Sunday Lunch

I have a bunch of cookbook reviews on deck, but until then, here for your delectation is today's lunch:  chipotle baked tofu from Vegan Eats World, yellow garlic rice from Viva Vegan, and  "kaleidoscope chard" from Trader Joe's, cooked according to the directions on the package.  All the colors made me so happy.

  

Improvised slow cooker posole

Posole (or if you prefer, pozole) is one of the foods I discovered when we visited the Southwest last fall.  It's a soup made with chile, hominy, and, traditionally, something dead.  According to Wikipedia, the original posole was made by the Aztecs and included meat from human sacrifices.  Ew.  After the Conquistadors arrived there were no more human sacrifices, so people used pork, the other white meat.  Still ew.  I make mine with beans -- in this most recent instance, cute little Sangre de Toro beans.

The hardest thing about making posole on the east coast is finding dried hominy.  Canned hominy is easy to find, but canned hominy is gross.  The first posole I made was with blue corn hominy I found at Whole Foods in  Santa Fe.  I haven't been able to find that here.  The closest I've come is at our local mercado latino, where I found Goya brand white and golden hominy, which according to the people at Wegman's (where I searched in vain) is positively loaded with iron.  Who knew?  Goya hominy is not whole kernels, it's cracked, so it's not nearly as dramatic looking, but unless I'm going to nixtamalize my own corn it appears to be the best I can do.

One thing about making posole -- even after you soak it overnight, the hominy takes forever to cook.  Hours.  Longer than beans.   So this time, I decided to try making it in the slow cooker.  I soaked a pound of hominy and a pound of beans overnight, then the next morning I put them in my biggest slow cooker crock with an onion, a bunch of ancho chile powder, some Mexican oregano, a little cumin, and water to fill the crock.  Lots of water.  Plenty of water.  Or so I thought. 

When I got home from work, the corn and beans had slurped up all the water.  Instead of soup, I had a big pot of stew thick enough to stand a spoon up in.  Fortunately, it didn't stick to the crock.

I suppose I could have added some broth and tried to soupify it, but I decided just to eat it as is: 

That's garnished with raw cabbage, a raw bell pepper, guacamole, and a lime wedge.  It was kind of bland the first day, so I added some of my new favorite commercial spice blend, Trader Joe's South African Smoke.  Over the next day or two, the flavors developed, and it was perfect as is.

My girlfriend doesn't like posole -- I think she had a bad experience with canned hominy as a child -- so I ended up eating the whole pot myself, mostly for breakfast.  I didn't intend to make a stew rather than a soup, but I might actually prefer it this way.

tortilla-free enchiladas, here I come!

I already commented on the original post on "That Was Vegan?" but I just want to take up a little bit of my own real estate to say that this is brilliant.  Enchilada.  Stuffed.  Peppers.  I don't eat tortillas any more (because they are crack), and with my recent interest in Latin cooking I've been feeling sad about not being able to make enchiladas.  No more.  Give me an enchilada recipe, and I will convert it into stuffed pepper goodness.  The linked recipe doesn't include sauce, but I see no reason why you couldn't pour enchilada sauce over the tops of the peppers before putting them in the oven.  And it just occurred to me -- stuffed cabbage is basically burritos with cabbage instead of tortillas.  Cabbageitos, anyone?

I'm going to look over some enchilada recipes, and try this over the weekend.  Pictures to follow.

A bounty of beans

I went to my neighborhood mercado latino on Saturday in search of cranberry beans.  I didn't find cranberry beans, but I did buy a big bag of Roman beans, because I love them and they were the best price I've ever seen.  Now Wikipedia is telling me that Roman beans are a variety of cranberry beans.  But in Viva Vegan, Terry Hope Romero talks as if they are completely different.  I don't  know who to believe!

This morning I am eating some posole I made with Sangre de Toro beans.  Gross name ("bull's blood"), but the beans are cute, very small and dark, glossy red.

I really like exploring different kinds of beans.  I've been into Indian dals for a long time, and now I am getting more into the Latin American beans.  In addition to Roman beans, on Saturday I bought Dominican reds (dark red with lighter spots, like pinto beans in reverse), and pigeon peas.  Pigeon peas have been hard to find -- I think maybe we have a dearth of Puerto Ricans here in Baltimore.  We've apparently got a critical mass of Peruvians, though -- the mercado has tons of Peruvian products, many of which I have no idea how to use (giant kernels of blue corn still on the cob, anyone?)

I've been making recipes from Viva Vegan and Vegan Eats World over the past couple weeks.  Pictures and recipe reviews to follow.

What is your favorite bean?

Experimental Chili

The first thing I actually made with the roasted poblanos was refried beans, but the first thing I thought of making was chili.  After some googling, I settled on a recipe from the Irreverent Vegan as a starting point, and followed Mark's instructions for roasting the poblanos, as well.

I said starting point, right?  I referred to Mark's recipe a few times, but basically did my own thing.  I post the result here not because it was so amazing (it's perfectly fine chili, but not necessarily something I would make again), but to show how my twisted thought processes work when I'm playing with a recipe.

Poblano Refried Beans

I love refried beans.  Canned or from scratch, at home or in a restaurant, to me they are the ultimate comfort food.  Traditionally, refried beans are cooked pinto beans that are fried in lard and mashed ("refrito" actually means "well-fried," not "re-fried").  Of course I don't cook with lard.  Ew.  I actually haven't seen any canned refried beans made with lard, either.  They're either made with vegetable oil, or they're fat free, which would mean they aren't fried at all.  But they still taste great.

I usually avoid cooking with oil, unless I am really convinced the recipe will suffer without it.  Since I like the fat free canned refried beans just fine, I don't use oil when I make refried beans from scratch.  I use my own recipe, which I adapted from the one here.  And this week, I've been making an exciting variation with roasted poblano peppers.

Basic Slow Cooker "Refried" Beans

Pinto beans, as many as you want to cook (I love refried beans, so I cook anywhere from 2 to 4 cups of dry beans at a time).  No need to presoak.
Yellow onion, chopped
Whole garlic cloves, peeled and trimmed
Salt

Exact amounts are not critical here.  For this batch, I used 2 cups of dry beans, one big yellow onion, and five or six cloves of garlic.

I have a cooker with 3 different sized crocks.  Fun!

Put the beans, onions, and garlic in your slow cooker crock.  Add water to cover by at least two inches.  Cook on High until they are really soft.  Anywhere from 8 to 12 hours should be fine.  I like to set up the slow cooker after dinner, and then let the beany, oniony, garlicky aroma wake me up the next morning.

The next day, turn off the cooker and drain the beans, reserving the thick, rich liquid.  Now it's time to mash the beans.  I use my immersion blender for this, but you could just use a potato masher.  After all that slow cooking, the beans will be very soft.

Now season to your liking.  I thought a tablespoon of salt would be about right, but it turned out to be too much.  Desperate to salvage all those over-salted beans, I threw in some black beans I had in the refrigerator, and mashed them up.  Turns out I really like that combination, and will probably be using it from now on.  The black beans are less mushy than the pintos, and stay more intact for a nice color and texture contrast.

You could stop right there and have perfectly good beans.  But I took it a step further, and mixed in a couple tablespoons of chopped poblano peppers.

 Here's a closeup of some beany goodness.  You can see the little flecks of black beans and poblanos.

Now it's time to serve the beans.  You could do all sorts of yummy things at this point -- make tacos, tostadas, Mexican lasagna . . . . but lately I've just been eating them plain, with some  kale and corn. I really like the contrast of textures and the bitter, sweet, creamy party in my mouth.

Mmm, mmm, good!