More ugly delicious food: chili enchiladas

So the multiuse chili in the freezer was an exceptionally good idea. We came home from NYC fairly exhausted, but of course had to run out immediately for prescriptions and perishable foodstuffs. "Perishable foodstuffs" included tortillas, cheddar cheese, and green onion, all for purposes of immediate chili enchiladas.

CHILI ENCHILADAS OH MY GOD

enough leftover chili for a pan of enchiladas (maybe 3 cups)
at least 8 tortillas
cheddar/other appropriate cheese
green onions
whatever else sounds good in your enchiladas, such as rice or beans

First, preheat the oven to 350F. Defrost/warm up leftover chili in a wide frying pan. If it's especially chunky, you may want to purée it. Ours was already puréed from before. Thin it with a little water if it's too thick, or if you don't think you'll have enough sauce for a pan of enchiladas.

While chili is defrosting, grate or thinly slice a bunch of cheese. Also chop up several green onions. Our green onions were particularly awesome and thin and tiny and fresh. Spring greens!

Get out a reasonable casserole dish; ladle several scoops of chili into it; spread everything around to cover the bottom. Make sure all of your ingredients are close at hand. Now start making enchiladas. First, put a tortilla face down into the chili pan, holding it by one edge. Leave it for a few seconds to warm and coat with sauce. Then take it out of the pan and lay it sauce side up in your hand. Fill with cheese and green onion and whatever else you want. The fillings can be kind of scanty and still produce a delicious result, so don't worry if you're running out of stuff. Then roll up the tortilla and put it into the casserole dish. Repeat until you've filled up the entire dish with totally delicious enchiladas.

You should still have a little sauce left over after this business. Pour it all over the rolled tortillas. If there is more cheese, strew it over the pan as well.

Bake for about a half hour, or until cheese is browned and everything is clearly hot through.

Eat. Go to bed. Sleep heavily. Bring the leftovers to work tomorrow.

NEW YORK

First, our flight was cancelled. Fortunately, we were still at home when we heard about this. John immediately got on the phone and got us a new flight. This meant we suddenly had an extra four hours in which to do things like loll about, find some plane snacks, and eat breakfast.

Breakfast:

I made cabbage and red pepper pancakes, essentially these. Sometime I need to make a batch of these with zucchini, red pepper, and corn. Also one with roasted tomatoes and feta and maybe some mint. Yes. They were an excellent idea for pre-plane sustenance.

Plane snacks:
- apples
- almonds and cashews
- the end of a bag of good trail mix with dried apricots.


I'm going to write about restaurants, since we ate at plenty of them, and it was kind of a bitch to find them even though we were basically living in the exact center of foodtown.

- Bread and Olive: I went here the first day, after coffee in Bryant Park and a couple hours in the that library with the lions. That one. I was actually pretty annoyed by the NYPL, since the only things accessible to humans are a couple reading rooms. No explorable stacks! You have to request all books from a librarian! It was way more a museum than a functional resource center. I made a long list of sources to find elsewhere. It was basically me tantalizing myself with the card catalog. Granted, that was pretty good, but still.

Ok. I wanted to find some decent lunch, so I went and asked a librarian about wifi access. She had no idea what I was talking about. Nice librarianship there. I had to spell it out as WIRELESS INTERNET ACCESS. Oh, there isn't any of that up here in the main gigantic reading room! I went down to periodicals, where there was any of that, and went through pages of NYC restaurant business before finding said Bread and Olive.

I felt better once I got there and ordered a falafel sandwich for $1.75 less than they cost in downtown Palo Alto. The salad selection looked pretty awesome too. The fassoulia, lima beans in some vinaigrette-looking dressing, had beans the size of a silver dollar. If I lived there, I would be all over that for lunch.

- Home on 8th: This is a Chinese place with both a meat and a vegetarian fake meat menu. We don't generally do a lot of specific fake meat (besides chik patties), just straight up beans, tempeh, and tofu. So the idea of soy in particular fake meat form was kind of foreign, yet appealing. We went for dinner. Iced green tea: exceptionally good. Cold sesame peanut noodles and ginger soup: also superlative. We could've subsisted on just those, had they not been small appetizer sizes. So good! Then we got our entrées: fried eggplant and fake squid; cashew fake chicken. They were ok. It was disappointing just because of the the completely perfect appetizers. Also it is apparently not the best idea to order fake squid if you're not especially into real squid. Lesson learned.

- Astoria Beer Garden: here in the bar we mostly had beer (Spaten), shockingly enough, but I also got a big mild plate of chicken paprikash from the Czech restaurant downstairs. It was pretty solid. Heavy sauce with soft bread and chicken was exactly what I wanted with beer. It would've been even better had I gotten dumplings. Our friend Matthew had a similarly heavy and good plate of pork and sauerkraut. Neither of us could come close to finishing.

- Angelica Kitchen: Bethany told us repeatedly that we had to go here, so we did. Their green tea, hot this time, was also very good. I just want green tea all the time. Appetizers: soba noodles again; curried cashew spread with vegetables. I only got one or two bites of the soba, which was fine, since said cashew business was giving me many, many ideas about future cashew blender experiments. Also: daikon! We need to eat more daikon. Entrées: John got a hot spicy seitan concoction in a tortilla; I got one of the specials, polenta with quinoa baked in, with chili and lots of dark greens (mustard?). It was all pretty good. Chili with dark greens is clearly an excellent plan of which I had not thought before. There was also some broccoli, which was fine but didn't go with the business as well as the greens. I actually felt like it was there just to make the name of the entrée work ("Broccoliback Mountain"), which can't be a good idea. I feel like I would be more enthusiastic had I gotten a salad, or some of the pantry combinations: clearly, fresh and often raw vegetables are what they do best.

- Pizza 33: We had to have pizza after living in California, home of zero decent pizza at all. It's been torturous to live without it for three years. So we walked in at about 10:30, ordered a cheese pizza, waited ten minutes, and took it back to the hotel. Oh my gracious me. Real pizza. Ok, I grew up in Chicago, and as such have some serious ideas about pizza. New York pizza is not MY pizza, but it was still just about perfect in the hotel room at eleven at night.


Notice the hundreds of quality pictures I took! YES.

We did cook once! It was at Bethany and Danny's house. We had total day of all exercise (bikes in the morning; stair climbing; more bikes in the evening) and were all totally starving. So John and I took over the kitchen and made swift swift garlic broccoli rabé and pasta carbonara. These are both pretty standard.

Rabé: get some rabé or other dark greens that sound good. Wash them and cut them into appropriate pieces. I left them long and just trimmed the edges. Mince a couple cloves of garlic. Heat some olive oil in a sauté pan; add garlic and soften. Add your rabé, turning to get it coated with oil. Cook until soft enough to eat. I added some rice vinegar as well, but executed it poorly such that certain bits of rabé were soaked and bitter with it but others had none. We corrected it with a little soy while eating.

All of my pictures are horrendous, so I'm just going to roll with it:
Carbonara: I seem not to have written about this for at least a year, although it's extremely common while lazy at our house. First, mince up a bunch of garlic and take your eggs out of the refrigerator. Get some olive oil warmed up in a pan big enough to hold the amount of cooked pasta you want. Soften the garlic in it. Add any herbs you want, such as oregano, basil, parsley, etc. Fill a second pot with water and bring it to a boil; add pasta when appropriate. We had cappellini. When pasta is done, drain it and tip it into the garlic pan. Add a bunch of cracked black pepper and a couple pinches of salt, and take the pan off the heat. Now, moving quickly, crack and add a raw egg for each person eating. Stir immediately and thoroughly; the egg will cook into a sticky semi-sauce business and adhere to all the pasta.

If you want cheese, carbonara likes it; on the other hand, you're already eating a sauce made of egg, so you might not need any more richness. Fresh parsley is also a good idea.

Eat it all as hot as possible.


Last: Organic Nectars raw vegan gelato.

This was kind of an accident. Well. We clearly knew we were buying it; we just didn't realize it was vegan cashew cream.

So. This stuff is definitely expensive, even in half pint. I don't care, though, because it is also so good you cannot possibly believe it. We had it with the pizza on our last night in NYC, watching who knows what on TV and generally lazing about nicely. SO GOOD. Holy everything. We had chocolate hazelnut; the other flavors were exotic combinations like ginger/green tea. It totally wants you to eat it right now.


In conclusion, I believe I am ok with the food in New York. Love, Eileen.

JUICE

So here's what I wish I'd had in hand every minute of every day for the entire duration of being in New York:

JUICE. It is hot and I want some!

Apparently Naked has come out with this new blue-capped juice series. It is clearly a rollout for summer, shall we say. This watermelon one had some serious lime and mint overtones, excellent for hot thirstings. Then the other day I had a peach mangosteen one that was so good I had a couple champagne glasses of it alone instead of in a mimosa. So.

Not to say these aren't excellent mixers, because they are. If I liked vodka at all, I would definitely be making plans for frigid vodka-juice concoctions. They would possibly involve freezing said juice into ice cubes, putting them in the blender with some vodka, and hitting the button.

You know what else they could be good for? Salad dressings. Say you were making a cucumber feta salad: watermelon wants to get in on that. Then you might boil the peach one down into a syrup and pour over ice cream, or on pound cake.

In conclusion, JUICE.


(We also cooked and ate in New York! However, my camera cord is at home, and we are not.)

Biscuit numphing

Or: how to make delicious biscuits even though you have no butter or acceptable solid substitute.

Use olive oil.
I've been using this baking powder biscuit formula ever since Clabber Girl decided to take their recipe off their cans. Apparently I'm still annoyed at that even after several years. Anyway. It works well. The biscuits are tasty. We can eat a whole double batch in one sitting.

So last saturday I was trying to figure out what to eat. I couldn't buy food, since we were flying out on monday. This is clearly the best time to bake something like biscuits: fresh, soft, delicious, small enough to eat in entirety before you get on the plane, and good for using up milk. It would also have been good for using butter, had we had any (or, uh, been at all concerned about spoilage, which is not generally true of butter).

For a minute I was put out. No biscuits!

Then it occurred to me that I did have a huge bottle of olive oil.

I didn't make any other changes to the recipe. Summary: Preheat the oven to 400F. Put a cup of white flour, a cup of wheat flour, 4 tsp baking powder and 1/2 tsp salt in a bowl. You could use any combination of flours you want, probably; I've definitely made these all wheat before. Make sure the baking powder is all actually powdery; break up clumps in the canister with the back of the measuring spoon. Mix all the dry business together gently. Then add 1/4 cup of olive oil and 3/4 cup milk. Stir it all roughly together for several strokes, until it looks like this:

Now is the time to knead. I just leave the dough in the bowl for kneading, since I am lazy and it's not like you have to make it fit a pie pan. Gather the dough chunks together and flatten with the heel of your hand, sticking the dough to whatever flour is left on the bottom of the bowl. Turn and do it again. Repeat two or three times more, until the dough sticks together and starts looking like this:

At this point you Could put the dough onto a floured board, roll it out, and cut it with biscuit cutters. I decided to tear off biscuit-sized pieces, flatten them a little, and bake them like that. I got 20 small biscuits from this amount of dough.

I was kind of concerned here about flake. All you ever hear about biscuit baking is that only cold cold butter will do!! for making flaky biscuits. However, you will notice that there is indeed a layered structure to the unbuttered dough. I don't have any pictures of this part, since I had dough all over my hands, but try it yourself. Each piece ripped in a definite grain. I tried not to shape the chunks of dough any more than I had to, in order to maintain it. Just make sure your biscuits will actually stick together, and no more.

Then put all the biscuits on a cookie sheet and bake for 12-15 minutes. Whip them out of the oven as soon as they are sufficiently golden brown.

Check out the successful layers!

Check out the tea and jam!

Eat biscuits with plenty of jam or honey or cheese. Eat them as hot as possible.

I made these totally plain for eating with anything at any time. You could make them flavored, though! Sage biscuits: add lots of chopped sage. Spicy cheesy biscuits: add grated cheese and cayenne. Spinach biscuits: add some blanched, dried, and chopped spinach. Pesto biscuits! Eat all the biscuits!

Secret roasty saucy chili

Clearly you could spend the rest of your life making all different kinds of chili. Chili chili chili.

Here is one kind:

Chili with roasty business

First, ROAST:
olive or flavorless oil w/ cayenne
a butternut squash
most of a head of garlic

Infuse the oil with cayenne: put some oil and some cayenne in a little frying pan and swirl it around over low heat. You don't want to cook them, just to warm them up together. (If you're feeling lazy, it would probably be fine not to even bother with this, and just use oil and cayenne to season the roast straight.)

Peel a butternut squash with a vegetable peeler. Cut off the top and bottom, seed with a spoon, and cut the flesh into little pieces. Throw all the bits into a pan appropriate for roasting. (You could also use other kinds of squash, or a couple sweet potatoes: all delicious.) Then tackle the garlic: smash the cloves with the flat of a knife, peel them, tear them up a bit if you think they're too big, and throw them into the pan.

Pour the infused oil (or just some oil and some cayenne) over the squash and garlic. Mix. Bake at 400F, stirring every once in a while, for about a half hour, until squash is cooked through and starting to come up with dark crispy bits.

This would be delicious just as is. I would eat it. Maybe I would put it on top of some mashed potatoes, add some chopped toasted pecans, and/or crispy sage, and have multiple textures to contend with!

Ok ok. In this circumstance we used the roasty business in chili.


CHILI:
onion, carrot and celery
olive oil/other acceptable oil
green pepper, or other colors if you feel like it
a hot pepper or two
chili powder, paprika, cumin, marjoram, salt, pepper
tomatillos
roasty squash and garlic business
tomato puree/sauce of some type
cooked black beans
cooked red beans
veg broth
water
tvp
a bay leaf
a deep pot
an afternoon.

OK!

Get out your big pot. Peel and chop an onion, a couple carrots, and a couple stalks of celery. Well, don't peel the celery, but destring it if you want. Actually, we didn't have any celery at all, but I would have used it had we had it! YES. Anyway. Dice everything up finely and throw it in the pot with some oil. Put it over medium heat and soften it all up with your first batch of spices: lots of chili powder and cumin, some paprika, and only a little marjoram. MIREPOIX.

While mirepoix is going, chop up a hot pepper or two, a green pepper, and a couple of tomatillos. Add them and soften them too. In general, subscribe to a "chop it; chuck it in" policy.

When all the vegetables are reasonably softened, it's time for liquid. Broth: add several cups, either liquid or frozen. If frozen, get some vegetables on top of the frozen chunk so it defrosts more quickly. You could also use water if you don't have any broth. Tomato stuff: add a full big can (or less if your pot isn't that big). Salt reasonably; pepper; bay leaf. At this point my pot was about half full.

Being the business to a simmer. Now add beans (with broth if you've just cooked the beans and have lots of bean broth). I used a whole pot of red beans with broth plus a half-batch chunk of frozen preboiled black beans. Also add several shakes of tvp. Also add the done roasty squash and garlic.

Add some water to get the whole business liquidy enough to cook down a while. Correct the seasonings with more chili powder and cumin, plus whatever else tastes necessary. If you want to add any cooking alcohol at this time, I suggest tequila.

Bring the business back to a simmer, lower the heat, put on the lid, and leave it for at least an hour. Leave it for more than an hour. Leave it for as long as you can stand it. When you are starving and everything smells perfect, make some toast and go for it.

I had my first bowl of chili in the traditional rustic chunky way, but John wanted to try puréeing it. So we busted out the stick blender and puréed it. The result: not exactly what my brain interprets as chili, but still very very good. Essentially, it became a super-savory deep chili-tomato sauce. So you can clearly eat it as is, with your copious toast as mentioned. I would probably make a bunch of croutons for it in the future. But! We can clearly do all kinds of things with a chili sauce business of this type:

- Use it as sauce for a pan of cheese-green onion enchiladas.
- Pour it over some hot split biscuits for biscuits and chili, with some chard or other solid greens.
- Make a corn bread, corn fritters, or a corn pudding or souffle, and use it as sauce for that.
- Or bake with chunks of cornbread and cheese into a swirly bread pudding thing.
- Mix it with a spoonful of sour cream and eat it with lots of chips or vegetables.
- Whip it into some mashed potatoes for half-soporific half-spicy late sleepy dinner.
- Make a batch of savory silver-dollar pancakes with lots of chopped greens, smear with chili, and eat.
- Make the most severe chili cheese fries and/or dog of your career.

Invite other people over to eat chili with you, or put leftovers into every piece of tupperware you own and fill up the freezer. We chose the second option. When we come home from New York in a week, there will be a freezer full of chili waiting for us.

Oh yeah, we're going to New York!

We're going RIGHT NOW.