Mango Salsa

While not my favorite of the worlds salsas, this stuff is peculiarly good on the right pseudo-Cubano fish dishes (like Fish Tacos). Bright and sweet with fresh mangos, tart and pleasingly sour with greener mangos. Do note: green mangos contain more pectin, and thus produce a slightly heavier salsa; riper mangos come apart a bit more, making a syrupier salsa.

Ingredients

2 mangos

1/4-1/2 red onion, minced

1 tbsp olive oil

Minced cliantro and jalapeno as desired

Salt, Lime Juice to taste

Cut the mangos into cubes using your favorite method. I prefer to orbit the outside of the pit with a knife, then drag the biggest spoon I have along the pit to separate it out from the flesh. (I know, I know: pictures are coming as soon as I eat some more mangos). Score the mango, still in the skin, with a butter knife, then scoop out the cubes with the spoon. Presto!

Stir everything together. Feel good about how fast it was. Ponder if it's a salsa or a chutney; ask deep, ethical questions about mango salsa -- after all, there are no tomatoes in it. It's a mad world.

Black Bean and Corn Salad

At a certain point, students of America's indigenous people looked about and began to wonder where, in places like New Mexico, the natives were finding resources like nutrients. Most of New Mexico is a desert, yet it had been happily settled long before the conquistadores arrived. A thorough investigation followed, focusing largely on corn. The indigenous diet, you see, centered aroud corn, and corn is an incomplete source of protein unless, it was discovered, you either:

a) Soak it in an alkali, like lye or lime (the stone, not the fruit). This breaks down the germ of the corn, creating hominy, which is vastly more digestible, and therefore more nutritious.

B) Pair corn with beans. Neither corn nor beans is all that healthful on their own, but put them together and you have the components from which your body can assemble a very good complete protein.

 And thus, I suggest you eat this marvelously economical salad. Cheap, fast as hell, nutritious as can be: a trifecta of delights! No special equipment is needed, and you can -- truly -- mix in damn near anything.

Base:

1 can pre-cooked black beans

3/4 can sweet corn

Olive oil, salt, and lime juice to taste

....that's it. Done. Now, for delicious, I reccomend you add some of, really, any of the following:

Red onion (1/4-1/2ish, chopped in small pieces)

Cilantro, minced

Crushed garlic (2 cloves for very garlicky)

Chopped mango

Jicama, peeled and diced (about 1/2 of a small-ish bulb)

Apple

Peppers, in almost any format (roasted and peeled, chopped and sauteed, raw and crispy)

Minced jalapeno.

Stir in whatever else you like and eat it! So simple! Spoon it onto chopped cabbage or greens to lighten things up a bit. I find the above makes enough salad for four good portions.

Root Vegetable Pie

In honor of my favorite day in March (Pi Day!), je te present: Root Vegetable Pie.

Okay, look: there will be a lovely essay here about how great starch is, someday. At least, there should be. That said: I'm sick, and woozy, and having a hard time waxing verbose about, well, anything. Give a guy a break, no?

I love this pie. It's fast, it's easy, it's freaking delicious. One of these suckers is 6 very solid portions; feed your friends! It's also a great place to seasonalia -- almost any root or tuber will work beautifully in this dish. I make mine tall and hearty; you can scale down if need be.

Choice of Root Veggies

I usually make my pies with at least four different root vegetables, selected from the following list: Carrot or Parsnip, but not both; Rutabaga; Turnip (not my very favorite, but OK); Potato; Beet; Jerusalem Artichoke/Sunchoke; celeriac.

A note about beets: while I love all beets, do remember that purple beets = purple pie. I prefer golden beets for this reason.

A note about potatoes: go with a waxy potato, like a Yukon gold or a German butterball. You want something with a little staying power -- this is a dish about Chunks of Roasty Goodness, and a starchy potato (like a russet) wont give you that. Purple potatoes make for a pretty pie, and wont stain the whole works like a purple beet.

Equipment

A Pie Pan of Some Incarnation: I make my root veggie pie in a spring form pan to allow for a Brian Jaques-esque depth of pie. You might prefer a round cake pan or a standard pie pan. Either way, really.

Ingredients

1 Batch of Pie Crust

4-6ish pounds root veggies

Garlic

Olive Oil

Salt

Pepper

Optional:

Herbs/Spices (I enjoy thyme, sage, rosemary, basil, oregano, and fennel. What I use in a given pie is entirely a product of mood and whim.)

1 large batch of Mushroom Gravy (Highly recommended)

Process

Your veggies will never get anywhere if you don't pre-roast them, so let's get on that. Set your oven on kill (about 425), then assess your veggies. You'll want them all reduced to a pile of roughly-evenly-sized chunks; I leave peeling up to you. (I peel beets, but never potatoes or sunchokes, which keep most of their nutrients in the skin of the root.) As you chop, put everything together in a large mixing bowl. To be honest, I play pretty fast and loose with the volume of my spring form pan; if you're worried, put your chopped veggies into the pan you're going to use and stop when it gets full.

When the chopping is complete, pour a tablespoon or two of olive oil over the pieces, along with a hit of salt, black pepper, and any herbs desired. Toss thoroughly: add more oil if necessary to get every piece lightly covered. Pour all of this into a relatively shallow roasting dish, cover with foil, and toss it in the oven.

Tossed with oil and herbs, ready to roast.

Now would be a great time to make pie crust, don't you think? No need to pre-bake; just have the dough ready to go.

Fill it like this! Click for big!Check your root veggies after 45 minutes; you're looking for mostly-cooked-ness -- not perfectly done, but almost. When that point has been reached, roll out your pie crust. If you're like me, and cooking this in a nice, deep spring form pan, you'll want to separate out about a third of the dough to form the top crust from. Roll the dough out until you have enough surface area to cover the inside of the pan, with extra hanging over. Remember, a spring form is a cylinder; you'll need to coax the dough down into the right-angle where the base meets the side of the pan. This accomplished, dump in the veggies. At this point, I always sprinkle chucks of raw garlic over the whole works -- it'll be roasty and awesome by the time the baking is done. Add the top piece of dough and try, as best you can, to work the edges together to seal the pie. Cut a few steam vents in the middle of the pie; maybe shape them like the Greek letter Pi, in honor of this favorite ratio.

Put the pie in the oven. My huge pies take a half hour or more to bake fully. Maybe go make mushroom gravy (highly recommended). For a snack, take your leftover pie crust, roll it out flat, cover it with butter and brown sugar and cinnamon and ground clove, and bake it in a little pan in the oven with the pie; in 15ish minutes you'll have a lovely treat. Om nom nom. Click for big!

It should look a little bit like this. Click for big!When the top crust is golden, remove the pie from the oven, open the spring form, cut slices, top it with mushroom gravy, and eat it!

Oh man. That's a good pi. Erh, pie. Enjoy!

Basic Pie Crust

It's Pi Day! Let's make pie! Or rather, let's post about how to make pie! Pictures to come as soon as I actuall go make some damn pie...

This recipe has its roots in the Joy of Cooking. It purports to make two 9-inch shells or one 9 inch covered pie, or two 10.5 inch tart shells. I agree with this assertion.

Equipment

A rolling pin

Optional, but highly recommended: a pastry blender

Ingredients

2.5 Cups Unbleached All-Purpose Flour

1 teaspoon white sugar

1 teaspoon salt

2 sticks butter, as cold as freaking possible without being frozen

Ice water (have a tall glass on hand, drink what you don't use)

Method

Whisk together flour, salt, and sugar in a large bowl. If making a savory pie, consider omitting sugar; if using salted butter, salt can be cut in half. Now, consider the following:

Your job here is to cut butter into the flour, a process that banks on a little handy chemistry. Flour contains a protein, gluten, that likes to form long, robust chains; this permits bread, among other marvels. But the ideal pastry crust is flaky and light. So, cold fat (butter or shortening or lard) is worked into the flour. Chunks of flour are separated from one another by a wall of impassable deliciousne-- erh, shortening. Flakiness is achieved. Everyone rejoices.

However: this doesn't work if A) the butter gets too warm and melts, or B) the works gets too wet. Your hands emit heat, making them awkward implements for crust-making. There are baking ninjas who use their bare hands in combination with an ancient Tibetan hand-freezing technique to make pastry crust; certain masters of kung fu are known to make pie crust using nothing but their overwhelming chi. I use a pastry blender; I highly recommend them. Lacking that, use two forks.

Let me say this again: the butter needs to be cold. You'll never get anywhere with frozen butter, but leave it in the fridge until the last possible moment.

To cut in the butter: take it out of the fridge and, touching it as little as possible, cut it into tablespoon-ish-sized pieces. As you cut each piece, toss it into the flour. When all the butter is in the flour, begin working your pastry blender or forks, smashing the butter briskly against the bottom of the bowl. I have very good luck holding a fork in each hand, pinching butter and flour between the two. Go until you have a great deal of flour that looks like corn meal, plus a number of hunks of unblended butter.

Get your glass of ice water and, using a spoon to dip it, start sprinkling water over the dough. Stir with a wooden spoon. Add water until the dough will just hold together. Yes, it's going to be uneven; mixing like this it's impossible to really get the water spread around thoroughly. It's OK: you should be able to glom most of the dough together in the middle of the bowl into a semi-solid-but-fragile mass, with a surprising amount of unincorporated flour. I usually use around a quarter cup of water, but there's no hard-and-fast rule.

Now, the trick: laminating. Lamination takes those big hunks of flour and works them into flat, thin layers all through the dough, making a spectacularly flaky crust. This is how we do it:

Flour a work surface, form your dough into as much of a mass as you can, and turn it out. Sprinkle flour over the dough; flour your rolling pin. Roll the dough out to a thickness of about a half-inch. As you work, scoop the unincorporated bits and pieces up and put them in the middle of the dough, rolling them into the work. When the dough hits the half-inch-thick mark, make sure all the remaining loose bits are piled in the middle of the dough, fold it into thirds, then in half, and put it in the fridge. Leave it there for at least a half hour; covered in plastic wrap, it'll keep for a day.

When it's forming a pie crust time, remove it the instant before you need it. Flour your work surface and pin, dust the dough with flour, and roll it out to a half-inch again. Fold into thirds, then in half: now you're ready to roll to the thickness and shape you actually need.

For a very wet pie, consider pre-baking: roll the dough, line the baking vessel, poke the bottom and sides full of wholes, and apply a thorough layer of aluminum foil to the whole works. Seriously: make sure the foil is in contact with the bottom and sides of the crust, because your next step is to fill the whole shell with raw beans. This is called weighting the pie; yes, you can buy re-usable, purpose-specific pie weights. We're simulating a filled pie; without all the weight, the crust would poof up tremendously, then collapse into a sad heap of flakes -- which would be sad, so don't do it. Bake at 400 degrees for 20ish minutes, until the whole works is a light golden color. Hooray! Pie crust! 

Now go fill it with something!

Chicken Stock

My stock drawer. Beautiful, no? (Also, ice cream churn. They're friends!)

Ah, here's something useful: chicken stock. Any of you who've been reading lately have probably noticed the "chicken are abundant sources of economic deliciousness!" kick I've been on. This is the latest -- and probably final -- entry in that series.

Home-made stock really is a marvelous thing to have in your kitchen. You'll be surprised just how much richer it is. There are fine brands of store-bought product out there; Pacific Foods, f'r instance, makes a totally fine range of stocks. If you must, for whatever reason, use store-bought stuff, I highly reccomend Better the Boullion. The principle problem with store-bought stock is, after all, concentration of flavor. Working from BtB, you can mix your stock as strong as you feel like you need it. But again: this is all store-bought stock. Your stock will be better; done really well, yours might be the best you ever have.

To be honest, I dont really grok why this is. Would it be so bad for a company to sacrifice a little efficiency and a little quantaty in favor of quality? Perhaps the economics just don't shake out unless you're a dude in a kitchen with a pile of chicken, beef, or veal you want to convert into a liquid. Whatever the case: I've yet to have a storebought stock that was better than the crummiest home-made stock. The best home-done stuff is perfectly unbelievable.

You'll need:

Equipment

Either 2 large stock pots, or 1 large stock pot and 1 large bowl

A collander

Cheesecloth or a chinois

Ingredients

Chicken

Mirepoix

Clove

Garlic

Bay

Parsely (optional)

Apple cider or white wine vinegar (optional)

Salt

Your main ingredients here are chicken and mirepoix, for which you'll want a 2-1 ratio chicken-mirepoix by weight. Generally, unless you're making stock specifically for one-and-only-one four-person batch of soup, you'll want to make stock in largeish batches.

On the question of water-to-poultry ratios, I follow Bernard Clayton -- as much a guru of soup as the world has ever seen -- who advises 4 quarts of water per three pounds of chicken. And yes, you can definitely do a quart of water and 3/4 pound of chicken.

Before you get going, you'll want to make your sachet d'epis -- a cheesecloth baggie of spices. To be honest... I often just chuck my spices straight in the stock, assuming they wont be too hard to strain out again later. One way or the other: your sachet should contain/amount to your garlic, clove, and bay. Parsely is highly optional -- as I dont like it much, I usually leave it out. For a batch of stock containing 6 lbs of chicken and 8 quarts of water, I usually use three whole cloves, three well-bruised cloves of garlic, and three crushed bay leaves. Remember, though: you're building a background flavor here. Stock becomes the body of a food; you can always add more flavor later.

Oh, and a bit of potential apocrypha: my mother always told me to add 2-3 tablespoons of vinegar to a stock early on in the process, the idea being that it leaches nutrients from the bones of the bird, making the stock healtheir. Do I know if this works? No. But I like the way my stock turns out, so I don't sweat it much.

Method

Finally, something refreshingly easy!

1. Put your chicken in a pot big enough to fit everything in. (Remember, you'll be adding a few things as you go -- think ahead.) If using raw chicken, give it a good rinse in cold water first.

2. Pour the water over the chicken. Put the pot on the stove. Turn on the heat. Add vinegar, if you're using any.

3. Let the stock-to-be come to a boil, then cut it back to a simmer. Let this go for an hour.

4. After your hour is up, add the mirepoix. Make sure you get back to a simmer, then give it an hour and a half.

5. Add your sachet d'epis (or just add things directly to the pot). Simmer for a final half-hour.

Holy crap, it's stock!

The Hard Part

So you've made a pot of stock! Great. I told you making it was easy, didn't I? The tricky part is filtering and packing it. Alright, maybe not hard; maybe just kinda irritating. I'm going to talk you through my aproach, but remember that this is just to give you an understanding of all the things that need to happen. Just how they happen is up to you.

First off: your stock is full of bones, fat, and heat, and we've got to get rid of all of those things. Chicken stock spoils more easily than other stocks you could make -- it's a very good idea to cool it as qickly as you can. During the winter, I usually just put a lid on the pot and put it on my balcony until the next morning. During the summer, empty your ice trays into a sinkfull of cold water and plunk the pot right in. If you've the fridge space, put the stock in there once it get's down to room tempterature (puttng a 200-degree pot of stock in your fridge is like filling out a written request for all your other food to spoil -- don't do it). Let it get very, very cold.

When you return to the project, you'll discover something magical and handy: in the heat, the fat and oil separated; in the cold, the fat became a solid. (Your stock may very well be a semi-solid, too; this is not to be worried about. Home-made stock has a lot more stuff in it, including gelatin and protein leached from the bones and cartilage.) Using a spoon (it'll melt quickly in your hands), take this layer of fat off the top. You can save it; it's delicious for making things like gravy or matzoh-ball soup. You can also pitch it -- up to you. Congrats: you've just gotten the fat out of your stock.

If your stock has turned solid, you'll need to up the temperature for this next step -- we need a liquid we can work with. (Sure, you could do this step when the stock was just off the stove, but that means juggling scalding hot chicken bones in scalding hot liquid. You have been warned.) Once the phase-change has occured (or even while it's happening), get a collander, a large bowl or pot, and the trash can. Now, manage this trick: pour the stock through the collander into the empty pot. My collander has two handy arms that let it sit right inside my second pot; you might need a helper to hold one or the other thing. You're not going to be able to pour all of it in one go, especially if you're making a large batch. Pause  as needed to let the collander drain. Being somewhat obsessed with not wasting things, I usually press the chicken scraps and veggies lightly to help get a little more stock out of them. When you're satisfied with how well drained a particular collander full of scraps is, dump it in the trash. Continue on until you've poured through the entire batch of stock.

You're not done, mind. You've just removed all the big stuff from the liquid -- anything too large to pass through your collander. Sadly, your stock is still (I guarantee this) full of tiny bits of stuff you don't want to eat -- like, say, bone fragments. Fear not: there's an easy solution. Rinse out the stock pot you made stock in -- it doesn't have to be sanitized, but get all the junk out of it. If you're the proud owner of a chinois, grab it; if not, grab your cheesecloth, line to collander with it, and dampen the whole works with water. (This helps the cheesecloth be a filter.) You have a filter; you have a pot full of stuff to be filtered. Do it! Pour the stuff through the thing, for the win!

So: you've got a pot full of well-filtered stock. If you're picky about have remaining oil in the stock, you can refrigerate it again and get even more. If you're like me, you're ready to put it in containers and put it in storage.

Important Note: Chicken stock really is really perishable. I put all of mine straight into the freezer. (Okay, that's a lie -- I put it in quart-size plastic bags first.) If you're going to keep it un-frozen for any length of time, bring that sucker to a boil and keep it there for five minutes -- voila, pasturized stock.

Great, you're done! You now have a supply of tasty ingredient that probably cost you very, very little to make.

Some suggestions:

1. Make big batches. This is great stuff to keep around. Pull it out of the freezer, thaw it, and you're set to go.
2. Use this for efficiency: when I roast a chicken, I toss the carcass and all the bones into a bag in the freezer. When I have three or four carcasses, I make stock. I'll often add in some fresh chicken of some kind to build a rounder flavor -- raw chicken and carcass can be used in any combination. I usually leave all the stuff inside the carcass -- it is, after all, just more flavor.