Enchiladas

I realized that I haven't been writing much about food. This isn't because there's no food worth writing about--to the contrary! It's probably just because I'm enjoying it all so much... what is there to write about? Ah, yes, so we had delicious Thai yellow curry for the third time this month and it was wonderful. How can you really describe delicious food and the experience of eating it?

One thing that has been fun is our experimentation in the kitchen. I have been doing a bunch of cooking and it's one of my favorite things, really, when I have time. I like to experiment. Lately I've been inventing different kinds of cole slaw and cabbage salad. One that turned out well had a mustard-honey-poppyseed-vinegar dressing and contained shredded cabbage, grated carrot and apple, plus pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds, sunflower seeds, and dried currants.

When we had friends over for tacos, Andy invented an incredible stewed eggplant & wild nettle salsa... it was really amazing. I made the usual kind of salsa with tomatoes, peppers, onions, lemon, cilantro, and salt. Hooray for the blender! I added chopped tomatoes and red peppers and fresh cilantro for more chunkiness.

The tacos turned out OK except that it's virtually impossible to get plain corn tortillas... all the tortillas are flour. However the other night we whipped up some chicken enchiladas which turned out really superb. It seems that my handmade refried black beans were the secret to yumminess. The enchiladas were a bit unconventional--I added a bunch of stuff that we had lying around--half an eggplant, some brown rice, shredded chicken thigh meat, peppers, onion and garlic, crumbled browned tofu, white Cheddar cheese (it was a close approximation to Jack), and enchilada sauce.

I would make the refried black beans again--you can't really get refried beans here; at least it's not worth buying a little can that has been imported from somewhere far away. So, I just boiled some black turtle beans for a while with a bay leaf until they were soft, drained them (I shouldn't have done that), then attempted to mash them with a masher. They were hard and drier than I had expected, so I had to add a bunch of liquid (olive oil, milk, butter) and then cook them some more. Added some salt. They turned out super yummy, full of texture and flavor. So easy!

The fun thing about eating tacos and enchiladas, etc., is that Mexican food is pretty unheard of here, but at the same time, we were able to cook up a huge Mexican food feast with locally available and easily accessible ingredients. Luckily avocados were cheap, and tortilla chips were also readily available. Only corn tortillas were difficult to find.

Back in the U.S. I wouldn't ever bother to make my own refried beans from scratch, or even salsa for that matter, because it's so easy to get. But then there's something very satisfying about making your own from the raw ingredients.