Grant McWilliams

I've been on a bit of a chile kick lately. You can blame Mexico I think since it started the minute I got back. In the past few weeks I've stuffed Bells, make sweet pepper cream sauce, stuffed poblanos for Chiles en Nagoda and yesterday made Chile and tomato rice to stuff my chimichangas with. Today I continued that trend and made an Ancho (my favorite) and Anaheim marinade spiced with canela, cloves, Mexican oregano and garlic. Half was spread over the country style ribs and let marinade overnight. The second half was laced with mint honey and used to baste the ribs as they braized. I paired this up with bright orange mashed sweet potatoes. I laid the ribs on a bed of lettuce and served them. I personally felt the flavor was very very good and I'll be playing with this some more in the future. My kids however weren't that thrilled. I'm perplexed as to why and they couldn't tell me either. I'm sold on using rehydrated chiles blended with garlic and apple cider vinager as a marinade. I'm not sure why I didn't do this earlier.

A friend gave me a bunch of cream which was starting to clump up so I decided to use it for something besides ice cream. Afterall you can only eat so much ice cream. My idea came from a couple of restaurants - one is a in Richland WA called La Isla Bonita that makes a seafood chimichanga with cream sauce poured over it that I've always loved. I just recently discovered a local Mexican joint near Edmonds Community College in Lynwood called Taquiera La Raza that also had a chimichanga with cream sauce and although it's not as wonderful as La Isla Bonita's it's very nice.

So here was my idea, make some burritos with tomato and chile rice, black beans and seared pork, then drop them in the fryer until golden brown and cover with a steaming heavy cream/mexican sour cream (Creme Fresca) mix topped with a sprinkling of sweet paprika, cumin and brown sugar. Here's the result. Natalya has never had something like this and she's my toughest critic so when she took a bite and nodded her head I knew that I'd done well. She's since gone back and cooked several more. I'm playing with chile and honey glazed pork spare ribs tonight and I think that may be a nicer meat to stuff the burritos with next time. Stay tuned, I'm sure there'll be an update.

There's this dish so pretty that a man once got on a bus with his three kids in a very southern city in Mexico and rode for 4 hrs to the town where it originated just to experience the decadance. This is a true story and the dish is that pretty. The dish is called Chiles en Nagoda (pronounced Nuh-God-duh) and is yet another invention of the Spanish nuns in Puebla for the first Emporer of Mexico after they gained their independence from Spain. The other famous dish that nuns in Puebla created is Mole Pablano which of course I ate many plates full the last time I was there.

There are many ways to make Chiles en Nagoda but the variation I had in Puelba (yes, that was me mentioned above) had a Poblano chile stuffed with a combination of shredded meat, tomatoes and dried fruits like raisins, nuts and fresh pomegranate seeds. This chile is then covered with a white sauce made of Queso Fresco (Mexican Cheese) and Mexican sour cream with ground walnuts and topped with pomegranate seeds and parsley leaves. The red, white and green symbolize the colors of the Mexican flag. It's customary to only eat it in August but I was lucky enough to find it in January at one small restaurant. My take on Chiles en Nagoda got it's start when I was perusing the aisles at Grocery Outlet when I found a package of sweet yellow, orange and red peppers. These weren't bell peppers but longer almost Jalepeno shaped peppers. Even though the Poblano pepper is traditional I decided to use these instead and it worked out wonderfully.

Tonight I decided not to do anything complex. I was at Safeway and they had prosciutto for half price (about $11/lb) so I picked up some and of course that led to getting some cantelope which in turn led to getting some red bell peppers and fresh cheese tortellini which were also on sale. Actually all of it was. You can't have these other things without some sort of bread so a baguette went in the bag as well. The checkout lady pointed at the prosciutto and asked me what it was. I said "prosciutto" and she said she could read it but what was it, was it salmon? It was all I could do but blink. No it's ham I said which was followed by her asking me what I do with it. I wrap it around melons along with Italian sweet basil and drizzle it with olive oil as an appetizer. I thought she was going to melt. She seemed to think it sounded very good. It's so easy I'm not sure why other people don't do things like this. A baby could do it!

I roasted the red bell peppers under the broiler and then tossed them in a ziplock bag to steam. A mixture of fresh garlic and butter slopped on to the bagguette set it up nicely. The fresh tortellini went in a pot of heavily salted water and two shallots and a couple of cloves of garlic went in a frypan with olive oil until translucent. A can of Campbell's condensed tomato soup and an additional can of milk was then mixed in along with the pealed red bell peppers and the whole mess was thrown in the blender and pureed. Back in the pan I added a very healthy handful of basil and a dab of olive oil for good measure. As I said earlier the melon was pealed and cut in thin slices then wrapped with prosciutto, basil and drizzled with olive oil. For a quick meal it turned out really well.

I was in my local Indian market the other day and they had the nicest looking small yellow bell peppers and for only 50 cents each. Thoughts of what to do with them raced through my head. I've been wanting to branch out and utilize the Persian Jeweled rice or versions of it for more dishes so I decided to pick up some yellow bells and stuff them with Persian Jeweled rice. This turned out really good but possibly the peppers are too small. You find yourself digging through the pepper trying to get a bigger bite of the rice because it's so incredibly flavorful. The jeweled rice has caramelized carrots and orange rind in cardamom and cinnamon spiced basmati with butter and yogurt. Topped with caramelized onions and soaked berry mix with a touch of pomegranate seeds.

My cousin Robin sent me a link to a food blog that had posted one of Wolfgang Puck's creations that sounded interesting - Pumpkin Lasagna. I almost didn't try it because I've had Wolfgang Puck's frozen pizza (a word of advice to other chefs - don't!) and I've seen his junk cookware but it sounded like it would be fun and maybe even good. In Italy it's very common to have Pumpkin or Squash puree in stuffed noodles and they've become a favorite in our house. My other reason for making the recipe is that I don't really like Lasagna. This may sound counter-intuitive but it's not. Classic Lasagna is about as interesting as classic Spaghetti (sorry Spaghetti lovers) in that it's well - boring. There's nothing interesting about a tomato sauce and noodles topped with cheese. Yes, kids like it but that's because they don't know any better. Why make Pumpkin Lasagna? Because it isn't boring! So we followed the recipe as posted at the One Perfect Bite food blog which made it according to the original recipe (I assume) by using Pumpkin and Chevre. The one red flag was the amount of salt used in the filling - ONE TABLESPOON! That seemed excessive to me but I hate it when I go through the trouble of making a recipe and people substitute cheese whiz for Froie Gras then complain so in the 1 Tbsp of salt went. I didn't have enough fresh Thyme so I had to commit the ultimate evil and dig through the cupboard for the dried version. I had fresh sage and ground some nutmeg. The recipe called for "goat cheese" (whatever that is) or Mascarpone which sounded good so I used that. We had a ton of Delicata Squash in the garage so we baked it cut side down the way I do pumpkins and it turned out real nice.

Conclusion: I think this recipe has real promise. If you like eating Squash then you'll love Squash Lasagna. However I was right on the money with the salt issue. I'm fairly certain that it was meant to be 1 tsp (teaspoon) and not 1 tbsp (tablespoon) as we had to gag it down. We'll be making it again later this week with a bit less Thyme, Sage and Salt. I believe this is the first time I've not doubled the herbs in a recipe and in fact pulled them back. Usually recipes lack flavor and need kick.

 

 

 

When I was a kid about 7 or 8 years old I knew what I wanted to do for a living. Most kids wanted to be Firemen, Police officers, Basketball stars etc.. I wanted to be a baker. I don't know why and I apparently didn't know anything about the hours they keep but I wanted to bake. I'm sure it had to do with my love for bread. When most people go to the cupboard late at night to get some sweets I go for bread. When I want to treat myself in the early morning I go to the donut shop. I've fallen in love with France for their pastries and many many types of breads. So why didn't I grow up to be a baker? Because bakers keep odd hours and the only way I could be a baker is to do all the baking BEFORE I go to bed. That and the little fact that most bakers don't spend three months a year traveling around the world. Although this year my travel schedule probably resembles a bakers travel schedule more than one of an IT consultant for fortune 50 corporations but I digress.

So there's rarely a time where I wouldn't appreciate the smell of dough rising in my house and the aroma of fresh bread baking in the oven waifing up the stairway to my nose parked in front of the computer is a very warm thought indeed. The problem is I'm a very spontaneous person and making bread is not a very spontaneous activity. You can't just whip up a loaf of bread and eat it 15 minutes later. You can however whip up a loaf of bread and eat it two and a half hours later. This might seem like a long time but I've started to realize that most of our meals take nearly this long to cook so if I get the dough rising first thing we'll have fresh bread for dinner. This is the plan anyway. If I mix the dough and get it on it's first rise at 5 pm we'll have bread at dinner. The other night I tried this theory with the Squash and mascarpone lasagna and it worked perfectly. The squash was going to take an hour to cook and then the lasagna was going to take another hour plus prep time so the bread got done exactly when the lasagna did.

With the Lasagna we were only involved twice - once to scoop out the squash and put it in the oven and then to scoop out the cooked squash and prepare the lasagna. That's about 20 minutes out of a 2 hr meal. Making bread is like that. People complain about it taking so long to make bread and how much work it is. It isn't really, you'll just need to trust me on this.

1. Drop your yeast in baby bottle warm water
2. Put all ingredients in the mixer bowl and turn it on for 10 minutes.
3. Cover and wait
4. Cut into shapes and wait
5. Bake

So easy even a baby could do it! If you're using rapid rise yeast or instant yeast either one you can skip step 1 and let's be honest step 3 (waiting) and step 5 (baking) aren't really steps - they're too easy to be steps. So with the lasagna I make buttermilk pull-a-part rolls. Of course we had to have real butter in them as well because anything else wouldn't be civilized.

One of my favorite meals is a Persian dish called Korescht-e Fesanjan or the slang term Fesenjoon. It's a meat "soup" of sorts with a Pomegranate and Walnut sauce. It's quite wonderful but also quite elusive in the dining world because of the lack of great Persian restaurants in the Seattle area. I've taken it to task to reproduce it at home. The first time I made it Jade proclaimed that he felt like he was "throwing up". Thankfully I've made progress since then. What I fixed last night got a thumbs up from everyone and Piper begged me to not change it (she knows me too well). I'm not satisfied but I'm on the right track. The texture and color are off and the flavors will need to be tweaked still. I paired it with fresh home made wheat pitas, steamed basmati and apple tea (really apple cider).

On occasion I check out frozen stuffed pasta at the local grocery but almost always pass over them unless they're dirt cheap or they sound especially interesting. I've learned that fresh homemade pasta is just plain better. I have found though that there are several types of fresh (packaged) pasta available in the store - most are unafordable by anyone but a first year Microsoft investor. QFC (our local "charge whatever they want because they have rustic tile floors" grocery store) had fresh packaged chicken and bacon borsetti that looked interesting. Interesting because it's not cheese or sausage ravioli. The pasta was usually $7 but was on sale for $4 and because of a special promo had a dollar off coupon so I bought it on impulse. The first night I cooked it I served it in the old standby - browned butter and sage sauce - and it worked fairly well. My kids couldn't place the flavor of bacon in the pasta because they weren't expecting it. The second time I cooked it I decided to put a little effort into it and make sweet pepper cream sauce. The sauce turned out very good but clashed with the strong flavors of the pasta. Oh well, live and learn.

I do however, think I'l be spending more time with borsetti. In case you don't know what they are they look like cute little bags of gold. I thought that maybe they'd be visible in the photo but they really aren't. You can see the top of the bag all bunched up in the right side of the pasta bowl. They seem really easy to make since they're just squares of pasta bunched up with filling. I think you'll be hearing more of borsetti in the future. Next time I'll just make them fresh. It's not that the chicken and bacon ones were bad, they just don't match what I had in mind.

So far I have $10 invested in the quarry tiles that I'm using as a poor mans brick oven. To get a flat surface I was looking into placing them in a baking sheet, bonding them onto a sheet of metal and other things. Because we were going to have a pizza party I basically ran out of time so I just laid the tiles on the metal racks in the ovens and winged it. I'm still going to work on a better solution because one rack of tiles weighs 16 lbs so the rack sags in the middle. My long term plan (at this moment) is to sand down the edges of the tiles so they fit together very tight and bond them to a sheet of metal some how. I think that if I bond them with the metal sprung a bit in the convex direction the tiles themselves will provide the structural strength. My only concern is replacing a tile if one breaks. I may look into fastening them a different way. Maybe I'll bond bolts to them and fasten those to the metal. Who knows, it's just ideas at this point.

To test out the tiles we made homemade pizza and set the oven to 550 degrees. I also had my old pizza stone on the bottom rack for comparison. The tiles worked wonderfully and even though I've not made any of the changes above I had no problem with them just laid on the racks and they had no problem with the heat.

We made pizza for us and made sure there were ingredients for people with narrower palettes as well. I poached pears in Chardonnay, simmered down our own BBQ sauce and made a marinara for standard pizzas. The pears I paired (ahem) with an herbed Chevre, rubbed the crust with a branch of rosemary dipped in olive oil and sprinkled with Balsamic Vinegar. The pizza in the photo I made the next night the same with but added shallots caramelized in Muscatel Sherry and pomegranate seeds.

For the narrower palette we made the BBQ sauce which we teamed up with grilled chicken breast and slices of smoked Gouda and sprinkled with cilantro. For the even narrower palette I made sure we had marinara, mozzarella and pepperoni available. Most of the kids ate that.

I think I need to say something about the dough for a minute. I've heard all kinds of horror stories about homemade pizzas and it mostly centers around the dough. I remember as a kid trying to make pizza at home and it always tasted funky but it was because we were trying to cut corners. We'd buy pizza dough in a can, pizza sauce in a can etc... Just skip to the chase because none of those things work very well. Pizza sauce (marinara) is a no brainer so I won't spend any time there. The dough however can be very picky so I've included the pizza dough recipe that we use in the recipe section. It's a bit more complex than some doughs (eg. Cooks Illustrated pizza dough) but I like it much better. It's such a wonderful dough to work with that it makes making pizzas a joy. You wil lneed to find durum flour and the recipe calls for bread flour as well but I cheat on that a lot and use a combination of bread flour and all-purpose depending on what I have. The recipe is in weights and is for 16 small pizzas so you'll probably want to do the math to cut it down.