The Mija Chronicles

Mexican food and culture, on both sides of the border

Vegetarian

Salsa de tomate verde (tomatillo salsa) with huauzontles

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Even after almost two years in Mexico, I still like to buy salsa out of a jar. (Hey, it’s convenient.) But because this is the Week of Huauzontles, and the huauz requires so much care, I figured it’d be worth it to make a salsa molcajeteada — a salsa where you grind everything in a molcajete, and the ingredients come together because of your own strength and patience.

Mixing huauzontles and tomatillos was not entirely my idea. Yuri whipped it up in cooking class a few weeks ago, using huauzontles leftover from a soup we were preparing. He boiled tomatillos and serrano chiles and ground them up in a blender, and then stirred in the huauz. The result was so good that I slathered it inside a tortilla and ate it alone as a taco.

You might be asking: but can’t I just use a blender to make this salsa, too? Yuri did!

Yuri has magic blending powers, because when I tried to make a similar salsa in my own blender, it was watery and too acidic. The molcajete allowed me much more control over the texture. I kept a few pieces of tomatillo cáscara, and added roasted onion and garlic to mellow out the flavor a bit. An allspice berry, known in Spanish at pimienta gorda (literally, “fat peppercorn”) gave it just a whisper of a curry-like, cumin-cinnamon taste.

A typical tomatillo salsa has a well-balanced mix of acid and heat, and the huauzontles here don’t mess with that. They do add one key element, however: texture. The little flowery buds provide heartiness, and an almost artichoke-broccoli-like chewiness. It’s like eating a really good, spicy pasta sauce.

I served this over tortillas sandwiched together with refried beans, topped with a fried egg. Today I’ll probably eat the leftovers in a taco.

Recipe below.
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Mex-Tex queso with huauzontle and chorizo verde

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It may look like guac in the photo, but I promise you it's queso. And yes, that is a Texas-shaped bowl in the background.

I’m not as knowledgeable as some people in the Tex-Mex cuisine cannon, but eight years in Texas did teach me the importance of one thing: queso. (That’s pronounced KAY-so.)

Queso is basically a jazzed-up melted cheese sauce, consisting of Velveeta, tomatoes, onions, jalapeños and maybe crumbly bits of ground beef. You eat it with tortilla chips. And beer. Preferably on game day. Or during happy hour. Ok, you pretty much eat it whenever the mood strikes.

I’d been hankering for some queso since we moved to Mexico, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. Chili’s had it (score!) but then they took it off their menu (lame). Crayton and I suffered through our queso-less lives in silence until a few weekends ago when he said, “You know what sounds really good right now? Queso.” And I said, “Yeah, I agree. Why don’t I make some?”

Until that point, I hadn’t thought about making queso from scratch because it requires Velveeta. Velveeta is sold at Costco, and I couldn’t justify a $10 cab ride solely to buy processed cheese product.

But what if I used real cheese?

At that point, I think I might’ve heard the universe crackle.

I thought avoiding Velveeta was queso blasphemy, but it turns out there are a few real-cheese queso recipes on the Internet. I used a a Homesick Texan recipe as my inspiration, and piled together an assortment of items that I had in my fridge — Mexican manchego because it melted well, huauzontles because they’re vegetables and I like those; tomatoes, a jalapeño, carrots in escabeche.

My Mex-Tex queso was so good that I made it again the following weekend, this time for the Bears vs. Cowboys game. I added chorizo verde (pretty much because it rocks, and it kept the green theme) and I put the queso in our fondue pot to keep it saucy and hot. Alice and Nick, both of whom are Texans, came over. They practically swooned when the saw the pot of cheese.

We scooped it with homemade totopos, carrots, cucumbers. There wasn’t much talking going on.

You don’t need the huauzontles to make this dish a success — a pile of grated cheese will do that on its own.

However, the huauz did add a pleasant grit and chewiness, similar to a spinach-artichoke dip, or a broccoli-cheese soup. And I mean that in the most natural, comforting way possible, not in a chain-restaurant kind of way. I promise you, this stuff is good.

Recipe below.
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Introducing… The Week of Huauzontles

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Huauzontles and I didn’t have the most auspicious beginning. Last fall, if you recall, I bought a bunch solely because I liked the way they looked. (A bushy green amaranth plant is hard to resist.)

I didn’t know that you weren’t supposed to eat the stems, and so I threw in a mess of raw huauzontles, with stems, into a pan of roasted butternut squash. The result reminded me of the weeds my mom used to make me pull as a kid.

Lately, huauzontles have become one of my favorite ingredients, precisely because they’re so finicky. This is a vegetable that makes you work for its love. You have to shape it, prune it, peel off its bitter leaves and spongy flower pods. At the end, if you’ve done your work correctly, you’ve got a pile of flower pods that feel like soft, airy sand. They taste like a milder version of broccoli.

Crayton prepares the huauzontle for its bike-ride home, after buying it at the tianguis

You might be thinking: Am I really going to do all this work for something that tastes like broccoli?

Shouldn’t it taste… better?

Here’s the thing about huauzontles: it’s not just about the taste. It’s about the transformation, and being close to your food. Huauzontles require human interaction. Because of your hard work, it’s you who transforms this grassy, wild stalk into a pile of airy crumbs that can suit just about anything. I’ve eaten huauzontles in pasta sauce and tomatillo salsa, and shaped into fluffy, small croquettes; later this week, I’m going to stuff it inside a chicken breast, just to see what happens.

Because I want more people to appreciate this strange-but-lovable vegetable, I’m launching the Week of Huauzontles on The Mija Chronicles, which is a series of posts dedicated to The Huauz. (As I’m now calling it, affectionately.) First up is a step-by-step guide on how to clean and prepare the huauzontle for cooking. Later this week I’ll post some recipes, including the truly awesome huauzontle queso dip with chorizo verde.

Even if you’re not a huauz fan, I hope you at least appreciate the versatility of this tree-like vegetable.

More coming tomorrow!

Tacos de rajas with queso cotija

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Last week we had a guest instructor in cooking class, and he gave us a list of dishes to prepare over three hours: chiles rellenos, salsa de chile pasilla, fish wrapped in hoja santa and banana leaves, jalapeños en escabeche and rajas con queso cotija.

Out of all of them, the rajas were probably the least exciting. I love rajas (pronounced RAH-has) but what more can you learn about roasting, deveining and peeling poblano peppers, and then cutting them into strips? I’d already done it several times at home.

Instead, I chose to spend the class — where else — in front of the molcajete, grinding the chile pasilla salsa. I roasted my chiles and rehydrated them in boiling water, and then ground them to bits. (The key there: the chiles must be completely pliable. You can’t remove them from the water too soon.) I plopped one tomatillo after the other into the bowl and smooshed each one to death, while also trying to shield my apron from the splatter. (If you’re wondering why I used a partner’s molcajete instead of my own, it’s because I was too worried about a possible pumice aftertaste. I still haven’t seasoned the damn thing correctly.)

At the end of class, everyone got to take home a chile, one fish filet and the rajas in little plastic baggies. Back at our apartment, Crayton and I sat in front of the TV with a couple of beers and dug in.

I love to share with my husband, but the rajas were so good I wanted them all to myself. They had the sweetness of a roasted root vegetable, while the cheese gave the dish these bursts of saltiness, and a kind of sour, pastoral tang. Cotija is hard, crumbly cow’s-milk cheese that’s named after a town in Michoacán, where it’s manufactured; it is characteristically salty and slightly acidic.

The dish seemed hearty enough to work on its own as a taco filling. So I invited my friend Daniel over for dinner a few days ago and decided to make the rajas again. Right before he came over, I momentarily panicked: Was this going to work? Were the rajas too strong to serve on their own, with a few crumbly bits of cheese?

I made brown rice at the last minute, just in case we needed something bland. But everything turned out fine. The peppers were as sweet as I remembered, and I think the cheese actually helped mellow the dish out. I served the tacos with some of my leftover chile pasilla salsa and they were a hit.

Recipe below.
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Roasted cabbage salad with garlic-chipotle vinaigrette

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I didn’t realize it until this week, but when you buy one head of cabbage, you’re gonna be eating cabbage for awhile.

One head of purple cabbage gave me and Crayton four days worth of meals. We had cabbage curry on Sunday night, whereupon I put a wee bit too much chili powder, causing Crayton to cough and sputter, “I can’t breathe.” (He was fine in the end.)

The cabbage continued into the next day, with leftovers for lunch and roasted cabbage salad with asparagus for dinner. Then came more leftovers for lunch the next day. And roasted cabbage salad with carrots for dinner that night.

I finished the final leftovers yesterday and was kind of surprised my skin hadn’t turned purple.

So yes: roasted cabbage. It’s so good you actually can eat it several days in a row, without feeling bored or wishing that the infernal cabbage would just disappear.

Although I came up with the roasting idea myself (thought process = roasted veggies with raw cabbage… roasted veggies with roasted cabbage, whoa), other Internet food bloggers love roasted cabbage, too. “Gets rid of cabbage funk,” says The Kitchn, in its drool-worthy recipe for roasted cabbage with bacon. “If you like cabbage at all, I’m guessing you’ll love it,” wrote Kalyn of Kaylyn’s Kitchen. There’s really no excuse not to roast cabbage. Especially when you’ve got so darn much of it.

Because roasting any veg brings out its naturally sweet notes, I decided to pair this salad with a spicy dressing. Had a lot of garlic sitting around, so garlic and chipotle seemed like a natural choice. I turned to Rick Bayless’ Mexican Everyday to make sure I had my salad dressing proportions right.

The result — crunchy, toasty cabbage drizzled with a sweet, garlicky, spicy vinaigrette — was pretty darn fantastic. In fact, I might even say that the dressing made the whole dish. Crayton specifically mentioned how good it was. Guess he’d forgotten about the chili-powder incident.

Recipe is below, in case you ever find yourself with a gigantic head of cabbage and no where to turn.
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Homemade veggie enchiladas with quintoniles, corn, rajas and onion

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Just so you know what caliber of dish we’re dealing with here, I served these to Alice as leftovers last week. She took a few bites and said: “Lesley. I think this is the best thing you’ve ever made in Mexico.”

I’m sure it was the quintoniles. And the homemade tomato-based enchilada sauce.

I didn’t explain this very well in the other post, but quintoniles really like a lighter version of spinach. You don’t get any of the bitterness. None of the squeaky texture across your teeth. Just mild, mellow flavor. They’re like the Dazed and Confused green, just wanting everyone to relax and enjoy themselves.

This veggie combination came about somewhat randomly. Somehow, all the stars aligned and everything I hoped to happen, did: The enchiladas were hearty and light at the same time; sweet and salty; toothsome from the corn, and lightly fried tortillas.

Not to get all weird-bohemian-girl on you, but I felt a sense of time passing as I ate them. Like, suddenly it became very clear that the pre- and post-Mexico me had morphed into two different people.

This is because I have a little bit of a history with enchiladas. In my 20s, when I lived in Texas, enchiladas were one of my “go-to” dishes. I’d dip the tortillas in canned sauce, blanket them with cheese and bake them. Sometimes I’d wear an embroidered Mexican blouse as I cooked, just to let people know, you know, that I was Mexican-American.

People would ooh and ahh when the dish came out of the oven. I’d think: I am so proud of myself for serving real Mexican food from scratch.

And here I am today. The two things I’d always wanted — to live in Mexico, and speak Spanish — have happened. I know more about Mexican food than I ever thought I would, and most of what I truly enjoy is nothing like the cheese concoction I used to make. (My favorite Mexican dishes don’t have any cheese at all.)

I still wear my Mexican blouse, but just because I like how it looks, not because I want to express any overt cultural connection.

Really, I’m just more confident in myself. And my cooking.

Funny how one bite of food can stir up all that, no?

Here’s the recipe.
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Sorry spinach, you’ve been booted for wild quintoniles

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Last Sunday I stopped by my old neighborhood tianguis, where I found man and a woman with a particularly fresh batch of produce for sale.

Everyone else’s curly-leaf lettuce looked wilted that day, but theirs was bright green and perky. They had fresh huitlacoche and spinach. And, in one big basket, a mess of dark-green, heart-shaped leaves. Some had purple splotches. I’m a sucker for greens, so I went over and stared. Crayton stood nearby, probably thinking, “Can we go now?”

“Epazote?” I asked the vendor.

“Quintoniles,” he told me. He pronounced them keen-toh-NEE-less.

My heart leapt a little bit. Mind you, I didn’t entirely know what they were, but they sounded like quelites, a wild Mexican green with a spinachy flavor.
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How to make chiles rellenos, Mexican-grandmother style

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My friend Lizzie lives with a real Mexican grandmother. Her name is Juanita and she just turned 90 years old. I’m not sure what her secret is, but she’s very active — she cooks big meals every day at lunch, and she shops at the tianguis, where she knows all the vendors. Plus she still does her hair every day, wrapping it in various braids and twists that are bobby-pinned to her head.

I’ve been hearing about Juanita and her cooking for a few months. (And envying Lizzie from afar for her housing arrangement.) Finally, it worked out yesterday that I could come over for lunch. Juanita would make chiles rellenos and white rice, and I could take pictures and notes. I was super excited. How fun was this going to be?

I arrived around 11:30 a.m., right when the trash man was stationed outside Juanita’s yellow apartment building, ringing his bell. (This is the universal sign meaning, “Neighbors, come outside and bring your trash, because the trash people are here.”) I walked through a small atrium and up a set of Art Deco-looking steps.

Juanita’s apartment was comprised of several small, cheery rooms. In the kitchen, a half-wall separated the area into two spaces: one held the fridge and a small, three-seater table; the other hosted the sink, stove and a few cabinets.

It wasn’t a cocina integral, and there was exactly one counter to chop things, if you didn’t count the kitchen table. But it worked. Juanita zipped around in her white nursing-style shoes, opening drawers, washing dishes, digging through the fridge to make space for a container of arroz con leche. Everything had its place.

We started on the chiles right away. First step: toasting the chiles on the comal.


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Millet risotto with leeks, chilacayote and melted gruyere

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When we moved a few weekends ago, I found a bag of millet that I’d forgotten about, wedged into a corner of my three-drawer pantry-on-wheels.

Millet is a nutty, whole-grain that’s produced mainly in Asia. I bought some last year at the Korean grocery store, not knowing exactly what I’d do with it. Fast forward 10 months later (cannot believe my Korean grocery store trip was already almost a year ago), and I’d done exactly nothing with it. Except stumble upon it and toss it into a moving box.

At our new apartment, living amid all the cardboard and dust was making me crave something homemade and comforting. A risotto. Mind you, I’ve never made risotto before. But how hard could it be? (Heh heh.) I consulted the Internet, and it confirmed — there were several recipes for millet risotto out there. Although the American blogosphere millet looked different than mine. Theirs was yellow; mine was white with brown speckles. (Perhaps mine was one of the “minor millets” mentioned in this Wikipedia article.)

Years ago, I made big pot of buttery polenta with leeks, and it was so fantastic that I knew I had to have leeks in my millet risotto. Found a leek at my local mercado, and also decided to throw in a few veggies that were ripening in the fridge: chilacayote and a serrano pepper. Chilacayote is a round, mildly sweet squash that’s native to Latin America. They look kind of like mini watermelons, with a thin skin instead of a rind.

I didn’t have any Parmesan (the go-to cheese topper for a risotto), but I did have gruyere. And although I didn’t have white wine, I did have Chinese cooking wine.

Exhilirated and flying by the seat of my pants, I whipped up my risotto over the course of an hour. It turned out great: nutty and full of texture (just slightly harder than your usual rice), with this intoxicating, light boozy smell, and of course, covered in cheese. I sat and watched our newly installed cable and was perfectly happy with life, even if my life at the moment happened to be cardboard-filled and dust-covered.

Recipe below.
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