Breakfast with MexiGeek: Migas en salsa verde

When I saw that Nigella had basically done a version of migas, I knew it was high time I did one.

(This was before we found out about the cocaine but after her now ex-husband choked her in a public restaurant in broad daylight. She's living the dream.)

Anyway, migas literally means "crumbs", but in the kitchen it means a dish of scrambled eggs and tortilla chips.

That's right: tortilla chips for breakfast.

This dish is pretty simple, and there are many variations, depending on what you have lying around.

Some people fry the tortilla chips first, but I only recommend this if your tortilla chips are homemade. Store-bought ones disintegrate too easily.

I didn't have an onion so I used minced garlic, but as a rule chopped onion is the way to go.

And I had some leftover salsa verde.

I started by heating some oil in a pan and sweating the garlic (use onion if you've got it. This is also where you'd fry your homemade tortilla chips. Remove them once they start to brown.)

Then I tipped in my salsa and fried it until it reduced and most of the water had cooked off. This is kind of like making salsa de huevos.

Then I added the eggs and a couple handfuls of crumbled tortilla chips and scrambled it all up.

¡Y provecho!

I served it with a few more tortilla chips, some sour cream, and chopped coriander or cilantro.

Just so you know, I do have one of these.

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: egg over easy in homemade salsa verde

I was actually trying to make a coriander (cilantro) vinaigrette, but it ended up more like a salsa.

I took a bunch of coriander (stems and all), a couple cloves of garlic, half a white onion, and a teaspoon of habanero chile paste.

For the acidity I was going use lime juice, but I had a lot of pink citrusy pickling liquid from my pink pickled onions, so I used that instead.

Into the blender it all goes, then check for seasoning.

It doesn't need any lime! And it's really more of a salsa verde! And it's hot as hell from the habanero!

Yay!

The cool thing is you usually need tomatillos in salsa verde to give it some tartness, but the pickled onions replaced it beautifully.

I LOVE salsa verde!

Now for the rest of my breakfast:

Because I'm out of tortillas, I used a bagel.

And because I was using a bagel, I decided to go for a fried egg rather than scrambled.

I always fry eggs over easy because I don't like "sunny side up".

I'm not actually a very "sunny" guy.

I seasoned the egg with salt, pepper, Mexican oregano, and some surprisingly hot Spanish chile powder I used to make patatas bravas once.

(They were pretty fucking "brav"!)

The egg goes onto a toasted bagel.

Then I fried the salsa a bit, because frying salsa is how you get it to reduce, thicken, and concentrate its flavours in Mexican cooking.

Cover the egg in salsa y provecho: a Mexican-American-Jewish fusion breakfast!

(¿)Carnitas de Pollo(?)

Apparently the Spanish for "WTF" is "WTF", and that is exactly what I'd expect Mexican and Mexican-American readers to think when they see the title of this post.

This is a dish I learned from Two Cooks and a Suitcase. I have no idea if it's really Mexican. It's not that I expect there is no shredded chicken in Mexico; it's just that the Spanish word carne usually seems to refer to non-poultry meat, and carnitas (the diminutive plural) in particular refers to slow-cooked, shredded pork (or "pulled pork" in the UK).

Obviously, from a purely technical and scientific point of view, the flesh of birds (as well as fish, reptiles, and amphibians) counts as meat or carne in Mexico just as it does in the rest of the world. And tomatoes are technically fruit, as we all know. But we still think of them as a vegetable, and I suspect Mexicans still think of carnitas as pulled pork, not chicken.

Also, "shredded chicken" in Spanish is pollo deshebrado. It's related to hebras, which are "strings". In Mexico, cheese which hace hebras ("makes strings") is highly prized.

Having said that, this is certainly a clever construction: having seen carnitas all over the place in Mexico, the authors of Two Cooks clearly thought "Hey, why not do the same thing with chicken?" And indeed, why not?

Also, it's delicious. I've used this as a filling in tacos, burritos, even tamales. It's never gone wrong, and, with good, tender chicken breasts, is certainly quicker to make than the traditional carnitas.

Our story begins when I ran out of epazote just as The Cool Chile Company got their fresh tomatillos in stock. Normally I would just get epazote from Lupe Pinto's, but I decided to take the opportunity to do a bulk order from the Cool Chiles, as I mentioned in my last post. When it arrived it looked like this:

 
The tortillas, by the way, were a suggestion from Chilli and Chocolate by Isabel Hood, who recommends you always keep a pack of Cool Chile Company tortillas on hand (they freeze and defrost well) in case you ever want to whip up some tacos for a quick meal. Hood writes that she only uses masa harina for making non-tortilla-based corn antojitos like tamales, sopes, etc. When I read that, it was like a revelation. In many ways I'm guilty of taking the hard road when it comes to cooking (for example, I'm peculiarly attached to roasting and grinding seeds by hand). But even I have been put off making tacos because I couldn't be bothered making homemade tortillas. It is a lot of work for something like a taco, which is meant to be a simple and hassle-free meal (or snack, really).

Plus, Hood reminds us that, except maybe in rural areas, most Mexicans don't make their own tortillas anymore either. Think of it like this: do you bake your item bread every day, or do you leave it to the professionals?

I will do a proper review of these tortillas soon. For now let's just say these are the best tortillas you can buy in the UK, and easily hold their own against any I've bought or tasted anywhere else.

Now, fresh (or non-stale) tortillas are usually used for tacos, and obviously that's what the so-called carnitas de pollo were for. However, tortilla and filling are only two of the three components of a complete taco. Any taquería with it's masa would also provide you with at least two or three salsas to put on your taco (self-serve, your choice and at your discretion), and one of these is invariably a salsa verde, which is a kind of green version of more familiar Mexican salsa, using tomatillos in place of tomatoes

Having just received half a kilo of fresh tomatillos, it was really the salsa verde that inspired me to make this dish. Until then, I had only ever made it with tinned tomatillos.

Any common Mexican salsa has a number of acceptable variations in ingredients, and I read quite a few recipes before I decided how I was going to make mine. Because I was using fresh tomatillos, I had three options:

1) use them raw
I decided against this after trying one on its own. Tomatillos are related to the Cape Gooseberry, and as such are very tart, without a large quantity of natural fructose to balance it out.

2) boil them until "just tender"
Two things stopped me doing this. First, how the hell do I know when they're "just tender"? And second, I imagine they would come out, taste- and texture-wise, a lot like tinned tomatillos, which are heat-treated after all.

3) asar-roast them
We have a winner. I am, as you know, a major proponent of asar-roasting, and I feel very comfortable with the technique. Also, I thought (correctly, as it turned out) that this style of roasting would concentrate the sugars and yield a superior flavour.

But let's start with the carnitas de pollo.

For traditional carnitas you would marinate pork shoulder in a spice mix, slow-cook it for the better part of a day, cool it, shred it, then fry it quickly before serving. It's delicious, but you need a lot of planning. With a couple of tender chicken breasts you could be eating carnitas de pollo in under an hour.

Chicken, in Mexico, has traditionally been more economically valuable as an egg-layer than as a meat source, usually not being killed until they have reached the end of their laying life. In addition, the chickens usually got more roaming space, so they could be quite "muscular".

By contrast, British and American chickens have largely been degraded into mere biological machines whose sole function is to produce (usually flavourless) meat.

Apart from the moral outrage, this means in Mexico you generally had to boil your chicken for hours to make it tender, while in the UK and US you don't, because the poor chicken has never actually been allowed to use its muscles before.

Having said that, I usually try to buy free-range or organic chicken, not only because the bird will have had a nicer life but also because it will actually taste of chicken. Many people think chicken is just a cheap carrier for flavour, but it was once a highly-prized food eaten only by the rich. That was, of course, before ethically bankrupt battery farming transformed chicken into the world's most affordable meat source.

So, now that you feel bad about type chicken you eat, let's get to the cooking.

The first step in making carnitas de pollo is "poaching" the chicken. This is also your first opportunity to add flavour to the dish.

Poaching chicken is basically boiling it in seasoned water. The seasonings will seep into the flesh. Also, the water can then be used as a weak chicken stock. For this recipe I used

Salt
Pepper
1 tsp Mexican oregano
2 avocado leaves

You can also bung in things like roughly chopped onions and garlic or other vegetables - anything you don't mind throwing straight into the compost bin when the poaching is done.

I got the avocado leaves from the Cool Chile Company and so can you (Americans: they might have these in your supermarket, otherwise see if there's a Mexican grocer in your area). Or you can use bay leaves instead, but they won't have the subtle aniseed flavour of avocado leaves.

Put your chicken breasts in a pot, add all the seasonings, cover with about an inch of water and bring to a boil.

Turn the heat down and simmer for 15-20 minutes. Remove to a plate and cool.

In the meantime, I made rajas. To make rajas, flame-roast some chiles poblanos as if you're making chiles rellenos (which I'll write about next time). After you've cooled and skinned them, cut them into thin strips (which is what "rajas" really means).

I also chopped up some spring onions. I chopped them at an angle, Asian-style, rather than just straight across, so they wouldn't get lost next to the rajas.

When the chicken is cooled, shred it with a fork (it should fall apart quite easily).

Now heat some fat (oil, butter, lard: your choice, though Mexicans would use lard). When it's hot, add the shredded chicken and fry until it starts to colour. Then add the rajas, fry a couple minutes more, then add the spring onions.

Now turn the heat way down and add about two tablespoons of sour cream or creme fraiche (Mexicans would use their own crema fresca, but it's not pasteurized), stir it in, and provecho! You may need to add more cream, but otherwise you're done.

 
And since I already had some delicious corn tortillas on hand, this was a pretty hassle-free meal.

Or it would have been. But I had to make the salsa verde as well...

Salsa Verde

Ingredientes

5 fresh tomatillos
2 fresh green chiles (I used jalapeños)
1/2 white onion
2 cloves of garlic
The stems of a bunch of coriander, plus some leaves
The juice of 1-2 limes

Preparación

Tomatillos come in papery husks, so you have to take these off and then give them a good wash, because their skin is sticky.

Asar-roast the tomatillos. I used the dry pan technique, foolishly thinking they would go quickly like tomatoes (even though I know they're not actually related to tomatoes). It worked but it took a long time, and the skin didn't blacken evenly. Next time I will try the Diana Kennedy technique, where you take the rack out of your grill pan, line the bottom with foil, put the tomatillos under a hot grill until they start to get soft, then turn them over and grill the other side. I find things get mushy using this method, but the tomatillos turned out that way anyway, so you've nothing to lose.

Dice the onion and garlic. Chop the stems off your coriander and roughly chop them.

While you're still waiting for the tomatillos to roast and/or cool enough to be skinned, grind the chopped coriander stems in your molcajete or with a bloody great mortar and pestle. You need it to go down to a paste, more or less. This is really hard and takes forever. Or you can throw it in the blender and have done with it (I'm trying to keep in mind not everyone wants to cook for four hours a night).

When your tomatillos have roasted and cooled, take the skins off and add them to the molcajete (or blender) and grind them up. If you're using the blender, blend in pulses, because you want to retain a fairly chunky texture.

Now add the onion and garlic, a bit of finely chopped coriander leaf, and the juice of one or two limes (use taste and consistency as a guide. The sauce is wet enough without overdoing the lime).

I was very proud of this, because it was my first sauce made almost entirely in the molcajete. Really only the onions and garlic didn't get crushed with the pestle, and that's because they weren't meant to.

Also, Mrs MexiGeek thoroughly enjoyed it.

It was a very wet sauce, though, and reminded me once again that, delicious though they are, tacos are not "neat" food. Bring lots of paper towels to the table.

Burritos al pastor

¿Burritos al pastor? ¿Que?

That's right. I put the al pastor filling in a flour tortilla. Now what would possess me to do that?

Well, I've been looking for something Mexican to cook after those disastrous polvorones, and the same friend for whom I baked them loaned me Down the Rabbit Hole by Juan Pablo Villalobos, which, by the way, you all should read.

Apart from the usual things you'd expect from great literature, this book made me want to do two things: learn Nahuatl and cook tacos al pastor (shepherd's tacos).

These tacos are apparently quite famous, but I'd never heard of them. And whenever I discover a Mexican dish I've never heard of, I have to cook it.

First, allow indulge in a bit of background and literary criticism (because old habits die hard). The tacos al pastor come into the story when the boy narrator, Tochtli, lists the foods he likes. It is interesting to note that all the Mexican dishes on his list (including enchiladas and tacos al pastor, but without the pineapple, which is "ridiculous" in a taco) are antojitos: starters or snacks. Proper Mexican main dishes like pozole and mole don't float his boat.

This could be simple childish fussiness, but it could also be Americanization of Mexican cuisine, for it is Americans who have taken a small number of Mexican antojitos and turned them into main meals, while ignoring the more challenging dishes. This is especially likely considering that, of the several world currencies he and his drug-dealing family have, their favourite are the US dollars.

Anyway, I looked up the recipe online and found a promising one on Rick Bayless' website. However, I had made tacos fairly recently, and while I enjoy making and eating them, it is quite a faff. Also, being antojitos, I don't anticipate they will feature prominently on Esteban's menu.

Also, I had remarked to my wife that, whereas for like 9 years whenever I made Mexican food I made classic American-style "combination plate" beef and bean burritos, since embarking on my journey through real Mexican food I haven't made one burrito.

But I still like burritos, even if they were possibly invented in San Francisco. And like tacos, they can be filled with anything. So I thought, why not make burritos al pastor?

This was an exciting opportunity for me, because it was my first chance to make Yucatecan achiote paste (recado rojo).

So what is achiote? It's a tree/shrub that grows in Mexico. It's called achiotl in Nahuatl (bizarrely, since the Yucatán is a Mayan region and Nahuatl is the Aztec language). You might know it by its Brazilian name, annatto.

The seeds of this tree are these tiny super-hard red pyramid-looking things, which are ground up with other spices and used to season meat throughout the Yucatán. Since I first read about it I've been dying to make it.

Where do you get achiote in Edinburgh? Lupe Pinto's of course. While I was there I also got some homemade flour tortillas, a tin of chipotles en adobo, a tin of tomatillos, three kinds of dried chile, some deadly hot naga chile sauce, and some pumpkin pie mix before the fucking Canadians kipe it all.

(By the way, though more and more supermarkets are stocking dried chipotles, Lupe Pinto's is still the only place in Edinburgh to get them en adobo; ditto tomatillos.)

Of course I cheated a bit. Lupe Pinto's sells both whole achiote seeds and ground achiote - for the exact same price. Having read about how hard the seeds are (Rick Bayless says even a spice grinder will have trouble with them), I opted for the pre-ground. I love my molcajete, but I'm only so strong.

Anyway, I made up the paste on Tuesday. I followed the Rick Bayless recipe exactly, so I won't repeat it here, but it's basically achiote, some cumin, some coriander seed, some cinnamon, rather a lot of garlic for a Mexican recipe, and some cider vinegar. Oh yeah, black peppercorns and a bit of wheat flour.

Interestingly, though this paste would seem über-traditional, it has clearly been augmented with Asian spices (and European wheat flour), introduced by the conquistadores. Mexico's complex relationship with its former oppressor strikes again.

This paste will keep for months well-sealed in your fridge.

On Friday, I made the full-blown al pastor marinade for the diced pork shoulder. Again, this is a Rick Bayless recipe, so I won't repeat it verbatim, but basically you combine the recado rojo with (for the amount of meat I was using) two chipotles and three tablespoons of the adobo sauce. Add some olive oil (another contemporary innovation I'm sure, as olives are traditionally scarce in Mexico), and blend.

I used pork shoulder that was already diced, and I marinaded the meat overnight.

Pay attention to the cut of meat you use, by the way. Pork shoulder has enough fat in it to be suitable for slow cooking. Strictly speaking, Rick Bayless' recipe called for you to marinade the un-diced shoulder overnight. Then you grill the cuts on a barbecue. Then you dice or shred the meat. This would make these tacos al carbón (tacos with a grilled or roasted meat filling). However, I had a side dish to prepare, and I needed the meat to just go away and cook slowly for a while.

So I browned the meat cubes on all sides, then added all the marinade (most recipes recommend keeping some back for other dishes) along with the pineapple chunks, covered the pot and put it in a fan-assisted oven on 160° C for an hour. This makes the tacos (or burritos in my case) de cazuela (tacos/burritos with a stewed or casserole filling).

Now, two Mexican things I'm particularly obsessed with are the Yucatecan pickled onions (cebollas en escabeche) and Thomasina Miers' warm sweetcorn salad. So I made batch of the cebollas to go top of the burritos and designed my own variation on the salad.

First, I made a salsa verde. However, I did not add any chile because I'm taking a lesson from Indian cooking and trying to include something non-spicy to balance out the meal. This salad was meant to be the "cooling" counterpart to the chipotles in the burrito filling. But ordinarily you'd want a couple jalapeños in the salsa verde.

Salsa verde

1 tin of tomatillos
1 bunch of cilantro/coriander
1/2 a white onion
A couple cloves of garlic (optional)

(Here is where I would list the chiles, which I didn't use this time. Just remember use pickled jalapeños or else roast them first, unless you intend to fry the sauce before eating)

Put all this in a blender, add some water to keep it loose, and blend to a fairly thick consistency (I made mine smooth and velvety, because of what I planned to do with it).

I may have accidentally ripped the above recipe off, by the way, but salsa verde, like the basic tomato salsa, is simplicity itself, so it's hard to write a recipe for it that differs significantly from all the other ones.

For the bulk of the salad I cut the kernels of one cob of sweetcorn (it is vital that you use raw corn on the cob for this or the corn will probably turn to mush. Tinned sweetcorn will have been heat-treated and thus cooked). Then I heated some butter and olive oil over a medium heat and added the corn, stirring constantly for about five minutes. Then I turned the heat way down and stirred occasionally for a further ten minutes.

Meanwhile I shredded one raw carrot, one raw courgette (zucchini), and about five raw radishes.

Mexicans love radishes, by the way. In Oaxaca they even have a holiday, la noche de los rábanos (night of the radishes), when people get together and carve radishes into various shapes. If I wanted to be truly authentic with this dish, I'd have kept one radish back and carved it into a rose or something. But I don't know how.

Anyway, when the corn had gone all sweet and carmelized (but not burnt), I took the pan off the heat, tipped in all the salsa verde and gave it a stir. Then I added all the shredded veg, gave it another stir, and covered the pan.

By now my stewed pork al pastor was ready. I scooped a bit of the filling into each flour tortilla, wrapped them carefully, and toasted them on a dry pan.

Then I put a long rectangle of the salad across each plate, lay the burritos perpendicular on top, and finished with the cebollas en escabeche. Behold: Burritos al Pastor con Ensalada de Verduras en Salsa Verde (photo below).

How did it taste? The veg, salsa verde, and cebollas are old friends of mine and were delicious as expected. Honestly, you can't go wrong with those things.

But the real star was the burrito filling. When I first opened the achiote, I was amazed that such a red powder could have such a "green", almost minty scent. However, after maturing a few says, the finished recado had a darker, spicier smell (and not spicy in the sense of "hot"; remember there's no chile in the recado).

Combined with the pineapple and chipotles this marinade became utterly addictive. So much so that I saved some of the sauce and cooked my eggs in it the next day.

Intriguingly, the sauce had a vaguely Indian flavour, which was either a coincidence or the result of the combination of cumin, cinnamon, and coriander seed (a classic trio in Indian cuisine). Whatever the explanation, it occurred to me this would make an awesome flavouring for my birriani.

The pork was well-cooked. Because I was unsure how it would turn out I served it with steak knives. But while it didn't quite fall apart under fork pressure it put up absolutely no resistance in your mouth.

In terms of spice, I could (as usual), probably have had it hotter, but it was pretty much at my wife's limit of chile tolerance (though thankfully not over it), and she was glad of the cooling salad.

I made this with two persons in mind, but we each had seconds of both meat and veg so this could easily stretch to three or even four servings.

Two final notes: achiote is also used to dye clothing, so wash everything it touches as soon as possible unless you want it to turn red; and no offence meant to Canadians. It's not their fault they celebrate Thanksgiving on Columbus Day.