Not really posole, but it’s in the same family. And the recipe I started with was a posole-like soup that people from northern New Mexico would recognize. Anyway, it’s been changed, but we like it.
Serves: 4-6
Time: 6-8 hours
Active Time: 30 minutes
Ingredients
1 C chicos
4 C chicken stock
1 Tbsp cooking oil or bacon grease
1 pound beef stew meat, cut into ½-¾ inch cubes
½ Tbsp ground ancho chile powder
½ Tbsp ground Chimayo chile powder
½ Tbsp onion powder
Salt and black pepper
15oz can diced tomatoes
1 bag frozen peas and carrots mix
Directions
Place chicos and chicken stock into a 4.5 quart crock pot.
Cook on high for 1 hour, then low for 3 hours, stirring occasionally.
Season beef with salt and pepper, and sprinkle with chile powders.
Brown beef in a medium skillet with about a tablespoon of oil or bacon fat.
Add beef, tomatoes, and onion powder to the crock pot.
Deglaze skillet with a can of water, then add to the crock pot.
Continue to cook on low for an hour or more.
1 hour before serving time, add peas and carrots and stir. Add salt to taste.
Serve with sour cream, soft tortillas and maybe some cilantro or purslane.
When you bake a meatloaf and want to glaze the top (which we almost always do), this is the stuff. Came from an ancient and yellowed Betty Crocker Cookbook, but they did half this recipe, which is nothing like enough for a standard loaf-pan-sized meatloaf. We often do twice this recipe, but we’re not like the other children.
Ingredients
½ C ketchup
4 Tbsp brown sugar
2 tsp ground yellow mustard seeds
Directions
Grind mustard seeds
Combine ingredients and mix thoroughly
Paint onto top of meatloaf a couple times while it’s baking, and again as you slice and serve the meatloaf.
Based upon this simplified peasant bread recipe, this works fine for me at 6900 feet altitude, though my scale told me 512 grams of flour was about 3¼ cups, rather than the 4 called for in the recipe. My version therefore uses a mix of units. If you have a kitchen scale, you should be fine. If not, you’ll need to use your judgement.
Note also that I’ve cut the original recipe in half.
Ingredients
2C flour – I use 256 grams, which with the flours I use is more like 1½ cups
1 tsp kosher salt
1 tsp sugar
1 tsp instant yeast
1 C lukewarm water
For greasing the bowl:
1 Tbsp butter
Special Equipment
Pyrex 1 quart glass oven-safe mixing bowl
Directions
Put all the dry ingredients in a medium mixing bowl. 2 quart capacity or better will give you room to stir. Don’t mix the yeast and salt (put them on different sides of the bowl).
Add a cup of lukewarm water and mix with a fork until everything is pretty uniform.
Cover with plastic wrap (if in a dry climate) or a tea towel, set in a warm area, and let rise until it has doubled in volume. About 90 minutes does the trick here in Santa Fe, but might take longer at sea level.
Grease the Pyrex bowl with about a tablespoon of butter.
Using a fork, pull the dough loose from the sides of the mixing bowl, and fold it on itself so it loses most of the air (punch it down). Scoop it into the greased baking bowl and set it (uncovered) near the oven.
Begin preheating the oven to 425F.
When the oven is ready, and the bread dough has risen to the edge of the bowl or slightly above, pop it into the oven for 15 minutes at 425F.
Turn the oven down to 375F and bake the bread for 15-17 minutes more.
When the bread is done, dump it from the bowl onto a cooling rack.
If the crust looks underdone, put the bread in the 375F oven (out of the bowl) for up to another 5 minutes.
Let the bread cool for at least 10 minutes before cutting into it.
Enjoy!
Above, I don’t specify what type of flour. I’ve made this with at least 1 cup of bread flour every time, but the remainder of the flour has been corn, rice, and rye (so far). They’ve all turned out well, though the rye needed a little extra water to be the right consistency. Feel free to experiment! It’s a small batch, and goes pretty quickly. I could see making a loaf of this every day if I didn’t have so many other hobbies.
4 cups sweet potatoes, diced into ½” cubes (or carrot/squash) (there are bags of frozen roasted sweet potatoes we like to use – 2 bags is the right amount)
2 cups vegetable (or chicken) broth or water
15 oz can coconut milk
1 tsp chile powder
½ tsp smoked paprika
½ tsp salt
¼ tsp black pepper
Directions
In a large pot over medium heat, sauté onion in a little oil (1T) until it begins to brown. Darker than translucent, lighter than caramelized.
Add broth and bring back to a boil, deglazing pan if needed.
Add coconut milk and bring back to a boil.
Add sweet potatoes and bring back to a boil.
Add spices.
Stir to combine, cover, reduce heat to low and simmer for 15 minutes if using frozen roasted sweet potatoes, or 30 minutes if using fresh sweet potatoes, or until potatoes are tender.
Use an immersion blender to blend soup until completely smooth.
Serve and enjoy!
We routinely add a Spam Single, some leftover ham, a half-pound of Italian sausage, or other meat to this. Frozen spinach or chard is also a good addition. My sweetie likes to add a sprinkle of Tajin powder to hers.
2 C chopped or crushed cranberries. Fresh and frozen are both OK.
1 large apple, peeled and chopped
1 large orange, zested and juiced
3½ tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
½ tsp ground cinnamon
¼ tsp ground nutmeg
1 large egg
1 C milk
3 Tbsp canola oil
Directions
Peel and chop the apple.
Zest the orange, then juice the orange, adding the juice to the chopped apple.
Crush or coarsely chop the cranberries. Mashing them between two cutting boards works pretty well. Add to the apple pieces.
Mix the flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, and orange zest in a large mixing bowl.
Whisk the egg, milk, and oil into the bowl, stirring just until blended.
Fold in the fruit and orange juice.
Pour into two greased 4x8 inch loaf pans, or four greased mini-loaf pans.
Bake at 350F for 50 minutes, until golden brown and delicious, until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.
Let cool for 10 minutes before removing from pans to cool on a wire rack.
You can frost these with an orange-flavored frosting if you desire (sprinkle some extra orange zest over the frosting if you do), but we like them plain, or with a little butter.
Based on the basic recipe from Southern Living, this is pretty tasty, and as a bonus, you get a good cup of pot-likker to give a boost (and some added vitamins) to some other recipe down the road. Switching Spam for ham will require tweaking the spices, but is not a horrible substitution.
Serves: 4
Active time: 15 minutes
Total time: 2 hours, 15 minutes
Ingredients
2 slices bacon, chopped, or 1 Tbsp bacon grease
2 Tbsp diced onion
2 (3 if using bacon grease, rather than bacon slices) slices ham, chopped
½-1 tsp garlic powder
2 cups chicken broth
1 Tbsp apple cider or red wine vinegar
½ tsp sugar
⅛ tsp chile powder (I prefer Chimayó)
⅛ tsp salt
⅛ tsp black pepper
½ lb collard greens
Directions
Sauté the bacon and onion until the onion has gone translucent.
Add the garlic and ham, and get everything mixed together.
Add all the other ingredients and bring to a simmer.
Simmer for 2 hours, or a little more, stirring occasionally.
Fish the greens out with tongs and serve, and save the pot-likker for something else. It’s tasty and full of nutrients.
It was the last farmers market of the year on Friday, so I was walking around talking to various vendors, and ended up getting a bundle of rhubarb from La Capilla Hop Farms because I didn’t make many desserts this summer, and wanted to end the season on a high note. This is more or less my standard crumble recipe, with a little added sugar to offset the rhubarb’s tartness.
Fruit Ingredients
1 bunch rhubarb from the farmers market (I’m not sure exactly how much the bunch is, but it’s the right amount for most recipes), cut into 1 cm or ½ inch long chunks. In this case, it was 7 big stalks.
2 small apples, cored, sliced and chopped into similarly sized chunks. You can peel them or leave the skin on, as you like.
A dozen strawberries, chopped into chunks
¼-½ cup sugar, depending on how sweet you like your desserts
Fruit Directions
Chop all the fruit into chunks about 1 cm or ½ inch in size.
Put in 8 inch square glass pan, and sprinkle with sugar.
Crumble Ingredients
150g all-purpose flour
100g butter
85g sugar
Crumble Directions
Cut butter into flour until it looks kinda like bread crumbs
Sprinkle sugar over mixture and cut together until it looks uniform
Sprinkle mixture over fruit in pan
Baking
Bake for 35-40 minutes in a 400°︎ oven
If the top doesn’t have a few brown spots, put it under the broiler for a minute or two.
For those who don't know, pasties are basically single-serving pies with a complete meal inside. They were popular with miners in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan as well as on the Iron Range in Minnesota because packed in a lunch-tin, they would still be warmish after a morning's worth of work. There are ton of pasty recipes on the web. Here’s mine. Makes a whole bunch.
Ingredients
5 pounds beef chuck or “stew meat”
4 pounds red or gold potatoes
2 pounds carrots
2 medium yellow onions
1 pound turnips
1 pound parsnips
1 pound corn and peas mix
eightteen 9 inch pie crusts (they’re usually 2 per package)
3 tbsp parsley
salt and pepper to season
Instructions
Bring the pie crusts to room temp
Grind the meat as coarsely as you can, or cut it into ¼ inch cubes
Cut all the veggies into ¼ inch cubes
Mix everything together in the biggest bowl you have
Use a 1-cup glass (i.e. liquid) measuring cup to scoop up the mixed filling and place onto one half of a pie crust
Place about 1 pat of butter on top of the filling
Fold over the crust and crimp
Score top of each pasty a couple times
Place at least ½ inch apart on a baking sheet
Bake at 350°F for 40 minutes
Let cool, covered with a towel, for at least ½ hour before serving
Optionally serve with ketchup or gravy.
Preparation time
a hour or two, depending on how many breaks you take
Cooking time
40 minutes
Feeds
18+
This is a huge batch, but I liked the flavor.
Reheating directions for frozen pasties: Pre-heat oven to 500°F and put pasty in on a pie-plate or cookie-sheet. Immediately turn the temperature down to 350°F. Let heat for 40-60 minutes, until warm through. They definitely want ketchup or gravy when re-heated.
Not exactly authentic, but it seems about right to me. And it fits the spirit of “a mess of leftovers cooked up together” that happens in so much of my cooking.
Ingredients
3 chicken thighs or two thighs and two legs (about a pound)
2 strips bacon
12 baby carrots, sliced thinly
2 celery stalks, sliced thinly
1 medium yellow onion, sliced thinly
1 lb andouille sausage, cut into ½ inch slices
2 yellow wax peppers, and about a half-dozen tabasco or similar peppers, chopped
14 oz. can stewed tomatos, chopped coarsely (just run a knife through ’em a couple times while they’re still in the can)
1 quart chicken stock
2 boxes Zatarain’s jambalaya rice & spice
1 lb frozen, pre-cooked, pre-peeled, no tails shrimp
½ tbsp liquid smoke
salt to taste (took about 1 tsp in my case)
Instructions
Broil the chicken – you’re aiming for about 30 minutes, and just want to get it done – crispy skin is fine.
Start bacon frying.
Slice the carrots into thin coins (penny-sized), and as soon as there’s visible grease in the pan, add the carrots and cover the pan.
Start slicing the celery (about the same thickness as the carrots), and when it’s sliced, add it to the pan, giving everything a flip to mix, and re-cover.
Start slicing the onion. When it’s sliced, into the pan, toss, and continue to fry, covered, until the onions go translucent. Heck, you can even caramelize them a bit.
Set aside vegetables, leaving grease in frying pan.
Slice 1lb andouille sausage into slices smaller than ½ inch (but not too much smaller).
Fry andouille in the frying pan, then set aside, keeping the grease in the pan.
Chop peppers, and fry briefly in the andouille grease (just enough to soften them up) – add to the other vegetables.
Add tomatoes and juice to the rest of the veggies.
Pull the chicken out of the broiler and break into bite-sized pieces.
If you’re not cooking immediately, you can pack things up in quart containers – one of chicken and sausage, and one of veggies (for example if you’re taking it to a pot-luck). Throw the containers in the fridge until you’re ready to go.
When you’re ready to go, throw everything but the shrimp into a 5qt slow-cooker (crock-pot), meat first, then rice, then veggies, and finally the chicken stock.
Set it on low for most of a day, or high for a couple hours.
Check on it periodically, give it a stir, and add a little water if it looks too dry.
Add the shrimp when there’s about 15 minutes to go.
Put some Hank Williams on the stereo, or get out the fiddle and accordion.
Serve with french bread.
Enjoy!
Preparation time
30 minutes
Cooking time
2 hours in the slow-cooker
Feeds
a whole mess of folks (it’s over a dozen one-cup servings)
Served for the first time at the 2005 holiday pot-luck at work. People seemed to enjoy it, eating about a gallon of it, and leaving me with less than a quart to bring home for a future dinner.
I also preserved my peppers in sherry this year, so there was about a half-cup of sherry got into the pan when I was frying the peppers. It seemed like a good addition.
So named both because it’s one of the dishes I routinely use for pot-lucks, and also because the ingredients can vary based on what I happen to have on hand at the moment. See also last year’s recipe, which is fairly different, and yet very much the same.
Ingredients
2 boxes Zatarain’s Jambalaya mix (rice, not pasta)
1 qt chicken stock
1 12-oz can tomato paste
1 lb cooked shrimp
1 lb browned burger (I prefer venison, but beef will work just fine)
1 lb andouille sausage (Johnsonville makes a surprisingly good one, but better is, well, better)
1 large or 2 medium green bell peppers (toss the seeds and stems)
1 baseball-sized or ½ softball sized white onion
4 ribs celery
1 leftover cooked carrot
1 tbsp smoked paprika
1 tbsp black pepper, ground
1 tbsp kosher salt
1 tbsp garlic powder
1 tbsp red pepper flakes (not dust – cut back to 1tsp if it’s finely ground and not flakes)
1 tsp oregano
Instructions
Dice vegetables, and sauté in bacon drippings, butter, or (as a last ditch) olive oil. Celery goes in first, then the onions, then the green peppers, and finally the (already cooked) carrot. Total time should be just until the onions start to go translucent. Throw into the bottom of a pot, and then pour any grease back into your sauté pan.
Cut andouille into ¼″ thick slices and brown in the leftover grease from the veggies until both sides of the medallions are dark brown. You want to be into serious maillard reaction here. Dump it into the pot, and pour the grease back into your sauté pan.
Brown the burger in the leftover grease from the andouille, seasoning it with about half of the spices. Into the pot with it once it’s all browned. If you use venison, you’ll have very little grease left at this point, but drain any excess grease.
Dump both boxes of Zatarain's, the tomato paste, the chicken stock, and the remaining spices into the pot. Add two cans’ (from the tomato paste) worth of water.
Turn it on low for a couple hours and cover it tightly. You want the water to go into the rice, not out into the air. If you have a crock pot (5 quart is the absolute minimum size), you can set it on high for the first two hours, especially if steps 1-3 were the previous night. If you’re doing it all in one shot, set the crock-pot on low. Keep it at a low simmer for up to 2.5 hours, or as little as an hour if you’re on a stove-top. Stir it about every half hour and check on it. When the rice has absorbed all the liquids, it’s ready to eat.
Add the shrimp. It’s already cooked, and you just want it in there long enough to warm up. Fluff the rice as you mix in the shrimp, and turn off the heat. Let sit for five minutes so nobody gets a cold shrimp or burns their mouth.
Preparation time
about an hour
Cooking time
1 – 3 hours
Feeds a whole mess of people. Ten as a main dish, or up to forty at a pot-luck where everyone brought too much food.
I think of steps 1-3 as “prep” can be done the night before if you’re doing this for lunch at work. Just put everything into either a 1-gallon zip-top freezer bag or some tupperware, and fridge it overnight.
You can also use other vegetables, too. I used a carrot this time because I had one leftover from Monday’s supper. You can substitute a can of spam (cubed into 1/2″ pieces and browned) or a pound of chicken (thighs are best, also browned) for any of the listed meats. If you don’t use andouille, you will want to double the red pepper and paprika. You can cut the salt back to as little as 1tsp since the Zat’s mix has salt, but 1 tbsp is about what I end up using when I “season to taste”. Spice amounts are a good place to start, but taste the liquid every time you stir, and adjust if you think it’s missing something.
