I wrote up this post before we left on our trip in September, and I’ve posted a bunch of stories in the interim. No matter, read on . . . I kid you not, folks. I am in l-o-v-e with Penzey’s Soup Bases. You just won’t believe how flavorful your soups and stews will be when you add just a bit of this to them. And I seem to be riding on the tails of the successful chicken posole I made last a few weeks ago. I must not have made enough of that – I’m craving more. So . . . since I was making dinner for us to take to our local kids and grandson, and decided it was cool enough yesterday (in the 70’s) that it felt almost, sorta, kinda like Fall,  chili and cornbread sounded like the ticket to me. I didn’t want to go buy stuff at the grocery store. Sure enough, I had everything to make this chili.
Researching, I read a recipe on the Food Network (from Ina Garten’s section) and used it as a kind of guideline. This particular version doesn’t have any beans in it, but you could certainly add them. I might add a can of kidney beans, just to give it some dramatic color. It has a bunch of corn in it (I had a plastic bag of Trader Joe’s fire-roasted corn in the freezer) so probably doesn’t need beans.

Frozen chicken breasts I had, canned tomatoes (yep), red bell peppers (yep, two left in the crisper) and onions. Everything else was just icing on the cake – yep, had some cheddar cheese, a little container of sour cream, and some about-to-be-stale tortilla chips. Hooray. No trip to the grocery store!

The chili came together very quickly – really. I made it my own with omission of a few things (basil, yellow bells, cayenne). I had some cute little chile peppers from our garden (the four-legged squirrel and ground critters don’t like chiles, I’ve learned – hooray). They weren’t jalapenos, but something close, so the recipe below indicates jalapenos. You can use your chiles of choice for the heat you’d prefer! And I added my Penzey’s turkey stock concentrate and some chipotle chile in adobo sauce, plus some ancho chili powder. And the corn. Garnishes can be of your own choosing. I used grated cheddar, sour cream, tortilla chips and cilantro. Green onions? Fritos? Jack cheese? Yogurt instead of sour cream? Lots of choices here.
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MasterCook 5+ import file – right click to save file, run MC, then File|Import

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A few weeks ago I was watching Martha when she had several famous New York chefs on the show. Seems like they all made fish of some kind, and this particular recipe just sounded interesting. Since Fall is in the air, a more hearty meal piqued my curiosity. The recipe is from Chef Daniel Boulud, certainly one of the pre-eminent chefs out there today. His method is more French than anything else. This recipe isn’t for a night when you’re trying to get dinner on the table in a hurry. It would be more appropriate for guests or a special evening at home. I have changed the recipe just a little. Originally it served 6. I cut it down to serve 2 (shown below). I couldn’t find salsify at the market, so I substituted parsnips. I hadn’t fixed celery root in years, but most markets here in California carry it regularly. I love the subtle taste of celery in this root vegetable.

So, here’s the gist of the recipe. First you make the wine and port sauce. It boils down to next to nothing (I actually left the shallot in the sauce, and I forgot to add the peppercorns altogether). Meanwhile, you peel and cube the celery root. Be sure to use a sturdy peeler if you have one. A light-weight one probably couldn’t pull the heavy peel off. Dig out any eyes and remove most of the very dark swirly parts (the part that’s actually the peel) by just peeling an additional layer or two. Cut into cubes and then you poach the root in milk to which you’ve added some seasonings. That takes about 20 minutes. I pureed it in the food processor (the actual recipe has more steps) and didn’t use all the milk, but just about.

The fish is fairly straight forward – you place some fresh sage leaves (from my garden) on the salmon fillets, then top them with one or two slices of bacon. I wanted to use one slice rather than two, but use your own judgment. It will be harder to turn the salmon if you lay the bacon on top (as I did) rather than wrapping two slices around the middle (so the bacon will stick to itself where the ends meet). I actually baked my salmon in the oven, but the done-ness was much harder to judge (it was overcooked, even though I used a thermometer), so I recommend you stick to the recipe below pan sautéing it.

The results: Absolutely delicious. The celery root puree with its moderately subtle celery flavor was a great pairing with the hearty salmon. The SAUCE is what makes it, though. I wish I’d made more. You want to take each bite that includes a bit of the celery root, salmon, bacon and sauce.
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Waiting for the weather to turn Fall-ish seems to take forever here in Southern California. On our recent driving trip we even got up to snow level (in Mt. Lassen), and endured 4 days of rain in Oregon, but as soon as we headed south again it was back into Indian Summer. The air conditioning has been running some hours nearly every day. But, it does cool off at night, thankfully. It’s not warm enough to eat outside in the evening (besides, by the time we eat it’s pitch dark now), and because I’ve been very busy trying to catch up on “things,” I’ve done some quick and easy dinners of late. Whenever the weather turns cool, my mind turns to soup. Soup is probably my most favorite food to cook, believe it or not. I even considered naming my blog something related to soup. But then, I cook a little bit of everything, so that would have been quite misleading and far fewer people would read my blog.

As I was baking Dana’s recent birthday cakes, my granddaughter Taylor asked me what was my favorite thing to cook. When I told her it was soup she gave me a funny look. When she comes to visit us I usually bake with her (cookies, cakes, desserts – I mean, what kid doesn’t love desserts . . . I always hope that one of my grandaughters or grandsons will have an interest in cooking).  So she was a bit mystified, I guess, that I said soup! Her mother (my daughter) doesn’t eat soup. Period. I don’t know where I went wrong there – she doesn’t eat eggs (or breakfast, for that matter), mushrooms or soup. Nor does she drink coffee or tea. Or wine. Or beer for that matter. Oh well. We eat/drink almost all of them. Back to soups . . . I’ve even written up a post about my soup “library” in my freezer – the vertical stack of flattened freezer bags full of soup. Twice this week I’ve pulled out bags from my inventory. I’m getting ready to start firing up the burners for a new season of soups.

I read somebody else’s blog this morning which gave me the idea that maybe some of you haven’t been reading my blog all that long. And maybe you haven’t read some of my older posts about my favorite soups. If you haven’t looked at my RECIPE INDEX, you can always go there and view a list of all of the recipes of all types that I’ve posted since I started my blog.

This soup list below isn’t all-inclusive . . . I’m only telling you about my favorite hot soups. The ones I make year after year after year. The ones I crave. Here you go:

Cabbage Patch Stew –  Kind of a cross between soup and stew. Simple to make and served with a topping of freshly made mashed potatoes. This is one of my all-time favorites because of the combination of hearty soup and the potatoes. Freeze the potatoes separately.

Cream of Tomato Soup –  From a cooking class I took last year up in Sonoma. Oh so much better than Campbell’s. This is the first soup I’ll be making very soon. I crave this soup, especially with a half of a toasted sharp cheddar cheese sandwich made on grainy wheat bread.

Roasted Butternut Squash Soup – a rather complicated fresh butternut squash soup. It also contains onions and apples, all oven roasted before concocting the soup itself. Succulent and a bit sweet. Freezes really well.

Roasted Poblano Asiago Soup –  the recipe I researched after going to Cindy’s Backstreet Kitchen and having a similar soup. I crave this soup too.

Butternut Squash with Ginger & Jalapeno – a completely different soup than the above one – spicy, smooth and quite simple to make.

Tuscan Chicken Soup –  not a chicken soup at all. Very easy soup with ground beef and greens.

Sopa de Calabacitas – a favorite because I just l-o-v-e calabacitas (a Southwestern combo of corn, poblano chiles, onion, zucchini and cilantro). Usually served as a side vegetable, I like the mixture so much I made it into a soup.  

And just because I’m writing up a post about soups, here are two cold soups that are particular favorites too, which I probably won’t be making again until next spring sometime:

Cream of Cucumber Soup –  A cold summer soup from my friend Jackie. I must have made it 5 times over this last summer.

Strawberry Gazpacho –  from a cooking class a couple of years ago. Simply scrumptious. When strawberries come in season in the spring I’ll be making this right away quick.

I created the photo collage from photos in my archive. Once I finished it I realized the top left isn’t soup, it’s salsa. From the tiny thumbnail, it looked like tortilla soup. But the rest are soup photos from my recent cooking.

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Last week was my turn to take desserts to my evening book group. One dessert isn’t enough for our group, so two is about the minimum. I had some cookie dough to make up into cookies, so those went along as well. I also made the applesauce spice cake with caramel icing, since it’s become such a favorite lately. I cut it up to serve about 16, and there were two skinny pieces left. I thought I should round it out with a fruit-type dessert. Apples would have been the obvious seasonal choice, but I had read a recipe recently over at Smitten Kitchen that looked absolutely fabulous. For pears. In a crisp. Yum.

FYI: Our group read The Falling Man by De Lillo. Quite a book. I didn’t particularly like it (a fictional account of a man and the people within his sphere of influence in the aftermath of his escape from the Twin Towers on 9/11). It’s a dark book, but the discussion was very lively as we analyzed the symbolism and the meaning behind some of the characters and their actions. The reviewer did an excellent job focusing our discussion and ferreting out the important details.

Anyway, this pear crisp is absolutely wonderful. If you enjoy fruit crisps, like pears, then this dessert is for you! You can make the topping ahead of time, and I’d think you could make the brown butter a few hours ahead too, if you want to bake this close to serving time (the best). Smitten Kitchen served it with fennel ice cream. Now, you have to be a regular blog reader to know about David Lebovitz (the American who lives in Paris and recently wrote an ice cream cookbook, The Perfect Scoop, the absolute best ice cream cookbook ever). I’ve made several of his ice creams, but knew I didn’t have time to make it for this event; therefore, I served it with vanilla ice cream instead. I wasn’t altogether sure my book group would appreciate the nuances of fennel ice cream anyway. But next time I make this (oh yes, I’ll be making this again and again in years to come) I will make the fennel ice cream. Smitten Kitchen raved about the combination, so that’s good enough for me to put on my to-do list!

The pears (either Anjou or Bartlett) need to be firm-ripe. This is important – too ripe and I’m sure the pears will disintegrate during the baking, and become mealy and granular. Mine were two full days resting on my countertop, and they were still quite firm. I tasted them and they were seemingly a bit under-ripe for eating out of hand, but they were PERFECT in this crisp. The pears held their shape, but released their sweetness and flavor.

So, here’s the gist of the recipe – first you make the topping (which has some ground up almonds in it), which needs to be made ahead and chilled (so it doesn’t cook too fast in the oven). Then you make the browned butter with fresh vanilla bean. Then you peel, core and cube-up the pears, mix it up with some pear brandy and the browned butter and pour that into a baking dish and top with the crumbs. Bake. This recipe is not difficult at ALL. But it’s unique for a couple of reasons – the browned butter adds a real depth, a nuttiness to the pears. And the pear brandy helps accent the pear flavor too. It’s baked for about 40 minutes or so, and you’ll want to serve this warm if possible. But, I’ll have to confess – there were leftovers that I brought home. Oh my goodness was it ever good! One morning I was in a rush to get somewhere and had a small little bowl of it for breakfast. It’s fruit, right?

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So, I was browsing through some of the blogs I read, and I happened on Chez Loulou’s post (I so enjoy Loulou’s blog – she lives in France, and has THE most interesting photos in and around the area she lives in – always very entertaining – I even tried to make a watercolor of one of her photos) about a breakfast or brunch dish that she’d made recently. It actually came from another blog Loulou reads (ah yes, I’m going to need to add yet another blog to my growing numbers that I read every few days), called Stonesoup. That blog originates from Australia, although the author is multi-national, I think. She’s lived all over the world, but currently resides in Sydney.

Perhaps it was the chorizo in this dish that intrigued me. Or maybe it was just because I’m always on the lookout for some easy entrée dishes that can stand in for dinner. Don’t you have evenings when you just aren’t inspired, or just don’t have the time? That’s me once in awhile (yes, really, there are times when I just don’t feel up to cooking anything much). So, that got me to thinking about meals – like this egg and bean dish – that is called a brunch dish – but could certainly be served for another meal like dinner.

I well remember that my mother sometimes on Sunday nights after we’d had a large midday dinner, would serve us creamed tuna on toast. She managed to make one small can of tuna spread between three people. She made a simple cream sauce, always added some lemon juice to it, then at the last minute she added the drained contents of one 6-ounce can of tuna, and we’d eat that spooned over one slice of white toast. It was a light meal, and perfect for the day in question. But then, there were Sundays when my mother would serve waffles for dinner. Why or how it ever became a tradition in our family I don’t know, but probably once a month we’d have regular waffles with sausage patties for dinner, with the finale being one last waffle piled with strawberries and whipped cream. As a kid, I thought that meal was heaven on a bun. My parents used to entertain other families for Sunday waffle suppers. My mother and dad are both gone, so I can’t ask them how that tradition ever got started. As a young adult I did have some waffle suppers, but my recollection (this would have been back in the 1960’s and 70’s, they weren’t met with much glee as I thought. I always told guests what we were having, so it wasn’t a surprise, but still I could tell people didn’t love it as much as I did. My DH doesn’t think waffles should be eaten at any meal except breakfast. In years past I tried the waffle supper thing on him, but he ate it reluctantly.

So, maybe it was that background of waffles on Sunday nights that made me look at this recipe with more interest. We don’t eat hearty breakfasts – if we do it seems to mess up our eating for the whole day. We’re not hungry for lunch, but then we’re starving by about 3-4 in the afternoon. Therefore, when I read this recipe I didn’t even think about breakfast at all. I thought – great idea for a light dinner. It took me 2 days to decide I wanted to make it.

Loulou’s and Stonesoup’s recipe is straight forward – you cook up some chorizo (I made a special trip to Whole Foods to buy their very meaty and lean version), some onion and garlic, a bit of Mexican oregano, red wine vinegar, tomato paste, canned tomatoes and canned cannellini beans. Little indentations are made in this mixture and eggs are gently cracked into them, then you bake it in the oven until done to your liking. This dinner took about 40 minutes to make from start to finish. My DH didn’t know what to think when I presented this dish at his place mat – for dinner. I had asked him first if this dish sounded good to him. I won’t say that he was over the top about it from reading the ingredient list, but generally he’s very willing to eat anything I put in front of him. So I made it the next night.

Truly, I enjoyed it a lot and Dave did too. I liked the flavor combination. It was hearty (beans). Very tasty. Easy and quick. I learned a couple of things, however. I revised the recipe to serve 2, since I didn’t know whether we’d eat leftover fried eggs on this chorizo bean bed. So I halved the recipe and tried to adapt it. I used a very large frying pan that can go in a hot oven, but the bean mixture then was quite thin. You must make this in a dish or pan that has enough depth to make the indentations for the eggs. And 15 minutes in MY oven was way too long at 400, so I revised the temp to 375. The eggs were almost rubbery, but not so overdone that we couldn’t eat it. My DH actually liked them that way since he doesn’t like runny eggs. So I’ve revised the cooking time to 10-15 minutes also. You need to determine your own preference. Definitely don’t use convection, either, as you don’t want hot air fanning the eggs! I also want this dish to have a bit more fluid – so use your own judgment about how much of the liquid to cook off. Ours was almost too dry, probably from being in the flatter pan. But it still tasted great.

Then you need to know about the leftovers – there was definitely enough to serve 3 adults using my recipe below. Dave and I both had a small portion of seconds, and there was still some leftover. So, what to do with those, you ask? Easy – I made soup. To the about 1 ½ cups of leftover beans I added some more tomatoes (I still had half a can of tomatoes), a small can of corn, some broth, chile powder, some ancho chile powder, heated it up and sprinkled shredded Cheddar on top. It was scrumptious!
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From a George Bernard Shaw music review: “The concert began with Mozart’s Figaro Overture. If you want to ascertain whether a musician is hopelessly belated, benighted, out of date, and behind his time, ask him how this overture should be played. If he replies ‘In three and a half minutes,’ away with him at once; he is guilty. . . . However, the overture, so treated, is undeniably useful to boil eggs by, though I prefer them boiled four minutes myself.”      -from The Ravenous Muse by Karen Elizabeth Gordon

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I’m not sure I ever thought I’d find a scone recipe that I liked as much as my own Buttermilk Scones with Golden Raisins. I’ve made them for years, and have been so happy with the recipe, I’ve never wanted to change. Then we stayed in Portland, Oregon for a couple of nights, at the Rose Cottage B&B just outside the city. The owner, Sally, served us just the lightest, most flavorful scones. The proportions of things are very similar to my tried-and-true recipe, but these have more flour in them – mine are more like very rich, flaky round biscuits. Sally’s were light, perfectly crumbly, huge and served in wedges. And, incidentally, if you’re ever up Portland way, I highly recommend Sally’s Rose Cottage as an ideal close-by location. She’s not in downtown, but it’s easy driving distance. She’ll serve you a breakfast that is enough to feed a small infantry, but it’s worth every single delicious-laden calorie.

Sally was kind enough to share the recipe for the scones with me. She said it was printed in the Portland Oregonian newspaper in 2004, and she raved about the chef, Anne Hughes, who created them. I believe she said the café that Hughes used to own is no longer in business. But Sally was happy she had THIS recipe from her café. Sally follows the recipe to the letter with the following exceptions: she mixes it by hand with a pastry blender AND she freezes the butter – she cuts the butter up in small chunks and puts that in the freezer so they’re all ready to go when she decides to make a batch (as a B&B owner, obviously she makes the scones quite frequently), then uses the pastry blender to cut it up a bit more (from a frozen state). She said you definitely don’t want to mix it so much that you can’t see the butter flakes. If the chunks are a bit larger (like little flat pieces the size of your little finger) they’ll be perfect for the flakiest results. These have a hint of lemon peel in them, and you briefly knead the dough just to pull it together, roll it out, sprinkle some of the zest on top, fold it over, then slice the pastry into wedges before baking on a parchment-lined baking sheet. Sally also adds fruit (like fresh Oregon blueberries) to the dough sometimes. I made my batch in the food processor (per the Oregonian recipe) and they seemed wonderful to me, but perhaps doing them by hand would produce even more flaky and flavorful scones. I also didn’t have frozen butter either, but I do like these enough that I might try those techniques next time I make them. I made them for my hubby’s Bible Study group the other day. They were gobbled up in short order.
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Since we ate exceedingly well on this trip, we decided that we should make every effort to eat some lighter meals once we got home. I went to my soup file and tried to find something new and different, lower in calorie, but also full of flavor. I have recipes in that file (and all the other ones as well) that go wa-a-a-y back. This one did. I have no idea where the photocopy came from, but I changed the recipe some anyway, so I guess I’m clear with the recipe police.

I like fairly substantive soups. They need to have lots of texture and layers to make me happy. I don’t make clear soups at all. Never have; probably never will. That’s a “why bother” in my book. So when I read this recipe I figured I could make it more my own by adding vegetables and revising the seasonings. I could tell by looking at it that it would be low in calorie (the bacon is the only no-no in it).

The toughest part of the recipe is cutting up the chicken. I read this recipe all the way through, then went back and read it through again. It was so unusual. So I went on the internet and researched the word “hamburgese.” It appears it’s the word for the people who live in Hamburg. That’s it. I found no mention of any soup. So I really don’t know the origin of this. The chicken pieces (minced finely) are the dumplings. This isn’t any traditional kind of dumpling, trust me. There is a little bit of chopped up fresh bread crumbs, but you hardly know they’re there. I know why I saved the recipe – it has nuts (I used walnuts instead of pistachios called for), green peppercorns, minced ginger, cumin and cinnamon in the seasoning. I mean, gee whiz, where does that combination come from? Not likely from Hamburg, Germany. I’m sure that’s what intrigued me.

So anyway, you have to cut up the chicken. Words of advice here – if you have frozen chicken breasts, partially defrost them and mince them up while they’re still mildly frozen. That will be a whole lot easier than doing it once they’re totally defrosted like I did. The recipe said you can’t use a food processor (wrong texture), but if you have a meat grinder that will do. Otherwise it’s mince it by hand. I’ll just tell you that it took longer than I wanted to spend mincing the slippery strips of chicken.

The soup is a broth (I used some more of the Penzey’s soup base), but I wanted the soup to have more to it than these chicken dumpling things and broth, so I added onion, carrot, celery and mushrooms. It reminds me of albondigas, the Mexican meatball soup that’s similarly made, but has totally different seasonings in it. Anyway, the veggies just simmer in the broth, then you add the little blobs of dumpling (hand formed gently) and they simmer in the broth at just BELOW a boil (otherwise they’ll all break apart).

I must say this soup is different. Good different. My DH didn’t get it when I dished it up – I’ve never served him a soup with chicken dumplings before. But once he tasted it he liked it. I followed the proportions for seasoning, but I think it should be more highly seasoned, so have increased the amounts in the recipe below. Please note that a 2-cup (approx.) serving is only 247 calories. You place the dumplings in a wide bowl, ladle the vegetable soup over the top and garnish with Italian parsley and some of the bacon bits.
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Just before we left on this last trip of ours (3500 miles) to Utah, Idaho and Oregon, our local paper had published an article about the pastry chef at Charlie Palmer’s Restaurant, Maren Henderson. I’ve mentioned the restaurant before – we’ve been there several times now and loved it on each occasion. It offers a very sophisticated dessert menu, and this is one of the items on it. I’ve not had the cake at the restaurant – always something else intrigued me more – but our daughter-in-law Karen tried it and raved about it. So in planning this trip, I took along some almond meal in a little plastic bag and was able to create this cake up north for our daughter’s birthday. She actually wanted a carrot cake (I made that too), but I made both so people could have a choice.

So, Maren Henderson created a really interesting (read: rich, yummy) cake that’s not your mainstream cake. It’s not hard to make, even though it has two layers. The bottom layer (which becomes a topping when you invert it) is a caramel that makes itself during the baking process. The cake is not unusual except for the addition of a cup of almond meal (Trader Joe’s carries it). I did make some sautéed apples to serve with this, and it needs something to cut the richness (the caramel is almost like candy) so I’d definitely serve it with vanilla ice cream on the side. I made the cake earlier in the day and reheated the entire cake (on the cake pan pictured). I heated it for exactly 5 minutes, but it wasn’t long enough, as the icing was still very thick and candy-like.

Once you bake the cake you allow it to cool briefly, then you invert the entire thing onto a baking pan. If you used a glass pan, you can watch the cake gently ooze itself out of it and once you take the pan off, the caramel oozes all over the sides of the cake. The recipe indicates it serves 21. Well, I’d say it might serve 30. It’s very rich, so you don’t want large pieces. Since we were offering two cakes, we cut this into about 1 ½ inch squares. Maybe some were 2-inch squares, and it was ample, especially with the apples on the side and ice cream too.

Everyone raved about the cake. And it’s really very, very good. Would I make it again? I might, but have decided that I prefer another cake to this one, the applesauce spice cake that I make in a springform pan. I prefer the caramel brown sugar frosting on that cake to the one here. But this one is very pretty to look at with its caramel dripping all around. The pastry chef apparently serves it in a small round – you can cut it using a round cookie cutter. She also serves it with a ghee foam, and I’d guess she probably drizzles the plate with more caramel sauce too. The caramel that puddled on the pan (see photo) became almost like sticky toffee/caramel cubes. So I’m not sure that maybe I overbaked it. I followed the directions to the letter (50 minutes) but still, maybe it had gone to the candy stage. Perhaps I should try it again with a different pan. I also might make half a recipe in a 9×9 pan and see how that turned it. So, in case you’d like to give this one a try, here’s the recipe:
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It’s always been a tradition in our family that on birthdays the celebrator gets to choose what he/she wants to eat. When my daughter Dana was young, before birthday parties became the huge mega-big-deal they are these days, she got to choose her dinner. Often it was my spaghetti and meatballs. Or homemade pizza. And she also got to choose what kind of birthday cake or dessert she wanted. Sometimes we’d go out, and as all of our kids have grown, moved out on their own and married, those traditions have changed somewhat. But for Dana’s big 4-oh, she wanted a Mexican food feast. She’s been a huge Mexican food fan from a very early age. And fortunately for her, her husband and his family have some Mexican blood, so they all crave Hispanic food with great regularity. For special occasions Todd’s mother Ann makes a variety of traditional Mexican dinners for all of her children, and this time she made crispy chicken tacos, Mexican rice and refried beans. Then she also made a huge platter of taco additions (tomatoes, sliced radishes, shredded cheese, lettuce and home made salsa and guacamole). My, oh my, was it ever good. Dana fried up a couple of gallons or more of fresh tortilla chips, and we all nibbled on chips and Ann’s home made tomato salsa while we waited for dinner.

THE CHICKEN TACOS: For the tacos the family all prefers chicken. Ann roasts a chicken (or cooks up a bunch of chicken breasts), and cuts or shreds all the meat. Ann made sure the chicken was very moist – no dried-up chicken allowed here! Standing around watching her she finally let me prep each corn tortilla. And I found out something interesting. Did you know there is a “right” side and a “wrong” side of a tortilla? It was news to me! There’s a rough side and a smooth side. You want the smooth side out, because it crisps-up better in the hot fat than the rough side. Now who woulda known, I ask you? The packages of tortillas were all stacked up one direction, so I didn’t have to check each and every tortilla. The ones I checked had kind of rough stripes, almost, on the so-called rough side. The other side was much smoother and no stripe. So, I laid out each tortilla and gently scooped about a heaping ¼ cup of chicken meat onto the tortilla. I didn’t take any pictures of Ann frying the tacos – I should have. She has a technique . . . you lay the whole flat tortilla (with the chicken kind of in a strip across the middle) in the large sauté pan with about ½ cup of hot corn or canola oil and you let it sizzle just for about 10 seconds, then using tongs you gently fold half of the tortilla over and hold it in place for another few seconds until the taco will maintain the fold. Continue frying for about another minute or two, turning the taco over so it just barely gets golden, then drain on paper towels, and keep hot (oven or chafing dish) while you continue frying.

Meanwhile, you need a large platter with all the trimmings (list in first paragraph) and set them out. There were fourteen of us, and Ann must have made about 60 tacos – we kept making them until the chicken ran out. Everyone likes a different combination of trimmings, so you make your own. Ann has a lovely big chafing dish that keeps the tacos hot, then you build them yourself.

THE MEXICAN RICE: Having never made Mexican rice myself, I was interested to see what Ann did to hers. I’d never had anything except exceedingly bland rice at some Mexican restaurants, and always thought it was pretty awful. So I hoped Ann’s would be different. Oh yes, indeed. I loved it. Knowing her technique, it’s really more like a pilaf than a steamed rice. She described what she did, so I don’t have proportions. She sautés some green onions (including the top part) in some corn oil, then adds some red bell pepper and garlic. Maybe she added a little tomato too. I can’t remember. Then she adds the rice and allows it to almost burn in the oil – in other words she continues to sauté the mixture for awhile until the rice has turned a dark golden brown. She adds LOTS of salt. She thinks salt is the most important ingredient in her rice. Usually she makes the rice to accompany chicken tacos, so she has some good juices and fat from the chicken. That’s an important component of the rice – using all those drippings and a little bit of chicken meat too. She adds broth (and the liquid from poaching the chicken if she’s used breasts only) and water for the proportion of rice (look at the rice cooking instructions for quantity). Cover and steam until the rice is almost done, but not quite. Remove lid and continue to let the rice cook over very low heat, stirring frequently, until all the liquid is gone and the rice has “dried out,” she said. That took about another 10-15 minutes. It might depend on how large a batch you made, however. Taste for seasoning and serve! I could have made a meal of that all by itself.

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