Ingredients:

Procedure:

1. In your soup pot over medium-high heat, melt oil and butter together. Whisk in flour to make a roux. Stir constantly until mixture looks like wet sand and smells like popcorn.
2. Stir in onion, celery, garlic, and bell pepper to coat in roux.
3. Sprinkle in herbs and spices and stir to mix.
4. Cover with chicken stock, add tomatoes, chicken, and shrimp.
5. Bring to a boil, reduce to a simmer, and cook about 10 minutes, until the vegetables are cooked but not limp. The roux will also cook and thicken the soup a bit.
6. Stir in okra.
7. Rest in refrigerator overnight, warm, taste and adjust seasonings if necessary.

It’s funny what can happen to a recipe over time. This dish is something that my family makes, except they call it “chile verde.” The truth, I’m afraid, is that real Mexican chile verde is a pork dish, with an insanely delicious sauce made out of tomatillos and green chiles. The recipe that follows probably started off with pork and tomatillos, but then somewhere along the line someone substituted chicken for pork, tomatoes for tomatillos, left out the onions… It’s total gringa food, but nonetheless very tasty, calls for ingredients that are usually on hand, and is delicious any time of the year. You may download the recipe from the sidebar to the left.

Ingredients:

Procedure:

1. Cook garlic and chili flakes in oil until garlic just begins to brown.
2. Add remaining ingredients and cook gently until thickened, stirring regularly.

For a number of years I made pizzas at home from scratch. I have a pretty great pizza dough recipe, to which I usually add grated parmesan cheese, pine nuts, and rosemary. I use my mother’s sauce formula and the whole thing can be accomplished pretty easily in a couple of hours over the course of the day. And there would be nothing wrong with continuing to make pizzas from scratch – I do not object categorically to it at all, in fact – but often there isn’t quite enough space in my day, or I am away from home, or I am unable to plan well enough a day ahead to ensure that I have all of the necessary ingredients at my disposal.

Enter the frozen pizza, one of the few convenience food items that is relatively unharmed by an extended deep-freeze in a par-baked state. The frozen pizza takes on an impressive array of shapes and flavors – the mini pizza, the personal pizza, the bagel pizza. It appears dressed in meat and veggies, or swathed in four-to-six-cheeses. It is now available with red sauce, white sauce and – gulp – peanut sauce. Their crusts are self-rising, crispy, deep-dish, whole wheat and even “low-carb.” The popularity and extensibility of the frozen pizza is undeniable. It is here and we – evidently – love it.

But the frozen pizza is, out of the box, not what I want to eat for dinner. There are never enough veggies, or one of the cheeses in the blends tastes funny (smoked provolone on a pie??), or the crust is wrong. This problem, however, is easy to solve. And the solving it feels like cooking – a home-delivery-frozen hybrid that turns out to be pretty much exactly perfect.

Fixing a Frozen Pizza

1. I start with Digorno’s Four Cheese model. I find the sauce a little too sweet on its own, but it is certainly preferable to everything else I’ve sampled. The crust is neither too thick, nor too crispy. It rises a bit during baking and is almost fluffyish without being too chewy. Of course, the pie you start with should suit your sauce-and-crust needs. If you like ‘em thin, go thin. If you love Freschetta’s zillion-cheese blend, go for it.
2. While the pizza is still snuggly suspended in the freezer, I preheat my oven to 400ºF and prepare the toppings. Zucchini, red bell pepper, garlic, black olives, and oregano are non-negotiable. Basil, shrimp, spinach, pine nuts and red onion are very nice auxillary garnishes.
3. Notes on topping-handling in an ideal world:
   • Give fresh, whole garlic cloves a rough chop, then cook them slowly in a sauté pan in some olive oil and butter. Pre-cooking the garlic thusly, ahead of the rest of the pizza, goes a surprisingly long way in deepening and mellowing that lovely garlic flavor. Take care not to overcook the garlic, however. Any browning on the stovetop will ultimately result in a crispy, bitter pizza topping.
   • Hide basil underneath the other toppings. Tuck it beneath the zucchini to prevent it from drying out and burning in the oven.
   • Leave pine nuts untoasted: they’ll get enough action in the oven.
4. Remove pizza from freezer, cardboard box, and plastic cover. Apply toppings.
5. Bake on a sheet pan for a chewier crust. Bake on the oven rack for a crispier crust.
6. Set pizza on a wire rack to cool. Place the cardboard box and maybe some paper towels directly below the hot pie.

This is the brilliant part! Pay very close attention and prepare to be amazed!

With a sharp knife, mechanical pencil, phillips screwdriver, or sanitized pitchfork, poke holes through the pie.

The reason for the holes is this: when the veggies cook on top of the pizza, they release a lot of juice. The juice has nowhere to go, being on top of a pizza with, most likely, a sunken middle. If it is not drained off somehow, the juice just hangs out on top of the pie, making it soggy and unpleasant to eat. The draining allows for the pie to carry an impressive quantity of fresh, delicious vegetables without sogginess or collapse. The draining only takes a minute or two, which I find is exactly as much time as I need to toss salad and pour wine.

Slice pizza, serve, and graciously accept praise from your impressed dinner companions.

Falafel – the Middle East’s brilliant veggie burger equivalent (roughly) – is the latest rediscovery among the lost and forgotten dishes of my past. A few months ago the Netflix geniuses recommended the cult-fave, He Died With a Felafel in His Hand. I dutifully added it to my queue, then promptly forgot about it. It’s a fun, entertaining flick even without the food reference, but when I saw that corpse clutching his pita-swathed falafel, that little light bulb went -ping!- and it all came flooding back… I now recall that less than a year ago, I was making the stuff at home on a regular basis. I think I had falafel parties, giddily setting out plates of tomato slices, sprouts, and cucumber; testing recipes for tahini and yogurt sauces, warming pita over the open flame of a gas burner… that was me, right? I had my first falafel at Petra’s Café in Monterey. The stuff they serve at the Basha’s cart at PSU is almost acceptable, but the Fantastic mix is even better (just add fresh basil).

Today, in an effort to create a memorable experience, and therefore a lasting relationship with my favorite incarnation of the mighty garbanzo bean, I made the stuff from scratch.

Ingredients:

Procedure:

1. Mash the garbanzos. Set aside.
2. Process onion, garlic, and herbs.
3. Add spices, egg white, olive oil, lemon juice and baking powder to onion mixture. Blend thoroughly.
4. Stir together onion, etc. and mashed beans.
5. Add bread crumbs gradually, until desired consistency is achieved. The mixture should hang together as a patty, approx 1/2″ thick and maybe 2″ in diameter.
6. Pan-fry over medium heat in vegetable oil and/or olive oil, until crisp and golden on both sides.
7. Drain excess oil over paper towels.
8. Serve with your favorite goodies: flat bread, red onion, cucumber, tomato, alfalfa sprouts, tahini, tabouleh, etc.

So, the enchiladas. This is the sad part. I know I am screwing it all up. I am bastardizing a perfectly wonderful tortilla-sauce-meat-cheese arrangement. I really don’t think I should even be allowed to call them “enchiladas,” but, when I use that word you know what I mean to indicate. If I said “really wet riceless baked burrito” it just wouldn’t come together as quickly – or as precisely – as I’d like it to. So when I write “enchilada,” please understand that I am fully aware of the culinary crime I am perpetrating.

My first attempt I modeled after some frozen enchiladas I get from Trader Joes’s. They’re wheat-free, dairy-free AND vegetarian. Tofu enchiladas: sad; but – yes – tasty. They are also filled with zucchini, yellow squash, black beans, and corn. I added to mine olives, chicken, and scallions. They were all right. They were all right because the sauce that I bought was pretty good (more sinning!).

Today I tried again –shredded the chicken this time, used pintos, onions, garlic, corn – no zucchini or yellow squash – and some cilantro from my windowsill. I made a little sauce out of the simmering water from the chicken (bay leaves, garlic, and dried red chiles) and (canned) enchilada sauce. I haven’t tasted them yet. I know they’d be great if I’d just use some damn cheese…

My family has a multigenerational tradition of bastardizing regional dishes. My mother makes this really great simmered chicken dish she calls “chile verde” that contains neither pork nor tomatillos. It’s really good. But it sure as heck isn’t chile verde. Our family’s tamal recipe came from Martha. They are tasty, but there’s no lard, no sauce on the inside.

We are California folk. For many years, we had Mexican friends who would deliver dozens of tamales to our home on Christmas Eve. We’ve all been to México, and we all ate food while we were there. We understand the difference between what we get down there and what we eat at home. Maybe we just can’t help ourselves – authentic Gringo is what we cook, not authentic Méxicano.

Do we owe it to Mexican food, qua Mexican, to do it right? I have given up on Thai and Vietnamese because I can’t even come close (due, for the most part, to the fact that I cannot bring myself to use fish sauce). A friend of mine said the other day that any regional or ethnic food sold in the United States is, to some degree, Americanized. Do we, as a nation, really have such an embarrassing and infantile palate? Or do we expect that whatever we find here just won’t be as good, effectively lowering our standards?