The Dinner Files

Air soaked with the grassy hot smell of green chiles roasting goes straight to my head.

I was in New Mexico – Albuquerque to be specific – for a few days last week. It’s still chile roasting season there. Piles of green chiles – and the drums that roast them – were everywhere: predictably at the farmers market and less predictably for one not from there, at Walmart.

People buy their chiles, get the roasted in holey drums that are turned by hand or machine over flames, flames often generated by propane tanks (some purists demand wood-fire roasted chiles, of course). This method is far more efficient than how I roast chiles at my house, where my four burners limit me to about a dozen chiles at a time.

When the chiles are fully charred and cooked, the roaster empties the drum into a plastic bag-lined bucket.

The customer then takes a steaming bag of chiles home, where he or she will – hopefully with some help – stem and peel the chiles, pack them into portions large and small, and freeze them to last until the harvest starts up again in August.

I saw one man with a toddler that looked like a Mini-Me of him and three 20-pound bags of chiles sitting in his cart waiting in line at Wagner Farm on Saturday. I could picture the whole scene: That morning his wife (the mother of Mini-Me) reminded him that he had not yet gotten the chiles. Would he do so today and would he take Mini-Me with him? I imagined she asked quite rhetorically because he knew and she knew that she wasn’t really asking, she was telling. When I asked him about the amount of chiles he was waiting to have roasted he confirmed that yes, his wife had been itching for him to get the chiles for the year and, yes, she had thought the errand would make a nice father-son outing.

Why don’t they just all buy frozen roasted chiles as they need them during the year? Some do, of course. Those that don’t have a few motivations tied into a pretty little bundle. Most people agree that roasted and hand-peeled chiles are vastly preferable to those peeled with chemicals, and hand-peeled chiles are way more expensive – $3 per chile has been seen by yours truly – than fresh raw chiles, which can be had for a dollar a pound plus a nominal roasting fee (and a tip for the roaster). The 20-pound bag-at-a-time route starts to make a lot of sense.

What I love about all this – besides the delicious chile that results and the spice-saturated air – is the idea that a large portion of a population is putting up a seasonal produce item as a staple. It would be like if most Californians canned their own heirloom tomatoes every year.

It warms the cockles of my heart, not to mention the tip of my tongue, just thinking about it.

My weakness for a crunchy endive salad is, in my mind, legendary. My love of endive in general is well documented – I once put together a cracker jack food trivia team with the sole goal of winning a 6-pound box of endive for myself. All the other prizes – coffee and wine and gift certificates galore – I let the others divvy up as they saw fit. But the box of endive: that was all mine.

And then I made an Endive Walnut Salad, and it was good.

I’ve written before about my obsession with manti, those tiny Turkish lamb dumplings. I’ve been insane enough in the past to make them and, if I’m being honest, it is highly likely that I will be that insane again.

Not this time, though. This time I got the general flavor delight by making the filling into a sauce and putting it on noodles. I got the idea from Melissa Clark, who did the same thing a few years ago. Her version had eggplant in it, which sounds good but not really so much like manti. My version sticks a bit closer to the original taste profile, with the exception of the fact that I ended up dolloping some harissa on it and being thrilled with the results. Authenticity be damned.

Is it as good as the dumplings? Absolutely not. Is it a delicious dish that was made and ready to eat in about 30 minutes instead of 3 hours? Yes it was.

Manti lamb pasta

The optional hot sauce is absolutely optional, but know that it is also absolutely delicious. Some kind of thick or even paste-like chile concoction works better than sauce-y condiments, but that may just be me.

1 pound ground lamb

3 tablespoons olive oil

1 small onion, minced

3 cloves garlic, minced (divided)

12 leaves mint, cut into ribbons

1/2 teaspoon plus 1/8 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

1/2 cup chicken broth

1/2 pound farfalle pasta

1 cup thick Greek-style yogurt

3 tablespoons butter

Chile powder

(Harissa, or other hot sauce type item for them that like it – while true manti are not traditionally spicy, this pasta is awfully tasty with an extra kick)

Bring a pot of salted water to a boil.

Meanwhile, pat the lamb dry. Heat a large frying pan over high heat. Brown the lamb in the olive oil. When about half the lamb is cooked, add the onion and 2 cloves of the garlic. Cook, stirring, until lamb is cooked through and onion is soft, about 3 minutes. Add 3/4 of the mint, 1/2 teaspoon salt, and pepper. Add broth and simmer until almost completely evaporated but a bit saucy on the bottom of the pan, 3 to 5 minutes.

Meanwhile, cook the pasta. While the pasta cooks, combine yogurt with the remaining 1 clove of the garlic and the remaining 1/8 teaspoon of salt.

Melt the butter in a small saucepan over medium high heat. Cook until butter starts to brown. Remove from heat.

Divide pasta between 4 plates, top with lamb, top that with yogurt, drizzle each serving with some browned butter and garnish with chile powder and some of the remaining mint. Serve with hot sauce on the side for people to add themselves.

Can we all agree that cleaning artichokes completely sucks? I mean, there isn’t anything fun about it. You can’t even get all meditative because the minute you do one of those thorns is going to embed itself under a fingernail and torture you for days after wards.

So those artichokes above – which were tasty delicious, by the way – were perhaps not the freshest and most divine of all artichoke specimens I’ve ever encountered. They were tough and fibrous, so cleaning them was extra super sucky. It took forever to clean just four of them.

Luckily, I passed the time with my hands-free and a friend in Seattle. We were strolling along, exchanging news and thoughts about kids and parents and husbands and friends and selves, when I quite rudely interrupted her by yelling “fuck.”

I know, classy.

She kindly asked what happened. I explained that I was cleaning artichokes and a thorn attacked me. She said quite firmly and with great conviction that she never, ever, under any circumstance, cleans artichokes.

Never.

I just might have to join her. The thing is, these artichokes really were crazy delicious. But, as I found upon a second cooking, you can get a similar result with a method that leaves the labor happily in the hands of the eater. Both methods are included below.

Lemon garlic artichokes with plenty of mint

To clean the artichokes or not? That decision is yours.

4 to 6 large artichokes (depends on how many people are being fed and how many artichokes they want to eat; the method and sauce amount really works for the range just dandy)

1/4 cup fresh lemon juice (1/2 cup if you’re cleaning them)

1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil, plus 2 tablespoons

1 teaspoon salt

3 clove garlic, minced

12 sprigs mint, leaves minced

Trim the stems of the artichokes and clip off their thorns if you like the people for whom you’re cooking, or go ahead and really trim them into fully edible specimens: set up a bowl of cool water with 1/4 cup of lemon juice in it, trim stem, pull off outer leaves until a solid 2-inch section of them are very light green (really almost yellow), cut off green tops of the leaves, use a paring knife to cut off all the dark or medium green stuff around the stem and heart, cut in half lengthwise and scoop out the heart, put in the lemon water and repeat with the remaining chokes (this guide to cleaning baby artichokes shows everything except scooping out the choke; this step of cleaning artichoke hearts shows scraping out the choke).

Put the 1/4 cup lemon juice, 1/4 cup of the olive oil, salt, garlic, and half the mint in a saucepan large enough to hold all the artichokes with 2 cups of water and bring to a boil. Add artichokes, stem-end down (or in whichever way you can if you’ve cleaned and halved them), cover, and reduce heat to maintain a steady simmer. Cook, undisturbed, until the bottoms of untrimmed artichokes or the entire cleaned artichokes are tender when pierced with the tip of a knife.

Lift artichokes out of the cooking liquid. Transfer trimmed artichokes to a baking or serving dish and full artichokes to individual serving bowls.

Increase heat to boil the liquid left in the pan is reduced to about 1/2 cup. Add remaining 2 tablespoons of olive oil. Pour evenly over artichokes and sprinkle artichokes with remaining mint. Serve warm, at room temp, or even chilled. Any leftovers are to die for.