The Dinner Files

Luscious. Silky. Salty. Fishy. Yum.

This gravlax was all of these lovely things. It was also cured in the trunk of my car. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

It started, as all salmon do, as an egg (yum, salmon roe!) in a creek or riverbed in a tributary that drains into the Copper River in Alaska. It grew and swam (and was swept) downstream into the cold, rich waters of the Pacific Ocean. The cold water made it develop a lot of fat, tasty fat that doesn’t congeal in the cold and thus is healthful and all things good for us humans to eat. It ate lots of stuff – crustaceans, squids, jellies, and other things that eat lots of marine plants and even smaller things that eat more marine plants. You know those omega 3 essential fatty acids health people are always going on about? They are mainly found in marine plants. So when things eat those plants and then other things – like salmon – eat them, the omega 3s build up in a most pleasing and beneficial way. Yet, like magic, this salmon remained low in mercury – they eat fairly low on the food chain compared to, say, swordfish or sharks, and they also simply don’t live that long enough (about 3 to 5 years) to build up mercury the way longer-loved fish do. Nice work, salmon.

This particular fish then had the great misfortune (or is that supreme honor?) to end up in Bill Weber’s gillnet last September (it was on its way to spawn – and die– in the same river where it was an egg). If I know Bill, and I don’t know him well but I have met him and heard him speak at length about how he handles his fish, this salmon was hand-picked off the net, bled (which drastically slows down decomposition), and immediately put on ice. Bill has all kinds of special and advanced methods because, at heart, the man is an inventor of things, an improver of ways.

There are people who will say – and they are probably right – that the wild salmon population is not doing so well and that, really, we probably shouldn’t be eating any of these creatures. We should let them all spawn and reproduce as much as possible. Fishermen and the communities they support, of course, have many arguments against this stance. I’ve decided that if there are only so many salmon left and other people are eating them, I want my share. I don’t eat it very often and when I do I buy it from fishermen I know are fishing responsibly and with great care so the fish I get is as awesome as possible.

And I did. Behold! A thing of great beauty!

It was then packed and shipped to SFO where my editor and pal Bruce Cole picked it up and brought it to his garage. I arrived, fillet knife in hand, and – visualizing but in no way imitating the clean, swift lines of the professionals I witnessed in Cordova – filleted this lovely creature while Bruce laughed at my lack of upper body strength (it’s a BIG fish!). I then took full advantage of my excellent fine motor skills, superlative manual dexterity, and expensive professional tweezers to pull out the pin bones one by one:

I then lugged it home in a trash bag with a few of its equally mangled brethren and one to fillet at home (so I could photoshoot it for you! see above!), packed it up very carefully, and put it in the deep freezer.

The Sunday before Christmas, I pulled this salmon out (yes, the whole salmon, both sides) and let it thaw. I did this because there is Norwegian in me and every Christmas (usually on the Eve) we have gravlax. It is what we do.

On Tuesday I rinsed the salmon, patted it dry, lay the two halves on a very clean counter skin-side-down, and sprinkled each half with 2 tablespoons of horseradish-infused vodka (usually I’d use aquavit, but we were out – yes, we usually have it in the freezer and yes, we ran out; what can I say, it was a trying fall). I then sprinkled each half with about a third of a mixture made of 1/3 cup fine sea salt, 1/3 cup sugar, and 2 tablespoons freshly ground black pepper. A person could add dill to this mixture – about ¼ cup chopped – if they were so inclined and I would be so inclined except that my dashing husband really doesn’t like dill and really, really, really loves gravlax and Christmas is, despite how some people may choose to proceed, not a time to torture loved ones.

I put one half of the salmon skin-down in a large baking dish and laid the other half skin-up on top of it so the flesh more or less matched up. I covered it with foil and plastic wrap, weighed it down with a cutting board that fit inside the dish, put it in the fridge and laid a few wine bottles on top to weigh it down further.

On that Wednesday morning I woke up at the ass crack of dawn. I took the salmon out of its dish, patted it dry, and transferred it to a small baking sheet I had sprinkled with half of the remaining salt-sugar mixture (leaving the two sides cleaving to one another the whole time but flipping it so the fillet on the bottom was now on the top) and sprinkled the top of the salmon with the rest of the sugar-salt. I then wrapped this whole thing in foil and plastic wrap and transferred it to its new home – a small $1.99 Ikea cooler lined with a kitchen garbage bag with several ice packs at the bottom. I then worked a small cutting board (that fit into the cooler) on to of the wrapped fish, put the various bottles of champagne we were bringing to Christmas on top to weigh it down, added more ice packs to top the whole thing off, tied the garbage bag shut, and zipped the cooler closed.

We put the cooler – FACING UP AT ALL TIMES FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY DON’T MOVE THE COOLER! – in the trunk of my Honda Civic with scads and scads of presents (our luggage had to go in the backseat), filled our travel mugs with coffee, and carried a very sleepy son to the backseat where I’d made a nest with his favorite quilt, a pillow, and all our luggage. We hit highway 101 before the sun rose and drove north for two days (with plenty of stops to hike in redwoods, eat seafood, and buy one hell of a fabulous late-60s dress at a junk shop) until we got to Manzanita, Oregon.

On Thursday evening, I ransacked the cupboards of my friend’s mother’s beach house for a baking dish, unpacked the fish, flipped it again while transferring it to its new home, re-jiggered the fridge and found place for both fish and champagne. Then I said hello to the various lovely people with whom we were to pass our holiday.

Christmas morning, after Santa’s good will had been fully investigated, we got out the fish.

My dashing husband carved it and we put it – with or without cream cheese and red onion and capers as individual tastes dictated – on rye crackers, baguette, pumpernickel, and/or lefse.

We ate, we drank coffee, and before we knew it, our work was done.

I hope you all had holidays that were just as delicious and lovely and extended as mine were. It’s good to be back.

Two things conspired to make me feel oh-so-nostalgic this past week. First, my best friend from high school called from Minneapolis to tell me that my brother was in the local paper. This did not surprise me. He is not regularly in the paper or anything, but he has the kind of job that one can imagine he might end up in the paper every now and again. No, she said. Third-grade Dave.

Our third grade teacher was looking for former students and the Star Tribune ran a story about her search that included (in the print edition only) a picture of my little brother – young enough so he still had his angelic blond curls (in the way of younger brothers he drove me crazy, sure, but he looked like an angel doing it) – and his best grade school buddy with our universally adored third grade teacher.

Of course this made me think of our neighborhood school and its mostly excellent teachers and walking on our own without adult supervision to and from school about half a mile everyday (well, the moms walked us on the first day of kindergarten, but after that they figured we had enough sense – and neighborhood kids  – to find our way back again). And yes, sometimes this walking took place through truly tremendous amounts of snow (check the snow records for the 70s – those snow levels were high!). And, as my neighbor friend pointed out when we reunited this summer, we had to go over a hill so it really was uphill both ways.

Then this weekend my little family of three snuggled into bed and watched Charlie Brown Christmas and I was back at St. Joan of Arc church in South Minneapolis during Christmas Eve mass or in our living room watching the same cartoon with my brother or walking home from a friend’s house in the dark of a December late afternoon looking into our neighbors’ windows to see their trees. In my mind’s eye, of course, there is a picturesque dusting of snow falling and it is so quiet that the snow crunches loudly beneath my snowboot-clad feet.

People not from there don’t tend to understand how a person can miss snow and cold, but this time of year – as the fog and drizzle of rain more or less set in here in San Francisco – I do. I have no doubt trying to bundle a kid up for months on end would make me nuts, and I’m happy to skip the endless rounds of cold and flu that circulate in the heated indoor air. I certainly don’t miss the toxic gray slush that forms in the streets or that dreary tail-end of the never-ending winter known as March and even April in Minnesota. But I do miss the way the sharp cold air can reach down into your lungs to check to see if you’re really breathing and mostly I crave the peaceful calm that descends on a household when everyone is home and safe and the snow starts coming down.

Charlie Brown Christmas captures so much of this. The kids skating endlessly, catching snow on their tongues, walking here and there as independent as can be – all really speaks to my own childhood (Charles Schultz was, after all, from St. Paul). And when Linus explains the true meaning of Christmas, that sounds about right, too. I was raised Catholic, but a 70s-style progressive Catholic. My mom wasn’t so into the whole “sin” thing and I remember a very intense debriefing after a Sunday school teacher had gone on and on about hell. Sure, Jesus was the son of god, that was always around and about, but what was played up to me was that he had some good ideas about how to be loving and kind to other people. Christmas was about “peace on earth and goodwill towards man,” just as Linus explains, it wasn’t a birthday party.

I’m going to spend the next few weeks creating a little peace on earth and goodwill towards man in my own world. I’ll be spending time with family and friends and seeing that my son enjoys that wonder of wonders – winter break when you’re seven – as much as possible. Then I’m taking off for a week without work or family on this thing called a vacation. I’m thinking that is going to be a fairly awesome way to usher in 2011.

See you back here in January. Check over at Local Foods this week, though – I’ll be posting the Christmas cookie recipes I worked on Sunday with the help of Very Cheery Cousin Katie. It was a bone-tiring day in the kitchen. That may be, however because we cooked up a few New Years cocktails, too.

Walnut buckwheat tea cakes

Swedish tea cakes were my favorite Christmas cookie (other than the rosettes my grandpa used to fry up) as a kid. Then I learned they were also Russian tea cakes and Mexican wedding cookies and Snowballs – everyone, it seems, would like to claim these as their own. I made these with walnuts, but pecans or hazelnuts (roasted and peeled), work, too. I used buckwheat flour because it has such a sandy texture when you bake with it, which is exactly what you want in these cookies. Plus, it gives the interior a cool dark color that contrasts so nicely with the snowy white powdered sugar on the outside. Use regular flour instead, if you like.

1 1/4 cup walnuts

3/4 cup butter

1 1/3 cups powdered sugar (confectioner’s sugar), divided

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 cup buckwheat flour

1 cup all purpose flour

Preheat oven to 300. Pulse walnuts in a food processor until finely minced. Transfer to a large bowl. Put butter and 1/3 cup of the powdered sugar in the food processor and whirl, stopping and scraping down as necessary, until butter and sugar are combined. Add vanilla and salt and whirl to combine. Add flours and pulse to combine. Turn the dough into the bowl with the walnuts and stir (or knead with your hands) to combine thoroughly.

Roll dough into bite-size (or two-bite-size) balls and place on a baking sheet about an inch apart. Bake until set, about 10 minutes. Let cool a few minutes and gently roll each cookie in the remaining powdered sugar. Set on a rack and let cool completely. Then gently toss each cookie in the powdered sugar a second time. It’s like painting a room – two thin coats are infinitely better than one thick one, which gets gloppy and doesn’t cover as well:

One thing about being a grown-up: it can be tricky to make new friends. Sure, I meet people that seem like I’d like to be friends with them, but finding the time to become friends is tough. Then there is staying in touch with old friends. People you’d love to talk to everyday. People who make you smile and feel good about the world and the way you go through it. People you truly love but to whom you only speak or see occasionally because everyone has not just jobs but careers and not just families but small children. Some days I feel very forlorn that so many people I love live far away and in any case we’re all so busy as evidenced by how infrequently I see dear friends who live within an hour (hey, even a five minute walk is too much to navigate much of the time!) of my house; on better days I feel extraordinarily lucky that I have so many people to miss.

On top of all this is the difficulty of finding couples with whom one can, if one is in a couple, be friends with as couples. My dashing husband and I definitely have an ample shared section of the Venn diagram of people we like. And yet… so many factors have to come together for it all to work.  The least of which may be the extent to which couples come in the very oddest combinations sometimes.

So when on Sunday night we had dinner at a couple friends’ house and were served scrumptious roast chicken and mushroom risotto and all the adults had a bit more wine than perhaps they should have while the children entertained themselves in other parts of the house, I was very happy I had spent the afternoon baking them a pie. It is a sad cliché, but it is true (and the reason why I have never ever wanted to work in or run a restaurant) that when I cook for you I am saying “I love you,” or at the very least I am saying “I think you are a lovely/funny/interesting person, I hope you enjoy this pie.”

Wait a second, you ask, back up. Why would it take all afternoon to bake a pie? Well, I didn’t get started until 2 because my son and I had spent the earlier part of the day with my Very Tall Cousin Sam being thwarted at every turn: it rained at the flea market and instead of leaving with a coffee table and a dining table and nightstands and a few chairs and a desk and vintage Christmas ornaments and “toys” we left with a coffee table and not one single other thing except a now-broken once-favorite umbrella, the Pixar show at the Oakland Museum was sold out, the tofu place wasn’t open.

So around 2 I donned my apron and started in on the walnut pie I had in my mind’s eye. The first walnut-laced crust was a disaster. It melted into a puddle of an overly buttery cake-like-but-not-delicious thing in the middle of the pie pan.

So I made a regular crust and what was essentially my world-famous pecan pie with walnuts and maple syrup in lieu of pecans and corn syrup. It wasn’t the pie I imagined but it was, by all accounts, fabulous. Best crust I have ever made. Ultra-flaky. I finally tried that trick where you use vodka instead of water. There simply isn’t as much water in 2 tablespoons of vodka as there is in 2 tablespoons of water, so there is less water to develop the gluten in the flour and take away from the flaky-tender potential inherent in flour and butter. The dough, however, is tender and delicate too, so it requires a kind hand when rolling out and getting into the pie pan.

May I suggest bringing it to people who make you smile?

Walnut pie

This is basically my pecan pie recipe. I love pecan pie but find most of them cloying. The bitterness of the walnuts tame the already not-too-sweet nature of this particular version. Plus I used maple syrup in place of the corn syrup, but I think we’ve established that I’m a bit maple-crazy these days.

2 1/2 cup walnuts

1 9-inch pie crust (buy one or make one – I used this pie crust recipe but left out the sugar and used vodka instead of water)

1/2 cup butter

1/2 cup maple syrup

1/2 cup packed brown sugar (dark or light, either works)

1/4 cup heavy cream

1/4 teaspoon salt

2 tablespoons whiskey of whatever sort – including bourbon – you prefer (optional but very tasty)

Preheat oven to 350F.

Lay walnuts on a baking sheet and bake until toasted, 5 to 10 minutes. Watch them very carefully. Walnuts go from toasted to burnt in a snap and this is a lot of walnuts. Let them cool. (Alternatively, you can toast them in a large frying pan over medium-high heat watching constantly and stirring frequently for 5 to 10 minutes.)

Roll crust and place it in a pie pan. Oil or butter the shiny side of a piece of foil and place it, oiled side down, on the pie crust. Fill with pie weights or dry beans. Bake 15 minutes. Carefully remove the foil and bake another 5 minutes. Let cool a bit.

While pie crust bakes, melt the butter in a medium saucepan. Add the syrup, sugar, cream, and salt. Stir until the sugar completely dissolves. Take off the heat and let cool to at least a warm room temperature. Stir in cooled off walnuts. Pour into partially-baked pie crust, place pie pan on a baking sheet (to save your oven in case it bubbles over), and bake until the entire filling is bubbling vigorously – and that includes the very middle of the pie, about 40 minutes. Let cool until set (see above) before serving.

Be warned that this pie has some body to it. It’s basically caramel-coated nuts in a crust. It is not for the weak of jaw or the newly crowned teeth. If you want that gooey, soft style nut pie there are many recipe out there that use a lot more cream and a fair amount of corn syrup and even eggs. Those are not the nut pies for me. This one is good on its own and sheer perfection with whipped or ice cream.

Yeah, I still have walnuts about. Five pounds is a lot of walnuts!

I’ve tried making winter pestos in the past – and I’ve tried them with walnuts. I’ve never been thrilled with the results. I realize not the error of my ways, though. I kept turning to arugula as my green, as my winter “basil.” I kept things a bit more simple and used flat-leaf parsley instead.

Score.

It will be delicious for the coming winter months – and its simplicity can serve as a perfect tonic to the insanity of the Thanksgiving feast you may have enjoyed.

Parsley walnut pesto

Parsley stays nice and green, no there is no need to blanch it.  Toss it with hot pasta or just smear it onto toast. It keeps well in the fridge for a few days and in the freezer for, I’m guessing, several months without trouble. If you plan to freeze it, I’d hold off on adding the cheese until you’re ready to use it.

1 1/2 cups walnuts

2 – 3 cloves garlic

Leaves from 2 bunches flat-leaf parsley

1/2 cup walnut oil

1 – 2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice or cider vinegar

1/2 cup freshly grated aged pecorino cheese, plus more for serving

Salt to taste

In a large frying pan over medium high heat, toast walnuts, shaking the pan frequently until walnuts start to smell toasty good and take on a bit of color, 3 to 5 minutes. Take care not to let them darken too much in the pan – they will continue to toast up when you take them off the heat. Transfer to a plate or cutting board and let cool.

In a food processor or blender, pulse garlic until minced – scraping the sides down as needed. Add parsley leaves and pulse until reduced a bit. Add oil and lemon juice and whirl until fairly smooth.

Add walnuts and pulse until as smooth as you like (I prefer to have some chunks of walnut in there). Add cheese and pulse to combine. Taste and add salt as you like.

I never would have come up with this recipe if 1) some lovely walnut folks hadn’t sent me five pounds of fresh walnuts in the mail and 2) I hadn’t just gotten back from Quebec City.

I had walnuts to use and maple on the brain.

Walnut cake

While not health food, there isn’t much refined nonsense in this cake. It is part very moist nut torta and part cake-like date sticky pudding. Top is with whatever you want – ice cream, whipped cream, or, if you serve the cake warm, hard sauce or even maple hard sauce (see below). It would be a lovely change from all that Thanksgiving pie, you know?

1 1/2 cups walnuts

1 1/2 cup whole wheat pastry flour

3/4 teaspoon baking soda

1/4 teaspoon salt

12 pitted fresh dates

1 egg

3/4 cup pure maple syrup

1/2 cup walnut oil

1 tablespoon cider vinegar

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Preheat oven to 325. Spray a 10-inch cake pan (spring form is nice here) with oil, line the bottom with parchment paper, and spray the paper with oil.  You can also rub the pan/paper with oil if you don’t like the spray stuff.

Spread walnuts in a single layer on a baking sheet. Roast in the oven until just starting to color, about 10 minutes but watch them carefully and take them out early rather than risk burning them. Seriously, walnuts will burn while you take a moment to blink your eyes. Let walnuts cool before going to the next step.

In a food processor, pulse the flour, walnuts, baking soda, and salt until walnuts are fairly well pulverized. Transfer to a large bowl.

Pulse dates, egg, maple syrup, walnut oil, vinegar, and vanilla in the food processor until dates are chopped. Whirl until the mixture is puréed. Pour into flour mixture and stir to just combine. Pour batter into prepared pan and bake until a knife inserted in the center comes out almost clean – a few bits clinging to it are fine.

Let cake sit at least 10 minutes before you take it out of the pan. Serve warm or at room temperature.

Maple hard sauce

Cream 1/2 cup butter and 1 1/4 cup powdered sugar until light and fluffy. Add 1/4 cup maple syrup and 2 – 3 tablespoons whiskey or brandy. The addition of the liquid will make the lovely fluffiness you’ve made fall apart and separate and look a bit nasty. Keep beating it, it will all come together again, more or less. You can leave the maple syrup out for plain hard sauce (add another 1/4 cup sugar), or the whiskey/brandy out for just some maple-tinged yumminess that would also be good on a warm cake or, really, pretty much anything.

First you roast squash, then you mash it in a bowl, then you add salt to taste, then you melt some butter, then you add some warm spices (I used my homemade garam masala), then you pour the spiced butter on the squash, then you sprinkle on some extra fleur de del or other sea salt:

Then you dig in and reveal the layers:

It’s a gentle twist on classic mashed squash. Perhaps even gentle enough for your stick-in-the-mud family that insists on the same Thanksgiving menu every year. Or, perhaps your crew likes to play with the side dishes. In any case, I suggest giving this easy yumminess a whirl.

For a more complete recipe, check out Spiced Butter Squash.

She has been notified, the lucky lady, and the Sunset Cookbook will make its way to her “tiny kitchen” that “is already bursting at the seams.”

I know you’re going to ask: I got the hat in Paris many moons ago and I wear every and all summer long. Someday I would like to take a millinery class and figure out how to make and block a new one (it seems to just be ribbon sewn together in a very particular way). When I do I will make scads of them and sell them here. It really is a fabulous hat. You can form the brim to hang low or rise up to show your pretty face. You can squish it into a suitcase and it emerges happy as can be. It works well for drawings, too.

I’m really settling into my forties. I forget things like nobody’s business. It used to be a steel trap up there and – poof! ­ – seemingly overnight, if I don’t write it down, it ain’t gonna happen.

I know I should have poured this homemade coffee liqueur into pretty wee glasses and set them on a tray with a pretty cloth on the side and taken a picture. But I forgot to do it – never even added it to my to-do list – and now I’m traveling and away from home while posting this. So please, imagine that instead of the giant jug of dark brown tar above there is a lovely little shot of some small stemmed liqueur glasses with silver rims (I even have them, that’s the real killer – I could have taken the shot, it wasn’t all fantasy!) on a white ceramic tray. Hell, since I don’t have to actually do it, let’s throw some flowers in there too, shall we? Perhaps a teeny plate of broken chocolate pieces would be good. Isn’t that nice?

For years now I’ve made a “cranberry cordial” every holiday season to give as gifts and serve at parties (a bit of the cranberry cordial in a glass makes cheap champagne completely fabulous!). This year I decided to mix it up. Coffee liqueur. I had read about it. I had thought about it. I had a few extra high-quality vanilla beans lying around the house. I got to work.

I scraped the seeds from the vanilla pods, dissolved the espresso into the vodka, added a crazy amount of sugar, sealed the whole thing in a jar, and taped it shut with a note extolling passers-by not to open it until mid October. Then I hid the whole thing in the cupboard over the fridge and promptly forgot all about it.

I was up there last week and found this forgotten labor of love. I unsealed the container and took a whiff. Heavenly. Fragrant, sweet coffee with enough alcohol to let you know it would be fun.

I poured a bit in a glass and took a sip. It tasted like really very good kahlua. Of course it did. It is better than kahlua, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not a fundamentally different product. I know a few kahlua applications that I think this finer product would enhance – pouring a shot over homemade ice cream is the first thing that comes to mind. I suppose I could also make the world’s finest white Russian… although who wants to drink white Russians anymore? I had a phase there in college when I drank them almost exclusively, which now seems terribly odd. I had one a few years ago to see if they were still good and they were but only barely and I certainly couldn’t imagine drinking more than one at a go.

Tell me, what would you do with this fine coffee liqueur?

Coffee vanilla bean liqueur

Scary dark, scary sweet, and scary delicious. The curing time – at least a few weeks – is key to the final quality of this liqueur. I tasted it right upon mixing and it utterly lacked the aromatic draw of the final product. Make a batch this weekend to have it well and ready in time for Christmas gifts or entertaining.

3 cups sugar

3/4 cup instant espresso (still dried powder, not made into espresso)

2 vanilla beans

3 cups vodka

Bring sugar and 2 cups water to a boil and stir to dissolve sugar. Add coffee and reduce heat to maintain a steady simmer. Cook, stirring to fully dissolve the espresso, for about 2 minutes. Remove from heat and transfer to a large glass jar or seal-able pitcher and let sit until more or less cool. Meanwhile, split vanilla beans open and se the back of a knife or a small spoon and scoop out the teeny tiny seeds (it seems more like a paste). Add seeds and pods to the coffee syrup. Pour in vodka. Seal and put it away for four to six weeks. Remove and discard vanilla pods.

Serve chilled on its own, in coffee, or over ice cream as a dessert.

The new Sunset Cookbook arrived with a serious thud on my doorstep. All 816 pages of it.

My friend and former boss, Margo True, and all my pals in the food department at Sunset slaved for ages putting this œuvre together. Most of it was pulled from the relatively recent Sunset archive, but I know they developed plenty of new material to fill in holes (bubble teas!), too. The pictures are drool-inducing. The recipes are fresh and simple and modern and lovely. And you can take them to the bank. The recipe testing system at Sunset is intense. Mediocre dishes don’t stand a chance. So-so results will not be borne. It is a cookbook anyone could turn to for basic dishes or new inspiration.

Yet, despite what a great book it is, I am giving my copy away.

As I’ve written before, I have a whole lot of cookbooks. This book is designed to be cooked from, to be turned to for Thanksgiving sides and Monday night suppers. It deserves a home where it will be well used, not sitting here on my shelf making the other books feel puny.

If you’d like to win a copy of the Sunset Cookbook, leave a comment below. I’ll hold the drawing and announce the winner on November 15. If the winner asks nicely I’ll even flag some particular favorites with post-its before shipping it off.

p.s. At the request of a good friend (Young Scallion, I haven’t forgotten!) I’ve started assembling links to my favorites of the Sunset recipes I worked on while on staff. It’s a big, in-process project, but at least I’ve started!

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.