Culinary Sustenance 2.0 - Autumn

For the second edition of Culinary Sustenance, I've created a meal that reflects the emerging cool evenings of autumn, and embraces the fading freshness of the summertime.  A crisp salad of arugula tossed with a tangy lemon vinaigrette takes care of the bright, sunny component, while a creamy risotto with a hint of smoky flavor takes care of the warmth.  This risotto is usually made with mushrooms, but I stumbled upon some wonderful Italian-style bacon, or pancetta, and I figured it would be just as delicious. The meal is rounded out by a ciabatta loaf, sliced in half, soaked in garlic and butter, and sprinkled with a tiny bit of Parmesan. The risotto recipe only calls for 1/3 cup of white wine, so there is plenty left over to drink with the meal.  I recommend something relatively dry, like a Pinot Grigio or an unoaked Chardonnay.  This meal should feed 3 people comfortably.

Risotto with Crispy Pancetta and Peas
Adapted from Everyday Italian by Giada de Laurentiis

• 4 cups canned low-salt chicken broth
• 1/8 cup unsalted butter
• 1 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 cup finely chopped onions
• 1 garlic clove, minced
• 3/4 cup Arborio rice
• 1/3 cup dry white wine
• 1/2 cup frozen peas, thawed
• 1/3 cup grated Parmesan
• 4 oz diced pancetta
• Salt and freshly ground black pepper, optional

Bring the broth to a simmer in a heavy medium saucepan.  Keep the broth warm over very low heat.  Melt the butter in a heavy large saucepan over medium heat. Add olive oil. Add the onions and saute until tender, about 8 minutes.  While the onions are cooking, fry the pancetta in a skillet until crisp. Add the garlic to the onions.  Stir in the rice and let it toast for a few minutes. Add the wine; cook until the liquid is absorbed, stirring often, about 2 minutes. Add 1/2 cup of hot broth; simmer over medium-low heat until the liquid is absorbed, stirring often, about 3 minutes. Continue to cook until the rice is just tender and the mixture is creamy, adding more broth by cupfuls and stirring often, about 28 minutes (the rice should absorb all 4 cups of broth). Mix in the pancetta and 2 Tbsp of the pan drippings.  Stir in the peas. Mix in the Parmesan. Season with salt and pepper, to taste.

Arugula Salad with Lemon-Parmesan Vinaigrette

• 4 cups (packed) arugula
• 1/3 cup freshly grated Parmesan
• 5 tablespoons olive oil
• 2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
• 1 teaspoon finely grated lemon peel
• Salt and freshly ground black pepper, optional

Blend first 4 ingredients in processor. Season dressing with salt and pepper. Transfer to bowl.  Pour over arugula and toss to coat.

Garlic Ciabatta

• 6 large garlic cloves, chopped
• 2 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 loaf ciabatta bread
• 4 tablespoons unsalted butter, softened
• 1/8 cup grated Parmesan

Heat the olive oil in a medium saute pan and add the garlic mixture. Remove the pan from the heat.  Slice the ciabatta bread in half horizontally, and spread the butter on one half.  Spread the garlic mixture on the other half of the bread, sprinkle with Parmesan, and put the halves together.  Wrap the bread in aluminum foil. Place the bread in the oven and bake for 5 minutes. Open the foil, and continue baking for an additional 5 minutes.

Culinary Sustenance 1.0 - Salsa

It would be an understatement to say that I love salsa. The spicier, the better, I argue. In my very humble opinion, the best off the shelf jarred salsas are those marketed by uber-chef Rick Bayless under his Frontera label. Sadly, like any high-end food item, these salsas are quite expensive. While they’re always worth the investment, they are at best an infrequent indulgence. For the inaugural edition of Culinary Sustenance, I set out to formulate a recipe that could at least match the qualities that I found so appealing in the Frontera salsas.

First, the salsa had to have body. It had to cling to the tortilla chip like its life depended on it. There is nothing more frustrating than a thin, watery salsa that defies your every effort to scoop it up. I believe that a thicker consistency is paramount, but in somewhat of a contradiction, I wanted to avoid making a super-chunky “pico de gallo” style salsa too. I have had many unpleasant experiences with inferior chunky salsas that were nothing more than unripened tomatoes, overwhelmingly raw onions, a palate-numbing amount of cilantro, all drowning in a pool of lime juice. The freshness and quality of the tomatoes was of serious concern to me, and presented a host of problems that I would have to reconcile in my final recipe.

Secondly, the salsa had to have heat. This requirement became especially important when it came time to select the kind(s) of chiles that would go into the final recipe. When I’m making guacamole, I almost always use fresh Jalapeños and serranos. Fresh chiles bring a very raw heat to the palate party, and are a very nice compliment to the mild, creamy flavor of the avocados. This raw heat is fine for guacamoles, but I think that in a salsa this heat can be overwhelming and numb the palate to all other flavors. After taking this into consideration, I decided that I would steer clear of fresh chiles and embrace the wonderful qualities of dried and smoked chiles like guajillos and chipotles instead. Even though these chiles don’t bring quite as much searing heat to the party, they do impart an abundance of unique flavors and allow those flavors to shine through.

Lastly, at the risk of backing myself into a proverbial culinary corner, I would also like to state that I am generally not a fan of fruit salsas being used as appetizers. While I think that a mango salsa is a wonderful addition to a nice piece of rare tuna, it’s just not what I’d pair with tortilla chips and a cold beer. Taking these general conditions and criteria into consideration, I began my search for a great salsa recipe.

I began my search online and in various cookbooks. To my dismay, the majority of the recipes that I located resembled hot sauces and marinades more than the type of salsa that I sought. With the increasing availability and popularity of cuts of meat like skirt and flank steak, many people are very interested in different flavor and spice combinations with which to prepare them. Most of them looked delicious and I will be sure to return to them when I have a nice piece of beef to work with. They were just not what I was looking for given my requirements for this recipe.

My next source of inspiration was friends and family. I am lucky enough to include many excellent cooks among my group of friends, and I am also related to some of the best cooks that I know. My aunt is a food scientist, so I figured that she would be a great place to start. She agreed with my decision to focus on dried and smoked chiles instead of fresh, raw ones. She also suggested that I could get around my issues with the freshness and quality of the tomatoes by utilizing a high-quality brand of the canned Italian variety. Like frozen vegetables, canned tomatoes are packed at their peak of freshness, and in recent years have also become available in organic varieties. I was sold.

My concerns about core ingredients having been somewhat addressed, I decided to turn to the problem of preparation. I knew that the best I could do with a chef’s knife was to finely chop my ingredients, and I realized that it wasn’t going to be fine enough to attain the consistency I was going for. My other option was to utilize an ancient piece of cookware that has been used in Mexico and Central America for centuries – the molcajete. While it’s a wonderful tool for grinding and blending spices and my favorite tool for making guacamole, the molcajete presented a few problems as well. For one – mashing and pulverizing my rehydrated chilies and chopped onions into something smooth and silky. It simply wasn’t going to work. Needing more inspiration, I contacted my friend Danny, himself a lover of all things Mexican. I genuinely expected him to bestow upon me a gem of deeply held wisdom, and to my surprise, he suggested only that I should try making my salsa in an electric blender. I heeded his excellent advice, and was extremely pleased with the result.

After much experimentation, and comfortable in the knowledge that you may have lost interest many paragraphs ago, I present the final version of my salsa recipe.

Salsa Muy Rápido y Muy Sabrosa

* one dozen dried guajillo chiles

* 6 chipotle chiles in adobo, with 2 Tbsp of the adobo sauce

* 28 oz can of peeled tomatoes, drained of liquid, reserving 1/4 cup for later use

* 1/2 cup chopped white onion

* 1/2 cup cilantro leaves

* 2 cloves of garlic

* Salt to taste

Soak the guajillo chilies in bowl filled with boiling water for thirty minutes.  When done, remove the seeds and stems, reserving a few seeds to add to blender for additional heat if desired. Toss in a blender with the chipotles, tomatoes, onion, garlic, cilantro, and lime juice.  Blend until smooth.  Add reserved tomato juice a little bit at a time until salsa reaches desired consistency.  Season with salt.  Cool in refrigerator.  Serve with your favorite tortilla chips (as long as they aren’t Tostitos) or as an garnish for tacos and enchiladas.

This recipe makes something that manages to be a wonderful, traditional salsa while also being completely antithetical to the Super Bowl Sunday variety.  Not a raw jalapeno in sight!  It’s made in a blender!  It uses canned tomatoes!  I’m having a hard time even justifying its existence!  As a bonus, for those of you who like your salsa slightly milder in heat but not in flavor, I also experimented with using tomatillos to make a salsa verde. This salsa utilizes raw, fresh chilis because in this case the dried and smoked varieties would overwhelm the tomatillos.

Tomatillo Salsa

  * 1 1/2 lb tomatillos

* 1/2 cup chopped white onion

* 1/2 cup cilantro leaves

* 1 Tbsp fresh lime juice

* 1/4 teaspoon sugar

* 2 Jalapeños OR 2 serranos, stemmed, seeded and chopped

* Salt to taste

Remove papery husks from tomatillos and rinse well.  Cut in half and place cut side down on a foil-lined baking sheet. Place under a broiler for five to seven minutes to lightly blacken the skin.  Place tomatillos, lime juice, onions, cilantro, chili peppers, sugar in a blender and pulse until all ingredients are finely chopped and mixed. Season with salt.  Cool in refrigerator.

Enjoy with friends.