Chiles en Nogada

It has been a long time since my last post, but I have found a new show that has inspired me to try some new dishes and crank out some new posts. The Food Network show is called "Mexican Made Easy", but I find the title to be a little misleading. The host, Marcela Valladolid, breezes through multiple dishes in 30 minutes, while it could take me a couple of hours to finish one of them even after procuring the ingredients.

Today's dish is Chiles en Nogada, Stuffed Poblano Chiles in Creamy Walnut Sauce. The name comes from the Spanish word for the walnut tree, nogal. This famous dish is said to have been developed by the residents of Puebla to honor General Don Augustín de Iturbide at a celebratory banquet held in August 1821, after the signing of the Treaty of Córdoba. All of the dishes served at the banquet featured the colors of the Mexican flag (green chiles, white sauce, and red pomegranate seeds). Still a popular dish, chiles en nogada is often served in August when walnuts and pomegranates come into season.

The first part of this dish is the picadillo, a mixture usually containing chopped or ground meat, aromatics, fruits, and spices.


Cook a diced onion and a few teaspoons of vegetable oil over medium-high heat until translucent. Add a couple cloves of minced garlic and cook for a minute longer, until fragrant. Add a pound of ground pork, a pound of ground sirloin, a bay leaf, and a cinnamon stick and cook over medium heat until meat is cooked through, about 7 minutes.

Chop 1/2 cup of dried apples, 1/2 cup of dried apricots, and 3/4 cup of dried pineapple. Combine dried fruit with meat and remove from heat. Mix in a teaspoon of ground cinnamon along with salt and pepper to taste. Remove the cinnamon stick and bay leaf and set aside.

For the walnut sauce, you are going to need to peel 4 cups of walnuts. This sounds a little intimidating, but really isn't that bad. In a cup of boiling water, add the walnuts and cook for 1 minute, then drain into a colander. After they have cooled, the walnut skins will mostly fall off. A paring knife can be used to remove the stubborn skins. Peeling the walnuts will make a smoother, whiter sauce. Unpeeled walnuts can be used, but the texture will be grainier and slightly bitter.

Combine the walnuts, 2 1/2 cups of Mexican crema, and 4 ounces of goat cheese in a blender and blend until smooth and silky. Sauce should coat the back of a spoon. Add a few more walnuts or crema to adjust thickness. Season with salt.

Next, char 10 poblano chiles on a gas stove top. Keep rotating until the entire chile is thoroughly blackened. I actually needed to get a little bit more of a char on mine to cook the flesh a little more. It was a sufficient amount to easily remove the blackened skin, but I thought that the meat was a little too crunchy.

Immediately after pulling from the stove top, put the chile into a plastic bag for 15 minutes allowing it to sweat a little loosening the skin. At this point, use a paper towel to pull the skin right off.

Cut a slit into each chile lengthwise and carefully cut out the seeds and veins. Leave the chile stem intact.

Spoon as much filling into each of the chiles as you can.

Finally, top the exposed filling with a couple of tablespoons of the walnut sauce. Top with some pomegranate seeds to resemble the colors of the Mexican flag.

Breakfast Burritos and New Bike Gear

The block that I live on was having a bunch of garage sales a couple of weekends ago, so I thought it would be a good opportunity to make some breakfast burritos for the visiting crowds. It was also a chance to try out the new side containers that my father in law put together to mount on the bike frame.

First I had to gather and prepare the ingredients.

• 12" flour tortillas from the Mexican market
• cooked a few pounds of chorizo seco (dried)
• peeled, diced, and boiled a couple pounds of potatoes
• 1 lb. of mixed of shredded jack and cheddar cheese to melt on the tortillas
• 2 dozen eggs
• diced jalapenos

The side car containers now had to be filled. The great part about this devise is that the individual containers come out for easy cleaning, and you can put ice in the bottom to keep the container contents cold. You can also put a Sterno candle underneath the container with some water inside of it to create a hot water bath to keep the container contents hot.

It was about 8:30 in the morning and I was ready to ride down the street and open up shop.


I had never cooked eggs on the hot 'arriba' part of the comal, but if I laid them down gently, they mostly stayed together without sliding off.

After the eggs were cooked, I mixed in the chorizo and egg that have been kept warm on the outer ring of the comal. Jalapenos occasionally went in here.

I scraped the completed filling to a free spot on the side of the comal so that I could use the center part to heat the tortilla and melt cheese on top of. The finished result turned out pretty good. Next time I would try to get more moisture in the filling. Maybe a chipotle sauce mixed in.

Squash Blossom Quesadilla

Went on my first trip at the farmers market last weekend of the year. My problem at these events is that I keep buying more ripe fruit and vegetables than I can possibly eat before they start going bad. This year was going to be different.

While wandering through the produce, I saw something that I hadn't seen in years, zucchini blossoms. I remembered how delicious these were when I was a kid and my grandmother used to fry them up. I had to take a second look.


Now I was recalling my Oaxaca trip, enjoying a quesadilla filled with Oaxacan cheese and squash blossoms. It was one of the most wonderful things I had ever eaten. The whole thing was made in front of you on a wood burning comal. The cheese was like strands of thread with a milky texture while the blossoms were recently picked. They were spread on top of a freshly made masa tortilla until the cheese melted out of the sides.

The quality of Oaxacan cheese here isn't nearly as good as that in Oaxaca, here it is a drier, matted string cheese that doesn't melt as easily. However, the flowers were beautiful and I decided to give the squash blossom quesadilla a try.


This is a pretty easy thing to make once you acquire the flowers. I went with a flour tortilla and placed it on a dry iron comal. After a few seconds, I did my best of shredding Oaxacan cheese and putting on top of one half of the tortilla. Next, I tore up some of the flowers and put on top of the cheese.


Once the tortilla started to brown and the cheese started to melt, I folded in half and let the whole thing melt together.


It wasn't nearly as good as the one I got in Oaxaca, but it turned out pretty tasty. I will be looking for squash blossoms again at the farmers market.