Hot sauce

I love hot food.  The hotter it is, the better the food, thus I have a lot of interest in hot sauce.  Now hot sauce is pretty cheap and there are a million varieties, but it is fun to try to make stuff at home.  Also, I keep eyeing the bags of Scotch Bonnet peppers at the Caribbean grocery and thinking what I could do with them.  One or two are easy to use.  20 not so much, except via hot sauce.

So the last time I tried to do this, I used apple cider vinegar.  Poor choice.  It was too tangy and sweet.  Some people like sugar and fruit in their hot sauce, but I like salt, vinegar, garlic and lots of heat.  Otherwise, the hot sauce was Trini-style, with chado beni (similar to cilantro), mustard, and two heads of garlic.  The garlic was actually worse than the peppers.  Raw garlic burn my tummy like the dickens.  It needed a couple of weeks to mellow before it was edible.

I kept the sauce in a mason jar, which was a bad idea as well.  The sauce stuck to the lip of the jar, dried, and got gross.  Much better would be to put it in a tapered jar.

This time I am started with a recipe from my brother's Jamaican cookbook.  It's a bit odd and I plan to split it in half and modify one half.  I am not sure why you don't puree the veggies, but we'll see how it turns out.  At 5 days, it is actually turning pretty good, if colorless.

Basic Hot Sauce:

1 carrot, finely diced
1 white onion, finely diced
4 Scotch bonnet or habanero chilies, thinly sliced
2 cups white vinegar
2 cloves garlic, pressed

1) Put everything in a jar.
2) Age one week, agitating once in a while to mix.

Day 5.  Still basically colorless.  A little cloudy from the minced garlic.

Day 7.  Filtered off the solids.  Cloudy yellow.

I tried to puree the vegetables, but they really didn't liquify.  It's kinda gross to have hot sauce with a bunch of debris at the bottom, so I just tossed it.  When I made my Trini hot sauce, I was able to get a pretty homogeneous sauce, so I suspect that soaking the veggies makes them less willing to puree.  No matter.  Interesting, while perusing Jungle Jim's, I noticed some hot sauce that looked just like mine - clear.  Some of the color might just be cosmetic.

The flavor is pretty good, with very hot pepper flavor and rich vinegar bite in balance.  I considered adding some mustard to some of it to make it Trini, but I haven't done that yet.  What do I do with a cup of hot sauce now?  Next post, the answer.

B and B

This is one of my wife's favorite recipes.  It is quick, cheap, and delicious.  We discovered this dish at Yat's, a now chain restaurant centered in Indianapolis.  They have a great selection of cajun food cheap.  There dishes are great vehicle for hot sauce, which I love.

So the dish is black beans with caramelized corn and red pepper.  The first "B" I guess stands for "Black Beans", but I am not honestly sure what the second "B" stands for, but it is "B and B".

Part of the key to the flavor is caramelizing the corn.  The controlling factors are moisture and heat level.  I have always used canned corn, but frozen or fresh might work just as well (or better).  Canned corn is of course packing in water, so you need to do a decent job of draining the corn and letting it sit a bit in the sieve to let it drip through.  You are never going to get it all out, so you need to boil off the rest.  Don't be timid with the heat.  I usually crank it up to one notch from max and that gets rid of the water quick.  Max on my stove is killer and I try to avoid it unless there is no risk of scorching.

One the corn is dry, modulate the heat so that the corn start to brown a little.  Don't baby it, but don't get impatient.  You don't want it black.  The corn should deepen in color as the white sugar in the corn turns to brown caramel.

Yes, there is a decent amount of butter in this.  There's no meat, so it is still pretty healthy.

The milk can be switched out with heavy cream.  Skim might work, but they sauce will be a little thin.  Try some red beans, black eyed peas, or pinto beans for a change.  If you don't like spicy, switch the cayenne to paprika.  Mmm.  Paprika.

B and B

4 Tbs Butter (half a stick)
2 cans sweet corn, drained
2 Tbs brown sugar
2 cans black beans, drained
1 red pepper, chopped
1/2 cup whole milk
1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
1/2 Tbs kosher salt
pepper to taste

1) Melt the butter over medium high heat.  Be careful not to burn the butter
2) Add the corn and boil off the liquid
3) Fry 5-10 minutes, modulating heat and stirring to caramelize the corn
4) Add brown sugar and fry 2 more minutes.
5) Add black beans on red pepper and fry 2 minutes
6) Add milk, cayenne, salt, and pepper.
7) Heat to boiling, then simmer until the sauce is properly thick, around 2-3 minutes
8) Serve over rice.  Add hot sauce as you wish.

I'll add some pictures next time I make it.

Basic sausage and vegetables recipe

 This is I think the only recipe that I learned from my mother.  It is super simple and tastes spectacular and is really pretty healthy.  It is a great way to use up extra potatoes and carrots, which I always seem to have around

The big key is the yin and yang of moisture.  Too much moisture and everything turns out mushy and too little and the veggies don't soften.  Remove the lid if things get a bit too moist and cook off the moisture.  Also, you want to add the pepper at the end.  Otherwise, it turns to goo.  I leave the potatoes fairly large.  They take a while to cook, but I like the big chunks.

Sausage and Vegetable Stir Fry

1 lb smoked sausage, sliced
5 potatoes
3-4 carrots
1 onion
2-3 garlic cloves
1/2 tbsp seasoned salt
1/2 pepper (red, green, yellow)
1/4 tsp rosemary (optional)
2 tablespoons oil (olive, canola)

1) Chop and peel the veggies.
2) Heat oil to medium-high
3) Toss in the veggies and sausage except for the pepper.  Add season salt and rosemary
4) Cover the pot and fry and stir until the veggie begin to soften and a brown crust forms on the bottom of the pan
5) Add two tablespoons of water to deglaze the pan.  Stir to incorporate, cover, and cook until nearly done
6) Add the pepper and cook another couple of minutes, until the pepper has softened, but is still crispy.

Mexican Food and Gazpacho

I think a lot about food origins.  As I make guacamole, I think, āhuacamolli from the Aztec language of Nahuatl.  I think avocado - from Mexico, onions - from all over, chilies - from Mexico, cilantro - from south Asia, but equivalents exist in Mexico, lime juice - from east Asia, and salt.  Seems like we have something that is pretty traditional that we could have eaten centuries ago, assuming the lime juice is substituted for some other acid, such as vinegar, which was available to all cultures.

So I've been cooking Mexican this week and I realized that Mexican and Middle Eastern cooking are very similar.  First, the ingredient lists line up very well.  Cumin, citrus juices, peppers, chickpeas, tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, cilantro, etc.  Second is the focus on freshness.  Raw tomatoes, herbs, vegetables, and fresh crumbly cheeses (feta and queso fresco) are staples of the the cuisines.  Modern Mexican is even beginning to use a lot of olive oil, which is produced out in Baja California.  It is funny that the Mexicans have adopted Middle Eastern ingredients and the Middle Easterners have adopted Mexican ingredients until they both kind of met in the middle.  It is very odd to think of Sichuan, Indian, and Thai cuisines without chili peppers, but until the Europeans hauled them out of Mexico a few centuries back, none of these cuisines were spicy, unless you count black pepper as "spicy", which I wouldn't.  You can only incorporate so much black pepper until the meal become unpalatable (and ridiculously expensive in the days before industrial agriculture).

It is unfortunate that Mexican food has been dominated by "package" presentation.  Everything is wrapped in some fashion, whether it be burritos, tacos, tamales, enchiladas, empanadas, etc.  I for one don't generally make "package" food, as it doesn't really keep that well, getting quickly soggy.  Fortunately, it doesn't have to be this way.

It being summer, I was dying for some gazpacho and what better source for a gazpacho recipe than the homeland of tomatoes - Mexico.  I optimized this recipe from Marge Poore's 1,000 Mexican recipes.  Use "good" tomatoes and not the ones strip mined from Texas that you buy during off-seasons.  These are flavorless.  I used Romas, but farmer's market ones would be even better.


Mexican Gazpacho

2 lbs fresh tomatoes
1/2 cucumber, seeded and peeled
1 celery rib, chopped
2 tbsp chopped onion
1-2 minced garlic cloves
1 diced jalapeno
1 tbsp red wine vinegar
12oz tomato juice
1/4 cup olive oil
1/2 tsp salt or to taste

1) Put everything in food processor and puree to a liquid
2) Refrigerate until cold.

Quick dumplings

Just back from vacation, so I haven[t been cooking much, but I have a very easy recipe that I just made today.  It is not uncommon that I end up with a soup that is mostly broth.  While yummy, it doesn't fill you up.  An easy way to turn it into a more filling meal is to add dumplings.  These won't take more than a couple of minutes and don't require any sort of skill.

Quick Dumplings:

1.25 cups all purpose flour
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup water

1) Mix all the ingredients in a bowl until relatively homogeneous.
2) Tear off dumpling size chunks and add to boiling soup/broth
3) Simmer 20 minutes while covered.

The dumplings should poof up a bit and firm up.  Yummy.