Flarecorn!

“This is really good. What’s in it? Pickles?”

“I couldn’t have another bowlful, I already ate three.”

“I need some more. The wind blew mine away.”

As it turns out, seasoned popcorn is the perfect festival food. It is easy to make lots, or to make fresh batches here and there all day. Everyone likes it. And the smell of popping corn puts people in a party mood.

I adapted this recipe especially for Art Flare Northeast, which went down in my friend Betsy’s backyard this weekend. If you didn’t make it out there, you should definitely watch this space. Will Art Flare return next year? And will they be serving Flarecorn?

Flarecorn
I made a tenfold batch, then kept the butter warm all day in a baby crockpot and popped the corn as we needed it. The recipe is adapted from Rebar Modern Food Cookbook, which wants you to use Chimayo chile powder. I a) do not have any of that and b) would not make it to serve to random Minnesotan strangers. Oh yah, 6000 Scoville yoonits is kinda hot fer us, don’cha know!

Serves 4-6.

½ stick butter
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 t Hungarian paprika
2 t rubbed sage
Pinch cayenne
½ t salt
½ c popcorn

Melt the butter in a small saucepan over medium-low heat. Toss in the garlic and simmer for a few minutes. Add the spices and simmer for a minute more. Scrape the butter and spices into a big not-plastic popcorn bowl. (Plastic will stain, and plastic + hot fat = bad news.)

Pop the popcorn right into the bowl if you still have one of those old-school air poppers. Take a rubber scraper and toss the popcorn around in the butter, scraping up the butter and seasoning from the bottom, as if you were folding cake batter.

Serve it when everything is about as evenly coated as you can get it.

¡Vivan Chiles Rellenos!

If you’re all wondering what to do with a poblano pepper, then you should go stuff it.

Har har har! No, really. And then you should batter it and fry it and serve it with a bunch of its friends.

Perhaps once a year I make chiles rellenos (say “ray-YAY-nohs.” Do not call them “reh-lennowz” unless you are still eating tor-til-ah chips.) from Diana Kennedy’s The Art of Mexican Cooking. To me, they epitomize the complexity of Mexican food. Even the most seemingly simple Mexican dish can involve multiple cooking methods and several iterations of processing. Making rellenos is like making four different dishes: roasting, peeling, and seeding the chiles; making the stuffing; making the sauce; and, finally, battering and frying the chiles. Add some side dishes to the meal, and you could be cooking all day a la Like Water for Chocolate.

This time, though, I tried to keep things simple. I used a good brand of canned refried black beans, and I used cheese for the filling. I made a very quick and easy tomatillo salsa for an appetizer and an even quicker and easier red tomato sauce to nap on the chiles. I rounded out the meal with a pot of white rice and a simple stewed zucchini with yellow cherry tomatoes and oregano. I forgot to set out the corn tortillas I’d bought, but nobody missed them. Dessert was vanilla ice cream or muskmelon, a cup of coffee, and a sliver of chocolate spiced with cinnamon and cayenne.

Chiles Rellenos
There are four stages: the chiles, the sauce, the filling, and the frying. Finally, we eat!

The Chiles
You can stuff any pepper, but traditional cooks use the poblano. These dark green, glossy triangles are relatively mild and about the size of a fist. Start with more chiles than you’re planning to serve; I promise at least one of them will end up in shreds while you are preparing it. Roast them on a grill or under a broiler, then peel them (here’s how). Find the weakest part of the chile, slit it open lengthwise, and sweep out the seeds and veins, being careful not to tear the flesh. You may need to wipe off your fingers, or your chile, with a towel as you work. Put the cleaned chile on a plate or cookie rack. You can do this a day ahead.

The Sauce
According to Kennedy, rellenos are traditionally heated up in a sauce—essentially, a very simple tomato reduction thinned with chicken broth. I opted to skip the broth and ended up with a tangy and fresh-tasting tomato sauce. You can make this ahead of time.

2 or 3 tomatoes
2 T chopped onion
1 clove garlic, chopped
1-2 T oil
Salt to taste

Put the tomatoes, onion, and garlic in a blender and liquefy. Heat the oil in a well-seasoned skillet. Dump in the tomato mixture and fry until reduced, maybe 5 or 10 minutes. (At this point Kennedy has you add 2 ¼ cups of chicken broth and cook 5 minutes more.) Salt to taste.

The Filling
Recipes abound for the relleno, or stuffing, part of chiles rellenos. You can use seasoned meat, or maybe potatoes and chorizo. I found queso Chihuahua, the quintessential Mexican melting cheese, at the Wedge. Muenster would be the next best choice. I cut it in strips about the size of my index finger. A large poblano will take two or three of these pieces; for a tiny chile, I cut one in half.

Put cheese inside the chile, being careful not to tear it. The chile should be nice and full, but the sides of the hole should overlap a bit. If you opt to close the slit with a toothpick, be sure to warn your guests.

The Frying
Cover a plate with several layers of paper towels and put it in the oven at 200° F. Get out a big frying pan and pour in about an inch of oil. Canola is nice. Put the pan on a medium-high burner.

Now make the batter. For every four to six big chiles, get these things:

3 eggs
¼ t salt
⅓ c flour

Separate the eggs. Beat the whites until they are stiff and turning dry. Beat in the yolks, one by one, and the salt.

OK, here we go. It’s showtime. I always get very scared at this point. I’m convinced that the chiles will come apart, stick to the pan, catch on fire, splatter everywhere, or burn black. But not one of those things has ever happened. They always fry up like magic.

Plan to work with one or two chiles at a time. Dredge a chile in flour...











then hold it by its stem and dunk it in the batter.


































Gently lay the chile in the hot oil and let it cook golden brown. Use two spatulas to turn it on its side (or flip it right over if it is very small). Fry each chile on all sides...





then remove to the plate to drain.

Hey, look at that! It worked!

Let’s eat!

If you did the broth thing, you can put the rellenos in the sauce and heat them up for five minutes or so. Otherwise, plate ‘em up! Serve each guest one big chile or two smaller ones. You can pool the sauce under them or nap it on top.

¡Buen provecho!

Pico de Mango

In case you didn't get the bulletin, it's summer. The days are a grind of punishing sun. The night flows in, sultry, its dark heat draping us with a slick sheen of languor. The dense, humid air trails its heavy fingers across our skin, leaving trickles of sweat to slip down a back or a neck. In my garden, the scents of jasmine and lily hang in voluptuous clouds, nectar oozing to the tips of turgid pistils, pollen sifting off to stain fleshy white petals.

It’s salsa weather. Mangoes are a shudderingly fine balance between acid and sweet. Their lazy, musky nectar and silk-smooth flesh are a perfect complement to the vigorous crunch and zing of onions, chiles, and cilantro. Round it off with the clean finish of lime to cut the lingering sweetness.

Mango Salsa
I have won so many salsa contests with this recipe that people don’t know whether to get mad or hungry when they see me coming.
2 ripe mangoes
5 or 6 scallions or half a small onion
1 or 2 jalapeño chiles
A fistful of cilantro
Juice of one lime
A dash of salt

Chop everything and mix it up. That’s it!

Bonus: How to cut up a mango
There are still people in the world who do not know how to cut up a mango without waste or injury. Not another thumb lost to mangoes!

Anatomy of a mango: The large, flat seed is in the center of the mango. Its fibrous outside is entrenched in the flesh. The trick is to cut away the fruit as close to the seed as possible, then come back for what’s attached to the seed.
























Addressing the mango: Find the stem to tell you where the center is. Hold the mango so the seed is perpendicular to the cutting surface.





















Lop off the cheeks. With practice, you will learn to know how close to the center you can cut.

















Score the flesh. Try to cut as deep as the skin, but not through the skin.



















Now hold the mango slice like a votive offering and push it inside out. The skin will pop from concave to convex, presenting you with many cubes of mango that you can slice or pick off the skin.





Finally, pare the skin off the remaining disc and whittle the flesh off the seed. This is slippery and possibly dangerous. If you don’t want to risk your fingers, and especially if no one is looking, you might just want to gnaw the fruit off the seed.

Hey, cook’s privilege. You earned it.

Pickling: the Art and the Science

For the twelfth year running, I opened canning season on the last Saturday in August. My kitchen filled with steam, vinegar fumes, and business as a small group gathered to enact the mechanical and chemical processes--and the acrobatics of slicing and seasoning--that transform fresh cucumbers into pickles. This ancient art is no less magical for our modern understanding of the science behind it.

Pickling is the artful combination of vegetables, seasonings, and timing. Pickles might be made with one or a combination of flavor-adding preservatives: salt, sugar, vinegar, and fermentation. All pickling methods are essentially a time capsule. The spoilage of food is controlled, repurposed, and all but stopped. Families and communities have passed recipes and preserving methods down through the ages as a matter of tradition.



The science of what people are achieving, though, is brilliant in its simplicity. Long before anyone knew about microorganisms, pickling methods effectively arrested bacterial efforts to decompose food.

Let's break it down: pickling is about solutes, acids, and oxygen. Adding heavy amounts of salt or sugar will desiccate your vegetables. It does the same to many microorganisms, upsetting their chemistry and killing them. The fermenting agents that move into, say, a vat of salted cabbage will begin producing acidic byproducts. These eventually pollute the batch until it is uninhabitable for yeasts (but is sauerkraut for us). Jump-start the process by pouring on an acid like vinegar. Now even fermentation is impossible. Beneath the surface of the pickling fluid, oxygen cannot reach. Microbial life, and therefore spoilage, becomes very difficult.



Lately we've added vacuum-sealing to the mix. Pack a jar full of pickles, then cover it tightly enough to keep water out but loosely enough so air won't stay in. Put it underwater and heat it until the contents expand and the air bubbles out. As the jar cools, the vacuum inside it sucks the lid on and you have created a little microcosm of hell. Think about it: Inside the jar is an airless world of burning acid and corroding salt. No one could survive it--not even a bacterium.

As long as one is not a bacterium, though, anyone can make a pickle. It can be done with a minimum of equipment and ingredients. If you are not a canner, you could leave the jars in the refrigerator for a week or more.

Garlic Dills
1/4 bushel cucumbers*
1 bunch dill
2 heads garlic
Fresh cayenne chiles (optional)

The brine:
1 gallon water
1 quart vinegar (5% acidity)
1 cup pickling salt (buy the proper pickling kind - don't use table salt)

* Cukes must go from the vine to the vat in less than 24 hours or they will be soft and disappointing. Buy from a farmers' market and ask the vendor when they were picked!

Put the brine ingredients in a tightly covered pot to boil.

Scrub and halve or quarter the cucumbers lengthwise. Separate the garlic into cloves and peel. Wash the dill and chiles.

Wash and sterilize jars and lids.

Pack the hot jars: 2 cloves of garlic and a sprig or seed head of dill at the bottom, cucumbers and one or two chiles on top, another bit of dill, more cucumbers, and a bit of dill on top.

Slowly pour boiling brine over the cucumbers. Chase out any air bubbles with a table knife. Wipe off jar mouths with a clean cloth, cover with hot two-piece caps, and process in boiling water for 5 minutes. Set the jars on a towel and cover with another towel until cool. Test seals and refrigerate any jars that fail to seal.

Makes around 10 quarts.

Fish Tacos with All the Fixings

This post originally published 8.23.2009. Photos added 9.20.2009.

[REDACTED: Friend, I’m sorry. I just came home from a weekend out of town, and so I did not cook and photograph this dish for you like usual. But I plan to cook it next Friday—and then you could cook it, too, and it would be like we were having dinner together. Cheers!]

Two or three summers ago, I made it my mission to create the perfect fish taco. After extensive research at restaurants, fish shacks, and taco stands around the Twin Cities, I settled on a few (highly opinionated) fish taco axioms:

• Grilled fish, not breaded and fried. Breading hides the fish; it’s for poseurs. Also, the entire arrangement will be wrapped in a tortilla, which is technically a kind of bread.


• Corn tortillas only. No wheat. Wheat tortillas are the wrong size, texture, and flavor. Plus they are morally bankrupt! Tortillas are made of corn! ¿Entiende?


• There should be vegetables, but you should never put iceberg lettuce in a fish taco. In fact, you should never put iceberg lettuce anywhere. Certainly not in your mouth.


• There should be some sauce. A finely chopped pico de gallo is good. There’s a special fish taco sauce, too. At the very least, there should be a lime to squeeze on the taco.


• Finally, it would be a really nice touch to serve some black beans and queso fresco to go along with the tacos.

I used these rules to develop my own recipe for fish tacos with all the fixings. This would be a good thing to serve to friends for a last summer hurrah on the patio. Maybe throw in some margaritas or Negra Modelo and a nice fruit sorbet for dessert.

Fish Tacos with All the Fixings

This will serve four people. There is a lot going on in here, and this is the order in which I think you should fix things.

Prep List:

• Pickled onions


• Seasoned fish


• The sauce


• The fixings


• Grill the fish


• Heat the tortillas


• Assemble the tacos

The pickled onions:

This excellent pickle comes from Diana Kennedy’s The Art of Mexican Cooking.

1 lb red onions, trimmed, peeled, sliced thin
½ c fresh lime juice
1 ½ t sea salt

Put everything in a glass bowl, mix, and allow to macerate for 2 hours. Maybe stir the onions halfway through and press them down into the juice. They will make more liquid as they pickle. They’ll keep, refrigerated, for weeks. (But when you find out how good they are on a sandwich, they will never live as long as a week.)

Back to prep list

The seasoned fish:

2 t thyme
1 t black pepper
¼ t cumin
½ t cayenne pepper (more if you are a chile-head)
½ t salt
1 lb catfish fillets

Mix or grind the seasonings together. Rub them into the fish fillets. Stack the fillets and set aside 1 hour or more.

Back to prep list

The sauce:

Besides the bare minimum of squeezing a lime over the fish, it's fun to dress up your tacos with sauce. You can use a fresh homemade pico de gallo. You can use any kind of good quality bottled salsa. I also serve this one.

8 oz sour cream
Juice of 1 lime
Bufalo chipotle sauce or any hot chile sauce

Mix them all together, adding chile sauce to taste and lime juice until the sauce is like a thin mustard. I use a funnel to pour the sauce into a squeeze bottle.

Back to prep list

The fixings:

• Half a head of red or green cabbage, cut as fine as you can. (I’d use a knife. Food processors tend to mush up the cabbage.)


• One or two jalapeños, cored, seeded, and sliced into thin rings.


• A bunch of cilantro, picked off the stem if you are patient or chopped if you are not. It is acceptable to have some soft stems in your cilantro.


• The pickled onions.


• The sauce(s).


• Tortillas: They must be the small corn kind. You will need four per person, two for each taco.


• Black beans: These go next to the taco, not on it. If you don’t want to make your own, then Bearitos has a nice fat-free refried black bean.


• Queso fresco: Crumble it and put it on the hot beans. Mmmm.

Back to prep list

Grill the fish:
Grill it two or three minutes on a side, then test it with a knife. If it is almost as cooked as you’d like, take it off the heat. The fish will continue to cook a little on the serving plate.

Back to prep list

Heat the tortillas:
You need 16 small corn tortillas to make 8 tacos for 4 people.

I have one of those hateful glass-top electric stoves. Its only saving grace is that I can do this right on the stovetop. You may prefer to heat up a dry skillet.

Put the first tortilla on the hot, dry surface for about three seconds. Flip it over (use your fingers if you are clever or a spatula if you are cautious) and put the second tortilla on top, then wait three seconds. Flip the stack over, then add the third tortilla and wait three seconds. The tortillas should be getting some dark spots on them from this treatment. Even if a bit of charred tortilla gunk accumulates on the hot surface, you’re still good.

Continue flipping the stack and adding a tortilla until all the tortillas are on the stack. Do the final flip, wait the final three seconds, and then transfer to a warm plate and cover with a clean dish towel.

Back to prep list

Assemble the tacos:
For each taco, lay two tortillas on the plate so they overlap. Take a fork to the fish fillets and flake/break off about two ounces of fish per taco; put this on the tortillas. Squeeze on some lime. Dress with fixings as desired, being careful not to overstuff. Top with a wee bit of sauce(s). Put a nice spoonful of black beans on the plate and put some crumbled queso fresco on top of them.

To eat the taco, fold the tortillas over the bottom and then fold the sides over to make a packet. It’s better to make a lot of little tacos than one giant taco.

¡Buen provecho!

Thai Eggplant ‘Salad’

Could I just say that I like Thai food? I like it a lot. Good thing I live in the Twin Cities, where we are blessed with perhaps more than our fair share of great Thai restaurants. (No, New York City, you CANNOT have a single one of them. We need them all, thank you very much.)

Now, there are cuisines that are about complicated nuance. Thai isn’t one of them. Thai food is about FLAVOR and lots of it. Japanese food might be subtle, and French food might be art. But Thai is like the old Batman TV series. There’s a ton of fresh herbs, POW! And fish sauce, SOCK! And blisteringly fresh chiles, WHAM! A Thai dish doesn’t pull any punches. It’s a knock-down, drag-out good time that everyone can understand and enjoy. You better hope your mouth has room for all the deliciousness.

And there’s more to love about Thai than its candor: there’s also its accessibility, its freshness, and its immediacy. If you want to make food crammed with the best produce summer has to offer, then here’s something that will make your friends gasp.

That’s what my friends did this week when I served them this yam. The closest English word for yam is “salad,” but that falls far short. It’s more like a party, or an explosion, or everything you ever wanted to happen to you in terms of food. Serve it with just the lettuce leaves for an attention-getting bar snack. Or add thinly sliced cucumber and zucchini, cook up a pot of jasmine rice, and find some mango sorbet for dessert. Then you’ve got a pretty good meal.

Eggplant Salad
This recipe is adapted from Seductions of Rice: A Cookbook by Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid.

1.5 lb Japanese eggplants (the long thin purple kind)
½ c finely sliced shallots, separated into rings
½ c roughly chopped cilantro
¼ c chopped mint
6 T fresh lime juice
3 T Thai fish sauce
¼ t sugar
1 Thai chile, finely minced (more or less to taste)
1 head of soft lettuce, i.e. Bibb, separated into leaves

Diagonally slice the eggplant ¼ to ½ inch thick. Grill or broil the slices until golden brown on each side. Let them cool a bit, then chop coarsely and put in a large bowl. Add the shallots and herbs.

In a separate bowl, combine the juice, sauce, sugar, and chile. Pour onto the eggplant and toss. Set aside for a half hour or more so the eggplant can absorb the seasonings.

Serve the eggplant yam in a low bowl or on a plate accompanied by a plate of lettuce leaves (add thinly sliced vegetables if you like). Use the greens to scoop up a bite of yam.

Anyone know how to say “mangiamo” in Thai?