Kitchen Garden Journal

Rumors have been circulating about a secret taco party in January. Consider yourself officially in the know. We are teaming up with Neftali Duran from El Jardin Bakery and Open Square in Holyoke to put on a night of tacos in homage to everyone’s favorite street food. 

Grab a beer, order a plate of tacos, sit and eat. Get up and mingle. Repeat. If this sounds like your kind of party, you need to check this out. It’s only going to happen once.

Join us at Open Square in Holyoke Sunday the 22nd of January at 7pm. Tickets are available in advance only, $50 per person, all you can eat and drink, plus live music, dancing and art. (Checks should be written to Caroline Pam and mailed to 131 S. Silver Lane, Sunderland, MA 01375.) Email or call us as soon as possible to reserve your space!

There will be 6 different tacos to sample made from locally raised pork, chicken, goat and vegetables. The bar will be serving 3 excellent beers from High & Mighty Beer Co. of Holyoke.

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(Pictured in top of frame)

These days I am really loving vegetable dishes that are part-salad and part-pickle. Salads made with sturdy vegetables like cabbage or cucumbers (unlike lettuce or field greens) actually improve by marinating in the fridge for a day or two. So if you don’t feel like eating it all right away it doesn’t go to waste. 

½ head of Tendersweet cabbage, very thinly sliced, preferably on a mandoline slicer

1 tsp salt

1 tsp sugar

Powdered red chile to taste (I like to use about 1 Tbsp Korean hot pepper powder. It is made from seeded red chili peppers and is intensely flavored without being too hot. It also gives a nice red color. Hungarian hot paprika would make a good substitute.) 

Juice of 1 lime

1 tsp white, rice or sugar cane vinegar, or more to taste

Silce the cabbage into a large bowl. Add salt and sugar and massage into the cabbage with your hand. Add the rest of the ingredients, mix and serve. It is best to wait at least 30 minutes for the cabbage to go fully limp and absorb the flavors. It can also be made a few days in advance also. Feel free to add any other ingredients you want like cilantro, onion, garlic, scallion, fresh chiles, etc. 

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I love tacos. There's nothing quite like that combination of fresh corn tortillas, crispy, fatty meat, pickled vegetables and cilantro. Before tomatoes are in season I like to make this spring version of pico de gallo using baby root vegetables, spring garlic or scapes, green onions and the first of the homegrown cilantro. 

I served this at my Wednesday lunch this week along with my goat meat tacos made with an amazing piece of goat shoulder from Wild Mountain Farm at our Tuesday Springfield market. FYI, I made the goat meat according to this method for making carnitas. I also made some cilantro cream to drizzle on top, which was truly a revelation. I took cilantro, garlic scapes and the juice of a lime and whizzed it with the stick blender with a pint of sour cream. It's like Mexican tzatziki.

Caroline just picked me up a new bag of pickling lime from the Greenfield Farmers Coop so I can make another fresh batch of masa for tortillas with the corn from last year. I'm so excited.

1 bunch baby carrots

1 bunch radishes or Japanese turnips

1/2 bunch spring garlic or a handful of scapes

1 bunch scallions or spring onions

fresh or frozen chili peppers to taste (I used 3 Thai chilies from the big bag in my freezer) 

1/2 bunch cilantro

juice of 1 lime

1 tsp salt

1 Tbsp vinegar

1 Tbsp sugar

Dice the vegetables and herbs into small cubes. Add, salt, lime juice, vinegar, sugar and stir. Good the next day, too.

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Fresh tortillas... mmmm. That was the thought I had ten years ago when I planted field corn my first garden. Back then I didn't even know how far apart to space the plants, let alone understand the process of making fresh masa. It has taken me this long to get around to figuring out the process once and for all.

Pictured here is our new crop of white dent corn, an heirloom variety from the southern U.S. called Hickory King that is/was often used for making hominy. And what follows below is the process that will take you from this (above) to this (below) in about 24 hours. 

Nixtamalization is the frightening word for the fairly simple process of cooking corn with alkaline, which chemically softens and dissolves the hull and improves the nutritional content of the corn. The indigenous Americans whose ancestors domesticated it understood this process, but when Europeans "discovered" corn, they ground it like wheat into cornmeal, which yields a completely different and nutritionally inferior product.

The first step is to cook the corn. I followed the recipe from Alton Brown, which calls for 2 cups corn, 6 cups water, and 2 Tbsp cal, or calcium hydroxide. It worked.

This is cal. You can buy it in a Latino grocery store. I bought this at the Ecuador Andino store on Rte. 9 in Hadley. (It's actually a really nice store. You can get all of the standard Mexican stuff and they also have a great selection of cheeses and they even had fresh epazote.) 

Mix the cal with the corn and water and put the pot on a medim-low flame. Bring it slowly to a boil. This should take 30-45 minutes. When it boils, turn it off and let it soak overnight in the cooking liquid.

As it cooks, the hulls undergo a visible change and begin to loosen. In this case, they turned yellow. 

The next day, pour off the cooking liquid and rinse the corn in several changes of water. In a bowl full of water, rub the corn in your hands to loosen the hull. You can also put it in a slightly abrasive vessel like a mesh strainer and stir it with a wooden spoon. Fill the bowl of corn with water and pour off any pieces of hull that float to the top, then drain. This is your nixtamal. Now it can be ground into masa or used to make hominy or posole stews. 

I also nixtamalized some of the corn we got from our grain share from the Pioneer Valley Heritage Grain CSA. This is an heirloom Native American variety called Mandan Bride. It is also a commonly grown variety of Indian corn used for decoration. It is quite lovely with its hulls removed.

Now for the grinding. Unlike grinding corn into cornmeal, to make masa the corn is ground wet, straight into dough, using the retained water from the cooking as the liquid component. Put the corn in the cuisinart and pulse a few times until it resembles a chunky mixture. (Note: do not attempt this in a mini cuisinart. Use the big guns.) Now, flip that switch up and let it grind away for several minutes. Add water as necessary until the dough begins to form. I added about a cup of water, which was probably too much, and my dough came out a little sticky. So use it sparingly. 

After about 5 minutes of solid grinding, the masa is done. It is very smooth and can be shaped easily into balls. As I mentioned, my dough was a little too wet, so when I pressed my tortillas, I used a little masa harina (dehydrated masa flour) to get the right moisture level to prevent sticking.

To press the tortillas, cut a gallon size ziplock bag into its two halves. Place a ball of dough on the first sheet, cover with the second sheet and give it a little tap to begin flattening it. Then place the dough in the plastic inside a tortilla press and press until very thin. Alternately you can do it directly on the counter using a heavy cast iron skillet to press the tortillas, like I did. This one is made from the Mandan Bride corn. Pretty!

It takes a little finagling and/or finesse to get the pressed tortilla off the plastic and into your hot dry skillet or comal. I leave that up to you. I used a very fine flexible metal spatula to coax them. Cook them on a very very hot dry pan for 20-30 seconds per side. It is a lot more fun to do with two people.

All in all it's a lot of work. But those tacos sure tasted special. The flavor of the tortillas is simply incomparable. It is sublimely corn-y, as if it were artificially corn-flavored. You just have to try it to know what I'm talking about.      

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“Toasting” the ingredients either on a grill, hot dry skillet (comal) or under the broiler until the skin chars gives this salsa its special character. Raw, it’s great for dipping tortilla chips; cooked, it becomes the red sauce found in the red or green squeeze bottles at a California burrito bar, great for squirting on just about anything.

Ingredients:
2 lb tomatoes
1 lb smallish onions (extra surface area)
1 large head garlic
3-4 chilies
1 bunch cilantro
lime juice (1-2 limes)
1 Tbsp sugar
1 Tbsp vinegar
1 tsp salt

Method:
Toast the ingredients on a hot surface until the skins are blackened: tomatoes and chilies are left whole; onions are quartered; garlic is left unpeeled as individual cloves. After toasting, “sweat” the tomatoes and chilies in a covered bowl or container so the skins loosen. Leave until cool, then peel and discard the skins. Peel the onions and garlic and scrape off any excess char.

Squeeze as much liquid out of the peeled tomatoes as possible. Blend or puree tomatoes, onions, garlic and chilies together in a blender or food processor. Add lime juice, vinegar, sugar and salt. Taste and adjust seasonings so that it tastes good to you. Personally I think the secret to a delicious salsa is the added sugar and vinegar. It really heightens the sweet-sour flavor of the tomatoes. Remember, this is a condiment, after all.

When making a red salsa, it is important to use only red, orange or yellow colored chilies. If you use green chilies, they will turn your salsa an unappealing puce color if blended with red tomatoes. If all you have is green chilies, chop them by hand and add to the rest of the pureed ingredients. Same goes for the cilantro: always hand-chop it rather than blending it. It makes for a much nicer appearance.

At this point the raw salsa is done. If you wish to make cooked salsa, heat a few tablespoons of cooking oil in your tomato sauce pan and add the sauce. Simmer until reduced by about 1/3 and thickened. It becomes a completely different sauce when cooked, turning and orangey red and having the pronounced sweetness of cooked onions.

Keep it for winter:
You can make a huge batch of this and can it, as I’m doing today, raw or cooked. Sterilize your pint jars, bring the salsa to a slight simmer and hot-pack the jars. Process in a boiling water bath for 15 minutes. The high acid and sugar content of this salsa makes it pretty foolproof and easy to can.

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• 1 pint cherry tomatoes (or 2 slicing tomatoes)
• 1 sweet onion
• 1 clove garlic
• Hot chilies, to taste
• 1/2 bunch cilantro
• Juice of 1 lime
• 1 Tbsp sugar, optional
• 1 Tbsp vinegar, optional

Chop everything to a fine dice and toss with the liquids. Allow to sit for 1/2 hour to meld the flavors. Eat with tortilla chips or quesadillas, enchiladas, burritos, etc.

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