Salsa de Arbol

One of our local restaurants serves a tongue-tingling salsa with their totopos, or tortillia chips. It is red and spicy but no too picante. I can practically eat the whole little bowl with a spoon, if I could get away with it.

Since we are pretty regular customers there, we know the family that owns the restaurant. So, I just asked what chiles were in the salsa. Much to my surprise it is chiles de arbol. I have had a long time fear of these chiles because I thought they might be extremely hot. I often go to the local markets and examine the various dried chiles. I usually use a sniff test to guess how hot they might be. Each dried chile is very different from the others; some smell smoky, some smell eye-wateringly hot, and some even have a floral fragrance. Try it sometime. You will probably find some chiles that are really drool-worthy.  Chiles de arbol have always whispered to me “watch out I’m blazingly HOT!”.

I screwed up my courage and bought a bunch of different dried chiles to experiment with, including a bunch of chiles de arbol. Our friend in the restaurant explained to me that the sauce was chiles de arbol and tomatoes, “cooked real slowly”. How’s that for a recipe? I was determined to figure out how to make this treasured salsa for my own!

If you have ever cooked with chiles, you already know of their idiosyncrasy: you never know just how hot each batch of salsa will be. Chiles are unpredictable and sneaky. The most innocent appearing chile may hide a fiery secret and blast your salsa into a sinus-clearing, eye-watering concoction, or it may be bland, like many of the modern day jalapenos.

My first try was a rousing success! Here is my recipe:

Salsa de Arbol

1 ounce dried chiles de arbol, prepared*

Boiling water

10-12 cups organic tomatoes, peeled and diced, with juice (or about 6-7, 14 ounce cans)

1 cup cider vinegar

1 cup fresh lime juice

1 medium to large diced onion

10 cloves of garlic

1 large bay leaf

1 Tablespoon dried oregano

1 Tablespoon dried marjoram

½ teaspoon cracked black peppercorns

Salt to taste

*To prepare chiles: remove from container. Break off and discard stems (do you know that the name chiles de arbol means tree chile and refers to the stem that is woody “like a tree”- ahh, trivia!). Break each chile in half and shake out most of the loose seeds. One ounce is about two cups.

Place prepared chiles in a heatproof container. Pour boiling water over chiles to cover well. Hydrate for at least one hour or up to overnight.

Pour off about half of the soaking water. Put chiles and the rest of the soaking water into a blender and puree well. Pour into a large pot.

Place part of the tomatoes into the blender jar. While pureeing, add garlic cloves and onion and blend thoroughly. Add to pot with chiles.

Blend the rest of the tomatoes in batches, adding the herbs and black peppercorns. Be sure the bay leaf is thoroughly ground. Combine all in the pot.

Taste the contents of the pot and if it is blazingly hot, add some more blended tomatoes.

Bring the contents of the pot to a simmer and add the vinegar and lime juice. Simmer to desired thickness.

Ladle into half pint jars and cap with two piece lids. Seal in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes. Made 7 half pints for me but your mileage may vary.

We tried it on our fish tacos. It was out of this world! It is so good, Mr. M actually asked me to open another jar tonight. I don’t think this one is going to last too long in the pantry. Good thing I bought extra chiles!

The Mighty Pak Choi

It is our “winter” here in Baja; the time for growing cool season crops like lettuce, cabbage, and Asian greens. As I have been posting, I am attempting to participate in the Dark Days Challenge. This week, my post is about one of our favorite Asian greens Choi: in this dinner Pak Choi. I grow both the full size plants and the smaller Tsai Choi.  Here are some photos of each in the garden.

A huge Pak Choi ready for harvest

Tsai Choi are much more compact

The big Choi here is destined for this dinner; it is huge and ready for harvest. Before I chopped it up, it filled my dishpan.  No photo of that, but here it is after I attacked it with my chef’s knife.

Chopped up and ready to cook

Before I chop it up I soak the entire head in cool water laced with a few tablespoons of vinegar to chase out any freeloaders. I garden organically so I don’t mind a few holes in my vegies. I handpick snails and it is easy to miss those tiny, tiny babies, but they are no match for the vinegar. I am not much on homemade escargot, too much effort to clean the snails and mine are usually too small anyway; it’s the big ones from next door that are the real problem. They know where the free lunch, or should I say dinner, lives.

I matched the chopped Choi with a few other ingredients: onions and some late ripening peppers from the garden and some local pork.

Sliced pork, peppers, onion, and Choi stems

Beside the Choi, the star of this dinner is some homemade Duck Sauce from our beautiful spring Santa Rosa plums. The sauce is way good and wonderful over rice.

Hmmm, rice… Not exactly local, since it doesn’t grow well here; it’s too arid. It does grow in central California just beyond my 150 mile range, so I am going to use it anyway. I do buy it in San Diego, so does that count? I could have just not admitted it but I wanted to show off the secret flavor of the day: homegrown lemon grass.

Steamed rice with crushed lemon grass

This represents a triumph of a sort for me: it is my third and only successful attempt at growing it. The two previous attempts met their demise at the overzealous weeding hands of Mr. M. After all it is lemon grass. I actually had to plant it in my vegetable garden because he is forbidden to weed there. (NO, don’t pull out those nettles! I need them!) But that is another story.

I steam the rice with homemade chicken stock, a bit of Kosher or sea salt and few smashed stalks of the aforementioned, highly prized lemon grass.

The Bok Choi stars in the stir fry:

Ready to serve

Here is the simple recipe:

2 locally grown boneless pork chops, or chicken thighs

1 Tbs fat or oil (I used some reserved fat from making stock)

1 Tbs dark sesame oil (I’m counting this as a spice)

1 large head of Bok Choi or other preferred greens, sliced crosswise

1 medium onion, thinly sliced

½ large green or ripe sweet pepper, or a few small ripe sweet peppers, thinly sliced

Several cloves of homegrown garlic, sliced, or chopped

1 pint homemade Duck Sauce (a half pint would work if less sauce is desired)

½ to 1 Tbs Cornstarch dissolved in 1 Tablespoon cold water, optional

Semi-freeze and thinly slice the meat. Heat fat and sesame oil, add sliced meat. Cook, stirring constantly, until the meat loses its pink color. Add onions, sliced stems of the Choi, and peppers and fry until the onions begin to soften. Add the garlic and sauce.  Add the leafy part of the Choi and cook until the leaves wilt. If the sauce is too liquid from the moisture in the leaves, thicken with the cornstarch.

I’m pretty sure that this dinner meets the SOLE (sustainable, organic, local, and ethical) requirements: well almost. And, if you are interested, here is the recipe for the

Duck Sauce

(loosely based on the Ball Blue Book’s Plum Sauce recipe, page 84)

4 pounds of Santa Rosa plums

2 cups grated pilonchillo sugar (Mexican cone sugar)

1 cup cane sugar

3/4 cup chopped onion

2 Tbs mustard seed (I get mine at a local Botannica,or herb store; it grows wild here)

1 chopped, roasted, peeled poblano chile

1 minced jalapeno or serrano chile

1 (1/4 X 1″) piece fresh ginger, minced or 1 tsp ground, dry ginger

3 garlic cloves

1/4 tsp ground cloves

1 cup cider vinegar

Wash, pit and slice plums. Combine the rest of the ingredients in a large pot. Bring to a boil and add plums. Cook until plums are soft. Blend with an immersion blender until smooth. Cook until the thickness preferred. Ladle sauce into hot jars, leaving 1/4 inch headspace. Adjust two piece caps. Process 20 minutes in a boiling water bath. About 4 pints, but your mileage may vary.

Note: when my plums ripen, I have a lot so I double or triple this recipe. I put the sauce up in pints and half pints because it also makes a great dippng sauce.

Fish Delish!

Yesterday, I posted about the Dark Days Challenge.  Today, I am posting my first entry. The challenge is to make a meal of sustainable, organic, local, and ethical (SOLE) foods. I have chosen one of our favorite, yet quick and easy, meals: Fish Tacos Modified Baja Style.

Good Conscience Tacos

Baja is famous for its fish tacos that are widely available from street vendors selling from small carts with propane powered fryers. We love to eat them but realize that deep fried fish with a floury crust is not the healthiest food. Adaptation! I decided that I could create a healthier style of fish tacos for our more frequent enjoyment. Be gone floury, fried, greasy crust! Enter spicy, diced, delicious fish cubes!

Savory, delicious fish

It seems easy to think, “I’ll just whip up some fish tacos tonight”, until you have to think about where the fish comes from and if it is sustainable and ethical. The best fish for this recipe comes from the large predatory fish like tuna, wahoo, or dolphin fish, which produce meaty, solid fillets.

The majority of the fish we eat here is locally caught; either just off of the coast in the Pacific, or in the Sea of Cortez, on the opposite side of our peninsula. In the past, Mexico, just like many other countries (including the US), has been ignorant of the dangers of overfishing certain species. Fortunately, Mexico has taken huge steps to protect its bounty of sea resources.

My favorite fish for this recipe is local, line caught yellowfin tuna. It is caught just off our coast from small boats called pangas. We buy it seasonally from our favorite fish monger at the local Mercadito, or open air market, and freeze the fillets for use later. Best of all, yellowfin tuna is not a protected species and appears to be increasing in population. Yay!

Put this in your taco!

And the rest of my ingredients? Yup,they meet the SOLE requirements, too! We are very picky about tortillias. Our preference is a thicker style that will hold up well for making enchiladas, tacos and other Mexican dishes. We actually import the majority of our tortillias from a small, family owned factory in San Diego, about 50 kilometers from here, called Porkyland. Mr. M’s parents used their tortillias in a Mexican restaurant they owned years ago and they are still the best. (Sorry Rosarito). By the way, Porkyland tortillias have made it to the big time; they are available at Costco and Amazon!

Next I had to examine the cheese. Sometimes we use local Queso Cotija, the tasty crumbly cheese, but I was out of that. I did have a chunk of Queso Viejo, which accurately translates to Old Cheese. It is very strong and uniquely tasty; maybe too strong for the fish. So I added some local Monterey Jack cheese to tone it down. Perfect!

Tomatoes from the garden? Check. Cabbage? Hmmm, not ready yet. No lettuce either. We do have an abundance of ready to harvest Wong bok, a type of Chinese cabbage. One leaf was more than enough to shred for this recipe. Take my word for it, not the best choice! Use regular white cabbage or, if you have to, lettuce. The Wong bok was too strong!

The Baja Secret Sauce? All fish tacos in Baja are offered with a creamy white sauce. It is usually, crema, local cultured cream that is not sour, combined with mayonnaise. I prefer to use plain nonfat thick yogurt, combined with mayonnaise. Okay, here is my failing: the mayo. I don’t make it, I buy it, but it is sustainable and available locally.

The red salsa? Homemade and home canned. I used my Salsa de Arbol. I will post about that later.

What else? Ah yes, my secret taco seasoning: THE special touch to the fish; here it is:

Taco Seasoning

1 Tbs dried ground California Chiles: NOT commercial chili powder

1 Tbs coarsely ground dried Chile Mulatto or Chile Ancho

1 tsp granulated garlic or 2-3 cloves minced fresh garlic

¼ tsp ground cinnamon

1/8 tsp ground cumin

½ tsp dried marjoram, crushed

½ tsp dried oregano, crushed

Salt and cracked black pepper to taste

This is sufficient for about ½ to ¾ of a pound of cubed fresh fish. It can also be quite tasty on ground beef or turkey. If you like it hotter, use New Mexico Chiles instead of California. You can substitute any ground dried chiles actually. This is just our preferred combination. The key ingredient, surprisingly, is the cinnamon. Don’t be afraid! Use it!

To use: Place fish fillets in freezer until just slightly frozen, or defrost frozen fillets, so that the fillet will be solid enough to easily cut into cubes. Put about 1 tablespoon of your preferred fat (I use coconut oil) into a skillet and heat. Add fish cubes and toss until they are opaque on the outside. Add seasoning and cook until the fish flakes easily. The fish will exude some moisture. Cook until the moisture and seasoning adheres to the cubes. This is just a couple of minutes.

The last condiment? Fresh limes to squeeze over the fish. We do have an abundance of limes from our trees, but I decided to use a more unusual citrus, a lemon from our Pink Lemonade Tree. Yes, as you can see in the photo it is pink inside when ripe! It is also a very pretty tree with green and white variegated leaves and striped lemons! The taste? It is a sport of the regular yellow Eureka lemon so familiar in US markets and tastes just like it.

And to accompany the tacos? Locally harvested pinto beans, previously home canned and just heated and smashed. When I can them, I add  homegrown onion and garlic before sealing. Delish and the ultimate fast food!

The musical fruit

The final result? A quick, easy, delicious SOLE meal that will brighten even the darkest day. Start to plating less than 20 minutes. Try it and let me know if you like it.

Dark Days Challenge

I try my best to be a localvore : one who eats foods grown locally whenever possible, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary. Fortunately, living in Baja is ideal for this. I can garden all year and there are great sources for locally grown and produced food. After all, how much produce eaten in the US actually comes from Mexico?

This year I decided to see just how well I am doing as a localvore by entering The Dark Days Challenge. Here is some information about it and a form if you are interested in challenging yourself. I don’t know how well I will do because there are some things that Mr. M and I like that are not grown locally, like peanuts, but we do our best!