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.

Sweet Corn Bisque with Poblanos

A few days ago I showed off my haul of poblanos from the farmer's market, and said I was thinking of cream of poblano soup.  I wandered around the web looking at recipes (poblano vichyssoise, anyone?), briefly considered just adding some roasted poblanos to the cheezy potato soup from The Ultimate Uncheese Cookbook,  and finally decided to veganize a recipe from a book I found at the library, Southwest Flavors:  Santa Fe School of Cooking, that I checked out as part of my ongoing love affair with Mexican and New Mexican cuisine.

This is a beautiful book, with lots of pictures, and good information about green chile and other traditional New Mexican ingredients, but it is not a vegan-friendly book.  Almost all the entrees are meat-based, and the few that aren't are heavily dependent on cheese. I marked just a few recipes that were vegan or sounded veganizable (the only actual vegan recipes are for salad and things like salsa), this sweet corn bisque being one of them:

1 T oil (I used less)
1 cup diced yellow onion
3/4 cup diced celery
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 cup New Mexico green chile, hot or medium, roasted, peeled, seeded, and chopped (I substituted roasted poblanos here)
4 cups frozen corn kernels, thawed
2 baking potatoes, peeled and diced
5 cups chicken or vegetable stock (I actually used water and some of this Chick'n Style Seasoning powder, because I had some in the pantry and was convinced nooch would be good in this soup, even though the original recipe didn't call for cheese)
1 cup heavy cream Trader Joe's soy creamer (I actually ended up using most of a pint container)
Salt (I think I left this out because there's salt in the chick'n powder)

Saute onion, celery, and garlic.  Add everything  else except the soy creamer and simmer until the potatoes are cooked.  Puree the soup with your ever-loving immersion blender.  Stir in the soy creamer.  Put some soup in a nicely contrasting bowl.

Verdict:  rich and delicious but HOT HOT HOT HOT HOT!  I thought a cup of chile sounded like a lot, and I made the mistake of trusting the recipe instead of my instincts.  I barely made it through my bowl with the help of several corn tortillas; my girlfriend couldn't finish hers.  I decided I had to try to fix the soup, so I cooked 2 more big potatoes and almost 2 pounds of frozen corn in some more chick'n broth, then added it to the original soup and pureed again.  So now we have a huge container of soup, which  is still spicy but is much less of a challenge to eat.

So the moral of the story is, try this soup, but maybe start with 1/4 cup of peppers and increase the amount from there if it isn't spicy enough for your liking.

The kitten thought the soup tasted great when it was still way too spicy for us.  He is so weird.

How to Roast Poblano Peppers and Live to Tell About It

Back in my pregan days, my favorite thing to order at a Mexican restaurant was chile rellenos.  Cheezy, deep-fried goodness, mmmm.  When I saw some poblano peppers at the farmer's market the other week, I impulsively bought them, figuring someone must have come up with a veganized recipe for chile rellenos by now.  I was right.  Google "vegan chile rellenos" and you will come up with many recipe options.  What I hadn't counted on, though, was that veganized chile rellenos are approximately as bad for you as the cow variety.  They're still deep-fried, after all, and while delicious, Daiya cheese is not exactly health food.  I needed to come up with something else to do with the poblanos.

Just about every recipe that doesn't call for stuffing poblanos says to roast them (actually, several recipes call for roasting and then stuffing, which sounds like a frustrating mess when I consider how soft and juicy the peppers get when roasted).  I decided to roast the peppers first and ask questions later.  It occurred to me that I might even be able to use roasted poblanos in place of New Mexico green chile.  Heresy, I know, but I thought that with my unsophisticated chile-eating palate it just might work.

Teasers

I was going to post pictures of the newest additions to our collection of Fiestaware kitty bowls (the Homer Laughlin Company calls them fruit bowls, but I think I know a kitty bowl when I see it), but my phone is dead so you'll just have to take my word for it that the new flamingo color (in stores now!) is the bomb.

I know some people have come up with themes for their vegan MoFo posts, and have even laid out a schedule of what's coming up.  I'm not that organized, but I realized that I do have the first few posts pretty much laid out in my head:

October 1:  World Vegetarian Day
October 2:  Roasted poblano peppers
October 3:  Refried beans
October 4:  Chili

After that, I'm not sure.  Maybe calabacitas.  Maybe something with acorn squash. If I'm able to find more dried hominy, I'll make posole.  But that's a big if.

I've been on a Southwestern food jag since I got back from New Mexico two weeks ago, and as you can see it shows no signs of ending.  I'm not going to commit to making the whole month about the Southwest, though.  At any moment I could crack and go back to my first love, Indian food, or throw in a macrobiotic recipe or something.  And at some point this month I'll probably write about my local farmer's market and fall produce.  Maybe I'll even sneak in those kitty bowls.

See you tomorrow!

Sniff

. . . and I'm not just sniffing because green chile makes my nose run, although that too.

Food of the Gods.

I'm sniffing because this jar of Extra Roasted New Mexico Green Chile, which I bought at Whole Foods in Albuquerque a couple weeks ago, is empty.  This is a sad, sad day.

Ever since we got back from ABQ I've been cooking pot after pot of black beans, and eating green chile at pretty much every meal.  We've got some dried green chile left, and a few green chile singles, which amazingly enough did not explode in the cargo hold of the plane, but the Jar is empty.

So now the quest begins:  can I buy green chile in Baltimore?  Stay tuned.