Thread: Dinner last night and chile score

On Mon, 8 Aug 2011 11:48:02 -0500, "Nunya Bidnits"
<[email protected]> wrote:

>I made tacos last night, served along with some really delicious tamales
>bought from a Hispanic grocery deli case yesterday. Cooked up the ground
>beef taco meat with some fresh chorizo, chipotles, onion, garlic, seasonings
>and green chiles. I brown up the meat stirring often and letting it get just
>a bit crispy, reduce heat, add the onion and let them get translucent, add
>the garlic and green chiles and cook a bit more. Then I turn up the heat and
>add the seasonings and about a cup and a half of water, scraping the pan
>bottom as it bubbles up, then cook until the moisture is almost all
>absorbed/evaporated. Built the tacos with sour cream, black olives, queso
>quesadilla and cotija cheeses, shredded lettuce, white corn taco shells,
>served with both red salsa and recaito. I know the recaito is supposed to be
>a cooking sauce but I like it as a condiment too. Yeah, not "authentic"
>tacos. Sosueme.
>
>Yesterday I shopped in a Price Chopper in a Hispanic neighborhood and bought
>beef tamales from the deli case. Nice big flavorful tamales with a generous
>portion of meat in each one. I've tried making my own tamales but these make
>it easy to just not bother with it.
>
>The other thing I found there is something I've been seeking forever, and
>didn't even find at other area grocers serving Hispanic populations... BIG
>cans of green chiles. Score! 27 oz tightly packed cans of whole roasted and
>peeled green chiles, $4.39. All I have ever found in grocery stores are two
>sizes... extra tiny 4 oz, and what I think are 7 oz tiny which cost $1 to
>$2. I love to cook with them and it pisses me off to have to open two or
>more itsy bitsy cans to get what I need. This goes for both whole and diced
>varieties. Restaurant Depot carries a Del Sol brand of diced green chiles in
>the 27 oz and 6 lb sizes, but they totally suck, full of nasty inedible
>pieces of peeled skin and in a liquid so tart it is almost a pickle.
>
>These are La Preferida brand whole green chiles, and they are delicious. Now
>if I could just find whole poblanos...
>
>OTOH this grocery had the nicest fresh poblanos I've seen in a long time so
>I grabbed some. I'll probably make them tonight stuffed with spiced chicken,
>onions, peppers, and cheese, no frying, alternative rellenos.
>
>Their entire produce section was nicer and fresher than what I've seen in
>other grocery stores that serve Hispanic markets. They didn't have quite the
>variety of fresh peppers as some but what they have was quite nice.
>
>No fresh Hatch chiles though, and no Hatch brand anything in the canned
>foods.

Which Price Chopper? I shop at three different Price Choppers but
even the one in Catskill which is considered a more ethnic hood for
NY's Capital district only has a sad showing of Hispanic foods. I've
discovered that the further south towards NYC one travels from Albany
the more Hispanic foods and other ethnic foods one finds. The hood I
lived in on Lung Guyland (Brentwood) was extremely ethnic, every kind
of Hispanic Hispanic foods were readily available... not all Hispanics
eat the same cuisine, many are very different; the Guatamalans,
Salvordoranians, Puerto Ricans, Jamaicans, Belizians, and all the
others eat a lot of the same foods but also very different foods and
they prepare them very differently. And to even speak of Mexican food
is as silly as speaking of European food... most of what people in the
US call Mexican food is crappy Tex-Mex... and the Tex-Mex in CA, NM,
AZ, and TX are different from each other... I wouldn't even classify
Tex-Mex cuisine as Hispanic, that's like calling Chinese take-out
Chinese food. My Central American cook books are about the only ones
I actually refer to often.