Heart-y Fare

My, how time flies.  It's about as hackneyed a statement as I can think of, but it's really describing my life right now.  It's the tail end of a three day weekend, and I'm finding myself making rigorous lists of the things I need to do to relax today, since I spent the first couple days of the weekend running around accomplishing things (another house-showing, meeting with the mortgage banker, clean the house, help a friend move, wedding errands...).  But wait: should the words rigorous and relaxation be used in the same sentence?  Probably not, but today I want to go for a hike, take a peek at the Superbowl, and do homework for an online class I'm taking.  So though my much-adored ArmchairFoodie provides respite and therapy from my workaday obligations, I'm only going to give some pretty cursory descriptions of two meals we ate this week.

This is just a repeat on a running theme: pasta with sauteed veggies.  This is a great meal because it's always different, and if the precept that one learns from one's mistakes is true, then it's always better than the last.  This time we set chopped onions, garlic, tomatoes and artichokes to a saute.  Boil pasta, and while you're taking the pot of pasta to the sink to drain it-- don't forget this part!-- pour about 1/4 or 1/2 cup of the water into your saute.  This helps break down the veggies and turn them into a sauce. 

Yum.  Good toppings: chopped parsley, toasted pine nuts, parmesan.
A couple days later I took out some leftover green chile enchilada sauce from the freezer.  See former post on that here.  This time though, I whipped up some calabacitas ("little squash," if I'm translating that correctly) to stuff the enchiladas with.  Chopped zucchini, corn, and onions, sauteed with salt, pepper, and oregano.  When they're just tender, roll scoops the stuff in tortillas, line up in a baking dish, top with cheese and bake covered for a while.  After a while is up, take off the tin foil and bake for a smaller while so the cheese gets brown and bubbly.  
This was truly awesome.  While eating it and loving it, I was pondering my favorite foods: enchiladas and lasagna.  They are really just different realizations of one basic concept: an Americanized "ethnic" dish using the appropriate herbs and spices of their respective native lands, but really just centering around the combination of bread and cheese.  Granted, the more veggies, the better; but I'll admit where the real attraction lies.  Noodles layered with ricotta, parmesan, and fontina.  Tortillas smothered in jack and cheddar.  Pizza dough dressed in mozzarella and fontina.  Ah well, at least I'm not a sedentary person.  My fierce attachment to the bread and cheese duo might not be so wise in that case.  And speaking of which, gotta run.  Happy Feb!  

Modern Day Madeleine

It takes a lot to be able to call a place home.  When I moved from San Francisco to Santa Fe-- i.e., from my hometown and the greatest city on earth to some dusty, forgotten trading post in the middle of a state a lot of Americans have never heard of-- I had no intention of putting down roots.  Funny how fast a girl can eat her words.  As it turned out, Santa Fe was such a magical place that just one blog post could never do it justice.  I might be a bit biased-- after all, I spent two years at a wonderful school, I met my future husband, I got a really fantastic dog, and had some great friends during the time I spent in The City Different.  The cards really were stacked in my favor.

But let me describe one of the things that makes Santa Fe, and the southwest as a whole, objectively special: chile.  My first night in Santa Fe, I arrived at the hostel after dark.  Hungry and tired, I asked at the front desk if there were any decent restaurants close by that would still be open.  Ten minutes later I was sitting at a little two-top tucked in the corner of one of the dark, labyrinthine rooms of a Santa Fe institution, Maria's New Mexican Kitchen.  While I stared at a margarita menu several pages long, a waiter who looked and acted like he'd been working there for 20 years (and I later found out that he had), asked me what'll I have.  Cheese enchiladas, please.  Red, green, or Christmas? he asked.  When I looked up at him blankly, he actually cracked a smile and said, Red chile, Green chile, or both?  And right then and there, yet another fierce addiction to chile was born.  

Some people adhere to red chile, the chile which has been allowed to ripen to redness and is then dried-- it's a much smokier, earthier flavor, and often much spicier than the green.  And others are intense supporters of the green chile, picked while still young and then roasted in massive, rotating metal roasters till the skins blister off.  Green chile, since it is cooked fresh, is always chunky; red chile, since it's made from dried chiles that must be blended, is always smooth.  Both, especially in late fall right after harvest, are as spicy as anything you have ever eaten.  I myself, ever since my first night in Maria's, have always been a Christmas girl.

After Adam and I graduated from school, curiosity brought us to Portland, and then a year and a half later, a job opportunity brought us out to Hood River.  We love it here, and I hope we stay a long time, but we are both homesick for Santa Fe, there's no denying it.  But as luck would have it, New Mexicans are not as few and far between as I thought, and I discovered that not only is one of my new co-workers from Albuquerque, but she loves chile too!  Loves it so much that she stocks up on it when she goes home to visit, and even had enough to give me a bag of it!  I couldn't believe my luck, and after some cursory protestations, I happily received her kind gift.

A couple nights later, look what Adam and I had for dinner:  

Green chile enchiladas!  Though the October Gorge winds whipped around outside our house, and the snow-capped Mt. Adams sat stately in the dining room window, we were transported to the dry sunny heat of the high desert for a few happy minutes.

My coworker gave me a great recipe for green chile sauce, too-- after thawing the raw green chile, you just stir it into a roux and then thin or thicken to your contentment with water.  You may also add oregano and cumin if you like.  If your chile is from New Mexico, you will NOT need to make it any spicier than it already is.  Case in point, my shiny forehead:

As we gasped and exhaled and chugged water, Adam said, "Woo!  I'm starting to get leaky."  and he blew his nose.  We laughed, and reminisced some more about our beloved southwestern town.

 

Old Standby

Every family's got their old standby, the when-all-else-fails meal that, over the years becomes a sort of edible member of the family.  Ours is the Breakfast Burrito.  In fact, I think it was the first meal that Adam ever cooked for me, on a camping trip near the Bosque del Apache in New Mexico early in our courtship.  So intimate with the Breakfast Burrito have Adam and I become that we now affectionately refer to it simply as "BB."

It was living in Santa Fe that taught us to integrate the BB into our lifestyle; after all, the cheesy, spicy treat is offered at every cafe and coffee shop worth its salt.  The New Mexican tradition puts green chile and bacon into its BB, but as herbivores who no longer live in chile country, we omit both those ingredients.  This by no means limits us.  Which, I guess, is why the BB is so fantastic-- there is no limit to what you can include.

There is a base, however, which includes tortillas, scrambled eggs, potatoes, shredded cheese, and preferably salsa, though hot sauce will do in a pinch.  Beyond that, let your imagination fly.  Avocado, cilantro, sour cream or yogurt, beans (black, pinto, refried...), fried onions, hash browns, corn, tomatoes, squash, chives, oregano, quinoa, as many different kinds of hot sauce as you want.  Tonight, on a whim, I even supplemented our paltry potato supply with a quarter of a purple cabbage, sauteed in cumin, chile powder, and smoked paprika (which, by the way, was the best six bucks I've spent recently).  It turned out great!  Nice crunch to counterbalance the starch of the spuds and the soft tortillas.  Another tip: if you've got it, stir cream cheese or sour cream into your eggs when you scramble them-- they'll come out soft and fluffy. 

The cabbage looked so pretty in the pan, I'm enclosing a before- and after-cooking shot, along with the final product: the beloved BB.  

Old New Mexico

There's a restaurant-- Adobe Rose Cafe-- near our house that serves New Mexican food, and unpretentiously at that.  Once I found out about the purveyors of green chile and sopaipillas, I knew we had to go at once.  Some of you may not know that Adam and I met while living in Santa Fe, the enchanting and strange southwestern town at 1700 feet above sea level, and many miles from anywhere resembling anything metropolitan.  Such isolated places inevitably cultivate unique cuisines, and I have been missing terribly the exotic, spicy offerings which, over several hundred years, have been informed by Native American, Mexican, and American cultures.

The interior of Adobe Rose is unprepossessing-- linoleum floors, basic wooden chairs composed the basic skeleton of its decoration, though a couple flowers sat in a vase at each table, and lovely photos of the Land of Enchantment hung on the walls.  We looked at our laminated menus, and decided to go pure-- Huevos Rancheros for Adam, and cheese enchiladas for me.  That way we could appreciate New Mexico's most valuable invention-- chile-- in an unadulterated fashion.

While we waited chips and salsa (free) flowed generously forth, and so did some decent margaritas (not free).  We admired the photos on the walls and tried to guess where they were taken.  One gorgeous church, where Adam and I actually contemplated looking into as a wedding location, turned out to be near Adam's old house in Espanola.  We missed the rolling red deserts with aching hearts, and discussed the prospect of returning to live in a few years.  (On that note, Adam got a job today!  He'll be working for PGE here in Oregon as a wind technician, which means he'll be climbing windmills many hundreds of feet tall every day so that we may have appliances running on clean, sustainable energy.  Needless to say I'm proud of my boy.  Anyway, Adam said that there are a few windfarms under construction in New Mexico, and we just might look into one of them as sources of income when they come to completion.)

So our food was out by now-- plain white dishes with vast plains of melted cheddar lying on top of our enchiladas (only difference was that Adam had a few fried egg mountains on top of his cheese desert).  And oh, delicious memories of sitting, on a balmy evening on the patio of The Shed in Santa Fe, or remembered nights of setting many such chile-and-cheese baked plates in front of tourists and locals alike at Maria's New Mexican Kitchen (where I waited tables for a year).  The chile was good-- very good.  Very spicy, which is good.  I ordered mine "Christmas," (red and green chile) and both colors were fabulous.

I struck up a conversation with our waiter, who turned out the be the owner.  Larry and his partner Terry ("Just remember, Larry and Terry") met while living in Albuquerque and came to Portland almost twenty years ago to start Adobe Rose.  Apparently there are either enough New Mexican natives making their way through town craving "sopas" (sopaipillas are big, deep-fried dough pillows that you can use to sop up your chile or douse in honey for dessert), in order to support such an establishment, or there are sufficient local Portlanders who consider the spicy unique flavors worth returning to, again and again.

Lord knows we will be returning.  Prices are modest and most importantly, the food set us into a sweaty reverie of the arid, sage-smelling place we knew and loved as Santa Fe.