Antojito Cantina: Mexican Pop-up for the Edinburgh Festival

So, every August the city of Edinburgh swells to twice its normal size as the world's comedians and theatre geeks (mostly comedians) flock to the Edinburgh Festival.

And with them flock hundreds of pop-up street food venues.

This year one in particular caught my eye: Antojito Cantina, temporarily housed at 3 Bristo Place and serving up US-style Mexican food, much like I grew up eating in California.

Their name means "snack bar" in Spanish, in that it is the word for "snack" followed by the word for "bar". And indeed their menu is composed of antojitos: nachos and burritos with various fillings/toppings.

Both these dishes are really American inventions; the classic Mexican antojito is a taco, by which I mean a fresh soft corn tortilla folded around a dollop of some delicious filling and topped with some kind of salsa.

Which is not to say that burritos are not delicious, because they are. And in some ways they're easier to eat than tacos, especially when running to the Festival show you have tickets for, which turns about to be at the Pleasance Dome instead of the Pleasance Courtyard (Oops!).

Now, this is the first "restaurant" review I'm posting, so let me cover the ground rules: I'll try to review five areas: Location, Ambience, Staff Knowledge, Menu, Dining Experience. Then I'll mention anything else noteworthy that doesn't fit into the above.

De acuerdo?

So...

1) Location: This is a pop-up specifically for the Festival, so 3 Bristo Place is pretty good. It's very handy for a lot of venues, including that damn purple cow that keeps coming back every year. The place even connects to one of the Assembly venues. They apparently sold them a bottle of hot sauce for their bar.

(Based on Antojito Cantina's hot sauce selection, Assembly Checkpoint must now be serving the best bloody marys in Edinburgh.)

On the other hand, having an actual brick-and-mortar location is a mixed blessing. There are dozens of interesting shacks, vans, booths, carts, etc selling food in the immediate area. Bristo Square/Teviot is just across the street and George Square with its famous Spiegeltent complex is only a few minutes walk away. I have a feeling it's harder to "stumble across" this place than it would be if they were literally on the street.

Of course, they do have a couple seats and tables, which can be an advantage (one lady sitting-in gawked at me while I sampled their "insane" hot sauce).

2) Ambience: Well, it's a pop-up, and despite having some seats it's not really meant to be a sit-down place. It looks and feels a lot like the many sandwich shops that dot Edinburgh's student-areas (which is what this part of town is the rest of the year).

But that's okay, because in Mexico a taco or burrito stand is pretty much the equivalent of a take-away sandwich shop. So I think this is par for course. It does what it should do and the jars of hot sauce on the shelves are a nice touch (especially as they're for sale, guys. Hint hint).

3) Staff Knowledge: The menu isn't very extensive, so there isn't much the staff need to know, but they've clearly been trained. This is important, in case they get customers who don't know anything Mexican or "Calimex" (California-Mexican) cuisine. I got the feeling the guys behind the counter would be able to answer most queries. Don't know if they're full time MexiGeeks, though.

4) Menu: Very basic: burritos, nachos, not much else. You can get these topped or filled with "barbacoa" braised beef (in Mexico it would probably be goat, but where you gonna get goat in this country?); pulled pork, aka "carnitas" (possibly Mexico's favourite meat), chicken tinga (a classic of Mexican street food), or "veggie beans".

(When I first saw "veggie beans" I assumed they meant refried beans fried in olive oil instead of lard, but I think they literally mean veggies and beans.)

I had a burrito with carnitas, though I was very tempted by the chicken tinga.

In true California style, the burrito comes with rice and beans in it, and you can add as many extra toppings as you want, like Subway. I went for "pico de gallo" and guacamole.

The inverted commas, by the way, are because in my house we just called this "salsa".

And finally they have three heat levels of hot sauce: hot, hotter, and insane. The first two are red, but the "insane" is yellow-orange. Which means no tomatoes and a lot of fresh habaneros.

You know which one I like, right?

I was sharing with Mrs MexiGeek so I ordered "hot" on the burrito, but I asked to try "insane."

In addition to the habaneros/Scotch bonnets, I also detected some fresh green chiles, which was surprising but delicious!

This sauce had a true sparkle on the palate and a surprisingly clean finish. I would say it's worth the trip just to get the sauce. I wish they bottled it.

5) Dining experience: This is where I would normally break it down into the three P's of promptness (how quickly to you get served?), presentation (how does the food look on the plate?), and palate (how does it taste?). Not all these points are relevant to a pop-up street food vendor, though.

As for promptness, there was no queue so we got served quickly, and if there were any delays it was probably because I kept chatting to the guys behind the counter.

Of course, during a lunch rush I can imagine queues out the door. But that comes with the territory.

Presentation is probably the least relevant for street food. They wrap the burrito up in foil and give it to you. But that's what all burrito shacks do. This kind of food isn't meant to be fine-dining.

(And actually, a big fat burrito wrapped in foil is very appetizing to those who love them.)

This actually looks pretty good.

And finally, palate. This is a good burrito. The guacamole was good (smooth, not chunky, but still fresh and delicious), as was the pico de gallo, and you know how I feel about the hot sauce. Also the carnitas were nice and soft and melt-in-your-mouth like they should be.

Mrs MexiGeek pointed out that £6 is a bit steep for a burrito, but this is the Festival. Just think what they're paying in rent!

Now, I saw several other temporary "Mexican" food shacks in my wanders through Festival-land. Some of them were even doing the same selection of dishes (for the same price).

But for my money, I'd stick Antojito Cantina. Their association with Glasgow's Street Food Cartel as well as my heroes at Lupe Pintos (which seems to be where they get a lot of their ingredients - their shelves look a lot like my kitchen cupboard!) gives them that edge that will be tough to beat for the Juanito-come-latelies.

¡Taco, Taco, Taco, que me Taco!

So, this post is partially in celebration of getting over a thousand pageviews and partially to introduce some planned changes to this blog (whenever I get around to making them).

I have five blogs; one is seasonal, and I don't expect it to get many hits when it's not Christmas; one is about my two-year-old, and it's mainly for my relatives; one is for random writings that I feel I may as well put out there, but I don't mind if nobody reads.


The other two are what I consider my "primary" blogs: this one and James Aristophanes Keaton.

If you're a regular reader here (and if you've read my first post), you'll know I'm writing a novel about a Mexican chef, which is why I need to know so much about Mexican food. I have occasionally posted about the writing process when I haven't cooked anything interesting in a while.

Based on how I tag this blog and especially on the search terms that lead people here, I'd say the majority of the audience for La Cocina y Yo are foodies rather than lit majors. My most-viewed posts are food posts (with my mole posts topping the list).

Quite quickly after starting this blog the pageviews exceeded my expectations (and I do disable my own pageviews). Even so, 1,000 is quite a milestone. In addition, my posts are fairly regularly shared on twitter and have earned me followers like @spicyfood and @thecurryguy (and, finally, A Mexican in Scotland). When compared to my other blog, which only has a couple hundred pageviews (though it hasn't been up for as long), you could say La Cocina y Yo is the more successful of the two.

On the other hand, James Aristophanes Keaton has 21 followers, to this blog's five. That means that, though JAK doesn't get as much attention, I'm more assured of repeat readers. JAK gets "likes" as well (a Wordpress feature). For all I know, the La Cocina audience is mainly one-time viewers who end up here by accident and never return. That's the thing about blogging: without "likes", comments, and named followers, you never really know who's reading or if they enjoy it.

I would like to have more confirmed repeat readers, and I would especially like all of you, if you're out there, to read my novel if and when it ever gets published. So I'm going to make a few design changes, a combination of suggestions from friends and advice from other blogs I follow, to encourage a more "visible" participation. I'm not trying to guilt-trip you into following me or commenting, by the way. If the changes work, visible traffic should increase "organically".

First, the ads. I'm sure you noticed my flirtation with having adverts on this blog. I optimistically thought Google would be cool enough to find Mexican-themed ads. I would even have settled for links to the McMaya resorts on the Yucatán peninsula. But no. Just unlimited data packages and tablet computers and other shit you can't eat.

One thing I know from adsense is that not one viewer has ever clicked on one of those ads. Know why? Because people looking for a blog about mole poblano don't give a rat's ass about  SIM cards!

So I ditched the ads. Instead I want to choose the Mexican-food suppliers, blogs, and other resources I want to give a shout out to. Therefore, hopefully very soon, I will be creating some new pages to that purpose. I say pages because, believe it or not, I like to keep as much as possible above the fold (meaning you don't have to scroll down to read it).

I plan to have a page for other Mexican food blogs, a page for non-Mexican food blogs my implied readers may find interesting (several pages if there are enough to form categories).

I also want a page (or pages) of links to ingredients-suppliers around the world so you can really cook this stuff yourselves. I will try to vet all of these, though as more than half my readers are in the US this may be tricky.

And lastly I want a page of cookbooks, with reviews based on my actual experience of using them. I may also review restaurants some day, but that would have to be very local to Edinburgh. Except when I go on vacation.

Basically I want this blog to be, in part, so portal to the wider world of Mexican food enthusiasts. (Some of this material will be replacing the current sidebar menus, of course.)

However, the blog must also remain about me and my project. Therefore I will be including an About the Author page with more information than just the sidebar, and contact details, so you can tell me what a puto gringo ignorante I am if you want. Positive feedback will also be welcome.

Naturally, there will also be a page about the project itself, with as many details as I can copyright.

Lastly, I would like to establish a newsletter, subscribable via email. I will probably be confining news about the writing process to the newsletter, and I aim to do one or two a month.

So, lots of plans. We'll just have to wait and see if I can bring this all to fruition.

In the meantime, what have I cooked?

As promised, I turned the rest of my chiles de árbol into a salsa picante. And I'm glad I did, for three reasons:

1) it's hot as hell!

2) it's delicious as fuck!

3) my wife loves it (I didn't expect her too)

This is one of those typical sauces that's in nearly every cookbook (and apparently at every taco stand in Mexico). I ended up using the Rick Bayless version, with a few modifications, because he included pumpkin seeds and I LOVE pumpkin seeds.

I don't usually do this when I've more or less followed someone else's book, but I will paraphrase the recipe, because I really want everyone to taste this.

Ingredientes
40 g chiles de árbol (dried)
2 cloves of garlic, minced
2 tbsp sesame seeds
2 tbsp pumpkin seeds
4 allspice berries
2 cloves
1/2 tsp cumin seeds
3/4 cup cider vinegar

Para Hacer
The first thing you have to do is stem and seed all those chiles (there will be, like, 50 of them). This takes forever. You have to cut the stems off and then roll the beautiful little red chiles between your fingers until the seeds fall out. Save these seeds to toast and grind later (good rule of thumb: never throw chile seeds out. You can almost always use them in what you're cooking).

Next reconstitute the chiles as described in my last post. (I'm happy to say I didn't burn any this time.) Rick Bayless doesn't call for the chiles to be reconstituted, but most other recipes do, and I had plans for the soaking water.

Now you must roast/toast/asar the seeds in the usual way: in a hot flat fry pan, stirring constantly so they don't burn. When they start to darken in colour they're done.

Rick Bayless had a variation for toasting the pumpkin seeds though. He recommended leaving the pumpkin seeds sitting in the pan until the first one pops, then stirring constantly until they all pop. I tried this and it worked brilliantly, so I'll be doing it again.

Once the seeds are done, they go into a molcajete with the garlic and spices for a good grinding.

By now the chiles should be ready. Remove them from the water with tongs and put them in a blender with the ground seeds and spices and the vinegar and blitz it to a smooth texture.

Now strain it through a medium-mesh sieve. This also takes forever because you have to push as much liquid as possible out of the pulpy residue. You basically want to end up with a bowl full of orange liquid and a mass of dry pulp. Discard the pulp. Remember it is compostable (let's be green).

Now add 3/4 cup of water to the liquid. I used the chile-soaking water, as I always do ever since I learned it from making mole poblano. Let the sauce "mature" for 24 hours in the fridge before serving.

I love this sauce so much I've been putting it on everything (within reason). I've even taken to drinking it straight with a dessert spoon.

My first use for it, though, was to go on top of the sweetcorn and courgette tacos I made last Saturday. I served the sauce on the side and warned my wife it would be quite hot. However, she lapped it up with almost as much gusto as I did, which demonstrates how delicious this sauce really is, as well as how much my wife's chile-tolerance has grown. (Remember, chiles de árbol are the second-hottest chile in Mexico.)

Also of note: I discovered that I have been making my tortilla-dough a bit too dry. I added a little extra water this time and got a much rounder shape. Every time I make tortillas, I learn something new!

And lastly, my two-year-old loved the tacos (she's still too young for the sauce though), so she's definitely her father's daughter.

Now, I was going to take pictures of all this, but I pure couldnae be bothered, so instead I have selected a little music video for you. It's called "Paco". If anyone leaves a comment I'll tell them a hilarious anecdote about this song.

It's a Spanish, rather than a Mexican song (Mexicans generally have better taste than this), but it's hilarious and I think of it every time I make tacos. I've also taught my daughter to sing it.

It's apparently about seven niños, at least one of whom is called Paco, on the camino de Sevilla. In Spanish, "que me" is an intensifier, so the chorus translates as "Paco, Paco, ¡PACO!" I don't know why there's such so fuss about Paco; my wife suggested that perhaps todos los niños se llaman Paco. ¿Por qué no? ¡Disfruta!

Sopa de Lima

I've decided to name my protagonist Esteban, after my brother, who learned to cook before I did.
Although he is a Mexican, Esteban (my fictional character) was born in the US, while his parents were living there illegally, so he is a de facto American citizen (unless Bush changed that rule). However, he was deported with his parents soon after he was born, and he grew up in Tijuana.
But that's not where his parents come from. They are from Oaxaca, and that is the culinary heritage he usually looks to when creating his food.

The other cuisine he becomes enamoured of is Yucatecan. And that's where sopa de lima comes in.

Almost all Americans from the southwest will be familiar with tortilla soup (and if you're not, you need to try it). Well, sopa de lima (lime soup) is the Yucatecan variation. A the name implies, it is flavoured with fresh lime juice, which adds such a compelling lift that I've completely gone off making the non-lime kind.

Sopa de lima was the first recipe I cooked from <i>Two Cooks and a Suitcase</i> (in effect launching me on my culinary adventure), and it was an instant hit.

As with all traditional soups, there are as many versions of the recipe a there are grannies and old aunties who make it. So when I got four new Mexican cookbooks for my birthday this year, I found lime soup recipes in three of them (and standard tortilla soup recipes in all four).
I recently tried one of the new recipes, but unfortunately it just inspired me to return to the Two Cooks one.

The recipe is really very simple, which for me is part of the attraction. To make a batch for two people (until Abby starts eating dinner with us we'll be cooking for two most nights) you need:

2 chicken breasts
1 roasted tomato, roughly chopped
1 roasted red pepper, roughly chopped
1 white onion, roughly chopped
2 cloves of garlic, roasted and roughly chopped
1 chile pepper, roasted or pickled (NOT raw), seeded and diced
1 tablespoon of Mexican oregano
The juice of one lime

The chile you use is a matter of some controversy. The habanero is the ubiquitous chile of the Yucatán. It is also the hottest chile known to humankind, and it has a very distinct flavour. The only recipe I know that calls for it in the soup proper is Thomasina Miers' in <i>Mexican Food Made Simple</i>. Which is not to say I doubt you'll ever get this soup with habanero in the Yucatán; I'm just saying be sure you know what you're getting into.

The other recipes I have call for a green chile, which I usually read as "jalapeño", though it could be any green chile.

You'll also need somecorn tortillas, cut into strips and fried.

Though roasting tomatoes, garlic, peppers, and chiles is not hard, one of the great things about this soup, is that there's a cheat version. Use pre-roasted, stuff out of a jar and some diced, pickled jalapeños (even Tesco has these now). And for the tortilla strips, get a bag of tortilla chips and crush them.

Basically, bung everything except the tortillas in a pot and cover with water. Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat to medium and simmer for about 20 minutes or until the chicken is fully cooked and tender.

Remove the chicken breasts to a plate, let them cool briefly, then shred them. I make a cut against the grain and rapidly shred the meat with a fork, like waiters do with crispy duck in Chinese restaurants.

Now strain the soup. The first time I did this I felt very weird about throwing away all the bits, but all the flavour by now will have gone into the broth, so there's no need to keep the chopped bits, and  they would be very off-putting floating around in the soup.

Place some shredded chicken into each bowl, add some broth, and top with the crispy, fried tortilla strips, and maybe some chopped coriander and a lime wedge.

The variation I tried recently came from Diane Kennedy's <i>Essential Cuisines of Mexico</i>.
Kennedy is meant to be the Julia Childs of Mexican cooking, so I had high hopes for this recipe. However, there were two issues with it which made it less successful than the simpler Two Cooks version.

The first issue was the amount of chile. Whereas Two Cooks calls for one chile, Kennedy gives a specific weight of chopped chile. I initially took this as good sign, as chiles can vary in size. However, the jalapeños I used came from Mexico (there was no English on the can), and were very hot. Jalapeños can very from 2,500 to 5,000 Scoville units, and these were definitely at the higher end of that. This meant the final soup was far too spicy.

The problem with this isn't that we're chile-wussies. It's that the dish ended up lacking balance.
Balance was something I heard them talk about a lot on Masterchef, bit I never really understood it until I cooked this soup for the first time. No one flavour overpowered the others; nothing got lost in the shuffle. Everything was there in just the right amount, working in harmony. It was beautiful. That kind of balance is impossible to achieve if the chiles drown out all the other flavours.

The other issue was the chicken. Kennedy calls for chicken on the bone, which is probably more authentic than breast. However, I suspect that chicken legs and thighs simply can't get tender enough in 20 minutes, the ready breasts can. The meat was difficult to shred, and still had a chewy texture. Mexican chicken tends to be more active (and therefore tougher) than battery farm chicken (we used organic, free-range chicken). As a result, Mexicans often boil chicken (and other meat) for a long time to soften it - much longer than 20 minutes. Failing that, I think you're going to need breast meat.

However, I did learn some interesting things from this experiment. Kennedy omits the roasted sweet pepper and does not use roasted tomato (odd, since she has a fool-proof method of roasting toms that Rick Bayless also cites in his book Authentic Mexican). However,as I began simmering the soup, the aroma was immediately familiar, and there was nothing in the pot at this point except chopped garlic, Mexican oregano, and water. This suggests that the true soul of this dish consists of of those two ingredients (so if you wanna make this soup, you better get hold of Mexican oregano).

The other thing I'll take with me is Kennedy's garnish idea. Although she doesn't use habanero in the soup proper, she recommends roasting some, skinning and seeding it, and chopping it finely. Then you put the chopped habanero in a dish on the table for diners to help themselves (put a small spoon in the dish as well, as it's dangerous to touch chiles with your bare hands).

This added lovely flavour and colour to the soup, and as it's on the side, anyone who doesn't want their head blown off can just leave it out.

Enmoladas

First, a couple of hard truths.
1) My own mother does not read my blog. Thanks, mom. Though I guess we're even, because I don't follow her Native American spiritual updates.
2) I hate my mother's enchiladas. Since she doesn't read this blog, I can write that without hurting her feelings.
I love all my mother's food, bar three things: her enchiladas, her bolognese sauce, and her lasagne (which is made out of her leftover bolognese).
By the way, if you know my mom, please don't tell her this. If I get a teary phone call from her, I swear I will hunt you down and kill you.
Now, the thing about my mom's enchiladas are: they are usually enchiladas suizas (Swiss enchiladas, though there is nothing swiss about them), also called enchiladas verdes (green enchiladas). I don't like her green chile sauce and I didn't like spring onions back in the day. I like spring onions now, so maybe I should give them another try.
Mom would also make red enchiladas sometimes. I didn't like these either. Again, I didn't care for her sauce (which wasn't very spicy, despite the fact that enchilada means "infused with chiles"). Also, she always adds black olives, which are not native to Mexico and don't really belong in the dish.
However, this never stopped me ordering enchiladas at Mexican restaurants in the Southern California of my youth.
So it was a revelation to me when I read in Rick Bayless's book that enchiladas are not:
baked - in Mexico you dip the corn tortilla into the sauce and then quickly fry it
a sit-down meal - like most everything made with corn masa, real Mexican enchiladas are a snack food or antojito
even that popular in Mexico - although, in a bizarre example of back-migration, enchiladas suizas are catching on, tacos, tamales, etc are the mainstays.
However, the biggest revelation for me was that enchiladas have what Bayless calls parentes: relatives. Out seems you can dip tortillas in any sauce, not just the common red or green sauces.
In addition to enchiladas (dipped in chile sauce), there are also enfrijoladas (smothered in beans), entomatadas (dipped in tomato sauce), and enmoladas (dipped in any of the seven moles).
Now, this dish has got to be the weirdest "quick and easy" meal ever, because it's only quick and easy if you have the mole on hand. Which I did, because I spent four days making it after Christmas.
If I had really wanted to be authentic, I would have made my own corn tortillas, but I really was looking for something I wouldn't still be cooking at ten o'clock at night. Making homemade tortillas is great fun, and not difficult by any means, but it takes for-fucking-ever.
So I just used some store-bought flour tortillas. (My mother always used flour tortillas as well). And I baked them, mostly because I needed the enmoladas to be out of the way while I prepared a side dish.
To start, I poached two chicken breasts in water seasoned with salt and pepper, epazote, and Mexican oregano for twenty minutes. In case you haven't poached chicken before, here is a fuller description.
Poaching chicken breasts:
1) Place chicken breasts and seasonings in a pot.
2) Cover with water and bring to the boil.
3) Reduce heat and simmer until cooked.
4) If there is time, let the chicken cool in the broth.
Once the chicken had cooled, I removed it from the broth and shredded it. I then strained the broth and kept it on hand to use for the mole.
I reheated the mole in a wide non-stick pan, adding some of the broth (a little at a time) to keep the consistency from getting to thick.
When the more was warm (not hot), I dipped the tortillas in the sauce (one at a time) and placed them in a baking dish. I filled them with the shredded chicken and some chopped spring onion (ironically, inspired by enchiladas suizas), rolled them up, covered them with foil, and baked them for twenty minutes at 170° C. I have no idea how to cook in Fahrenheit, by the way.
In the meantime, I prepared my side dish.
I got this idea from an episode of Saturday Kitchen a few years ago. I cut some courgette (zucchini) into long, thin strips like over-sized linguine.
I blanched them in boiling water, drained them, and put them in chilled water to stop them over-cooking.
I happened to have some of my coriander pesto on hand, so I heated that in a pan, added some cherry tomatoes and the courgette linguine and stir-fried it all for a bit.
By this time the enmoladas were ready to come out. Before plating up I sprinkled them with more chopped spring onion and crumbled up feta cheese.
Why feta? Because all the Mexican cookbooks I have say that feta is the nearest thing you're likely to get to Mexican queso fresco (literally "fresh cheese"), which is the most common type of cheese in Mexico.
In America, any given Mexican dish probably comes covered in yellow "American" cheese and/or white Monterey Jack.
Those of you who used to watch King of the Hill may remember Peggy berating get niece during Cinco de Mayo:
"You can't use Swiss cheese. It's not Mehican. It's American. You have to use Monterey Jack."
And she pronounced "jack" with a Spanish j: "hack".
Monterey is a real Mexican placename (meaning "mountain of the king"), but "jack" sure as hell ain't Mexican, or even Spanish, nor is any word that has the letter k. Ths letter doesn't exist in Spanish. (It wouldn't exist in English either, if it hadn't been brought to England in the 10th century by the Norse, who got it from the Goths, who got out from the Greeks.)
It's not that there is no other type of cheese in Mexico. There's even one quite similar to Jack, but it's a regional product, whereas queso fresco is pan-Mexican.
But enough about cheese and orthography. Below are some photos of my main and side dish.
I had been slightly worried ray the feta wouldn't work with the mole poblano, but the acidity actually provided a nice contrast.
The courgette linguine, however, continued to release water even after they were chilled, which eventually diluted the flavour of the coriander pesto. So I have yet to perfect that idea.
So far this blog has had over 500 pageviews but zero comments. Perhaps one of my readers might comment with some advice on keeping the courgette from washing away the seasonings in the future.

Mole Poblano 4: verdict and meaning revisited

[First published 18 February 2012]

The last instalment in my mole poblano series is something of an anticlimax in that, once the sauce is made, there isn't that much work left to do.

What had been worrying me (besides the flavour) was how I was going to make the dish look nice.

It's difficult to make a big lake of brown sauce look beautiful.

To add to the trouble, I'm not really much of an artist. I love being served beautiful plates of food in restaurants, but I'm not sure it's my calling to design them.

So I basically ripped off the common technique of resting the dish's main component on a neat round pillar of accompanying rice, with extra sauce around the edge.

Choosing the rice was tricky.

 I wanted something with colour, to relieve the brown of the mole. But the recipe I usually use for arroz verde has tomatillos, which are very tart, and would probably clash with the dark, rich sauce.

Luckily I found an alternative version of arroz verde in Thomasina Miers's Mexican Food Made Simple. She excludes tomatillos, cuts down on the coriander, and ups the quantities of common green leaves and herbs like spinach and parsley.

This is most likely because her book is written for British cooks, and she is mindful of what ingredients are available in the UK.

Tomatillos are especially hard to get here, though, as expected, Lupe Pinto's sells them tinned, and you can even order fresh ones from The Cool Chile Company when they're in season. The website currently promises them in July 2012, and I will definitely be ordering some for fresh salsa verde.

By the way, the basic recipe for any arroz verde is:

1) blitz whatever green leaves and herbs you're using together with some green chiles

2) sweat some finely chopped onion in an oven-proof pot over medium heat

3) add plain white rice to the pot and fry for a few minutes, until all the grains are coated in oil

4) add minced garlic to the pot and fry for a minute or two longer (you want the garlic to get lightly brown, but don't let it burn)

5) add the pureed greens to the pot and fry for a minute

6) add stock (about twice the volume of rice) and bring to the boil

7) either turn the heat down and simmer for a half hour or cover and place in a 150°-170° C oven for a half hour

Anyway, the other thing I wanted was a salad of some kind.

The Romans apparently invented salad, and it's really a European thing.

In Mexican dining, vegetables are included in the main dish, or there is a separate vegetable course. But because American dining is largely based on European dining, I feel compelled to have an accompanying salad.

My original plan was to use the sweet corn salad from Thomasina Miers' book. It's delicious. But then I discovered an even better idea from an unlikely source: Jamie Oliver.

One of the books my wife uses is Jamie's 30-Minute Meals. Though we never really get the food cooked and served within a half hour, the recipes are amazing. I know people have mixed views about Saint Jamie, but you have to admit he's got it in the flavour department. I'd take him over that twat Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall any day.

The salad is meant to have an Indian feel to it, and consists of shredded courgette (zucchini) and carrot, in a dressing of plain yogurt, fresh red chiles (yay!), and red wine vinegar.

As I was eating this bomb-ass salad, it ocurred to me that with minor alterations, this salad could be completely Mexican.

Courgette is native to Mexixo (where it is called calabacita). And though carrots originally come from the Middle East, they are a popular vegetable in Mexico. Check your jar of pickled jalapenos if you don't believe me.

In fact, in 2010 Mexico produced over 346,000 tonnes of carrots.

The alterations I made were swapping the yogurt for sour cream (okay, technically sour cream isn't Mexican either, but it is the closest thing I'm likely to get to crema espesa, unless I make my own, which I'm scared to do), and the red wine vinegar for lime juice.

Now, after the epic journey to make the sauce over the preceding four days, today's work was relatively minimal.

First, I took the mole sauce out of the fridge and put it in a pot on the hob over a medium heat, stirring occaisonally. 

In a separate pan I melted some butter. Mexicans cook with lard, but I don't, and my wife also expressed interest in frying the turkey breast in butter before adding it to the sauce.

So when the butter was melted and beginning to foam, I put in the turkey breast left over from Christmas and browned in on all sides. Then I put it into the mole and left it to simmer.

Next I did the rice as described above and shredded the carrot and courgette.

I had never eaten raw courgette before I tried this salad, but trust me, it's delicious.

I also whipped up the salad dressing, but kept it separate until it was time to serve. It's not very acidic, but I didn't want to risk the lime juice (and chile acid -- see my post on cebollas en escabeche) cooking the veggies and making the salad go soggy.

When the rice was done it was time to serve. The salad went on side plates, and I spooned the dressing on at the very last minute.

I created a restaurant-style column of rice by using an ordinary cookie-cutter. I was very pleased that the rice held its shape after I gingerly pulled the cookie-cutter away.

Using tongs, I painstakingly placed slices of turky breast on the rice, spooned over a bit more sauce, and then made a ring of sauce around the edge of the plates.

Because my efforts weren't as neat as I had hoped, here's an airbrushed version of the final result:

Yes I cooked this. I also edited it using Photoshop.

So how did it taste?

I've had mole a few times before.

There was the mediocre mole with chicken I had in a Mexican restaurant in Edinburgh.

Also I have been given jars of mole paste on two separate occasions: once it was La Preferida, and once La Costeña. Both are respectable brands, the latter being an actual Mexican company while the former was founded in Chicago by Hispanic Americans.

Fortunately my homemade mole tasted more like the jarred versions than the bad restaurant one. Which is not to say I hadn't been worried.

There is so much preparation involved in this recipe, but once you get to the long simmering stage, there's not much more you can do to add or improve flavour, beyond a bit of seasoning.

I tasted the sauce several times as it simmered.

First it needed salt, because I'd used homemade stock instead of a salty stock cube.

Then I was concerned it didn't have enough rich "darkness", so I added 25 grammes more of the chocolate.

But the chocolate had sugar in it, so now it was too sweet. I added a bit more salt and a bit of the chile water.

It still didn't taste quite right, but I was now afraid to tweak it further.

Besides, the flavours apparently needed time to mingle, so I went upstairs for a shower. When I came back, I found the promised layer of fat that meant the mole was cooked.

I skimmed off the fat and tasted it again. Still not quite there, but moving in the right direction.

I cooled it and let it "mature" in the fridge overnight.

However, when I finally dug into the finished dish, I was pleasantly surprised. It tasted like mole. I had actually made mole!.

Nevertheless, if I ever make this again - and that's a pretty big if - there are a few thing I will do differently.

Firstly, I still think it was a bit too sweet, so I'll forget the brioche and substitute a stale slice of baguette.

Also, it was a bit too chocolatey in that commercial milk-chocolate way, so in the absence of solid Mexican cooking chocolate, I would use high coco-solid European cooking chocolate, for a bitter, rich base note.

Also, as a time-saver I might use more of the chile water in place of stock. It's much easier to make, and would probably make the flavour darker and spicier as well.

Overall the mole was a great sucess, though the big hit of the evening was actually the green rice.

My wife even had seconds, which she never does with rice (except for risotto, which should give you an idea of how tasty the rice actually was).

So well done, Thomasina. No wonder you won MasterChef.

This was quite an undertaking, and certainly the most ambitious thing I've attempted in the kitchen to date.

But there are actually seven types of mole in Mexican cuisine. And I intend to cook them all.

Cebollas en escabeche

When I first decided to make panuchos, Alison was totally on board...until I mentioned the pickled onions. Why would you make a delicious meal and then ruin it with something gross like that, she wondered. You don't have to eat them, I told her, but I think they'll be nice.

There was a misunderstanding, you see. She heard "pickled onions" and thought of those stunted baby onions soaked in vinegar and sold in jars. Why indeed would I put those on my delicious food? Why indeed do those onions exist at all? I can't imagine anyone enjoying them. Even if you had no taste buds, their texture would put you off.

Of course I had no intention of putting pickled white baby onions on our panuchos. The pickled onions I had in mind are a Yucatecan delicacy, like panuchos themselves.

Like most things beyond the limited range of North Mexican, Tex-Mex, and Mexi-Cali cuisines (eg burritos, baked enchiladas, chile con carne, and those U-shaped hard tacos), I had never heard of this condiment. In fact, these pickled onions belong to the list of foods I would never have expected to be part of Mexican cuisine, like duck en pipián.

Once she tried them, Alison agreed they are delicious, but insisted I learn their Spanish name, you avoid evoking the jarred monstrosities. In another cookbook I learned they are called cebollas en escabeche.

So what are they? Well, to start, they are red onions, not white; and they are full-grown, not baby-sized; and they are sliced, not whole.

The pickling is a bit problematic, actually, as the usual way to pickle something in European cooking is to soak it in vinegar. To get vinegar you need wine, and Mexico is not a major producer of wine (much to the dismay of the Spanish colonists).

Obviously vinegar can be and is imported now, but how did they make the dish traditionally?

A running theme of this blog is that I have a lot of Mexican cookbooks, and all of them include recipes for certain classic dishes. The Two Cooks version of pickled onions calls for red wine vinegar. Other versions use white wine or even cider vinegar. There's even one which doesn't call for vinegar at all. It can, apparently, be done with boiling water.

The other common natural pickling agent is citric acid, i.e. the juice of any citrus fruit, which is and always has been readily available in Mexico. Yet strangely, citrus juice is not used in this recipe until after the onions have already been pickled! However, all versions call for habanero chilies, so perhaps the acid from these is enough to do the job on its own.

I have made these pickled cebollas twice, once using red wine vinegar and once using white wine vinegar, and I haven't noticed a major difference in taste. In both versions, more than half the liquid is still just boiled water, so I'd say the more important thing to get right is the seasonings. Some versions call for nothing more than the chilies, but I stand by the Two Cooks version, which includes allspice berries, Mexican oregano, and epazote. These have been my favourite Mexican seasonings ever since I discovered them, and I use them at every opportunity.

So, begin by slicing red onion very thinly. I cut the onion in half first, because I don't want rings, but this may not be the most attractive way to present the finished product. It is, though, only a garnish.

Then you need some habanero, roasted and finely chopped. You can leave the seeds out if you include vinegar, but if you're going with just water I'd include the seeds, as you'll need as much acid as possible.

Then you need some allspice berries (lightly crushed), some epazote, Mexican oregano, and maybe a teaspoon of ground cumin.

Put all this in a bowl. Add vinegar until the onions are about a third of the way to being covered. Then pour in boiling water to cover the onions. If you're not using vinegar, just cover with boiling water.

Seal the bowl with clingfilm and set aside for about four hours.

But that's not the end. After the onions have pickled, drain most of the liquid (and remove the allspice berries) and place the onions in a serving bowl. Then pour the juice of one bitter orange over them.

Bitter orange is a Mexican citrus fruit that does but seem to be available outside Mexico. Obviously I've never had it myself, but apparently it tastes life a cross between orange and grapefruit, so you can make "mock bitter orange juice" by mixing the two fruits. It is this bitter citrus zing that makes this such a delicious condiment. And the best part is that there's usually plenty left over to put on sandwiches and such for the next few days.

One of my cookbooks calls these "pink pickled onions" in English, and indeed, though they start out as standard red onions, they end up uniformly pink by the time they're ready to serve.

I forgot to take a picture while they were in the serving dish, but I do have a photo of the last of them sitting on a flour tortilla (store-bought), moments before I filled it with chicken and probably too many chipotle peppers. I'm not sure the picture does them justice, but at least you can see how pink they are.

If you are ever cooking a Yucatecan dish, you must include these. In fact, you should probably make them anyway. They're that good.

Adventures in Tortilla-Making

I don't own a tortilla-press, which is perhaps why I attempted tamales before I tried making my own corn tortillas. Even after I bought a bag of real Mexican masa harina from Lupe Pintos (Maseca, which is the leading brand in Mexico), the first tortillas I made were actually panuchos.

Before I read Two Cooks and a Suitcase I had never heard of panuchos, and unless you've lived in Yucatán, you probably haven't either, so I will explain.

Panuchos are extra-thick corn tortillas with pockets cut into them, sort of like a Mexican version of pita bread. The pockets are filled with refried beans or black beans; then the panuchos are shallow-fried. Just before serving they are topped with something like shredded pollo pibil and some Yucatecan pickled red onions (cebollas en escabeche) - or just the onions, if it's a snack or a light lunch you're after.

Obviously, stuffed and fried tortillas would be tempting enough on their own, but it was equally the "extra-thick" part that appealed to me, as I thought they would be easier to make without a tortilla-press.

When I was in college, I saw this film about Guatemalan refugees called El Norte (which you should definitely check out). In one early scene, a young girl makes tortillas by patting them back and forth from hand to hand. I figured I could try this technique for my panuchos. How hard could it be?

So I made a batch of masa dough and patted out some panuchos.

It's pretty tricky to get it right your first time, so the first few were a bit wonky, but most were usable, shape-wise. One caveat for anyone trying this at home: there is no way to get perfectly round edges on a homemade tortilla unless you trim it using a bowl or something, which I've never bothered to do.

The recipe I had (again from Two Cooks), said that when you flip the tortilla to cook the other side, you must press down gently to get it to puff (essential for the pocketed panuchos). I didn't believe them. I thought, how could pressing down in the middle cause a great puffy pocket to form? So I pressed down firmly around the edges for the first one. And nothing happened.

I can't remember now if I decided to try pressing down in the middle on the second or third panucho, but I regardless, I eventually trusted the recipe enough and pressed down in the middle with my spatula. And behold: it puffed! Not a helluva lot, but enough to create a pocket.

Fresh-cooked tortillas and their relatives are hot to touch, so I let them cool in a pile on some kitchen paper. Then I gingerly tried opening the pockets with a sharp knife.

Obviously the first one or two had no pocket because they hadn't puffed properly, but most were definitely usable. I made more than enough, so I decided to choose the best looking six (three per person).

Once they had been fried, I arranged them in a triangle patten on the plate, with a neat pile of pollo en pipián in the middle, plus a trio of garnishes in the colours of the Mexican flag: chopped tomatoes, diced avocado, and sour cream (one for each panucho). I wish I had a picture of this, but I didn't record my food back then.

Naturally I made cebollas en escabeche as well, but I'm making them again this weekend, and they deserve a post of their own.

The second time I made "panuchos", I was really after plain tortillas to go with the mole sauce I got for my birthday, but (again owing to no tortilla press) I lacked confidence to make them. Further, Rick Bayless confirms in his book Authentic Mexican, that the hand-patting technique I saw in El Norte is practised in Mexico as well, though discouragingly he doubts a non-native could ever learn it.

My first batch of panuchos had looked a bit rustic, but the last two of my second batch looked almost right, so I did begin to hope I could eventually master this. (All the the panuchos tasted lovely, by the way, so if you're making this at home don't worry too much about looks. Dinner will still be delicious.)

The hand-patting technique is even a plot point in my story. Esteban impresses his friend's mother by hand-patting tortillas, which she hasn't seen since her childhood in Mexico. This friend becomes Esteban's business partner for his first restaurant and an investor in his second.

However, my own hand-patting experiments were brought to a halt by a tip from Thomasina Miers' Mexican Food Made Simple. In the absence of a tortilla press, she recommends placing the ball of masa dough in a large ziploc bag and rolling it out as if it were a pastry. This works a charm, though the edges are still not very round (again, you could use a cutter or trace around a bowl if you want perfect edges).

I first tried this out the Sunday after I made the disastrous alternate version of sopa de lima. I had hella broth left over, plus some of the hot chiles, and I needed something to do with them. There were also some bits of veg left in the fridge from the week's other meals: cherry tomatoes, mushrooms, sweet peppers, etc.

Thomasina Miers only includes four recipes for taco fillings, one for each season, and all are veg-heavy, with two or three exclusively vegetarian. This gave me an idea: make some corn tortillas, sauté the veg with some of the broth and some Mexican seasonings, and make tacos.

This calls for a bit of exposition. In Mexico, tacos are not those fried U-shaped things filled with ground beef. In the first place, beef is not widely eaten on Mexico, apart from in the North. Chicken, pork, and goat are the main meats. Secondly, the U-shape things are a complete US invention. Real Mexican tacos are either not fried (what we would think of as "soft tacos", but with corn tortillas), or if they are fried, they are first rolled into a cigar shape (like what we call "taquitos").

Tacos are street food: really nothing more than a warm corn tortilla informally wrapped around whatever stewed, fried, or grilled fillings the taco vender has on hand, with maybe some salsa on top for good measure. And they are both more delicious and easier to rest than the American imposters.

Now, back to my tacos.

I seasoned the veg with epazote, jalapeño, and some ground allspice berries (which was a revelation to me, as far as Mexican cuisine goes) and just a bit of the leftover soup. The rest of the soup I used to cook arroz blanco.  For something I just made up out of what was on hand, the sauteed veg was delicious. In fact, it could stand up to any planned dish. But the real stars were the tortillas.

The recipe for tortilla dough from masa harina is simplicity itself: one part masa harina to one and a quarter parts warm water. Bring the dough together with your hands and knead for ten minutes. The let it rest for half an hour. Tortilla dough is made from warm or room-temperature ingredients, so rest it on the counter, not in the fridge, but cover it with clingfilm to keep it from drying out. If it's to dry after resting (and won't hold together when you roll it out), work a bit more water into it.

There are few things I love more than the gorgeous corn smell you get when you add warm water to masa harina. It always fills me with a combination of good memories and anticipation.

Thomasina's rolling advice was spot on, and I got the best-looking tortillas I'd ever made, but the real triumph was when I flipped them and watched them puff. Next time I make tacos I'll try to make video of it. Until then, here's a picture of my impromptu vegetation tacos and white rice (tacos de verduras con arroz blanco).

Next time: Yucatecan pickled onions get their own post.

Loco

I have crazy idea: to write a book -- a novel, though I hate that word -- about a Mexican chef.
It's crazy because I'm not a chef and I'm not Mexican*.
This idea started when I first moved to Edinburgh ten years ago. I found that, contrary to my expectations, Mexican food was available (there was once even a Mexican restaurant across the street from my flat). But it was very different from the cuisine I grew up with in Southern California.
I had always thought of burritos as the prime Mexican dish, but in Britain they are rarely on the menu. Instead, the country is obsessed with fajitas, which I don't remember eating until I was a teenager.
My first thought was "This is not real Mexican food." Then, of course, I realized the food we eat in SoCal may not be authentic either.
Not long after that I discovered a brilliant Mexican deli at Tollcross called Lupe Pintos. They seem to have everything, including homemade tortillas (both corn and flour). I stocked up with provisions and started making my own Mexican food.
Alison, my wife, became very fond of burritos; however as that was all I ever made, it did get to be a bit same-y. I started wondering what else I could cook. Lupe Pintos have their own cookbook, called Two Cooks and a Suitcase (actually I believe they have more than one now). So one year for my birthday, Alison got me the book, and I began broadening my culinary horizons.
They idea for the novel, though came much more recently.
Last summer I was sitting in the Ivory and Willow in Corstorphine with Alison and our daugher Abby. I noticed they had nachos on the menu. A lot of British cafes and pubs serve nachos now (of greatly varying quality). I guess it's an easy dish to make, especially if you don't make your own tortilla chips, and it doesn't require any fancy presentation.
I started thinking about how most Mexican food in Britain is still pretty humble, and not very authentic. And basically, I came up with the plot -- about Mexican chef who seeks to elevate his national cuisine to Michelin-star quality -- by the time we finished our lunch.
But as I said, I'm not a chef, and I'm not Mexican. All my previous writing had been about me, more or less, but this project would require serious research.
So that's what this journey is about: learning how to cook real Mexican food and learning how to elevate it to fine dining. Along the way I'll report on how the book is going and any other culinary experimentations I attempt.
*Actually I do have some Mexican ancestry, but no more than many other Americans from the southwest are likely to have