What even is chili? In the US it’s hamburger, bean and tomato soup, seasoned with cumin and a hint of “chili powder,” which is usually dried red chili mixed with cumin and dried onion and garlic. Hey, it’s pretty good! But is it chile?

In Latin America, a chile is a hot pepper, and it is prepared in countless ways, often as a sauce (salsa). My old friend S in Cuernavaca showed me how she made two kinds of sauce, one red and dry roasted, the other green and boiled.

This weekend I made chile (the dry roasted red kind) and mixed it with beans. I’ll call the result “chili beans” because it’s been chilly a.f. in Portland this weekend, and also, I’m a gringo. Here’s the basic recipe:

Ingredients

• 5 oz New Mexico chili pods (any kind will do! it’s just everybody says New Mexico are best, yada yada yada)
• 2 onions
• 1 bulb garlic (or more! no such thing as too much)
• 4 cans beans (yeah, I’ve been using canned beans, don’t judge, cook your own if you want, I used red and black this time)
• cumin
• oregano
• salt
• olive oil
• Recommended for serving: fresh cilantro, chopped; sour cream/crema (a.k.a. “Mexican cream” which is closer to crème fraiche); cotija/queso seco cheese, crumbled; lime wedges; fresh corn tortillas

Method

Red chili sauce / salsa roja

Preheat oven to 350F. Put a pot of water on to boil.

Snap or cut the stems off the chilis. Arrange in a single layer on a baking sheet and dry roast a few minutes until they start to get fragrant. Alternate method: heat a cast iron skillet and dry roast them in that.

Put the roasted chilis into a large mixing bowl and cover with boiling water. Cover and let soak for an hour or more. Reserve the water; you’ll need it later for two steps.

Take half an onion and cut it into quarters. Peel half your garlic. Dry roast these in a hot cast iron skillet until they are browned.

Put all your chilis and the roasted garlic and onion in a blender with salt, cumin and oregano. (How much cumin and oregano? I never measure, sorry! But a good bit of cumin and a little less oregano? You’re gonna have to wing it.)

Add a few ladles of the chili soaking water and blend until smooth. Keep adding water until you get a nice liquid consistency. This can be super thick, or super runny, depending on how you plan to use it. It can also be smoother or chunkier, like if you want to make table salsa. Since I’m going to cook this with beans, I make it more on the liquid side.

Give it a taste and add more salt and cumin/oregano if you think it needs it.

Thassit! You’ve made salsa roja! Imagine the variations you can come up with.

Da Beans

Heat olive oil with cumin and salt (how much cumin? again, uh… a good bit?) in a cast iron skillet. Chop one onion (this should leave half an onion for garnish). Sautée/caramalize. Mince the rest of your garlic. Add to the sautée once the onions have started caramelizing.

Throw this all in the pot with your beans, then mix in your chili sauce. Add some of the chili soaking water to thin it out till it’s a good bit thinner than you want (it’ll thicken up). Bring it to a simmer and let it cook for, I dunno, half an hour to an hour?

Voila! Steve’s Chili A.F.

Serving

Serve with a dollop of sour cream or crema, chopped onions, some fresh cilantro and queso seco crumbles. Garnish with a lime wedge. Super tasty with some heated up corn tortillas. Enjoy!

There, I said it. (And craft beer sucks, too.)

Now before you get your knickers in a knot, hear me out. I’m not a fan of Folgers or Budweiser.

I had my first espresso circa 1990, when second-wave coffee was pretty well on the way to jumping the shark. Starbucks led the way, selling primarily steamed milk flavored with a variety of syrups and espresso. My first double shot was from Captain Beans on Southeast 12th Ave. in Portland, and quickly grew to prefer it to drip coffee. I’m not a milk drinker, so I never bothered with cappuccinos or lattes. I’ve always preferred it straight up, with no sugar or milk.

In the early 2000s the “third wave” came along, with Portland’s Stumptown setting the tone. I grabbed a double shot at their original Division St. store after a dentist appointment once, and remember how awful it tasted. Not so much bitter as sour. Not the well-balanced flavor I had grown accustomed to. They call it Hair Bender. A balanced shot of espresso should not bend your hair. It should warm your soul.

Now in 2015, I find myself working in downtown Portland, trying to find a decent espresso. All the cool places have that awful sour taste. I braved the self-conciously hip Courier (record player on the bar? seriously?) to try their version of the double shot, and literally threw it away after a single sip. Mugshots: same story. Nasty. Ken’s Artisan Bakery? Same story. Spella? Not quite as bad, but definitely a noticeable sour taste. What’s the deal, I wondered.

One idea I had was that there’s some kind psychology in foodies that requires “good” things to be an acquired taste. Just like beer snobs have acclimated to dramatically over-hopped, unbalanced flavor in their beer, third-wave coffee snobs have convinced themselves that “sour” equals good in espresso.

The other thought I had was that most people drink espresso buried under two or three cups of steamed cow’s milk, and without sour espresso, they wouldn’t be able to differentiate “good” espresso without the sour tones cutting through all the lactose and milk fat.

Today I found a blog post about this flavor trend that explains it a little better. It seems in an effort to preserve the individualized flavor of single-source beans, third-wave roasters lightly roast their beans. Unfortunately (for those of us who prefer balance of umami and bitter), the preserved flavor agents are acids that would otherwise be muted in a darker roast. The result is a very unbalanced, acid-forward flavor. Maybe with a ton of sugar and/or milk this would be pleasant to drink. But that doesn’t sound very foodie, now does it?

It turns out that like beer brewing, it’s hard to improve on the Europe’s espresso tradition. Starbucks, for all their sins (and there are a lot) still makes a damn good shot of espresso.

Yes, you can learn to like bitter and sour things, and then pretend people who don’t like it are Budweiser- and Folgers-loving troglodytes. Or you can appreciate a smooth, rich, balanced thing, perfected over generations, in no need of improvement.

Ingredients

Spuds, peeled
Olive oil
Melted butter
Salt and pepper

Method:

Preheat oven to 425F. Slice spuds almost all the way through and place in a roasting pan. Drizzle with olive oil and melted butter. Roast for 45 minutes or so. Use a pastry brush to slather the butter and oil over the tops of the spuds a couple times during the baking. Done when browned on top and crispy on the bottom.

Ingredients:

1 package frozen hashbrowns
6 eggs
1 6 oz. tub pesto
1 bunch asparagus
olive oil
balsamic vinegar
salt & pepper

Preheat oven to 400F.

Preheat a large cast iron skillet* with oil over medium-high heat. Put hashbrowns in preheated pan and cover.

Roast asparagus in olive oil and a splash of balsamic vinegar.

Beat eggs, and add tub of pesto. Chop up roasted asparagus, let cool a bit, then add to egg mixture.

Preheat broiler.

When hashbrowns have browned on the bottom, remove from heat and pour egg mixture over the top. Put under the broiler until firm and browned on top.

*If you don’t have a cast iron skillet, you can improvise with a non-stick skillet and a roasting pan. That’s what I did today. I browned the hashbrowns in two batches in a non-stick skillet, then transferred them to the roasting pan for the final broiling.

Zeke and I mixed these up and baked them today. They are too good. Don’t say we didn’t warn you. The idea is a layered bar, bottom a blondie, the top a brownie. Start with the blondie layer.

Blondie ingredients

1 cup flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/8 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/3 cup butter, melted
1 cup brown sugar, packed
1 egg, beaten
1 tablespoon vanilla

Preheat oven to 325F.

Mix flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt in a medium mixing bowl and set aside.

Mix melted butter and sugar in a large mixing bowl, then add egg and vanilla.

Gradually stir in dry ingredients to the sugar and butter mix. Spread mix evenly in a greased 9×13 baking pan. Set aside.

Brownie ingredients

2 sticks butter
2 cups sugar
4 eggs, beaten
1 cup flour
1/2 cup cocoa
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons vanilla

Cream butter and sugar; add eggs. Mix dry ingredients together and add to butter-sugar mixture. Add Vanilla.

Spread evenly on top of the blondie dough.

Bake for 45-50 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.

You may recognize the brownie recipe from Grandma Margie’s cookbook, which you should go buy if you haven’t already!

Palace of Westminster (Houses of Parliament) from the London Eye

Emmy and I first started planing a London trip almost two years ago. We can thank Harry Styles, Zayn Malik, Liam Payne and the rest of One Direction for the inspiration of the destination. They were a gateway for Emmy getting into other British acts and British fashion. Emmy says, “I was thinking of London as this perfect place. And it was.”

Other than Canada, I hadn’t traveled internationally since 1997, when Nancy and I got engaged in Lisbon and Wesley and I traveled to Prague.

To be honest, the UK was not the top of my travel bucket list for travel. But it should have been. We had an all around great trip. I was very pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to travel in London, and how much I enjoyed the green spaces alongside the cosmopolitan urban culture and amenities. Public transit is extremely convenient; we took the tube everywhere except a cab to our flat on arrival and when we took the train to Windsor and to the Harry Potter studio tour.

Greek lunch in Windsor

We were both especially pleased at the ease (and quality) of vegetarian dining in London, something that is always stressful while traveling, particularly in continental Europe (maybe it’s better there now) and Latin America. It seems like almost every restaurant in London has a selection vegetarian items, all nicely marked with a “V” or in their own category on menu. (Even in supposedly prog Portland, we often don’t get this courtesy.) I assumed we’d be eating a lot of Indian food (no complaints there, mate!), but we never did, and we didn’t find the need to look for vegetarian restaurants, either (of which there are plenty). Somebody even rated London the number one vegan city in the world. I would have scoffed at that notion prior to this trip.

For a while we considered splitting the trip between London and Paris, even entertaining the crazy notion of a day or overnight trip to Paris. We decided this would be too much hassle and not enough time in either city, and decided to focus a full 10 days on London. We rented a flat instead of a hotel so we could just unpack and move in and have a full home base. This turned out to be a really good decision. It was less expensive than a hotel, still very conveniently located, and extremely comfortable and convenient (separate bedrooms, kitchen, laundry, and a huge terrace overlooking the neighborhood).

If you’re not me or Emmy or directly related to us, the rest of this may be boring. I’m just recording it from my hand-written journal for posterity. If you just want to see photos, you can see them all on Flickr (pictures of me and Emmy are protected; if you’re family drop me a line and I’ll send you a special link so you can see us).

Read the rest of this entry »

Yeah, it’s l’estate, not la primavera, but the peas are just coming on strong, and so are the carrots. And we had some red bells and pesto in the fridge, ergo:

Ingredients

1 Red bell pepper, sliced
1 handful fresh carrots, sliced thinly on a diagonal
2 handfuls snow peas, sliced into bite-size chunks
1/2 sweet onion, chopped
6 cloves garlic, sliced
1 handful sun-dried tomatoes, chopped (I like the kind packed with olive oil)
Grated Parmesan
1/2 cup pesto
Zest of 1 lemon
Olive oil

Method

Saute onion, carrot and pepper in olive oil over medium heat until soft. Add peas, garlic and sun-dried tomatoes. Saute until soft, then turn up heat and sear. When carrots and onions are browned a little, turn off heat and toss in pesto. Serve over capellini, top with a sprinkle of Parmesan and another sprinkle of lemon zest.

No lettuce? No problem!

leftover Salad

1/2 red bell pepper, cut into 3/4″ squares
1/2 cucumber, sliced thinly
1 medium carrot, grated
1 slice onion, chopped finley
1 slice jalapeño, chopped finely
A couple drizzles olive oil
Splash balsamic vinegar
celery salt to taste
ground black pepper to taste
Tamari rice crackers, crumbled

Mix all ingredients. Eat as your first meal of the year out on the deck.

photo by MiniQQ

The wife and I found ourselves in downtown Portland for breakfast yesterday, and thought we’d hit longtime Portland fave Bijou Cafe. That didn’t work out; the line was out the door (but not around the block like the one for Voodoo Donuts down the street). We could have grabbed a crappy cup of coffee at Stumptown next door so we could sit down at their sidewalk table while waiting for our Bijou table, but we worried we were getting too close to acting out a Portlandia sketch.

Speaking of Voodoo, that place has come to define Portland. A couple walking ahead of us (mid 50s, him with a Harley jean jacket and pressed Levis) stopped a stranger and asked where it was. Pretty soon we noticed every other person on the street was carrying a pink box of donuts.

Also, good luck finding street parking in downtown Portland anymore unless you are parking a fixie bike, a streetcar or a short-term rental car (excuse me, car-sharing car). So we had to walk about 20 blocks to discover that we’re not cool enough for Bijou anymore.

So yeah, hipsters on fixies, ironic donuts and lines out the door for a pretentious over-priced breakfast. And cops cruising around looking for mentally ill people to beat up or shoot. That’s what our Portland has become, apparently (or was it like this all along and we’re just now noticing?).

Walking back to our car we stopped to buy a Street Roots. Had to wait in line for that, too, but only one deep (“It’ll be a good day when the line to buy Street Roots is as long as the line at Voodoo Donuts,” said Nancy).

Then we saw Bagel Bistro on 4th and Stark. Not a customer inside. We got breakfast there, and it was pretty good. Pretty, pretty good. Standard greasy spoon type menu, including genuine hash browns. None of those pompous “home fries” or “cottage potatoes.” Honest-to-goodness hash browns, grated and fried to a crisp golden brown. And the price was right, too.

Jesus, maybe we did end up acting out a Portlandia sketch.