component than an herb. It's really too strongly flavored for that, though, at least in this sort of application. Maybe in a salad, though.

CSA week 19 - Baked fish in hoja santa tomatillo sauce

This is a recipe from Victoria Challancin, the owner of the Flavors of the Sun International Cooking School. It's pretty simple and I made it even simpler because, after making the sauce, I didn't have leaves left to wrap the fish too. Also, I didn't have enough fish so I used some shrimp.

Ingredients:
1 share hoja santa leaves, I didn't count. Six? Around that.
6 ounces tomatillos, husked, cleaned and quartered
1 clove garlic, peeled
1 hot chile, seeded or not to your taste I used a seeded jalapeño.
1/6 cup water
salt to taste

0. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

1. Boil a pot of water. Blanch the hoja santa leaves for 30 seconds. Cool immediately to stop the cooking. Strip out the tough stems and roughly chop.

2. Add everything to a food processor and process until fairly smooth. I found I got little chunks floating in a watery sauce so you might want to keep on blending for a while longer.

3. Place seafood in a baking dish. This makes enough sauce for a couple fillets. Cover with sauce. I didn't, but you might want to cover the dish with foil to try to keep the fish moist. Bake until fish is cooked through, 10-15 minutes.

Serve with tortillas or possibly rice. I made tacos because why not?




Hmm...The sauce is slightly spicy, brightly acid from the not-quite-ripe tomatillos (a squeeze of lime takes the unpleasant edge off the tartness), aromatically herbal, rooty and slightly chemical--unmistakably hoja santa. Nothing transformative here, but the hoja santa flavor, a bit much on its own, works better as a balanced element of the gestalt of the sauce. It goes pretty well with the fish, less well with the shrimp (which were kind of funky today. Maybe from overcooking; maybe I just got a bad batch?) and really well with the tortillas. I'm going to try using hoja santa in a corn salad next time I get some or maybe in tamales...Hold on a second, I just added some chipotle to the sauce and the smokiness is great base for the hoja santa's flavors. That's definitely the way I'm going next time around. Just add a little to this sauce and you'll be happy, I'm promise.