The Dinner Files

There are a few dishes that, come summertime, my family very much likes to have me cook up. By “family” I mean family of origin – plus additions – in Minnesota, not just my dashing husband and young son in San Francisco. Turkey tacos are always a hit, as is any grilled meat affair. For the fourth, though, we kept it simple and I made much loved green chile cheeseburgers. The great thing about these burgers is you can cook them well done and they’re still juicy and moist and delicious. How is that possible? From the grated cheese that is inside the burger. It is mixed in, along with chopped roasted green chile. I developed them when I was still at Sunset for a whole hamburger heaven spread. I developed quite a few recipes for that story. These are the only ones I ever make.

Green chile cheeseburgers

Handle the meat as little as possible to keep the final burgers as tender as possible. Cook over truly high heat. Flip only once and, for the love of god, don’t press down on the burgers with a spatula while they’re cooking! What is that? Why would a person press all the juice out of the burger?

Experience tells that this recipes easily halves or doubles.

2 or 3 large mild green chiles (like poblanos)

3 pounds lean ground beef

1 cup grated cheddar cheese

2 teaspoons sea salt

Get the grill going. Char the chiles, turning to brown/blacken them evenly. Take the chiles off the grill and let them sit 10 to 15 minutes. Remove the skin (it should slip off easily), stems, and seeds and finely chop the chiles.

Note: the chiles can also be charred over a gas flame or under a broiler if you want to prepare the burgers ahead of time.

Put the ground beef in a large bowl and gently break it up with your hands. Add chiles, cheese, and salt. Use your hands to gently mix to combine. Divide meat evenly into 8 chunks. Gently pat each chunk into a burger about 3/4-inch thick at the edges, making a slight dimple or dip in the middle of each patty. Put the patties on a baking sheet, cover, and keep chilled until ready to cook.

Make sure the fire on the grill is hot. You should only be able to hold your hand about an inch over the cooking grate for a second before pulling it away. Put the burgers on – they should sizzle immediately – and cook without turning or pressing or messing with them in any way until they have grill marks and well browned edges on one side, 4 to 6 minutes. Flip them over and cook until grill marked on the other side and cooked to your liking. For me it’s another 5 minutes or so. Remember, these burgers are designed to be delicious even though fully cooked, but if you want to keep things less than fully cooked please, I beg of you, please grind your own meat or make sure you know where and when it was ground. Actually, no matter what please look into that last item. Commercial ground beef can be some vile stuff.

Serve on a bun, with the condiments and fixings you like. A good burger, in my opinion, can be kept very simple and, as you can see, that’s how I eat mine. You and your burger? That’s your business.

I was craving some chiles rellenos. Then I read this lovely post at Rachel Eats about walnuts, and her walnut pesto looked so yummy that the neurons started firing. Then I remembered that there is a traditional chile rellenos dish that uses a walnut cream sauce. After a bit of research I realized I did not want to make that dish, at least not any vaguely authentic version of it. I don’t much care for peaches in my meat.

So I MacGyvered my own version. They were fabulous and I will never make them again, at least not until someone tells me a trick for skinning walnuts that actually works (um, that baking soda thing? sure, it loosened the skins, but it turned the nuts dark and the skins weren’t all that much easier to deal with). I ended up picking the skin out of all those grooves like a crazy person. My self-diagnosed OCD doesn’t need that kind of aggravation.

Chiles rellenos in walnut cream sauce

1 1/2 cups walnut halves

1 cup cream

1/2 cup milk

1 teaspoon salt, plus more to taste

12 large mild green chiles

1 tablespoon vegetable oil or lard

1 onion, chopped

3 cloves garlic, minced

3/4 pound ground beef

1/4 cup currants or chopped raisins

1/4 cup pitted black olives, minced

1/2 cup sliced almonds

Pomegranate seeds or chopped red onion for garnish

Put walnuts in a medium bowl and cover with boiling water and let sit a few minutes. Drain. Return walnuts to the bowl and cover with boiling water, again letting it sit for a few minutes. Drain walnuts and spread on a kitchen towel. Settle in with a long radio program or a good chat and pick off the skins from the walnuts.

Put the skinned walnuts in a medium bowl and cover them with the cream. Let soak for a few hours or overnight (chill). Whirl in a blender with milk and 1 teaspoon salt. Set aside.

Roast and peel chiles (if this process is new to you check out this guide). Once cool, make a slit along the side of each chile and pull out and discard the seeds. Set chiles aside.

In a frying pan over medium-high, heat oil or lard and add onion. Cook, stirring, until soft, about 3 minutes. Add garlic and cook, stirring, another minute.

Add beef and cook, stirring and breaking up the meat as you go, until well browned and cooked through. Add currants and olives. Cover, reduce heat to a maintain a simmer and cook about 5 minutes. Drain off any excess fat and stir in almonds. Add salt to taste.

Heat oven to 350. Let stuffing sit until cool enough to handle. Stuff each chile with the beef mixture. Lay chiles in a baking pan, cover loosely with foil, and bake until hot through, about 20 minutes.

Meanwhile, put walnut cream in a small saucepan and warm over medium low heat.

Serve chiles napped with walnut cream sauce and garnish with pomegranate seeds (traditional and would be amazing, but we had none) or the sad-sack but very tasty purple of the chopped red onion.

You will likely have extra walnut cream sauce. It is delicious spread on toast or tossed with a small bowl of pasta for lunch.

Anyone else remember all that green chile I ate last spring in New Mexico and West Texas? I imagine the memory is less compelling, less sweet for someone who just read about it instead of digesting it.  Still, perhaps you remember all that talk about how I was going to figure out how to make it?  I used all of my stew-making knowledge and sha-zam: delicious green chile stew.

I was cooking for two families, and children besides my own relatively omnivorous son were involved, so I kept the whole thing on the mild side. To punch it up I served the stew with a serrano-jalapeno-red onion relish for the grown-ups to dabble on top of the stew. It’s a relish that I would happily swathe on pretty much anything (2 jalapenos, 1 serrano, 1 small red onion – all very finely minced – with about a teaspoon of lemon juice and salt to taste). A few warm corn tortillas (for the grown-ups to eat with their stew and for the children to make masks out of with strategic hole-biting) rounded out the delicious, soul- and gut-warming creation.

Feel free to add  few hotter chiles to the stew for an all-in-one spice fest.

Green chile stew

12 large mild green chiles, such as Hatch chiles

1 large onion

2 Tablespoons lard or vegetable oil

1 1/2 teaspoons salt, plus more to taste (if you’re using commercial broth, reduce this amount to about 1/2 teaspoon)

2 lbs. well-trimmed pork butt or shoulder cut into bite-size pieces

2 Tablespoons flour

1 cup beer or broth or water

2 cups broth or water

First things first, you need to roast and peel those chiles. You can roast the chiles over a gas burner or under a broiler. Then put the chiles in a bowl and cover with a pot lid or foil. Let them sit and steam and cool down a bit for at least 15 minutes. Scrape off and remove peels, pull off stems, remove seeds, and chop. Set chiles aside.

Then peel and thinly slice the onion. Heat lard or oil in a large, heavy pot. Add onions,  chiles, and salt and cook, stirring when you think of it, until soft, about 3 minutes. Transfer the vegetables to a bowl, leaving as much fat in the pot as possible.

Brown the pork, working in batches just large enough to be in the pot in a single layer of pieces that don’t touch. This step adds extra flavor and helps melt some of the fat off the meat.

Once you’ve browned all the pork and have transfered it out of the pot, sprinkle the remaining fat/oil in the pot with the flour. Cook, stirring, until flour smells cooked, about 3 minutes. Add beer, broth or water and scrape up any brown bits on the bottom of the pot. The mixture should thicken up fairly quickly. Add the 2 cups of broth or water and return vegetables and pork to the pot. Everything should be covered by liquid, add more broth or water if necessary.

Bring mixture to a boil, then reduce to simmer and cook, covered until pork is extremely tender, about an hour. Alternatively, you can put the whole covered pot in a 350 oven and bake for about an hour.

Remove lid and simmer to reduce and thicken liquid, if you like. Add more salt to taste, if you like.

You can cool the stew and remove the fat that will congeal on top, but that would be very silly of you because that fat is just amazingly delicious.

You know how sometimes you dread something and then you have a good time doing it but by the time everything is said and done you remember why you were dreading it in the first place? That, in a nutshell, was my Sunday.

I’ve never liked Sundays. I know my mother and brother have the same weird, unsettled, vaguely unhappy sense on Sundays. I only recently realized why. This summer the whole family came up to the family cabin in Northern Minnesota for a long weekend. Within two hours of everyone being there my brother and I started lamenting how quickly the weekend would go.

“Typical Watson behavior,” my sister-in-law laughed, “always dreading the end in the middle.”

I’m glad she can laugh at it. But it seems pretty entrenched and it does mean that we start mourning the weekend when there is still a full half of it left to enjoy.

So there I am, not liking Sundays anyway, dreading the end to my weekend – at the end of which my bosom buddy from graduate school would head home to Seattle from her weekend visit, making its passing all the more un-fun – driving to Sacramento in 100-degree heat. I know. It sounds like a bad idea, doesn’t it? Well, we needed to see a baby. A brand new baby who, despite our pleas to her mother years ago, lives in Sacramento. It’s difficult not to dread a drive to Sacramento. It’s 1 1/2 to 2 hours from my house and it’s not a particularly pretty drive (by my spoiled California standards, anyway), what with the strip malls and car dealerships that dot the highway’s sides. It’s not a space-out, zen-with-the-road kind of drive either. It’s crowded and you need to be on the ball the whole way and at any moment horrible, mind-numbing, anger-inducing, insane-making traffic could appear out of what appears to be nowhere (sorry, Fairfield, but that is how I think of you). Oh, and some part of my car had been hanging down and hitting the road making a horrible noise, so I was also worried that the whole thing will fall apart at any minute despite assurance that it wouldn’t because a friend’s husband had kindly duct-taped it (!) to hold for the day.

Did I mention it was hot? Like 100 degrees? Maybe over? The kind of hot that car air-conditioning can’t really handle? Did I mention that part?

But we did want to meet this baby. So away we went with Ernest in the backseat because the baby has a big sister who is a terrible amount of fun.

Just as we crossed the Carquinez Bridge – just at that moment when we were too far to turn back in any reasonable way – my friend realized she forgot the presents she bought for the girls and I, in turn, realized I forgot the carne adovada I made the newly expanded family. We made our way there, fortified with cool beverages and the knowledge that our company really was more welcome than our offerings of toys and food, and had a lovely time. Then we drove home. It could have been worse. There could have been more traffic. It could have been hotter. Ernest could have spilled even more juice all over himself and the backseat.

The upside, of course, is that – after the temperature dropped yesterday and San Francisco’s famously chilling westerly winds picked up – we got to have carne adovada last night. I first had this when my pal, Amy Traverso, made it when we both worked at Sunset. Then on our New Mexico-West Texas road trip last spring I had it for breakfast a few times, because diners in New Mexico tend to have it on their breakfast menus and who am I to argue with local tradition?

Stew pork, ground dried new mexico chile, onion… that’s pretty much it.

Carne Adovada

Note: Don’t let the full cup of ground red chile powder freak you out – New Mexican red chiles are relatively mild. Delicious dried ground New Mexican red chile powder is available at Chimayo To Go.

1 Tablespoon vegetable oil
3 pounds pork butt or shoulder, well-trimmed of fat and cut into 1-inch pieces
2 onions, chopped
6 cloves garlic, chopped
1 teaspoon salt
1 Tablespoon flour or masa harisa
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground pepper
1 cup (8 ounces) ground dried New Mexican red chile powder
6 cups water or broth

Preheat oven to 350°. In a large pot over medium heat, add oil. When hot, add pork pieces to brown (add only enough so the pieces are in a single layer and don’t touch each other; you will need to do this in batches). Pork should sizzle the minute it touches the pot; if it doesn’t, remove it and wait for the pot to heat up. Cook, undisturbed, until well-browned on one side, about 3 minutes. Turn and brown on all sides. Transfer pork to a large bowl or plate and repeat with remaining batches.
When all pork is browned and set aside, add onions, garlic, and salt to pot. Cook, stirring, until soft, about 3 minutes. Sprinkle with flour and pepper and cook, stirring, until flour smells like pie crust, about 3 minutes.
Add ground chile and stir to combine. Add 4 cups water and bring to a boil.
In a blender, whirl chile mixture until smooth. Return to pot and add another 1 cup water and reserved pork. Bring to a boil, cover, and bake 1 hour. Stir, add additional 1 cup water if stew seems dry, and bake until pork falls apart with a fork and sauce is thick, about another hour. Serve hot or at least warm.

I’ve now had green chile at every meal for two days straight. I’ve had it on a chile relleno (doubling up my green chile intake since it was a stuffed green chile covered with green chile) with eggs for breakfast at the just-as-good-as-promised Cafe Pasqual’s, cooked into whole grain flatbread from the Santa Fe farmers market, on another two chile rellenos at Tomasita’s, over huevos rancheros at Tesuque Village Market, and in a bowl and also drizzled into tacos at The Adobe Bar. I also used it as an answer as my dashing husband, my boisterous son, and I played 20 Questions while while hiking through beautiful, painfully arid Northern New Mexico mountains.

I’ve returned from the Oaxacan Coast. My, is it lovely there. Hot and lovely. After this cold cold winter and so far freezing spring, the hot sun and warm ocean felt mighty good.

You know what was just as good? I ate chilaquiles every morning. Every morning. I ate tortilla chips cooked in chile sauce for breakfast every morning. Saying it now, it sounds sort of wrong. It did not, however, seem at all wrong at the time. I have a theory: Even bad chilaquiles are good. I’ve proved it true in the past. I was happily unable to prove it true again; all the chilaquiles I had were delicious. Some had the green chile and tomatillo sauce:

Some had two sauces and came with a black bean filled pastry bull with dried chile horns:

Some were ordered, some were glopped out of a hotel breakfast buffet, some were purchased at an airport lunch counter. What they all had in common was a generous drizzle of crema (slightly thin and ever-so-drizzle-able Mexican sour cream), some grated salty Oaxacan cheese, and plenty of thinly sliced raw onions on top. Duly noted.

A good chile relleno is hard to beat: crispy coating with a soft interior, the mildly spicy chile filled with unctuous melted cheese, a sauce tart with tomato with just a bit of kick. Of course, most chiles rellenos you order don’t quite measure up to the ideal form. Greasy, bland, and heavy are some unfortunate adjectives that come to mind.

One night in January last I was confronted with the decision between the traditional chiles rellenos and some chiles rellenos “frescas” which were stuffed with “Yucatecan beef” and topped with a “creamy tomato sauce.” I asked the server if the sauce was spicy. He said no. So I ordered one of each -the traditional and this “fresca” business – had he said yes I would have just gone ahead with the “frescas” in the spirit of adventure and not being afraid of a bad meal. But not spicy at all? I figured I’d try it in the spirit of professional curiosity, but I was prepared to be disappointed.

The “fresca” version was a hit – in my mouth and at the table. Such a hit that we all went back the very next night so we could eat them again. I vowed to my dining companions – my parents and their best friends – that I would figure out how to recreate these chiles. And, by the way, the server lied. The sauce was spicy. It wasn’t super spicy or painfully hot, but there were chiles in it of some sort lending a hand towards deliciousness.

I’ve come close. I used ground beef instead of chopped because, seriously, who among us wants to spend the afternoon chopping beef? Not I, and if I don’t want to do it I figure there are few others who do.

Be warned: the sauce is so good you will want to sop it up with something or just spoon it directly into your pie-hole. I’m thinking it would be completely and totally awesome on some huevos rancheros. It is also crazy easy to make – 20 minutes, tops.

So last night we had baked chiles rellenos in spicy creamy tomato sauce, with some beans and an escarole salad. Guess what I did with my salad? Yep, I poured some of the sauce all over it.