Roasted Green Chili Hot Sauce and Salsa Verde

 

When my friend Melissa sent me a link to her favorite hot sauce recipe, I realized I had never made any. How could I have a blog named after a pepper and never have made my own hot sauce? I needed to rectify this situation.

Since this was the first time I had made hot sauce I didn't play with the original recipe much. I varied the peppers a bit; I'm not a banana pepper fan so I used caribes and since they're wicked hot (at least the ones I get)I balanced them with a mild Anaheim. Also, since I often find vinegar overwhelming, I used the mildest vinegars I had- rice and red wine - and replaced 1/3 of the vinegar with water. 

 

Chandelle, the author of the original recipe, has some great tips about dealing with hot peppers. For example, did you know that capsaicin, the  chemical that makes peppers hot, dissolves in oil? That means if your hands start burning, you can scrub them well with some handy cooking oil and that should take care of the worst of the heat.  She also suggests rubbing down your knife and hands with oil before you cut the peppers, wearing gloves and tying a cloth over your mouth and nose. I didn't do any of that, but I do suggest at a minimum that you lay a piece of plastic wrap across the hand that holds the peppers as you work with them. Even if you have no trouble cutting up a couple of peppers, you are bound to work a good bit of capsaicin into a bare hand after processing a whole pound of them. As for protecting your face, keep it out of the steam rising from any freshly-cooked peppers and you should be good. Fans and open windows in your kitchen help also.

Roasting the peppers really adds flavor to this sauce. After letting it sit for an hour or longer the flavors meld so that the first thing you taste is sweetness, then rich roasted peppers, and finally the heat sneaks in at the end; not too much, not too little. 

Jim came home and said "Great, hot sauce! Do we have any chips?" I told  him that it was the wrong kind of hot sauce - it wasn't salsa, it was the kind of sauce you used in tiny amounts. But I needed to go back to the store anyway, so I bought more ingredients to turn some of the hot sauce into salsa, and of course, some chips.

The salsa is quite tangy. After we had our fill of it with tortilla chips, I put it in the freezer. I plan to use it to top enchiladas, like these. 

   

Roasted  Green Chili Hot Sauce

1 pound medium-hot green peppers or a mix of hot and mild ones

2/3 cup mild vinegar, such as rice vinegar, or red or white wine vinegar

1/3 cup water

4 cloves garlic

1 teaspoon salt

Slice the stems from the peppers. Slit the peppers lengthwise. Use a small spoon to remove all or most of the seeds from the peppers. (This is where you will want to cover the hand holding the peppers in plastic wrap.)

Place the peppers skin-side up on a baking tray. Place your oven rack in its top-most position and turn the oven to broil. Broil the peppers for about 4 minutes until they start to blister. Turn the tray around and broil for another 3-5 minutes until peppers are evenly blistered and starting to blacken. Remove from the oven and cover the tray lightly with wax paper or a dish towel. Let peppers cool for 10 minutes or more.

Peel as much of the skin from the peppers as you can. Puree in the blender with the vinegar, water, garlic and salt.

Makes about 2 cups.

Roasted Chili Salsa Verde

2 teaspoons olive oil

1 cup diced onion (I used a red one)

2 cloves garlic, minced

1 teaspoon ground cumin

1 pound tomatillos, diced

1 cup Roasted Green Chili Hot Sauce, above

3/4 teaspoon salt or to taste

1/4 cup cilantro, minced

Heat olive oil in a medium pot. Sauté onion until tender, about 4 minutes. Add garlic and cumin and cook for a minute.  Add the tomatillos, chili sauce and salt. Bring to a low boil, reduce to a simmer, cover and cook for 20 minutes. Let cool and stir in cilantro.

Makes about 2 cups.

Bean Hominy and Chipotle Soup

I don't cook in large amounts usually, so I often end up with various leftover ingredients in my freezer. When their quantity becomes overwhelming, I make a list of them and figure out how I can use them up in just a few dishes. When I made such a list last week, I had five kinds of beans and peas back there, as well as some hominy. The obvious thing to do was to make bean soup.

Once I made the soup, I was on a roll. During the rest of the week, I stretched a couple of servings of Coconut Curry with Purple Hull Peas to make more with some potato, water, cornstarch, salt and garam masala, and had the curry with rice and Gobi Manchurian.  I used my found bag of mango (Why did I buy this?) and made mango Margaritas. Finally, I turned about a serving and a half of mushroom soup into gravy with a roux of flour, oil and salt, and made use of some frozen tofu, lima beans and puff pastry that were languishing in the freezer; the ingredients became pot pie.

I was so proud of my empty freezer that I took pictures of it. It never looks like this!

You can see the bottom!

 

 

The door even is empty.

 

 

I am still on a spicy food kick (more than usual), so I added chipotle pepper puree to the soup. (The puree is made by combining the contents of a can of chipotle peppers in adobo sauce in a blender or food processor. Then you can store the rest in a glass jar in the refrigerator for up to a year.) You might think cumin would be a natural spice for this soup, and I would agree, but I left it out this time. Sometimes it's better not to put every ingredient in every dish possible - that way everything you cook doesn't end up tasting alike.

Bean Hominy and Chipotle Soup

2 tablespoons olive oil

1/2 large onion, diced, about 1 cup

2 stalks celery, diced, about 1 cup

2 carrots, diced, about 1 cup

1 medium zucchini, diced, about 1 cup

1/3 red bell pepper, diced, about 1/2 cup

2 cloves garlic, minced

4 cups of cooked beans or peas, any variety*

1 cup cooked hominy

1 14.5-ounce can diced fire-roasted tomato

1 6-ounce can tomato paste

6 cups vegetable broth or water

1 to 3 tablespoons chipotle puree

1 teaspoon smoked paprika

1 teaspoon oregano

Juice of 1 lime, about 1-1/2 tablespoons

Salt to taste (I used 1/4 teaspoon)

Heat olive oil in a large pot. Sauté onion, celery, carrots, zucchini and red bell pepper until  the vegetables become tender, about 5 minutes. Add garlic and sauté for another minute.  Add remaining ingredients and bring to a low boil. Reduce to a simmer, cover, and cook until zucchini is tender, about 20 minutes.

Serves about 6.

*My beans consisted of 1 cup purple hull peas and  3/4 cup each chick peas, cannellini beans, lima beans and edamame.

Walnut Lentil Pâté

There is a terrific vegetarian pâté - Bonavita - that I like to buy if we're going on a trip. It's especially nice for snacks on a plane flight, because it doesn't smell strong and it keeps for a couple of hours after you open it. When my son was small, he loved it so much that he could eat a whole can by himself at a sitting. But at almost $6 for a 4.4 ounce can, it's expensive.

I made it my goal to find a homemade pâté that we like just as much. At first I tried recipes that had the same ingredients as the commercial pâté, but then I came across this one on the internet, originally from Louis Lanza's Totally Dairy Free Cooking. It turned out to be the best one of the bunch. The recipe welcomes substitutions; I usually use the inexpensive brown lentils, but French du puy lentils work, as do the red ones (just cook those less). The lemon juice was originally ume plum paste, so use that or ume vinegar if you have some, but lemon juice is fine, too. The only ingredient you don't want to substitute for is the fresh basil.  The pâté also freezes well and is a great addition to a holiday menu. 

I am entering this in House Favorites: Vegan, and My Legume Love Affair, hosted this month by Suma at Veggie Platter. I am also linking it up with the Hearth 'n' Soul blog hop. 

Walnut Lentil Pâté

1 cup lentils

2 cups water

1 bay leaf

8 ounces cremini mushrooms, thickly sliced

1 shallot, diced, 2 or 3 tablespoons

1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar

1/4 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon pepper

1/2 cup walnut pieces

1/2 cup loosely-packed fresh basil

1 tablespoon lemon juice

2 tablespoons miso

3 tablespoons olive oil

Bring lentils, water and bay leaf to a low boil in a saucepan with a tight-fitting lid. Reduce heat to low, cover, and cook for 30 minutes. Drain and reserve the water.

Preheat oven to 350 F. Toss mushroom slices and diced shallot with balsamic vinegar, salt and pepper. Transfer to an oiled baking sheet for 15 minutes.

Spread walnuts on another baking pan and toast for 5 minutes.

In a food processor, combine lentils, mushroom mixture, walnuts, basil, lemon juice, miso and olive oil.  Process until smooth, stopping to scrape down the sides of the bowl as needed. Add some of the lentil cooking water if the mixture becomes too thick. Taste and season with salt and pepper if desired.

Grilled Seitan and Vegetables with Peanut Sauce

It is cool enough here finally to grill outdoors again, yay! I inaugurated the fall grilling season with some seitanmarinated in peanut sauce last weekend. The peanut sauce was from a package, so there is no recipe for the sauce. In fact, I just threw this together at the last minute and wasn't planning on blogging about it, but the vegetables were so good, I wanted to record what I did so that I can make them exactly the same way again. Since I didn't take a photo of the finished dish, you'll also have to do with a photo of the smoky chimney  and your imagination as to how pretty the vegetables were.

I'm sending the photo to Black and White Wednesdays, hosted by Susan of The Well Seasoned Cook.

Grilled Seitan and Vegetables with Peanut Sauce

8 ounces seitan

2 cups prepared peanut sauce

8 ounces green beans, trimmed and sliced in half

1 medium zucchini, about 8 ounces, sliced

1 red bell pepper, cut into 1-1/2 inch pieces

4 ounces cremini mushrooms, sliced

1 stalk celery, sliced

1/4 cup soy sauce

2 tablespoons rice vinegar

2 tablespoons mirin

2 teaspoons toasted sesame  oil

2 teaspoons sriracha sauce or other hot sauce

2 cloves garlic, minced

A 2-inch piece of ginger, peeled and minced

Cooked rice to serve, from 1 cup raw rice

Slice seitan into 1/8-inch slices or as thinly as you can. In a medium bowl, gently toss the seitan with 1 cup peanut sauce. Set aside in the refrigerator.

In a large bowl, toss the vegetables with the remaining ingredients, soy sauce through ginger. Set aside in the refrigerator. Turn over the seitan and vegetables at least once before grilling.

Heat coals in an outdoor grill. Toss vegetables in the marinade one more time and then drain. Grill in a grill pan until tender and starting to blacken, about 10 minutes. (If your coals are not super-hot, you might need to close the lid for part of the time.)

Push the vegetables to a cool side of the grill pan and add the seitan slices. Cook until the bottom is dry, then flip the slices and cook until the other side is dry.

Serve the vegetables and seitan with the rice and remaining peanut sauce.

Serves 3.

Hominy-Soyrizo Stuffed Poblanos

I have been craving spicy foods lately, even more than usual. I've made something spicy for nearly every meal the last week or two. These stuffed peppers are something I've been meaning to try for a while. Now seemed like the perfect time, seeing as how I'm in the middle of a craving.  Once the peppers are roasted, these go together quickly. Rice or beans (or both!) makes this a meal. I couldn't resist adding a big glug of this hot sauce to some black beans for a side dish.

Hominy-Soyrizo Stuffed Poblanos

1 pound poblano peppers (about 4)

6 ounces (1/2 package) soy chorizo (aka Soyrizo)

1/2 (15.5 ounce) can golden hominy, drained, about 3/4 cup

1/2 cup bread crumbs

Turn oven on to broil. Put one oven rack in the topmost position and place a second rack just below. Put a large pan on the lower rack to catch the drips. Place the peppers directly on the top rack and broil until the skin is thoroughly blistered and beginning to blacken. Turn the peppers with tongs to blister all the sides. Remove from the oven and wrap loosely in wax paper, or place in a paper bag to cool slightly. The steam from the cooling peppers will loosen the skin and make them easier to peel.

Peel as much of the blistered skin from the each pepper as you can. Use a small knife to cut around the stem and slit the pepper lengthwise. Remove the stem and most of the seeds, then open up and flatten the pepper. Rinse or wipe the remaining seeds the pepper.

Heat oven to 350 F. In a small bowl, mash the soyrizo and stir in the hominy. Divide the mixture  among the peppers and fold them up over the filling. Transfer the peppers to a baking pan (I used the same one that I put under the peppers earlier.) Bake until the filling is heated through, about 12 minutes.

Serves 4.

House Favorites: Vegan - September Wrap Up

It's a short but savory wrap-up this month. As the last of summer weather wound down last month we turned to dishes to showcase the best of the harvest.

Growing up, Deepika of My Life & Spice called eggplants baingan or in English, brinjal. It was hard for her to start calling them eggplant when the typical large purple ones don't look at all like an egg. One of her favorite ways to prepare them is roasted and mashed in Baingan Ka Bharta. Whatever you want to call it, it's always delicious.  

Caffettiera of La Caffettiera Rosa was too busy this summer for the lazy days and outdoor activities that usually mean the hot season, but she did get a chance to cook some favorite, summery food, which is the next best thing. After finding some lovely tomatoes, she made a favorite of her mum's, Pomodori Repieni, or Bread, Tomato and Olive Oil. 

Every summer, I look for fresh purple hull peas in the market. They're creamy cousins of black-eyed peas that are only for sale for a brief time. This time, I used my bounty to make Purple Hull Peas in Coconut Curry Sauce.

Thanks for your entries! I am looking forward to seeing everyone's favorites in the cooler months ahead. It's almost time to start thinking about holiday recipes, isn't it?

Bread, but no sandwiches

 

 

Do you remember when I announced my sandwich cookbook a couple of months ago? I made great progress on it. At last count, I have completed over thirty-five recipe with only minor rewriting needed and had a good start on writing the supporting material as well. I also have nearly a hundred and fifty items in my idea file.

Well, someone beat me to it. Two someones, actually, both published cookbook authors to boot. They announced that they are co-authoring a sandwich cookbook a month after I announced mine, but it seems that they have been working on it together for a while.  They already have a publisher even, while I haven't looked for one yet. I just don't see how the market could support two vegan sandwich cookbooks coming out at the same time, so I am postponing mine.

I'm not giving up on writing a cook book, though, and I'm already at work on something new. It's more of a general-purpose vegan cookbook with a twist to make it stand out from the crowd. As soon as I've done a bit more research and recipe experimentation and can narrow down my focus somewhat, I'll announce the details. I'm a little bit relieved, actually, as I was getting nervous about writing a specialty cookbook when no one knows who I am. I was beginning to think that I should have started with something more general-purpose, which the new one I'm working on will be.

This is some bread I made for the book. You might have already seen the picture of it I posted for Black and White Wednesday. I was impressed with its light texture and how high it rose. I included it in a sandwich called The TLC, made from baked marinated tofu, lettuce and carrots, and finished off with agave dijonaise. I wanted the bread to have a neutral taste, so I used agave nectar and canola oil in it, as opposed to molasses and olive oil. This is good to make when you need bread that doesn't dominate the flavor of your sandwich. It also made wonderful French toast.

Light Bread

2 cups white bread flour, divided

2 cups white wheat flour

2 tablespoons vital wheat gluten

1-3/4 cups warm water (about 105 F)

2 teaspoons active dry yeast

3 tablespoons canola oil

3 tablespoons agave nectar

1-1/2 teaspoons salt

Measure flour and vital wheat gluten into a medium bowl and whisk together with a fork. Add water and yeast to a large bowl, or the bowl of a stand mixer equipped with dough hooks. Scoop up about a cup and a half of the flour mixture and add it to the water and yeast. Set aside the remaining flour. Combine  the water-yeast-flour mixture well with a fork, cover, and let stand for an hour or more. This sponge will bubble up and expand.

Add the olive oil, molasses and salt to the sponge and whisk in with a fork. Add the remaining flour a cup at a time. If you plan to knead by hand, use a large wooden spoon to work the flour into the dough. Then, turn the dough out into a large cutting board and knead for 10 minutes. If you are kneading with a stand mixer, start the mixer and let it run while you add the flour. You may need to stop the machine once or twice and work some of the flour into the dough with a spoon. Once the flour is incorporated, let the machine knead the dough for 5 minutes.

Transfer the dough to an oiled, medium-sized bowl. (This can be the bowl that you measured the flour and wheat gluten into earlier.) Cover and allow the dough to rise at room temperature for an hour, until doubled in size.

Oil a 9 x 5-inch loaf pan. Shape dough to fit the pan. Cover and allow to rise again until doubled in size, about 45 minutes. Heat oven to 350 F, and bake bread for about 30 minutes.

To test your bread for doneness, turn the loaf out of the pan and rap sharply on the bottom with your knuckles; your loaf should sound hollow. If it doesn't make a sound, bake a little longer.

When bread has cooled, slice with a serrated knife as thinly as you can. You should be able to get about 14-15 slices.

House Favorites: Vegan - October Announcement

As food bloggers, sometimes we get so caught up in trying new things that we forget about the dishes that we make all the time. These are the recipes we make repeatedly for house guests and potlucks. The ones our families won't let us skip on the holidays. Our beloved signature dishes. Our house favorites.

What are your house favorites? This is a monthly blog event where you can show them off. It will run from the first day of the month to the last. I'll have a writeup of all the entries by the fifth of the following month. The rules are simple:

    1. Your dish needs to be vegan. This means no meat, fish, dairy, honey or their derivatives.

    2. You should have made this at least three times and consider the recipe "finished." Any course is welcome, from appetizers to desserts. Variations on your favorite dishes are welcome.

    3. In your blog post, please mention House Favorites: Vegan, and link to my main page: http://chezcayenne.blogspot.com.

 4. Use Mr. Linky at the end of the monthly announcement to enter your post.

Of course older posts are welcome, but please limit your entries of older posts to one a month, or reblog about them during the current month to enter more. There is no limit to the recipes you've blogged about during the current month. 

Feel free to enter your House Favorites: Vegan entries in other blog events.

You are welcome to use either of the logos here, but it's not required.

If you have a recipe that's not vegan, but you can veganize it without changing the character of the recipe much, blog about your vegan version and send it in - there's no need to make the vegan version three times. If a vegan ingredient is an option, make sure that you mention it in the ingredients list and instructions. (e.g. Your ingredients list can say something like 2 tablespoons butter or olive oil and your instructions say heat butter or olive oil.)

Non-food bloggers can participate too. Do you have a favorite message board that welcomes vegan recipes with photos? Post your recipe, a photo and a link back to my main page on the message board. Then use Mr. Linky and leave a comment here.