You'll thank me later.

 No, seriously. Watch that.

Monthly Mingle: Mexican Fiesta

A few weeks ago, I was asked by the purveyor of All Things Edible to participate in a blogging event involving foods. I'm generally not good about Intarwebs events because, well, I usually forget, but this time it was something well worth pursuing: i.e., Mexican foods which totally rock. Note that the actual cooking was done two weeks ago and that the end product has already been consumed with much gusto.


One of my favorite things from Chipotle, the happiest place on Earth, is their barbacoa. I can't type with any authority on what authentic barbacoa entails (cow head?!) but this is my take on Chipotle's version with some interesting twists. My version is basically a spicy braised beef with sauce and I proceed accordingly. But first! Let's inspect the ingredients.

The Raw Team
The Raw Team in this recipe is played by two and a half smallish Vidalias, most of a clove of garlic, and about 6 pounds of chuck roast. In this case, because the butchers at my local megamart hate me, the chuck roast is boneless which annoys me to no end. I would have much rather used a couple 7-bone roasts but I'll be damned if I can find one anywhere on the eastern seaboard. I do like chuck for this application, though, since it's full of fat and connective tissue, very tasty, generally inexpensive, and is generally considered the "classic pot roast".

The Spice Team
Given that this is a classic braise, we want to end up with a flavorful liquid and chunkies. Thus, we require the services of:

Four bay leaves

One can of chipotle chiles and its adobo sauce (yum)

One bottle of cumin, whole

One tablespoon of ground anchos

One tablespoon of ground chipotles to up the smokey goodness

About 3/4 of a cup of my homemade chili powder

About 1/4 of a cup of salt

If that seems like a lot of spice, recall that we have about 6 pounds of meat here and it's all going into a crock pot full of braising liquid. Depending on your particular setup, you may require more or less but the intent is to end up with spicy beef when it's all said and done.

Procedure
Just like I would with a normal pot roast, I seared the beef as best I could without burning down the apartment. This had the expected result of filling the place with smoke but curiously failed to set off the fire alarms.

Into the pot also went the 2.5 onions (sliced) and most of the head of garlic (smashed), and all the spices including the entirety of the can of chipotles. For those who aren't in the know, a chipotle is a smoked jalapeno. I usually get these dried, but in this instance I really wanted the adobo. To quote the great AB: "Adobo is dang tasty but it is double dang hot so don't go addin' more unless you knows what yous doin'." Luckily, I knows what I'm doin'! I can only guess what adobo actually is but if you get canned chipotles, it's almost always present. Don't go rubbing your eyes after handling it, though, I mean it.

Fill the pot until you get the meat mostly submerged, lid it up, turn it on, then let the waiting begin...

The Extraction
Many hours later and your home will be filled with the aroma of cooking chiles and beef which is a pretty awesome thing. You want to cook it long enough that it's going to defy easy extraction by falling apart. In my case, I was impatient and only waited 8 hours. I usually start these kinds of things off in the early morning and eat in the late evening (10 to 14 hours).

Once extracted, allow to cool a bit before shredding. Bonus points if you can restrain yourself from eating the super-heated meat off the platter prior to shredding (super tasty, tho). If you've ever shredded pork barbecue, this is the same maneuver.

This is where things get a little nuts. As is typcial with a large volume of water braise, most of the spice ends up in the liquid and I'm not about to let all that awesome chipotle, er, awesomeness off without a fair trial. Sadly, I have no visual evidence of the procedure, but it went a little something like this:

Skim off the liquid and add to a pan or wide sauce pot being careful not to grab full chipotles and the bay leaves (small bits are fine)

Add about a cup of good-tasting non-balsamic vinegar (I used cider)

Reduce by half

Season to taste

Thicken to a gravy-like consistency (I used cornstarch)

Service Options
Far be it for me to tell you how to eat your barbacoa, but here's what I did with it:

One whole wheat tortilla in the 8" variety

Barbacoa down on the bottom

Pile of cheese (mild cheddar in this case)

Lots of sour cream and sauce on top

OM NOM NOM NOM NOM

Fiesta rice, pintos or black beans, your choice of salsas, or guac would all be welcome additions to the feast but I didn't have any of the above on hand. Also note that the whole wheat tortilla isn't strictly on my diet but, meh, I figured I'd splurge a bit.

Future Work
As this recipe is a work in progress, I'm constantly looking for ways to improve it. Some of the stuff I'm thinking about:

I love cumin but the flavor almost never comes through in large pot braises. I'd like to try toasting it and grinding it immediately prior to cooking but don't have a suitable spice grinder yet.

AB's "potroast without the pot" is a fun approach but I didn't think the foil would hold up well to the adobo. That said, the recipe would certainly benfit from having less water present.

It definitely needed more spice. I'll try steeping dried anchos, chipotles, and arbols in something tasty and adding it to the pot next time. Maybe some smoked paprika would help too.

Moar sear.

How Can So Much Love Fit In One Bowl?

Yes, I said this aloud to no one in particular not 15 minutes ago. The picture says it all.

Well, ok, not "it all", but most of it. The rest of "it all" is played by roughly 2 pounds of cheese, a 1 pound box of macaroni elbows cooked to be super-aldente, about a tablespoon of chipotle powder, and topped with about a cup of the no-longer-elusive panko. All told, roughly $9.

It's telling that despite having had about a half dozen things cooking in my head to put in this space, that this is the one that finally gets me posting.

Carry on.

I Like Oats

If you take the oat, the whole oat, and take off the hull but leave the bran on and don't process it any further, you have a groat. When I eat groats I usually toast them in a little butter then simmer for at least 30 minutes. These are good but chewy and take a while to cook. They're good but take a lot of effort, sort of like brown rice. I hear they're good in haggis too, but I'm far too chicken to try one.

Scotch oats, Irish oats, or pinhead oats are what you get when you take a groat, remove the bran, then send it through steel cutters. These are also called steel cut oats. I love these: toast in butter until they smell nutty, then simmer for a while adding salt and cream at the end. What you get if you do this is a pretty awesome hot porridge which I think is pretty magical--tasty, kinda chewy, with a nice creamy texture even if you don't add dairy.

Take the same groats, remove the bran (usually), then mash 'em flat and you have rolled oats or "old fashioned" oats which is typically what we think of when someone says "oats". You can cook them in the microwave but they've lost the awesome; convenient but iffy. If I have to, this is what I buy when I want oats and can't find any steel cut oats or don't have the time to cook them (say, at work). These are great for things like oatmeal cookies and granola which I almost always make myself because it's a) dirt cheap, b) kinda fun, and c)I have a nut allergy.

"Can you process them more? Well, sure!"--Alton Brown

"Quick oats" are those that are cut, par-cooked, then mashed even flatter. They blow away in a stiff wind. They cook in a tiny fraction of the time, like a couple minutes of nukeage. They don't get nutty. They don't get creamy. They don't, in fact, taste all that good at all, these "instant oats". I'm not sure they're terribly good for much of anything beyond being convenient. I hate these and almost never buy them.

I almost never buy them. In an attempt to eat healthier, I bought a big carton of Quaker Oats. Guess which kind I got.

Baked Beans; Avocados

I realize that few of y'all cook...but...

If you cook and you like baked beans, you should totally go out and get a crock pot and make a batch, right now. Google has a veritable cornucopia of recipes vying for your attention. The batch I got going right now includes maple syrup because, hey, I like maple. I'm almost convinced that if slow cookers didn't end up with food at some point that they'd qualify as bona fide torture devices.

Also, avocados rule.

That is all.

Mmm....Paaaaah

Forgot to upload this last weekend when I made them. These would be no-bake chocolate mousse pie. There's a thin layer of ganache at the bottom and a thick layer of mousse on the top. They were pretty awesome. I just thought I'd share.

Weekend Cooking

In a feeble attempt to steer this blog away from how much I hate my job, I present to you, A Weekend In Cooking. I'm also going to try to use the image upload doohickey.

Adventures in Homebrewing

For those not familiar with the brewing process, it typically goes a little something like this:

brew a proper wort and pitch your yeast

wait 1 week

rack (transfer) to secondary fermenter

wait 2 weeks

bottle the beer into, um, bottles

wait 3 weeks

get really drunk
Astute readers might notice that there's an awful lot of waiting around. I'd be on that last one right now one week in. Technically I bottled last weekend, not this one, but I also hadn't gotten to update here either.

Bottling went OK if a little long and messier than anticipated EXCEPT that my triple scale hydrometer decided to make a bid for freedom. Now I get to randomly pick shards of glass out of my feet in my kitchen which is nowhere near as much fun as it sounds (ow).

(For those wondering why the glass is mostly empty...I'll leave that to your imagination.)

Things You Shouldn't Do While Watching Tivo

That, on the right there, is a very burned yet still somehow very tasty pancake. I make these occasionally when I'm not trying to diet like right now. The Tivo, sadly, isn't even hooked up. These would be the 40 odd episodes I've had recorded since I moved here in February of 2005. The Tivo is very not happy with me but I don't have a phone line to hook it up to. (For the nit pickers out there: I also don't have a wireless network nor do I have an Ethernet cable long enough to reach from the den to the TV even discounting the fact that I'd trip on it every time I went downstairs.)

Right about here is a better one.

I make these from scratch and, minus the inevitable burning part, they are the tastiest pancakes I've ever had. Yesterday I even splurged on a gut-busting bottle of Grade A Amber maple syrup--a taste from my ever-so-blocked-out-of-memory childhood. If you haven't had maple syrup--real maple syrup--you're totally missing out. Seriously. I'm not just saying that because I grew up in a place where we put spigots in trees.


Ok, one more.

Probably the first real dessert I could ever make and oddly enough, probably the only thing I can bake consistently and effectively is cheesecake. Those would be attempt #48,123 (roughly) of mocha cheesecakes. I had previously given up on these thinking them to be a culinary oxymoron of some sort but then on Friday night at one
Hubbard Avenue Diner where I tend to frequent, I had a slice of mocha cheesecake. Oddly enough, it wasn't even that good, but it did convince me to try again. So there on your right is attempt #48,124.

No clue how it tastes since they're still cooling, but the batter was pretty tasty with just a tiny bit of coffee and a whole huge amount of dark chocolate (Hershey's Special Dark in this case). Two of the bricks of cream cheese was played by a similar amount of Ricotta which I'm told they use in Italy for their cheesecakes--so I figured, what the hell.

I didn't get to the granola mostly due to laziness. I might just survive this distubring lack of oat-snack, just maybe.