Chilaquiles Jones

For our anniversary, my mom got me and M. a gift certificate to Frontera Grill. We went with my mom and aunt one Saturday for brunch, after buying berries and pastries at the Green City Market in Lincoln Park.

Frontera chilaquiles with guajillo sauce. And really good coffee.

I'd had chilaquiles on the brain for weeks, and when I saw it on the menu I knew I had to have it. The guajillo sauce was sharp, a little spicy, a tiny bit bitter, and all delicious. The substantial chips were made from the housemade thick tortillas, so they still had some bite despite being drowned in the delicious sauce.

After getting home, I had to make a batch of my own. I found a recipe on Epicurious, which I followed with a couple of exceptions. I used chipotle powder in place of the paprika, and I doubled it, so it cooked longer.

It was pretty easy to make. I soaked a package of guajillo chilies in hot water until they were soft, then roughly chopped jalapenos, onions, and garlic. After removing the stems and seeds from the chilies, I blended everything with drained whole tomatoes and some of the soaking liquid, and cooked  it for about 40 minutes. The heat level was still pretty low, so I added some more chipotle and cooked it a little more along with the honey.

Homemade chilaquiles

I tossed some of the sauce with store-bought tortillas and topped it with some crumbled feta (instead of queso fresco), then baked it until the chips were browned.

With some chopped sweet Texas 1015 onions, lime juice, and avocado, it was satisfying, but pretty different from Frontera's version. This one was more tomato-y and less spicy and complex. Next time, I think I'll try a mixture of dried chilies and toast them before soaking, and reduce the amount of tomato.

I'd assumed the sauce would cook down a bit, which is why I made the double batch. I ended up with four pints, which was a bit more than expected. I'll be making this again soon.

Onions: Milagro Farm

Jalapenos: Urban Roots

Garlic: Buena Tierra Farm

Green Corn Project Fundraiser

Last weekend, I had the great pleasure of attending the Green Corn Project fundraiser at Boggy Creek Farm.

The man's brother was in town, and we thought it was a great way to let him try some of Austin's food and check out the urban farm. We arrived just after the event began, right around noon. The crowd was trickling in, and it filled out over the course of the afternoon.

At $35, it was a bargain. Some of Austin's best restaurants were represented, bringing samples of their delicious food for tasting, while a silent auction raised even more money.

For me, some of the standouts were:

Parkside's pumpkin soup with coriander. So good, I went back for seconds.

Aquarelle's corainder-carrot salad: really spicy, crunchy and sweet.

Olivia's spicy deviled egg and spicy maple sweet potato. The sweet potato was just OK, kind of mildly flavored, but the egg was perfect - spicy, creamy and perfectly tender.

After gorging ourselves on more veggies and chocolate, and buying some sweet potatoes and green beans at the farm stand, we headed to the back of the house to catch a cooking demo.

Jam of Thai Fresh showed us how to make a Thai egg custard inside a kabocha squash. I've been buying kabocha the last few weeks, and just roasting them, so I'm glad to have an interesting new recipe to try. (If you want to try it, check out the recipe on Jam's blog.)

Jam, scooping a squash

The custard was delicious - delicately sweet and flavored with pandan leaves. The squash was tender, but not mushy. It was light, and really nice after all the food we'd just shoved into our faces.

Thai egg custard made with coconut milk, cooked into a kabocha.

A visit to Boggy Creek wouldn't be complete without visiting the chickens, so we popped over to check them out. They have the most gorgeous chickens, with lots of variety in size, color and seriousness of strut. Check out this character:

A beauty of a chicken

Project: Stuffed Poblanos

I've always loved stuffed peppers. My grandma's version used green bells stuffed with rice and rich tomato sauce. They were pretty tasty, but I prefer a spicier Latin-inspired poblano relleno to a standard stuffed bell pepper.

I've made chiles rellenos before, stuffing charred and peeled poblanos with cheese, then breading and frying them. They're always delicious, but after having an un-fried version at La Fonda in San Antonio, I wanted to try making them myself.

I found some gorgeous poblanos, which I charred, peeled and seeded.

Charring poblano and naked peppers

I used one to make a poblano cream sauce, and stuffed the remaining two with a mixture of quinoa, raisins, pine nuts and a veggie mixture of sweet potato, corn onion and purple cabbage.

Veggie filling with quinoa steaming away in the background

I put a little bit of the poblano cream into the bottom of a pan, and placed the stuffed poblanos in it, then covered them with more sauce and some nutty-sharp Cheddar cheese and baked them until everything was hot and melty.

Stuffed poblanos, before and after baking

We ate them with quinoa with raisins and pine nuts and black beans.

I am really happy with how well the poblanos turned out. The texture was fantastic, still a little firm, and I think I prefer this non-fried version to the battered one. It's much lighter, and the flavor of the poblano comes through a lot better. Plus, it's not fried, so you get to save a little on fat and calories.

I think that, with fall coming, I'm going to make these again and experiment with fillings. Maybe butternut squash and black beans?

The poblano cream sauce was delicious, and really easy, too. It's kind of based on a Rick Bayless recipe from Mexican Kitchen, but it's a lot lighter. I had a funny kitchen moment when making it, though. I used all low-fat milk and no cream, but when I blended the milk in the food processor, it aerated and puffed up like whipped cream! It deflated once I added it to the hot pan, but just over cup of milk filled the bowl of the food processor.

Poblano Cream
1 large poblano, charred, peeled and seeded
1 1/4 cup milk
1 Tablespoon flour
1 Tablespoon butter
1/2 cup Greek yogurt (you could use crema, but this is what I had)
salt and pepper

Blend the poblano and 1 cup of milk in a blender or food processor.

In a small saucepan, melt the butter and add flour. Cook over medium heat until it begins to take on a little color. Whisk in the milk mixture, along with the remaining milk. Bring to a simmer. Add Greek yogurt, salt and pepper. Heat through.

Full English

I go the Sunset Valley Farmers Market almost every week. While I'm usually going for veggies, fruit and fresh pecans, other stuff sometimes finds itself in my bag. This can be hot sauce or pesto from Sgt. Peppers or teas from Sesa, but more often it's sweets from Full English.

The booth at Sunset Valley Farmers Market

Owned by a charming couple, Alice Bachini-Smith and Shad Smith, Full English makes traditional English pastries in small batches from scratch, using good ingredients like unrefined sugar, Callebaut chocolate and unbleached flours.

The stall always has a good variety of sweet and savory pastries, and sometimes chutney and lemon curd.

Savory pastries

I haven't tried anything I didn't like there. The cheese pasties are savory and flaky.

The flapjacks are slightly chewy, kind of crunchy oat cakes that are nothing like American pancakes. The sweet and moist cakes have a great oaty flavor.

Flapjacks

My favorite, though, is the rock bun, a tiny muffin-shaped crumbly cake. It's crisp on the outside, and has an amazing toasty, buttery flavor. The light crunch of the outside of the pastry is well balanced by the crumbly texture of the interior, which is chock-full of plump, juicy raisins.

The humble but mighty Rock Bun.

I remember my first rock bun, from when the stall first opened at Sunset Valley about a year and a half ago. I had bought one for me and the man to share, not knowing how delicious it was going to be. After we shared that bun later that Saturday evening, we were both upset that we a) didn't get at least two of them, and b) had to wait a whole week before getting another one.

Since then, we're been buying them in 6-packs, except for when they run out (sometimes early!), when we shake our fists at the sky and hope for better luck next week. For a while, we were getting them once a week. Now it's more occasional, but we usually try to get them when we know we're having out-of-town guests.

Full English sweets are available at:
Sunset Valley Farmers Market
Farm to Market Grocery
Thom's Market
Live Oak Market
Cafe Caffeine
The Hideout Coffeehouse

Tasting Home

A couple of weekends ago (before the Great Motherboard Death of 2009), I escaped the heat of Texas for a long weekend in upstate New York. My sweetie and I visited his family and attended a wedding on Lake Seneca.

The cool breeze off Lake Seneca, and later in the trip, off Lake Ontario was refreshingly crisp, and a kind of chilly I forgot I could feel in the never-ending heat we're been experiencing in Austin.

I attended the large Rochester Public Market one Thursday morning. At the first table, I saw pineapples. Why are there pineapples in a farmers market in New York, I asked myself. I asked someone manning a table where the farm was, and was answered "We don't have a farm." So, this isn't a growers' market, I guess.

I did find plenty of farm tables, including one with a towering pile of fresh sweet corn that I had to sample, raw, right at the market. Coming from the Midwest, I miss big, juicy ears of sweet corn, and that one did not disappoint.

Probably the most abundant fruit at the market were New York apples. There were varieties I'd never heard of, and they were all incredibly inexpensive. Had I had more time in NY, I would have bought baskets and baskets of them.

On the way home, we had a short layover at O'Hare. Being a Chicago native, I miss the airport (or, I miss living in a hub city where I don't have layovers on every trip). It's familiar, and I know I'm in for a treat whenever I visit home or have a connection there because of the Garrett Popcorn shop.

Why I love the airport

When I was a kid, my grandma worked downtown. Sometimes, as a treat, she'd stop by Garrett's and buy a small bag of their Chicago Mix, a sweet-salty blend of their homemade caramel and cheese corns. The caramel is buttery and sweet, and the cheese is tangy and salty and a finger-staining shade of orange. Together, they're one of my favorite foods from childhood.

Salty-sweet goodness

Melon Soup

One of the things I really dislike about the summer in Austin is the heat. It's oppressive, and it feels like it's never going to end.

One of the things I love about the summer in Austin is the fruit. I look forward to melon season all spring long.

This year, one of the first farms to have melon at the Sunset Valley market was Buena Tierra.

Buena Tierra Farms

Fresh melon is crisp and cooling, and I don't think I've ever had melon as delicious as the melon I've gotten here in Texas. Maybe it's the heat?

I've also had melons I hadn't heard of before moving here, my favorite of which is the galia. It's kind of canteloupey, kind of honeydewy, and all delicious.

Fresh Galia

And during these really hot days, a chilled melon soup is simple to make, requires no cooking and is really cooling to eat.

Melon Soup
One melon, preferably galia
1-2 cups vanilla-flavored yogurt, depending on the size of the melon
Juice of 1 lime
2 Tablespoons agave nectar
1/2 inch ginger, grated
1 Tablespoons chopped fresh mint leaves
1/2 teaspoon salt

Cut the melon in half, and scoop out and discard the seeds. Scoop the flesh into the bowl of a food processor. Add yogurt, starting with 1 cup. Add the rest of the ingredients, and more yogurt to taste.

Soup with mint leaves and ginger snaps

Instead of croutons, I like to crush ginger snaps on top.

Seattle Weekend

I spent a fantastic few days in Seattle last weekend.

The man and I stayed in Kirkland, a cute little town across Lake Washington and near Redmond. We arrived on Friday afternoon and spent a little while at the Friday Night Market at Juanita Beach. Though small, the market held a wealth of fresh and ripe stone fruit, including a few varieties of cherries.

Yes, cherries. We bought about a pound from one of the first stalls we encountered, intending to take them back to our hotel and eat them later. They lasted about 5 minutes. Seriously? These were the best cherries I've had in my life.

They were soft, juicy, sweet and really complex in flavor. I love cherries, and I thought supermarket cherries tasted good. Well, they're nearly all from Washington, and Washington cherries in Washington are like nothing I've ever had.

We bought another pound to take back with us, along with the most delicious fresh apricot I've tasted.

The next morning, we checked out the University District Farmers Market, where we got even more cherries. There the standard Bings and Raniers, along with varieties I'd never even heard of - Goldens, Index and more.

We brought about a pound or so home with us, and have been snacking on them every night. I'm going to be sad when they're gone (probably tonight).

Sunday morning, before heading to the airport, we ate breakfast at Trellis a farm-to-table restaurant near the water in Kirkland. After checking out the menu, I ordered the cheese plate from the dinner menu.

left to right: Cougar Gold Cheddar with toasted hazelnuts and quince paste, Mt. Townsend Seastack triple creme with orange-tomato marmalade, fresh crisp bread and Point Reyes Bleu with onion jam.

The cheese plate itself was great - the cheeses were delicious, but cold (I totally understand they weren't room-temp. Not everyone wants cheese for breakfast), and the jam and marmalade were really good, too.

There were some doughnuts for the table with some house-made strawberry compote and butter. The doughnuts were fine, but would have been much better warm. They had a slight orange flavor, and were tasty with the compote.

Farmhouse Delivery at Sinners Brunch

I've been getting emails from Farmhouse Delivery, a local produce delivery service, for several weeks, but I've never gotten a delivery. I like going to the farmers market way too much, so I've been reluctant to order.

Last Sunday, Farmhouse Delivery hosted a farmstand at Jo's Coffee on South Congress, so I jumped at the chance to try their produce while choosing it myself.

There was just one table, but it was loaded with goodies - heirloom tomatoes (fortunate, because we'd eaten almost all of those we got at the Saturday downtown market), sweet corn, Texas mangoes and citrus, chard, potatoes, and more.

I got a bagful of tomatoes, sweet corn, two types of cucumbers, limes and a mango.

farmstand booty

I can't wait to eat a nice tomato-cucumber salad, one of my favorite summer salads, and juicy sweet corn. The tomatoes smell fantastic, and the sweet corn looks great with its tightly closed husks and moist silks.

Farmhouse Delivery's farmstand at Sinner's Brunch runs Sundays 10:30 am -1 pm.

Ugly Soup

I get on these food kicks (don't call it a rut!), and lately I've been making lots of soup. For some reason, when the weather got to 90 and stayed there, I couldn't get enough of the stuff.

My most-made soup the last several weeks is one I call Ugly Soup. It's kind of like a Vietnamese-style hot and sour soup, spicy with chiles and sour with lime juice.

It's delicious, and pretty good for you. But it's ugly. Really ugly.

It's got a whole head of shredded cabbage boiled in it, and that stuff just ain't pretty. But boy, is it tasty! I put a little fresh cilantro on top to dress is up a little, but it's clearly drab. The cabbage is light - almost grey, and tofu looks like, well, tofu - beige and square.

Tomatoes and pineapple make it more tart and fresh-tasting, and the color from the tomatoes helps a bit, too.

I could probably make this stuff a couple times a month and still not get sick of it. Even in the heat, it's light and fresh and feels nourishing to eat. The hot, sour and slightly sweet broth is irresistible, and I love the slight crunch of the cabbage.

Cauliflower Soup: Better with Air Conditioning

There are so many good veggies at the market now. I got an incredibly gorgeous golden cauliflower recently at Sunset Valley.

My usual method of cooking cauliflower is roasting - I find it really brings out the flavor without having to add much of anything else, except for a little bit of butter and salt.

I've been eating a lot of soup lately, so I tried a creamy cauliflower version.

To start, I chopped the cauliflower and roasted it until it was golden brown.

As it was roasting, the house got hotter and hotter. That's not so unusual, but the air conditioning was on. I checked the vents, and air was coming out, but it wasn't cold. Uh oh. Now, I had roasting vegetables and I had to eat a bowl of hot soup pretty soon.

I added the cauliflower to a pot of sauteed carrot, onion potato and vegetable broth and boiled it all together for a few minutes.

I added fresh milk and parsley and whirred it with a hand blender until it was smooth-ish (I like some texture).

The result was delicious, and really pretty. I love the pale orange color. I'd thought about adding some Full Quiver Cheddar for sharpness, but I forgot. (I blame the heat.) It was good, even without the cheese, but I may try it next time.

Eating hot soup in a hot house is not the most comfortable thing in the world, but when the soup turns out really well, it isn't all that bad.

Stuffed Squash

At last Saturday's farmers market, I found some round squash. The farmer described them as being similar to zucchini in texture and flavor. Since I hadn't had them before, I thought I'd give them a shot.

Their full, round shape and flat bottoms make them perfect for stuffing. It's been quite warm, so I decided to use a light and summery quinoa mixture.

First, I scooped out the middles, creating hollows in which to stuff the stuffing.

Next, I stuffed them with a mixture of the sauteed middles, cooked quinoa, Pure Luck feta , tomatoes, toasted almonds, fresh parley and mint.

Then I baked them until they browned a bit.

I think they turned out really well for a dish thrown together on the fly, and I'll probably make them again, or at least a variation. Next time, I might add more fresh herbs—their flavor, especially the mint's, got a little dulled with the cooking.

The squash themselves did taste a lot like zucchini, juicy and buttery, but has slightly more bite to them. Overall, the dish tasted really fresh and summery. Aside from having to brown them in a hot oven, they're a great hot-night dinner.