Today I made gazpacho for the first time using the recipe from the food processor instruction book. Tasty. Here's the recipe.

Gazpacho

Ingredients

• 1 medium cucumber, peeled & quartered
• 1 medium green pepper, cored & quartered
• 1 small onion, peeled & quartered
• 2 sprigs of parsley
• 1 clove of garlic
• 1 cup chilled tomato juice
• 3 tbsp olive oil
• 1 tsp salt
• 1/8 tsp pepper
• dash of Tabasco sauce
• 6 ripe tomatoes, peeled and quartered

Preparation

1. Place cucumber, green pepper, onion, parsley and garlic in food processor. Process at low to chop to desired texture.
2. Add tomatoes and process at medium using momentary action until tomatoes are chopped. Pour chopped ingredients in bowl.
3. Process remaining ingredients in food processor at medium speed. Pour into bowl and mix. Cover, chill, serve.

Tonight I made for the first time gallina en pipián, which is a chicken dish stewed in a sauce of pumpkin seeds, peanuts, and red chile purée. The recipe comes from “Simple Mexican Dishes.” I've actually never eaten this before, so I had no idea what it's supposed to taste like. The chile purée I made from a recipe in the same book; I used mild dried chiles but included the seeds and membrane instead of getting rid of them. It gave it a very slight bit of oomph that I liked. Instead of using a three pound chicken, I used three chicken breasts.

This time around the recipe made 6 cups of chicken and sauce. By my calculation that should be about 225 calories per half cup serving.

In terms of taste, for someone who has had it for the first time, I think it's okay, but that once you've had it three or four times you will like it more and more. It's kind of like peanut butter that way. By itself it's not so interesting, but with constant exposure it becomes tasty and comfortable.

Tonight I made “ejotes con chile colorado” (green beans with prepared red chile sauce) from “Simple Mexican Dishes.” Tasty. It has a certain heft to the flavor that I suspect is due to the lard. Next time I make it, I'll try thickening with corn starch instead to see if it tastes as good. I'll probably also add cumin and black pepper.

I went to the farmers' market in Ahwatukee on Sunday and purchased some Thai peppers. (The picture also shows some guavas, but they have nothing to do with this blog entry.) Now what the heck will I do with them? I took a hint from Spicy Spices, chopped the peppers without seeding them, chopped a clove of garlic, added the juice of a lemon and ¼ tsp of sea salt, macerated them all together with a mortar and pestle, and put them in the fridge to meld for a day or three.

Tonight I used it as a garnish with poached chicken breasts. (The liquid from the breasts I used in the next recipe on the blog.) Tasty. When I first put the chiles and garlic in the fridge, the garlic smell was overwhelming. Three days of interacting mellowed the garlic flavor entirely, and I suspect that it knocked some of the heat from the chiles, though I can't swear to that since I didn't try the chiles before mixing them.

A couple weeks ago for the first time I made red chile purée from “Special Mexican Dishes” by Amalia Ruiz Clark. I used mild dried red chiles and removed the seeds. I have to say that the taste was too dull for me. Then last week I made it again with the same type of chiles, but this time I didn't take the seeds out. Tonight I'm using that purée to make «pasta de chile colorado—guisado,» which is essentially a basic enchilada sauce. I have to say I like the purée a lot better with the seeds in, although if I had made it with hot dried red chiles, it might be a different story.

I've been surprised recently to discover low calorie tasty drinks that one can make at home that entirely replace soft drinks for me. First there was iced ginger elixir from “The Garden of Eating.” Then there was a similar version of lemonade from the same book. Both recipes make use of stevia for sweetness. So today I decided to try my own variation on that them. I took ¼ cup of dried peppermint, which I purchase under the name yerba buena in the Mexican spices section of the local grocery store. (Yes, I do know that it should be spelled “hierba buena” to be academically rigorous, but that's not how it was written on the packet.) I put it in a 2 cup pyrex container and then poured boiling hot water over it and let it steep for an hour. Then I strained the liquid into a pitcher and added four cups of cool, filtered water, along with ¼ teaspoon of liquid stevia. Nice. It doesn't have the slap in the face effect of the lemonade or ginger drinks, but a nice drink nonetheless.

Tonight I made Caveman Chili from “The Garden of Eating.” It was okay. I cooked it in a steel pan that was pretty thin, and I wonder if that didn't burn the ingredients a bit more than intended. It also seemed to me that there wasn't quite enough liquid in the recipe, so halfway through the cooking I added a cup of boiling water, and then near the end another cup. Most likely it was a bit dryer than the chef intended because I only found tomatoes that weren't quite ripe enough. I look forward to trying the recipe again.

On second thought it's possible that I also cooked it on too high a heat. I kept it boiling as opposed to reducing it to simmering, so that may have been part of the dryihg out problem as well. It's all still quite edible, though. None of it will be thrown out.

Today I cooked my first recipe with kombu. Kombu is the Japanese name of a sea vegetable mentioned in the recipe I wanted to make. I wasn't confident that I could find it. Oh, sure, there are Asian stores here in Phoenix, but have you ever been in an Asian store??? All sorts of things are labeled in Thai, Japanese, Korean and Chinese, and I'm a total gringo who has never studied an Asian language. So before I shopped I went to Wikipedia and looked up kombu. Down the road there is a store that seems to be run by Korean people, so I wanted, among other things, to figure out that Korean characters for whatever the Korean equivalent to kombu was.

Go figure, right off the bat the Wikipedia article mentions that the Korean equivalent of kombu is dashima. I copied down the Korean characters and went to the store. In the seaweed section I found packages that seemed to have something sort of like the Korean characters, but I wasn't entirely confident. Up the row walked an Asian couple. The man approached first, so I asked him about kombu/dashima. He looked confused and said to ask his wife. Fortunately she had a much thicker accent and knew exactly what I was talking about. “Oh, yes, this is dashima. Are you making soup?” I said 'yes,' although chile is not exactly soup, but I had read that kombu's main purpose in Japanese cooking was for soup base. Then she pointed out the ugliest package of dashima I could imagine. “This looks like good dashima.” Yuck! But of course I'm not stupid enough to think that things that look like good pre-packaged assinine Yankee products necessarily taste the best, so I bought what she pointed out. (Picture attached.) It's so nice when complete strangers are so nice to you, even though there spouses are monolingual gringo-equivalents.