The Dining Diva

Hit or Miss

Sometimes cooking can be hit or miss.  Frankly, I have more hits than misses, but unfortunately, dinner on Sunday fell into the miss category.  I've been cooking my way through Mexico, One Plate at a Time as part of the cookbook of the month cooking experience on Chowhound . I chose an easy recipe, one that wouldn't require a huge amount of time, technique or skill, the Flank Steak with Roasted Poblano Chile and Tomato Salsa.  I did trade out the flank steak or a flat iron steak, but that really had no bearing on the final result. 

I love working with fresh chiles.  I love the way they look, the way they feel,  and the spicy, earthy way they make the house smell when they're roasting.  Not to mention they're a fabulous source of Vitamin C! The first step in the recipe was to roast the chiles, tomatoes, onions and garlic

Since I don't have a gas range or broiler they had to go under the electric element in the oven.  The recipe indicated 5 minutes per side, a time frame I found too short.  This could be a function of the fact the oven I was using is 40 years old and the broiler element might not be that hot.  Or it could be a function of the time in the recipe being too short.  But after 5 minutes, this is what the chiles and tomatoes looked like.

The skin on the chiles will blister much quicker than that on the tomatoes.  The biggest challenge I've always had with trying to char chiles under the broiler is to not over cook them so that they end up being too soft and mushy.  The charred chile needs to retain some structure and bite to their texture.  The chiles came out after about 15 minutes total under the broiler............

........... and the tomatoes after about 20-22 minutes.  Far longer than the 10 minutes total called for in the recipe.  Already I was not off to a good start with this recipe, the roasting and toasting had taken twice as long as it should have.  But the chiles and tomatoes looked pretty good after they were done so I figured we were still on the right track.

Then I moved on to charring the onions and garlic. While the onions were roasting I skinned the chiles.

They look rather like the swamp monster from the green lagoon or something don't they.  But they were not overcooked.  Then it was on to peeling and coring the tomatoes

Once again the onions and garlic took longer to cook than the recipe indicated it should, and I wasn't as happy with the char I got on the onions.  Mostly the onions wanted to burn rather than turn a nice shade of "deep golden brown", but the garlic came out nicely roasted. I guess it was a trade off. So I dumped them into the food processor and pulsed a few times to chop.

Then added the tomatoes and pulsed a few more times

Chopped the peeled chiles and folded them in.............

Half the salsa went back into the food processor along with a little olive oil, a little balsamic vinegar, some sugar and some salt. Looks a little disgusting doesn't it.

   

Anyway, I ended up with 2 salsas.  One a puree to be spread on the steak before and during cooking, the other to be served on top of the finished steak. 

    

I cranked up the broiler once again and slathered the pureed salsa onto the flat iron steak.

         

      

Anything you can do with a flank steak you can do with the current trendy darling of the meat industry, the flat iron steak.  A more accurate name is probably top blade steak since it is actually derived from the tender top blade roast by cutting it in half horizontally.  There is a sinewy connective tissue running through the roast, splitting it in two seems to mitigate that connective tissues somewhat.  Most flat iron steaks are quite tender and any remnants of the connective tissue easily removed.

After about 10 minutes under the broiler, I flipped it over, slathered on some more pureed salsa, cooked it another 10 minutes and then let it rest while I finished the rest of dinner.

   

Served with black beans cooked with onion, garlic, epazote and drizzled with crema, and some steamed broccoli we called it dinner

    

And it'll have to be the side shot because the aerial photo from the top down didn't turn out.  The black beans were great, the steamed broccoli cruciferiously crunchy and the steak tender.  Unfortunately, I didn't care for the taste of the salsa and it certainly didn't add much to the steak.  I just wasn't that thrilled with the end results. 

I looked at the left over pureed salsa and the left over salsa and wondered whether to throw them out or save them.  I decided not to worry about it and transferred both salsas to a refrigerator container and figured I'd be like Scarlett O'Hara and worry about it another day.  4 days later as I was looking at a couple pork tenderloins and wondering what to do with them I remembered the container of salsa in patiently waiting in the the refrigerator. So I browned off the tenderloins poured the salsa over them, added a bit of chicken stock to thin it down and popped it into the oven to finish.  The salsa went far better with the pork than it did with the beef, but I still didn't care for it.  By now it was clear, this recipe just wasn't a keeper.

         

Cranberry Oatmeal Cookies

Saturday has become predictable.  At 10 AM I meet my friend Chef Vinny for a Pilate's class that used to be on a Pilate's reformer but is now on a gravity machine.  Pretty cool and good for developing core strength and lengthening out the muscles.  After being appropriately stretched, folded, prodded and bent, Vince and I usually adjourn for coffee and a bagel at Twigg's Coffee House .  The coffee isn't that great, but the bagels (and other pastries) are and the ambiance can't be beat.  Here, Vince and I have commiserated about the challenges and woes of our respective lives.  And though we usually don't come to any earth shattering resolutions, we almost always leave feeling better than when we walked in.  Or, we opt for breakfast at any of the great breakfast places that abound in San Diego. 

This past Saturday, however, neither one of us felt like coffee and bagels and we most definitely didn't feel like breakfast.  Oddly enough, what we felt like doing was baking.  Both of us missed our calling to be a pastry chef, though Vince probably had a better opportunity to achieve it being an actual graduate of the Scottsdale Culinary Institute in Arizona.  We baked the Mexican Chocolate Streusel Cake the weekend before; we felt like doing cookies this weekend.  Kind of a warm up for the approaching holiday season. So we turned to a cookbook I already owned and selected a recipe for which I happened to have all the ingredients, or at least almost all the ingredients

We decided to bake the Cranberry Oatmeal Cookies from the All-American Cookie Book by Nancy Baggett.  As I said, I had almost all the ingredients and the ones I didn't have weren't critical. I didn't have an orange, but I had limes, so we subbed that in..........

The lime worked just fine, but as they say hindsight is always 20/20, the orange would have probably provided a stronger flavor note than did the lime.

The really good thing about cranberries is that they last a long, long time when frozen.  And since we're coming up on prime cranberry season I figured why not get rid of what was in the freezer to make room for this year's crop.  So into the work bowl of my trusty Kitchenaid food processor went a bunch of cranberries, 4 oz to be exact

Once they had been coarsely chopped, 3 tablespoons of brown sugar went in

A few more pulses to combine and they came out looking like this.  I love the deep ruby color.

As with any baking project it's really key to get all the ingredients together before you start preparations.  It's called mise en place in the restaurant business and here's ours.

The recipe called for both butter and shortening.  Shortening was another thing I didn't have so we used all butter, 2 sticks, which went into the stand mixer along with 1 1/4 cups of packed brown sugar to be creamed

Something a lot of people forget to do is to scrape down the sides of the bowl during the beating process.  It's a simple step that helps to ensure all the ingredients are well incorporated into the mixture.  Remember, baking is based on formulas with each individual ingredient providing specific parts of the formula.  Scrapping the bowl between each addition will make sure each ingredient gets to do the job for which it was intended.

Next a couple of eggs were added one at a time, beating well after each addition

Then some vanilla, corn syrup and the lime zest were added followed by flour that had been sifted together with cinnamon, cloves, allspice and salt.  The allspice was the last of our ingredient substitutions.  The original recipe calls for ground coriander which I thought I had but didn't.  Since there really is no alternative for that we just used our baking instincts and decided that allspice was probably a better choice than Chinese 5-Spice, though that probably would have worked too.  Anyway, here's the almost finished batter

 

Not to mention my favorite way to clean the beater.  It's all about playing with food.  I love the tactile nature of raw ingredients and food preparation.  Plus, touching and handling the products during preparation trains your hands to feel when a dough or batter is right.

Finally, the last 3 ingredients went it, those cranberries, oatmeal and chopped pecans.

The recipe called for dropping them onto a prepared pan with a coffee measure, which it usually 2 tablespoons.  I grabbed the first one I found in the catch-all drawer and started dropping

Turns out this was a 3 tablespoon coffee scoop and these turned out to be ENORMOUS cookies.  We'd baked 1 dozen when I found the other coffee scoop that was 2 tablespoons and we finished up the baking using that one.

The final results

We liked the cookies a lot.  They had excellent flavor though were softer than we had though they would be.  We will make these again using the orange zest and shortening as called for in the recipe plus one additional add-in.  These cookies would be real dynamite if they had 3-4 oz of finely chopped dark chocolate.  Cranberries, oranges, oatmeal and chocolate.  What's not to like!

Mexican Chocolate Streusel Cake

500 years ago or so, strange and exotic food items from the New World began their trans-Atlantic voyages to the Old World.  In turn the Old World sent some of their favorite food items Westward.  The story of tomatoes is legendary with the Italians being one of the few countries to quickly and lovingly embrace them. And pigs, olives and wheat quickly established themselves in the New World. But by far, the most popular gift from either world was the the Aztecs sent Eastward...... xocolatl, or chocolate.

Chocolate comes from the tropical cacao tree which grows it's cacao fruit at an easily reachable level making them easy to harvest.  The shell of the cacao fruit is easy to crack and the pulp surrounding the bitter seed rather tasty.  While the cacao fruit pulp made man and monkey happy, man discovered that when he ground the shiny, bitter and ate it, it gave him an energy boost that could either wake him up in the morning or keep him awake at night, which ever he needed. It's stimulant properties had been discovered and appreciated.  So much so that gradually over time, xocolatl evolved into a drink - such as it was - for the ruling classes and for ritual, including those heart wrenching human sacrifice for which the MesoAmericans are so well-known. 

The Spanish court took to the new  stimulant drink because, well, because it was a better pick-me-up than brandy at 8 AM in the morning, especially for the royal kids of the court.  Other European royal courts weren't quite so enamored of chocolate as it was being called until a royal wedding brought the ruling families together. The game of one-oneupmanship as practiced by the royal families on that matrimonial party scene went to the Spanish and their fabulous drink. Their party tent became the most coveted invitation, not in small part due to the fact that they were serving this terrific drink they called chocolate. And as evolution is wont to do, the drink gradually changed as competing royal families tried to do each other one better by adding or subtracting ingredients until eventually chocolate as we know it emerged.

Back in Mexico sugar, canela (cinnamon) and ground nuts were added to the xocolatl and pressed into tablet form in order to make it more usable and palatable to the ruling classes.  It was later vigorously frothed in a special pot with a special utensil to make a rich hot chocolate. Because of the added sugar, Mexican chocolate is not the easiest chocolate product to use in cooking.  It tends to be grainy and since baking is based on formulas, sugar quantities in recipes often have to be adapted. But it is possible, after some experimentation, to successfully bake with Mexican chocolate. 

North of the border Abuelita (a Nestle product) and Ibarra are the most common Mexican chocolates found. Over the last year I seem to have collected quite an assortment of chocolate from my travels around Mexico.  Since I had more than I could possible use I decided it was time to reduce the inventory and made the Mexican Chocolate Streusel Cake from Mexico, One Plate at a Time by Rick Bayless.

I'm a pretty good baker, I really enjoy the process, not to mention I have a terrible sweet tooth. There are a couple of things that I usually do to help ensure the success of each recipe I make when I bake.  One is that I read through the recipe several times before starting to make sure I understand it, and I don't make big changes in the recipe formula.  The other thing that I do is to get everything lined up. measured out and ready to go before I start baking.  Kind of a common sense thing, but not everyone does it.  So, back to chocolate, Mexican chocolate. I ended up using 3 varieties of Mexican chocolate --

Popular, which I purchased in Monterrey and which I really like. 

Uruapan which I picked up in Patzcuaro.  I was a little disappointed in it as I felt it was more like Abuelita or Ibarra.  And finally I used a little bit of chocolate that had been grown and hand made in Michoacan

This is actually an unsweetened chocolate containing no added sugar, canela or ground nuts.  It is suitable for baking. I used about 2-3 oz. of this chocolate and about a pound of the other two brands

Because of all the additives in Mexican chocolate it's a more brittle and not as easy to chop as other chocolates.

 

That white line you see in the chunks of chocolate above is sugar, and as you can also see, the product has a tendency to get crumbly or come off in big hunks.

This is the hardest and messiest part of making the cake.

About half the chocolate is reserved for the cake and the other half is put into a food processor along with 7 tablespoons of butter an egg yolk and 1 cup of flour.

It's lightly pulsed until crumbly with some large lumps

As with most cake recipes you start off by creaming fat and sugar together, in this case 2 sticks of butter and 8 oz of cream cheese and 2/3 cup of sugar

   

The objective is to get the sugar to dissolve into the fat which will encourage tenderness and evenly distribute it all though the batter.  Next, come the eggs.  4 of them added 1 at a time beating them well between additions until each egg has been well incorporated

Here I detoured from the written recipe and added 2 teaspoons of vanilla.  Vanilla is a natural with chocolate and especially Mexican chocolate.  So, since it wouldn't significantly alter the formula for the cake I added it and think it perked up the flavor.

The dry ingredients, flour and baking powder, sifted, go in last and are mixed only until incorporated.

And finally, that reserved chocolate was folded into the batter

Into the pan

Add the struesel

And into a 350* oven for 30-35 minutes

Cool..........cut

And serve

This cake is surprisingly rich as a result of the cream cheese and moister than I had remembered.  Rick Bayless recommends serving it warm, it's not bad cold, or at room temperature either.  A couple of baking hints -- I would recommend adding the vanilla and I would make absolutely sure that the baking powder is still active.  Once a can of baking powder is opened it will loose it's power to puff relatively quickly.  If you can't remember the last time you used an open can of baking powder, replace it before you bake.  The streusel topping is heavy, which means that the batter is going to need all the puff power it can get in order for the cake to get a decent rise. 

In addition to being a nice dessert cake, in a pinch, this could also do double duty as a breakfast coffee cake since the crumb is denser and coarser than a regular layer cake.

Pescado Veracruzana & Arroz Blanco

I discovered Rick Bayless about a year or so after I bought my first Diana Kennedy cookbook on Mexican cooking when I bought his first work, Authentic Mexican. I had been cooking successfully from Ms. Kennedy's Cuisine's of Mexico and was even more taken with her descriptions and stories about her expedition into the Mexican kitchen than I was with some of the recipes.  As I read through Authentic Mexican I had to admit his writing style was just as engaging as Diana Kennedy's and his recipes really did seem to be "authentic", which I could define better 20 years ago than I could today. But still, I had a hard time accepting that this American interloper could possibly know as much about Mexican cookery than my revered British authority. I can look back now and realize the irony that neither of my authorities were Mexican. Time and countless recipes later, I now know that I can count on recipes from either Rick Bayless or Diana Kennedy whenever I want to satisfy a craving for Mexican food. 

In 2003 I had the good fortune to spend a fantastic week in Oaxaca cooking with Rick Bayless (sponsored by the CIA/Greystone).  He's probably one of the best teachers - in ANY subject - that I've had, not just because his passion for his subject is so evident, but because he has the ability to make a student really understand the subject matter at hand as well as the many nuances hidden within. And, by the way, he is much more low key in person, and not quite so enthusiastically over the top as he is on his PBS show Mexico, One Plate at a Time. I was quite delighted, then, when the companion book to the PBS show was selected for the month long cookbook cooking project on CHOWHOUND for November 2006. The objective of the project is for as many people as are interested to cook whatever they like from the cookbook of the month and then report on their results.  With a large number of people all cooking from the same cookbook the odds are pretty good that most, if not all, the recipes are going to get sampled and the feedback will help others decide what to make, or even if they'd like to purchase the book if they don't already own it.

I'd owned the book Mexico, One Plate at a Time since it came out in 2000.  In fact, when I hauled it out to make my own recipe selections I discovered my copy had been inscribed and autographed.  I had totally forgotten I'd attended a book signing that Rick Bayless had done at a local Border's Books when I lived in San Rafael, CA.  But I digress..........back to the recipes.  Since I'd already cooked a number of items from this book I wanted to try something new, so I decided on Pescado Veracruzana.

Veracruz is a seaport on the East Coast of Mexico and was the starting point for most Spanish conquests - military or religious - into Mexico.  The cooking of this region still clearly shows it's Spanish and even Moorish roots.  And this is certainly true of one it's most famous dishes. Capers and olives are 2 ingredients that are going to be found more frequently in Spanish food than in Mexican.  Pescado Veracruzana uses both to add flavor and punch. It isn't a difficult dish to make, it's actually rather easy.  The worst part is the advanced prep and chopping, lots of chopping.  I started with 3 pounds of red, ripe tomatoes

The recipe gives the option to leave the skin on the tomatoes, if desired.  I didn't desire. Since they tend to come off when the tomato gets cooked anyway, and skinning tomatoes doesn't take a very long time, I went ahead and skin them.  Into the bottom of each tomato I cut an "X" to facilitate loosening the skin

And dropped them, a few at a time, into vigorously boiling, unseasoned, water.

After about a minute or so, the skin around the "X" begins to split and shrink away from the meat of the tomato.  Scoop them out and plunge them into a bowl of ice water to stop the cooking. 

Then simply pull the skin off the tomato

Once skinned, the tomatoes are cut into 1/2" cubes

Followed by thinly slicing on medium white onion.  White onions have a little more bite and are a little less sweet than regular yellow or Spanish onions and are the most commonly used onion in Mexican cooking.

Because almost all the sauce components go into the pot at once, it's easiest and most practical to get everything ready to go before starting to make the sauce.  So, after slicing the onions, I minced 4 cloves of garlic, measured out 1 1/2 teaspoons of Mexican oregano, crushing it against the palm of my hand to release the volatile oils and aroma, fished 4 bay leaves out of the cupboard and minced up a bunch of flat leaf parsley.

Then I drained and rinsed 1/4 cup of capers, sliced 3 jalapeño peppers, and roughly chopped 1 cup of pitted green olives.

Now I was ready to cook and began by sauteing the onions in 1/4 cup olive oil for about 5 minutes, or until they began to soften.

Next came the chopped tomatoes

Followed by the rest of the ingredients

This mixture cooked for a couple of minutes.  Then a cup of water went in and it was ready to simmer.

Fifteen minutes later and a1 teaspoon of salt, the sauce was good to go.

The recipe calls for using a 4 pound whole red snapper (huachinango), making several slashes on each side and marinating for up to 4 hours in the juice of 2 limes and some salt.  I was cooking this meal for my mother who is squeamish about whole fish, so I opted for two beautiful red snapper filets instead.  I lightly sprinkled them with espuma de mar salt from Colima then squeezed on a lime, wrapped them up to marinate for about 20 minutes, and flipped the oven on to 350*.

To go with the fish I made Arroz Blanco (White Rice) by finely dicing some onion and sauteing it with the rice until opaque, tossing in some minced garlic and using chicken stock as the cooking liquid along with a good squeeze of lime juice.  Once the lid went on the rice, the fish came out of the fridge and into a baking dish. Several cups of the sauce was poured over the fish and it went into the oven, uncovered, for 15 minutes.

I knew when I was making the rice that I'd let some of the grains of rice get a little to roasty toasty (to use one of Mr. Baylesses favorite terms) so my rice wasn't exactly blanco.  Ecru is probably a more accurate descriptor.  But it was light and fluffy; each grain swollen yet separate. The flavor was a little nutty with some nice undertones from the lime.

 

I almost made if from the baking dish to the plate without having the snapper filets break apart.  Almost, but not quite.  The fish was extremely tender and moist and flaked easily and just as I was getting to the plate, each filete broke into 2 pieces.  Not a problem, since breakage can be easily hidden by the sauce.

It's hard to see the fish under the sauce and goodies, but it was there and it was marvelous.  I've made many versions of Pescado Veracruzana over the years; it's one of my favorite dishes.  This version is easy and flavorful, and with a whole fish would make an impressive party dish.  The sauce was well balanced with just enough zip from the jalapeños, acidity from the capers and sweetness from the tomatoes and cooked onions.  The only thing I might do differently next time is to cook the sauce a little longer than 15 minutes.  There was quite a bit of liquid left in the bottom of the baking pan that had cooked out of the tomatoes while in the oven. Some of the excess liquid probably would have evaporated out had the sauce been cooked about 10-15 minutes longer.  How much liquid the tomatoes give up will depend upon how juicy they were to start, and I did have pretty juicy tomatoes. 

Served with a nice glass of assertive red wine, Pescado Veracruzana con Arroz Blanco made a fine meal.