The Dinner Files

When I cooked up this green chile turkey chili I thought I was saying: “Hey, you guys all seem pretty cool and our kids get along and thanks for inviting us to your gracious mountain chalet and I hope you find this tasty after a day of skiing.” With maybe an addendum of: “I was not raised by wolves and I know how to be a good house guest.” And, perhaps, just in case I am as much like my father as I’m starting to suspect: “Oh, and I’m sorry about leading the kids down that black diamond run at the end of the day. My bad!”

What I ended up needing this chili to communicate was: “Oh my god. I want to die. I cannot believe I am so lame. I don’t know what I was thinking. I am so sorry I got my snow chains tangled onto my tires as I tried to take them off. I don’t know what I was thinking. I wasn’t. Obviously. It would be bad enough if this just delayed getting everyone home after a long day of skiing, but the fact that you needed to lie down on the slushy mud-filled parking lot to get them off for me because I was paralyzed by fear that I would be stuck there all day waiting for AAA and couldn’t think clearly…. Words can never express my embarrassment, much less my gratitude. Please, please, please, for the love of all that is great and good on this green earth, may the taste of this chili erase any memory of the incident from your mind.”

Along with trying to infuse the chili with amnesiac powers, I’m also hoping that skiing worked its mojo. I’m hoping that my hosts are like me: that at the end of a day of skiing, they are always glad to have gone.

Crazy-ass storm off the Pacific closes I-80 in the middle of the day and turns it into a parking lot well past midnight, extending a 2 hour 52 minute drive into a 6-plus hour extravaganza during which I literally slapped myself to stay awake driving on dark, icy mountain roads at 3 a.m.? Happy to have done it as soon as I click into the skis.

Even the day I messed up my knee a few years ago (all better now, thanks!). That run before the fall… that was some good snow. I am not sorry to have gone out that day. Sorry to have taken the run-out at that speed, perhaps, but not sorry to have skied.

Skiing involves a certain level of hassle. There is equipment to manage and layering decisions to make. You can take wrong paths and end up in places you didn’t expect to be and don’t think you can get out of. It can be free and easy, with turn effortlessly flowing after turn until all of the sudden you lose your rhythm and the next turn takes more effort than you think you can muster.

As I find myself telling my son when he thinks a slope is too steep or too bumpy: I know it’s hard, but you can do it.

And I suppose I could now say that these are life lessons the slopes make clear to me. I suppose I could think that I should live a bit more as I ski: take a few more risks, be a bit more in the moment, trust that the best runs come after beginnings that require very difficult moves indeed, know that the best snow is usually found where few others make the effort to tread.

I wish I could think about any of that with clarity, but I’m not in the moment. I’m not home at my computer writing this post and calming reflecting on the fun I had this weekend. No, I’m still standing next to my car, heart beating wildly as I scan the emptying parking lot for a time machine to take me back just three minutes so I can remember to unclip both sides of the chains, desperately wondering what the hell to do to solve the problem myself quickly, without fuss, and not inconvenience anyone.

But if you gave me a choice between not going skiing and thus avoiding this shame spiral or having a day of skiing and the resulting wild grasping at shoulds and coulds and woulds? I would choose the skiing-plus-shame option. Every time.

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.

Last night my mom cooked up some smoky chili.* The recipe was from Sunset and, although you can’t tell from the website because of the way copyright law works (Sunset, like many magazines, owns all rights to recipes it publishes and thus does not need to credit the author when that recipe is reprinted in special publications or when it is posted online), was written by a dear friend of mine, Juliet Glass. She doesn’t do a lot of recipe work, but that which she does is perfection itself. Her recipes are the best-tested, most thoughtful (every ingredient, every step has its place and reason), and crazy-delicious you’re likely to find. This easy chili recipe is no different: she makes basic ground-beef chili awesome by using smoked paprika, a bit of bacon, and “fire roasted” canned tomatoes.

She is such a nut that she has since further perfected the recipe (I learned in a text message when I let her know my mom was cooking up the recipe) by adding 1/8 tsp. ground cinnamon to the pot. We didn’t have cinnamon in our ski rental kitchen, but I’ll be trying that option at home.

* And, I must add, smokin’ chili. Both literally, in that we needed to open windows at one point, but that had more to do with some gunk on the stove than the chili itself (but I digress), and figuratively, in that it was, as mentioned above, crazy delicious. If you need proof beyond my say-so, check out the glowing reviews.