Breakfast with MexiGeek: Chimichurri scrambled eggs on blue corn tortillas with habanero sauce and queso fresco

...which is a mouthful to say as well as to eat.

First off: chimicurri is NOT Mexican. It is (I believe) Argentine. It seems to be kind of a "thing" just now. They sell it in supermarkets, and of course in Lupe Pinto's. It was even mentioned in the most recent series of MasterChef.

So this breakfast came together because I was near the end of a bottle of chimichurri, so I fried the sauce in hot oil, because frying sauce is one of the basic techniques of Mexican cooking.

When the sauce was sizzling, I cracked a couple of eggs and scrambled them until they were just done.

On a plate I had two warm blue corn tortillas from The Cool Chile Company and some slices of cured Spanish-style chorizo.

I put the chimichurri scrambled eggs on top of the chorizo, crumbled up some queso fresco from Gringa Dairy and some KANKUN habanero sauce.

Y provecho!

It ain't breakfast if it don't got chiles

It has never occurred to me to cook eggs without some form of chile. I'm not even sure that it's possible.

What I loved about this breakfast was that:

A) I made it up as I went along, and 

B) I made it with a little help from my friends: Cool Chile Company, Gringa Dairy, and KANKUN. Three of the reasons it is possible to cook Mexican food in the UK. 

Also, it was delicious, but that pretty much goes without saying.

Lunch with MexiGeek: apple and pumpkinseed salad with queso fresco

I don't normally do lunch posts (even though "lunch" is traditionally the main meal of the day in Mexico), but this was a pretty damn good salad.

Salads based on green leaves aren't the most typical of Mexican dishes; mexican cuisine has other ways of getting a good portion of veg into your diet.

But I love a good salad for lunch, especially on a hot day.

The inspiration for this salad came from three things:

1) those blue cheese and walnut salads that were all the rage in middle-brow cafés several years ago (I used LOVE shit like that!)

2) the fact that I have a big block of Gringa Dairy queso fresco in my fridge

3) Gringa Dairy's website, which suggests crumbling their cheese over salads

So I toasted some pumpkin seeds and some sesame seeds, peeled and chopped an apple, and tossed it all with some rocket and a bit of fresh basil.

I "bruised" the basil leaves in my hands, by the way, so they would release more flavour. I probably got that trick off Jamie Oliver.

Then I crumbled some queso fresco over the salad and dressed it with balsamic vinegar and agave nectar (thanks to Luchito for inspiring that!).

They sell agave nectar everywhere now thanks to Chris Martin's wife, but if you really can't get hold of some honey would work fine.

On the side I served some tortilla wedges filled with some of my homemade coriander pesto.

This is totally "fusion food", of course, but still one if the best salads I've ever had. Possibly it could have used some chopped celery, but there you go.

Breakfast with MexiGeek: more fun with queso fresco

The morning after making queso fundido I found myself with leftover cheese and tortillas, plus my homemade coriander pesto and a bottle of Cholula.

So I fried two tortillas (because one just wasn't enough), then fried an egg over-easy in the same oil.

The tortillas were homemade too, by the way. I had replenished my supply of Maseca on a recent trip to Lupe Pinto's. I pretty much bought everything they had in the shop.

I spread one tortilla with my coriander pesto, put the egg on top, then sprinkled it with Cholula and crumbled queso fresco from Gringa Dairy.

For the record I topped the lot with the other tortilla and sprinkled some more Cholula, but I went for an open-faced presentation for the photo.

The coriander pesto doesn't show up in the photo (drag) but it was still delicious.

Quesadillas con rajas: starring queso fresco from Gringa Dairy

Note the colours of the Mexican flag. Most delicious flag ever.

Quesadillas are not a complicated dish, but they are good for two things:

• They're doable when you don't have a lot of time to cook because you have a three-month-old baby

• They're perfect for testing out the new queso fresco you bought from Gringa Dairy in London

Actually I've been "testing" the cheese since I got it. So has my family. We keep testing it just a little more, to make sure it's still delicious.

It always is.

The cheese has been a major player in my sandwiches all week as well. It even stood up to my homemade chipotle sauce.

For those of you who are whisky drinkers, my favourite single malt is Ardbeg, which should give you an idea of how smoky I make my chipotle sauce.

You might expect a fresh white cheese like queso fresco to get lost when paired with such bold, spicy flavours, but on the contrary it was present in every delicious bite.

My family and I also got through quite a bit of cheese just on its own (pieces of queso fresco are apparently served as botanas - the Mexican equivalent of tapas - in some parts of Mexico).

Until Gringa Dairy started up, you couldn't get queso fresco in this country, so a lot of us won't know what it's like.

Especially confusing to the uninitiated is the variety of substitutes recommended by various recipes, even in the same cookbook. How can one cheese be the equivalent of feta, mozzarella, ricotta, cottage cheese, and halloumi?

Well, there are different styles of queso fresco, which accounts for some of the above, but the cheese does combine several attributes we don't often see together.

Gringa Dairy's queso fresco holds together in a block but can easily be pulled apart into small pieces (not quite the same as crumbling, as it's a bit softer than feta).

It also slices easily.

On the palate it has a gorgeous texture. I've heard some people call it queso fresco creamy; personally I find it has more firmness than that (it's not a soft cheese like brie or Philadelphia), but it does practically melt in your mouth.

It's nowhere near as salty as feta, but slightly more salty than mozzarella, and whereas some mozzarellas are so mild they almost taste of nothing, this cheese has a definite personality.

Best of all for me is the subtle tang it has, sort of like sour cream, that tells your palate "Hey, don't sit down, cuz this is a party!"

So: this cheese is delicious on its own, as a sandwich filling, or as a topping. But what I dying to do was cook with it, and I chose quesadillas con rajas (strips of chile poblano).

(Chiles poblanos aren't in season in Britain yet, so I had to use tinned.)

By far the best way to make quesadillas is to make some tortillas and fill them with cheese before you cook them, but I didn't have that kind of time so I used premade tortillas, filled them and toasted them in a dry pan.

As usual, I recommend the
Cool Chile Company's tortillas if you're not making your own.

And as you can see from the photo, I basically "sandwiched" two tortillas instead of doing the traditional fold-over.

This was purely to fit more cheese into the quesadillas.

I really love this cheese!

And of course an antojito* is nothing without a salsa or two, so I decided to make salsa verde and a red chipotle and tomato salsa cocida (meaning I fried the salsa once more before serving.

For the salsa verde I used tinned tomatillos (fresh ones are not in season here yet), fresh jalapeños, one diced white onion, two cloves of garlic, and lots of chopped coriander.

Everything but the onion goes in the blender.

Pulse-blend until you have a thick, textured salsa (some lime juice wouldn't hurt if you need to loosen it a bit, but you shouldn't need to).

Then add the onions and stir well.

(You can blend the onions too if you don't want a chunky salsa.)

Tinned tomatillos are better than no tomatillos, but because they are less tart than fresh ones, this salsa benefits from frying before serving to intensify the flavour.

("Frying" a sauce to reduce it is one of the most typical Mexican cooking techniques and really makes the difference between a Mexican salsa and a nearly equivalent one from another cuisine.)

I think I've given this chipotle sauce recipe before, but here it is again:

3 tomatoes, roasted on a dry frying pan or comal until they come up in blackened spots

2 cloves of garlic, roasted with the tomatoes

One white onion, roughly chopped

3-6 chipotles en adobo (or to taste)

1-2 (or more) tsp of the adobo sauce
1 tsp Mexican oregano

When you roast the garlic, leave the papery skins on.

It will cook faster than the tomatoes, so keep an eye on it.

When it starts to blacken, turn the cloves over and let them start to blacken on the other side. Then let them cool and the skins should just slip off.

Everything goes into a blender; just like the salsa verde, you're looking for a textured consistency (though you could also strain it for a more "refined" salsa.

I let this chill in the fridge overnight so the flavours could mingle and develop and fried the sauce again before serving.

I served one salsa on each side, with more cheese down the middle, going for the classic Mexican flag theme.

Simple, but delicious! And the cheese makes strings when it "melts", which is another reason people compare it to mozzarella.

I can already see Gringa Dairy is going to change the way I think of cheese in Mexican recipes.

Before, I would think "What's the best substitute for this type of cheese?" Now ink starting to think "Maybe we can get this cheese in Britain soon!"

(Gringa Dairy is planning to introduce more varieties in the near future.)

And finally, I served the quesadillas with fried plátanos machos ("macho bananas" ie plantains).

These were Caribbean style, rather than Mexican style, meaning the skins were still slightly green (in Mexico, they usually wait until the skins turn black before cooking plantains).

Of you've never had fried plantains before, these were kind of like potatoes, only denser, with just the faintest hint of banana flavour.

Next time I'll wait for them to ripen. Maybe.

Breakfast with MexiGeek: Salsa de huevos con queso fresco

One of my cookbooks claims this is a traditional Oaxacan dish, but I know it as the way my mother made scrambled eggs for egg burritos.

Basically you fry some leftover salsa on a pan until it just starts to reduce and thicken.

(I used my chipotle and tomato salsa.)

Then you scramble the eggs into the salsa until they're just combined.

I seasoned the eggs with salt,  pepper, and dried epazote.

Then I put the eggs on a fried tortilla, topped with salsa verde and some crumbled up queso fresco from Gringa Dairy, and put it under the grill to let the cheese melt.

When queso fresco melts it "hace hebras" ("makes strings") like mozzarella!

¡Y provecho!

The queso fresco is the perfect complement to the bold, sweet chipotle sauce.

One of the things I love about Mexican cuisine is that there are literally hundreds of ways of preparing eggs, nearly all of which involve chiles.

Gringa Dairy: THE place to get Mexican cheese in Britain

If there's one Mexican ingredient that's nearly impossible to find outside of Mexico it's real Mexican cheese.

(And I haven't found fresh epazote yet.)

That's why London's Gringa Dairy, based in Peckham, is so amazing. They're making real queso fresco right here in the UK!

Cheese is probably the least exported of all Mexican ingredients, and therefore the least familiar to non-Mexicans.

Queso fresco literally means "fresh cheese". It's an unaged white cheese made from cow's milk with a consistency similar to feta.

Recipes aimed at cooks living outside Mexico often suggest substituting feta, ricotta, or even cottage cheese. But none of these are quite right.

Feta for example, is too salty and made from the wrong kind of milk.

Because Gringa Dairy produces its cheese here in the UK, we can now add a level of authenticity to our Mexican food that hasn't previously been possible.

Obviously I have ordered some for myself (you can order yours here).

In the meantime I asked Kristen, the Dairy's founder (and fellow Californian expat) about her journey to becoming to UK's first producer of Mexican-style cheese.

What inspired you to make Mexican cheeses here in the UK?

I have long wanted to be a cheese maker and felt that no one needed another cheddar!

It was clear to me that there was finally an opportunity for this kind of cheesemaking in the UK, based on the rapid and recent increase in the availability of quality Mexican food and the correspondingly rapid maturing supply chain importing ingredients from Mexico, the US and the EU.

However, one of the missing pieces of the puzzle is the supply of goods like cheese that require a cold chain (that is, they must be continuously refrigerated).

It’s expensive to import these kinds of products and a short shelf life and tricky import laws make it even more economically risky.

So, it just really made sense to me that there was an opportunity to make these cheeses in the UK.

Due to Tex-Mex influences, authentic Mexican cheeses are among the least familiar Mexican ingredients outside Mexico. How did you discover them?

Did you know that Mexico exports less than 3% of the cheeses it produces?

As you might guess, 99% of what is exported goes to the USA.

There are some people out there who are committed to increasing the awareness of Mexican cheeses, such as Carlos Yescas at Lactography, but there is a long way to go before these cheeses get the recognition they deserve!

As for me, I am originally from California, living in both the Central Valley and San Francisco.

My teen years were spent at a high school that was primarily Latino and Mexican culture has simply been there most of my life. So, I guess I have always been familiar with the cheeses.

But I agree about the Tex-Mex influence really skewing the role of cheese in the cuisine as a whole and then Monterey Jack somehow became seen as “Mexican” cheese. (Though I admit Monterey Jack is something of a guilty pleasure…kind of like eating Pringles!)

A lot of the recent flowering of interest in Mexican food here is inspired by expats, either from Mexico or parts of the United States, who find they can't do without their favourite cuisine. What brought you to the UK?

Work. My partner got a job here and we thought it would be fun to shake things up a bit and live abroad.

What are your favourite Mexican dishes and is cheese a vital part of them?

This answer could take a very long time, so I will keep it short.

I dearly love the regionalism of the cuisine, so I have a lot of favourite areas.

I really like the traditional food of Oaxaca and will walk miles for good cochinita pibil. Do not get your hand between my mouth and a really fresh tuna taco and I have been dreaming of tres leches cake for the past week.

But I do tend towards dishes that are best finished with a sprinkle of Queso Fresco or Cotija as I like cheese as an accent.

I think it is because so many Mexican dishes are created through “layering” flavour.

Meat, veggies, moles and cheese really come together to make some amazing dishes.

Oh, and let’s not forget LARD - there is a town an hour from where I grew up named Manteca!

Okay, and another admission - I do love a good burrito. I am from California after all! I prefer Chihuahua for these.

Is Mexican cheese (in particular) or Mexican food (in general) bound up with any specific memory or experience?

After 5 years in London, I will say “being warm”!

I do have lovely memories of the places I have been and the people I have met, but I think if I trace it back to the start of it all, it was my neighbour’s abuela teaching us how to make refried beans when I was about 12 years old.

Life changing stuff, that.

The motto of MexiGeek is All Mexican Food is Local, which means two things:

Mexican food has incredible regional variation and is always made with local produce and according to local traditions (even ubiquitous dishes like tamales vary greatly from one region to the next)

When you cook Mexican food outside of Mexico, you inevitably have to make some local substitutions, effectively creating your own new "local" Mexican cuisine

Thanks to Gringa Dairy, we now have a local version of an authentic Mexican cheese!

Five years ago - or even five months ago - I never would hadn't imagined this would be possible.

The New Mexican Revolution rolls on!

Chiles rellenos!

Mexican Food guru Rick Bayless writes that many people have been "smitten" the Mexican snack known as chiles rellenos (stuffed chiles), "which is unfortunate for them, because they do take a little time to prepare."

Actually, they take a lot of time to prepare. I've read recipes for this dish in every book I could get my hands on, plus all of the many Mexican food blogs I follow (September is the traditional season for chiles rellenos, so everyone was writing about them. I'm late!).

They are all pretty much identical, and there are no short cuts.

Ordinarily I'd file this under Don't Try At Home (unless you're a hardcore MexiGeek). But these are so delicious I think everyone should try them, and until Edinburgh restaurants start serving them, you'll have to make your own.

(Chiles rellenos are common in Mexican restaurants in the US, and you can get them from the London Mexican restaurant Mestizo.)

So: chiles rellenos or "stuffed chiles". Basically, these are exactly what they sound like, only better.

For me, the classic chiles rellenos are stuffed chiles poblanos (literally "chiles from Puebla"). The poblanos' large size, medium-thick flesh and mild heat makes them ideal for this. In fact, many Mexicans call them chiles para rellenar ("chiles for stuffing").

I've read that Mexicans also stuff smaller, hotter chiles, as well as reconstituted ancho chiles. And in the US you can get deep, fried jalapeños stuffed with cream cheese, which are addictive, but I'm not sure they're very Mexican.

To prep the chiles, first you have to roast them. Ordinarily this is where I've talk about asar-roasting on a dry pan. You can do that, but in this case it's not the best choice.

Poblanos have a though transparent outer skin which must be removed or your fork will have trouble cutting through it. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to char the skin off without overcooking the rest of the chile.

If you roast the poblano on a dry pan, you'll probably burn through the skin in places before you get all the outer layer charred. Then you can't stuff the chile. FAIL!

If you do the Diana Kennedy thing and stick the poblano under a grill, turning it until it blackens on all sides, the outer skin will slip off easily, but the remaining flesh may be a bit to soft to hold its shape. You want it to be flexible, but not on the verge of turning to mush.

So what works best is to hold the poblano over an open flame until all the skin blisters and loosens. I find you need a gas hob for this.

Once your chiles look like the above, stick them in a plastic bag to "sweat" for ten minutes. This makes them easier to peel, but beware "easier" is a relative term here. The skin will come off in maddeningly small bits and you will have to "shave" some of it with a sharp knife because the flame won't reach into the "valleys" of the chile.

You will get your hands dirty, but they won't sting, because the chiles are mild.

When the chile is peeled, take a small, sharp knife and make a slit down one side of it. This is the hole you're going to put the stuffing in, so don't slice down the entire length of the chile. You want it to stay closed after you're stuffed it.

Now, put the tap on and gently wash the chile inside and out. I'm not kidding. Also, stick your finger in the hole and gently brush the seeds out, and carefully pull out as much of the white veins as will come free easily.

It is vital that you don't rip, tear, or poke through the chile or it becomes unstuffable (though you can still slice it into rajas). Must recipes recommend roasting extras in case you rip a couple.

Now for the stuffing. What do you stuff them with?

One the popular Autumnal versions of this dish is chiles en nogada, "nogada" being a creamy walnut sauce. These chiles rellenos are stuffed with a Oaxacan-style picadillo, which is fried pork mince and dried fruit (think of old-school mince pie, which actually contained mince).

The stuffed green chiles are then covered in the white nogada, and sprinkled with red(-ish) pomegranate seeds: the three colours of the Mexican flag.

Because of that and because the walnut harvest usually comes around Mexican Independence Day (16th of September), it is a traditional Independence Day celebration food. To preserve the Mexican Flag colour scheme, chiles en nogada are usually not battered, though I have seen photos of an exception.

I didn't manage to get fresh walnuts for the sauce this September. But it's just as well, because the light, fluffy batter is one of the best parts, and in any case my favourite filling is cheese!

The main cheese in Mexico is queso fresco (literally "fresh cheese"),  a homemade cheese which is like a goat's milk version of cottage cheese, with a firmer, more crumbly texture. If you really want to rock the house, you can make your own, like Tiffany from Kitchen Conversations did.

I nearly always use feta in place of queso fresco because I love feta and the saltiness really works with this dish. However, Rick Bayless writes that real queso fresco isn't as salty as feta, so if you're not a feta fan try plain cottage cheese, ricotta, or even some mozzarella (there's a Oaxacan queso fresco that "hace hebras" or "makes strings" like mozzarella).

Chile relleno, stuffed and resealed, ready for frying

Now, I did the roasting, peeling and stuffing the night before to save some time on the day. I wrapped my stuffed chiles in foil and put them in the fridge. This is a common practice, but the chiles must be at room temperature before you fry them, so take them out of the fridge at least an hour before you start to cook.

Then comes the batter. This is what really scared the living hell out of me. I'm not a strong baker and making a batter - even if it's just for shallow frying - feels like baking to me.

Add to that it's a fairly unusual batter and my nerves were really through the roof. It felt like I was trying to walk before I could run and I was sure I was going to screw it up.

Once again, I read every recipe for this I could find and they all said the same thing. There are no short cuts. So here goes.

The easy part is dusting your room temperature chiles with pain white flour. They look like this:

The toothpick is because one wouldn't close on its own. Bad chile!

But then it gets tricky.

Chiles rellenos have a distinctively fluffy-textured batter. It is apparently quite similar to tempura batter, but I don't know how to make tempura, so that's no help to me.

What you do is get one egg for every two chiles and separate them. Whisk the whites until they just hold a peak (no stiff peaks; this is not a meringue).

Then whisk in the yolks one at a time. Don't be too vigorous or you'll lose all the air you so painstakingly whipped into the whites.

Lastly, fold about a tablespoon of flour into the batter for a bit more bulk.

Finished batter. MexiGeek ALWAYS whisks egg whites by hand.

Now have to do some frying. And despite living in Scotland, I'm not a big fan of frying, beyond shallow-frying with a tablespoon or two of olive oil. However, deep(er)-frying does have its places, and this is one of them.

Pour some flavourless oil (not olive oil) into a wide, deep pan until it reaches about 3/4 of an inch up the sides of the pan. Then heat it until it is quite hot (medium-high, almost to high, but don't set the oil on fire).

Now take a chile by the stem, dip it into the batter and quickly pull it out. It should be evenly coated in the batter, but if not don't stress. Just pour some more batter around the chile with a dessert spoon.

Lay the battered chile in the hot oil until it gets all golden-brown, then turn it over to fry the other side.

Repeat until all the chiles are fried.

These do not keep well; apparently they'll go soggy and stale if you leave them sitting around too long (I always eat them right away, so I wouldn't know). Therefore serve as soon as all the chiles are fried. If you're doing a lot at once, keep the done ones in a warm oven. But they don't take long to fry: maybe ten minutes tops for both sides.

Here's a finished one, with some pollo adobado and what turned out to be inedibly underdone potatoes.

Could be prettier, but could hardly be tastier!

 Now, despite all the faff involved, I managed to get these right my first try! I'll admit mine could have been a bit neater, but they tasted fantastic. In fact, they were Mrs MexiGeek's favourite part of the meal.

I want to stress again that poblanos are mild chiles. Whereas jalapeños have a Scoville Heat Unit count of 2,500 to 5,000, poblanos have like 1,000. So if you or your near and dear aren't into hot stuff, don't be afraid to try these.

Also, the batter and the cheese both help to tone down the heat (capsaicin, the substance that makes chiles hot, is not water soluble but it IS fat soluble, so pairing chiles with cheese, cream, or other dairy products is a reliable way to moderate the chile burn).

Once again, Mestizo in London serves these (stuffed with cheese or picadillo, which I notice they do with beef mince instead of pork). Possibly some other UK Mexican restaurants of similar calibre (if any) also have rellenos on the menu. Otherwise, if you want to taste these (and I highly recommend you do), you've got to make them yourself. Do it at the weekend.