A haphazard chronicle of my inevitable misadventures during a year in Vietnam and points east.

p.s. I'll be pitifully grateful if you send me email during my exile: TravelerKaty@hotmail.com

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Day 7 - Part 1 - Mexican Home Cooking School
2/17/06

Without further ado, here's a summary of cooking class:

Sopa de Tortillas (tortilla soup). This is a bit of a Mexican official dish. For the most part it's a tomato soup with garlic, onions, and serrano chiles, and its final presentation is supposed to evoke the Mexician flag -- red in the soup, white sour cream and cotija cheese sprinkled on top, and green avocado slices and fresh cilantro for garnish. Crispy dried corn tortilla chips are generously mixed in. Not Doritos. Real tortilla chips. That's what actual cooks use.

Filete de Sierra en Adobo (whitefish filet in Adobo sauce). I was happy to learn that this Adobo sauce is also good on rabbit, since I do a great deal of cooking with small furry animals. Adobo sauce, a very yummy thing, has lots of chiles, garlic, oregano, cumin, etc. I have no further comment and have determined that I can never become a food writer.

Chiles Rellenos and Chiles en Nogada (stuffed chiles with walnut sauce). Both the stuffed poblano chile dishes involved the usual pain-in-the-ass chile prep of cutting and de-seeding, charring over open flame or "comal", cool and peel. I love stuffed chiles, but as Estela says this is not an everyday exercise. These dishes were also both fried with flower and egg coating, giving them a look of tempura.

The traditional chiles rellenos were the easiest -- stuff them with cheese and toothpick the sides closed, then drop the battered chiles into the hot oil (they'd love the fry-daddy down there). Pour a little home-made tomato sauce over the top and you're good to go.

The second recipe, Chiles en Nogada, was slightly more complicated, involving a stuffing mixture of pieces of fruit, raisins, almonds, garlic (as usual) and ground beef. The chile was then battered, fried, and topped by a delicious walnut (or pecan) sauce. Very very good, and not something I'd tried before.


© 2006 Katy Warren

posted by Katy at 7:32 AM