Author: Shane

Black Bean Chilaquiles with Grilled Corn Salsa

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The first Friday of the month is reserved for recipes. You can see additional First Friday Food posts here.

The Reason:

Well, the reason is that Rick Bayless is a culinary god. If we pick a recipe at random from his cookbook, it is sure to be our new favorite.

In fact, Evie just recently told us this is her favorite meal.

The Journey:

I believe the first thing that piqued Evie’s interest is that this recipe includes lots and lots of chips.

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This is actually quite a strange recipe. What you make is sort of a…brown lump. It’s like…brown, soggy nachos.

Hmm, this is not really selling it it.

Okay, well, it’s not much to look at, I will grant you, but it is delicious. And it is made further delicious by the toppings. Pretty much anything you would put on nachos works well here (cheese, sour cream, avocado, pickled radishes, etc.), but our two favorite toppings are smoky chipotle salsa, or grilled corn salsa.

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This is a sweeter salsa (though still pretty spicy!), and the slightly blackened, grilled-corn flavor is just fantastic. It’s great for chips too (and anything else that you use salsa for), but it seems to work particularly well for chilaquiles.

The Verdict:

This is absolutely the tastiest brown…lump…loaf…thing I have ever eaten! We make this very frequently at our house, and the kids beg for it in their lunches the next day.

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The Recipe:

Chilaquiles recipe from Rick Bayless’s Mexican Kitchen.

  • 2 cans of black beans (or 1 1/4 cups dried)
  • 1 cup vegetable or chicken broth (plus 5 cups broth or water if using dried beans)
  • 1/2 medium white onion, roughly chopped
  • 4 cloves garlic, roughly chopped
  • 3 canned chipotle chiles en adobo, plus 2 teaspoons adobo from the can
  • 1 teaspoon salt (not needed if using canned black beans)
  • 8 oz of thick tortilla chips (~8 loosely packed cups)
  1. If using dried beans, rinse them, then boil with onion, garlic, and 2 of the chiles, partially covered on medium to medium-low heat for about 2 hours. Add water if necessary to keep the beans submerged.
  2. Puree the beans (including liquid), onion, garlic, and 2 of the chiles in the blender.
  3. Add bean puree to a pot. Add up to 1 cup of broth until the consistency is that of a thin cream soup. Taste and season with salt (most likely not necessary if using canned beans). Bring to a boil over medium heat.
  4. Slice the remaining chile into strips.
  5. Add the tortilla chips and the chile. Stir to coat the chips well, and cook about 2 – 3 minutes (chips will continue to soften once off the stove, so do not overcook).

Salsa recipe adapted from Local Kitchen Blog.

  • 6 ears corn on the cob
  • 2 ½ lbs tomatoes, diced (if tomatoes are runny, let some of the juice run off)
  • ½ of a large yellow onion, diced
  • 4 jalapeno peppers, minced (we included the seeds)
  • 1 clove garlic, minced
  • 1 ¼ cups white vinegar
  • ¼ cup lime juice
  • 2 Tablespoons sugar
  • 1 ½ tsp salt
  • 1 ½ tsp cumin
  • ¼ cup, packed, chopped fresh cilantro
  1. Grill the corn (instructions here). Allow to cool, strip off husks and slice off kernels with a sharp knife. (Save the cobs for corn cob stock!)
  2. Prepare canner, jars, and lids.
  3. Combine vinegar, lime juice, sugar, salt and cumin in a large, wide-bottomed stockpot and bring to a boil over high heat. Add corn, tomatoes, onion, peppers and garlic and return to a boil. Lower heat and simmer for about 5 – 10 minutes, to reduce liquid slightly and allow flavors to blend.
  4. Add cilantro and return salsa to a boil. Remove from heat and ladle into hot jars to ½-inch headspace; bubble the jars, adjust headspace, wipe rims, affix lids and process for 15 minutes.
  5. Allow the jars sit for at least 1 month, for optimal flavor mingling

Midnight Adventure Follow Up

/ Shane / 1 Comment

After the ominous proclamations, I did end up catching Evie sneaking into Ollie’s room at about 5 a.m.

I can normally sleep through a punch to the face, but years of tending the children at night has fine-tuned me to certain noises, the door on Ollie’s room opening apparently being one of them. My body leaps straight out of the bed and is halfway to the door before either my brain, or Sara, are awake. So good luck as teenagers, kids!

Evie fessed up that they had made a plan to get up in the middle of the night and play “mischievous fairies”, a game Grandma Kathy made up. Basically you just do little bits of mischief, like tying shoelaces together, hiding someone’s glasses, or SMOTHERING THEM WITH PILLOWS WHILST THEY SLEEP.

You know, mischief.

Then, you leave a cute little note that says “mischievous fairies” so the person knows why they can’t find their $%&# glasses, or the police can find the murderer, or whathaveyou.

Anyway, mischief thwarted by my super-human night senses, and Evie was sent back to bed.

Nobody gets smothered in their sleep on MY watch, sweetheart!

Ollie’s Midnight Adventures

/ Shane / 1 Comment

At about 3 a.m. I heard Ollie’s door open and close. I went to see what was going on, and I found him standing in his room with a flashlight.

I told him it was too early and tucked him back into bed. I didn’t think much of it. On the way to school the next morning, Ollie was whispering to Evie. Sara couldn’t hear what he was saying, but she overheard, “last night” and “mischievous”. 

An ominous thing to overhear, if there ever was one.

Sara told me about this and we puzzled over what he could have been up to. Ollie is a pretty solid sleeper, who has to be physically separated from his bed in the morning; wandering around at night is more Evie’s style. But he clearly was up to SOME kind of devious plan.

Throughout the day there were references to a “secret”, and then tonight after dinner we heard the two of them once again whispering to each other. Sara and I paused and strained to hear what they were talking about.

We heard only one phrase: “…put pillows over their faces…”

I guess it’s my turn to be spooked out.

Needless to say, I will be sleeping with one eye open tonight.

 

How to spook out your daughter

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After I tucked Evie in bed, I started some laundry and then went upstairs. Some time later, Sara was doing something downstairs.

“Mom?” called Evie in a quavery voice. “The laundry light keeps flickering on and off by itself.”
“I think daddy was doing some laundry, honey.”
“Yeah, but I heard him go upstairs a long time ago, and it keeps doing it.”

Sara looked around.

“I don’t think so, it’s not on now. Just go to bed.”

Apparently when CFL bulbs start to go, they can do that creepy, flickery thing that we’ve grown so used to in horror movies. I’ve had other CFLs just stop working, but the one in the laundry room was blinking like a strobe light. “Thats…really creepy,” Evie had said earlier in the day.

Now, of course I couldn’t be bothered to actually change the lightbulb. We don’t really use it all that often, and you can usually get by with the light from the hallway. Apparently it had gone out while I was doing the laundry, and somehow I didn’t notice that? So I neglected to turn off the switch when I went upstairs.

We didn’t realize it until the next morning, but apparently all night long it would just come on and start flickering for awhile before going off again.

Talk about CREEPY. I can’t blame her for being creeped out on that one!

 

“The Dress”, Explained

/ Shane / 6 Comments

So, last night, us citizens of the Internet collectively lost our minds over a picture. Cat pictures? Leaked celebrity nudes? Pictures of llamas? (Well, yes actually, that happened as well.) Some daring red carpet attire?

No, I’m talking about this picture, of course:

It turns out that some percentage of (WRONG, WRONG, ABSOLUTELY WRONG) people see that dress as blue and black. Another percentage of people, looking at the exact same picture, see that picture (CORRECTLY I MIGHT ADD) as white and gold. (Many people report having seen both, or being able to switch back and forth between the two.) (Spoiler alert, the dress actually is blue and black.)

It takes quite awhile to get over the fact that this isn’t some kind of massive Internet hoax. You should see the looks on people’s faces when I tell them that, to me, that dress is white and gold. The progression from disbelief (“Are you stupid?”), to suspicion (“Why are you playing stupid? What’s your angle?”), to pity (“Oh you are stupid, you poor simple thing!”) which flashes there before they have a chance to hide it is actually kind of frightening. (Now I know how you really feel about me!) When you see something with your own eyes, it is fact. Seeing is believing. How could anybody disagree? It is, quite literally, as plain as the nose on my face.

I might not have believe it either, except that Sara sees blue, even when we are looking at the exact same picture at the exact same time. There’s like this weird moment where we realize, we’re not seeing the same thing and calling it different words, we’re actually experiencing different things. And then my mind melts.

I’ve read quite a few “explanations” about why this happens, and, needless to say, they left me a little underwhelmed. They mostly consist of a “vision expert” saying, “Rods and cones. Rods. And. Cones.” So I’ve pieced together the best articles, and what I’ve come up with is this:

Seeing is actually quite difficult, and in the nanosecond between when your eyes experience light bouncing off something and you “see” it, your brain does some processing. Depending on what your brain expects to see, it may modify the input just a little bit, to give you a “better” image. This gives rise to the many optical illusions that you’ve probably seen elsewhere in books, science museums, or the Internet.

This particular case is a combination of the actual equipment of your eyeballs and the split second of processing in your brain. If your eyes are good enough, you detect enough blue for your brain to say, “This is a blue dress under yellow light”, and that is the image you “see”. If your eyes are just on the other side of that magical tipping point, your brain says, “this is a white dress under blue light” and helpfully color-corrects the image for you.

This dress is just perfectly, accidentally, right on that tipping point such that some people go one way and some go the other. Some can “trick” their brain into falling one way or another by changing the brightness on their monitor, or looking at something blue or white first, before looking at the dress.

As to why your brain “changes” what you are seeing, it is really trying to help you. As I said, seeing is a difficult thing. All colors are based on seeing which light reflects from something. A red shirt is absorbing all spectrums of light except red; observers see the reflected red light and say, “Hey, that’s a red shirt!”

Imagine the red shirt is up against a white wall. Now imagine that the only illumination in the room is a red light bulb. The shirt is still reflecting red light, but now the white wall is *also* reflecting red light. And so your brain has to decide: did the wall suddenly become a red wall, or is it a white wall with red light reflecting off of it?

When you look at the dress, your brain is very quickly trying to decide which scenario you are actually seeing: a blue dress under yellow light, or a white dress under blue light. Some brains pick one, some pick the other, and some change their minds based on other things (such as recently seeing something blue).

The fact that two people can actually see the same thing differently is fascinating to me. It’s like we’re not living in the same layer of reality. And that’s not even taking into account animals with acute senses of hearing or smell, or who can see into the ultraviolet, or senses we can’t even imagine, like electromagnetic detection. Who knows how those animal perceive the world differently than us? For that matter, who can say what else we are experiencing differently?

(My wife, for lack of a better term, lives in a much “smellier” world than I do. Is it because my nose has died inside after being subjected to years of my own reek, or because her brain is causing her to BELIEVE she is smelling things that she can’t possibly be smelling because they don’t exist and that is ridiculous? WE CAN NEVER KNOW.)

We used to have a bag that I insisted was purple, and Sara insisted was blue. It kind of became a running gag; however, we both ultimately assumed that we were seeing the same thing, but calling that thing a different name. In the aftermath of “the dress”, however, I am forced to conclude it is possible that we were actually experiencing legitimately different colors. Experiencing a different reality.

And, also?

It’s still white and gold.