Ranchero Sauce and Mexican Rice

3 Nov

If you haven’t already discovered it for yourself, I can offer nothing but the highest of praises for the Tamra Davis Cooking Show.  Tamra Davis is a film and television director based in both New York and California.  She is a mother of two, an avid home cook, and she just so happens to be married to Mike D, of the Beastie Boys.  Davis is a great originator of recipes, and a couple of years ago she self-published a cookbook called Make Me Something Good to Eat.  The cookbook is a great source of not only recipes, but also meal plans and cooking strategies for making delicious, creative, healthy meals that will satisfy both children and adults.

And Tamra Davis is serious about getting people to eat real, healthy food.  She’s led cooking classes at local food banks, and a few years ago she started the FIVE for Kids program, designed to teach kids—and their parents—about the importance of eating a natural, balanced diet that follows the simple guidelines of the food pyramid.  The FIVE for Kids program not only outlines the basic nutritional composition of common foods, but it allows kids to learn about where their food comes from, how different foods benefit their bodies and minds, and how making good food choices can have a positive effect on a person’s general well-being.  By the end of the program, the kids have been taught how to make 25 different healthy, affordable meals and snacks for themselves and their families.  You want to see someone walk their talk?  Tamra Davis is your woman.

The Tamra Davis Cooking Show is, in itself, a delight.  Each episode is only a few minutes long, but they never lack for substance.  Several shows feature not only cooking, but also meal planning, grocery shopping, and play breaks.  It’s a true representation of real life and how the process of nurturing and feeding a family is rarely as straightforward as just going into the kitchen and calmly placing things in the oven.  And this is more of a side note, but the different music choices featured as a soundtrack to each episode?  Top notch.

One episode of the Tamra Davis Cooking Show involves a trip to Mexico.  The shots of the incredible Mexico coastline are beautiful, and the recipes in this particular show are extra mouthwatering.  Davis’ family rents a vacation house that happens to come with a chef, and nearly everyday the chef ends up making a slightly different version of ranchero sauce, an incredibly versatile sauce that can be used for enchiladas, chilaquiles, and anything else you can think up.  Using Davis’ posted recipe, I’ve made this sauce several times now, and I can attest to the fact that it is not only super delicious, but it is also supremely simple to make.  The fact that the sauce is so willing to be changed up makes it a dream to work with.  You can change the type of chilies you use, you can brown the garlic in the pan with the onions, you can puree the sauce smooth or you can leave it slightly chunky—whatever you do to this sauce, it’s tough to make it taste bad. Sometimes we just sit back and dip tortilla chips into the sauce, never bothering to add it to anything because we are too busy depositing it into our tummies.

My favorite use for the sauce right now is as a flavoring for Mexican rice.  We eat a fair bit of beans and rice around here (a simple and healthy meal that goes a long way towards satisfying the nutritional needs of a small child), and I am always looking for ways to dress up the dish and make it a bit more welcome to the fatigued palettes of the adults in this house.

Cooking plain white rice in a mixture of ranchero sauce and vegetable broth produces a fluffy, flavorful rice dish that is a welcome addition to our table.  And since this ranchero sauce is made entirely of vegetables, cooking it into your rice adds a good dose of vegetables to each serving you dish up.  If you can get yourself to stop eating a batch of ranchero sauce like it’s a main dish on its own (no, really—it’s that good), I recommend you pour some into a pan of rice and get to simmering.

My son’s dinner plate.

Ranchero Sauce

From the Tamra Davis Cooking Show

Cooking show episode can be seen here.

You can adjust the spiciness of this recipe to your liking.  When I make this sauce to put in a dish for my child, I use only half of a jalapeno pepper with all of the seeds and ribs removed.  When I make it with adults in mind, I use 1 or 2 whole chilies, and I leave in the seeds and ribs.  You can really make the sauce wicked hot this way, so err on the side of caution when judging your level of spiciness.

5 medium tomatoes

2 cloves garlic, peeled

1 or 2 chilies of your choice (I often use fresh jalapenos in this recipe, but any type of dried chile pepper will also work.  I’ll bet habaneros would be great in this.)

½ onion, sliced

1 tablespoon vegetable oil

½ teaspoon Mexican oregano

½ teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon powdered vegetable stock (I generally leave this out because I do not have powdered vegetable stock, but if I have a bit of vegetable stock laying around, sometimes I’ll throw in a splash or two)

Boil tomatoes in 4 cups of water with garlic and chilies.  Cook for 20 minutes at a low boil.  The skins of the tomato should start to peel off.  While the tomatoes are cooking, sauté the onion in the vegetable oil until soft.  When the tomatoes, garlic, and chilies are done cooking, drain them, reserving a bit of the cooking water to add to the sauce.  Peel the skins from the tomatoes, and put the tomatoes into a blender or food processor, along with the garlic and chilies.  Add the sautéed onion, Mexican oregano, salt, and stock (if using).  Blend on high until the sauce is smooth.  Add a bit of the reserved cooking water if the sauce appears too thick.

Pour the sauce back into the pot you used to cook the tomatoes.  Cook the sauce over low heat for an additional 15-20 minutes.  Use as a sauce for any number of Mexican dishes, or use as a flavoring for Mexican rice (recipe below).

Makes about 1 ½ cups of sauce.

Mexican Rice

2 tablespoons vegetable oil

1 cup long grain rice

½ teaspoon cumin

¼ teaspoon salt

¼ cup chopped onion

1 cup ranchero sauce

1 ½ cups vegetable or chicken broth

Heat oil over medium heat.  Add rice and cook, stirring frequently, until rice is puffed and golden.  Sprinkle with cumin and salt, then add the chopped onions.  Continue to sauté the rice and onions until the onions are tender, 3-5 minutes.  Carefully stir in ranchero sauce and broth (the liquid will sputter quite a bit as it hits the hot oil in the pan).  Bring to a boil, then cover the rice and lower the heat to a simmer.  Cook the rice at a low simmer for 20-25 minutes, until rice is tender.  Fluff the rice with a fork to fully integrate ingredients without smashing rice.

Makes about 3 cups of rice.

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Chewy Ginger Thins

31 Oct

Every so often, after I have spent the better part of a day trying out recipes and washing pan after pot after bowl several times over in an effort to keep the kitchen from looking as though it suffered through some sort of highly site-specific typhoon, I start to wonder what is wrong with me.  Is it really necessary to test out five different variations of a muffin recipe just to get one that I think smells as good as it tastes (don’t even get me started on that one…it seemed really important at the time)?  Does it really matter if the squash suffers a crack on one side when roasted if it also happens to taste like a heavenly dream?  And do those positively delicious cookies really have to be the size of a quarter, just because when I pictured them in my head they were that small, but, dear lord, it turns out that making them that small will necessitate the forming of, let’s see…200 COOKIES?

That’s right.  I made a cookie recipe that yielded 200 individual cookies.  Why?  Because they were delicious.  Because making them any larger would have made them hard and crisp, and hard and crisp was not what I wanted the cookies to be.  Because eating tiny cookies makes me happy, makes the people around me happy, and, well, because I sort of began to enjoy making tiny little cookies (after the third or fourth batch) in lieu of regular sized ones.  Or, maybe it’s all because of the query I posited in the previous paragraph.  Could there be something wrong with me?

The answer is that, yes, there probably is something wrong with me.  Of course, it mustn’t be forgotten that there is generally something wrong with everybody, and rather than be upset or bewildered by that fact, I think it behooves us all to relish, rather than reject, that fact.  Mild obsession is oftentimes what fuels intense creativity, and, though I would not call my insistence on developing the best bite-sized chewy ginger cookie an incredible feat of genius or inventiveness, it does point to what I believe is an at least mildly admirable trait to possess while in the kitchen: persistence.  And not just any kind of persistence, but cookie persistence.  That’s what I have, and this is what it lead to—the chewiest, most flavorful bite-sized ginger cookie in all the land.

Chewy Ginger Thins

Adapted from Joy of Cooking 

As previously mentioned, these cookies are bite-sized.  Each cookie is formed from about ¼ to ½ teaspoon of dough.  While this may sound completely insane and like a total waste of time to make, hear me out on this.  Forming these cookies is as simple as filling a pastry bag (fitted with a large-ish star tip) with dough and then piping out simple stars of dough on your baking sheet.  It takes between 30 and 45 seconds to form roughly 35 cookies on a baking sheet (yes, I timed it), which is substantially less time than it takes to form a similar number of regular sized cookies.  Forming these cookies is simple and nearly effortless, so making such a large number of them is hardly more noticeable than forming regular-sized cookies.  Don’t have a pastry bag?  No problem.  Just scoop the dough into a large Ziploc bag, cut off the very tip of one of the bottom corners of the bag, and squeeze out your dough using the Ziploc bag as a pastry bag.  Your dough won’t come out in stars, but that’s not a problem since the dough is meant to flatten out when baked.

¾ cup (12 tablespoons) unsalted butter

1 cup dark brown sugar

1 beaten egg

¼ cup molasses (dark or light are both fine)

1 ½ cups sifted unbleached all-purpose flour

¼ teaspoon salt

½ teaspoon baking soda

½ teaspoon ground cinnamon

½ teaspoon ground powdered ginger

pinch nutmeg

1 teaspoon grated fresh ginger

Preheat oven to 325 degrees Fahrenheit.  Line two baking sheets with parchment paper and set aside.

In a large bowl, cream together the butter, brown sugar, egg, and molasses.  Combine the flour, salt, baking soda, cinnamon, powdered ginger, and nutmeg, and sift together directly onto the butter mixture.  Stir until smooth.  Add the fresh ginger, then mix to combine.

Using a pastry bag or a Ziploc bag with a bottom corner cut off, pipe or squeeze out cookies onto a parchment-lined baking sheet in approximately ¼ teaspoon portions (if your squeezes turn out marginally larger, don’t worry).  Place each cookie about 1 inch apart, lest they stick together as they spread during baking.

Bake cookies on the center rack of the oven for 7 to 8 minutes, until the edges of the cookies have just begun to appear slightly darkened and dry.  While the cookies are baking, pipe another batch of cookies onto your second prepared baking sheet.

Cool baked cookies on their parchment sheet placed on a wire rack.  When cookies have cooled on a rack for about 5 minutes are and no longer gooey, you can slip the cookies right off of the parchment and reuse the parchment for another batch of cookies.

The desired consistency for these cookies is super chewy but ever-so-slightly firm (they will be very bendy when they come out of the oven, and will become soft-firm when cooled).  If you find your cookies are persistently floppy even after having sufficiently cooled, increase the baking time of subsequent batches by 1 minute.  The size of these cookies is meant to be small, so keep in mind that making the cookies much larger than called for will substantially change their outcome.

Makes roughly 200 cookies that are the size of a quarter.

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Butternut Squash and Dry-Cured Olive Pizza with Ricotta and Chevre

27 Oct

In 2010, the San Francisco Giants won the World Series, and in the course of that happening I nearly lost my mind.

My father was a kid in the Bay Area when the Giants moved to San Francisco, so he’s been a fan since 1958. This means that when the Giants won the World Series, he had experienced 52 long years of fandom void of seeing the Giants win the World Series. I’ve been a Giants fan since birth. Being as though I was born many years after 1958, one might think that the level of suffering I’ve experienced as a long-term Giants fan could somehow be deemed less fraught with pain and melancholy than my father’s, due to the smaller number of years I have lived as a fan. This assumption would be false. It is important to remember that, before 1958, my father experienced many wonderful, innocent years as a child free from the woe and misery caused by a beloved sports team repeatedly jabbing him in the heart, whilst simultaneously punching him in the face. I, however, have been privy to that pain practically since birth, since my life as a Giants fan essentially began as soon as I was released from the calm, baseball-free confines of the womb.  While it’s true that my father has endured a period of suffering that happens to be markedly longer than mine, I, as I know no other life without said suffering, and he does, would have to declare a draw if called upon to quantify whose life was made more woeful by the oft-crushing presence of the San Francisco Giants.

By the time last year’s World Series rolled around, we’d seen the Giants work their way towards the World Series before, and, sadly, we’d seen them lose the World Series before. Before my husband and I were married, he was an unfortunate audience member in the tragic real life play entitled I Watched the Giants Blow the World Series in 2002 (this bit of theater exists on a similar level of horror as I Watched the Giants Get Absolutely Creamed in the World Series in 1989). As he once told someone, he knew I was a fan, but up until then he did not realize the sheer intensity of that fandom. When the Giants are losing, I tend to curse a lot. I also tend to violently turn off the television, leave the room while muttering about how much I hate those bums, then stomp back into the room, turn the television back on, and proceed to let loose with a string of exceptionally unladylike obscenities. This will happen several times in the course of a game. Sometimes the Giants don’t even have to be losing for me to reach that level of unpleasantness. Sometimes they are winning, but are threatening to lose, and that’s enough to set me off on a long tirade of Oh, my god, those lousy bums.

But now, as a mother and a person rapidly settling into my mid-30s, I try to tone things down a bit. I’ve cut out the salty language and the hurling of the remote control, but I seem to have replaced those two things with the type of obsessive superstitions ordinarily reserved for the sort of people who frequent Bingo halls or palm readers. Last year, when San Francisco had made their way through the playoffs and into the World Series, I began to wear an awful lot of black and orange, which happen to be the Giants’ signature colors. Halloween was coming up, so, if anyone asked, I could always fabricate a plausible excuse for my color choices. As time went on, however, and the Giants came closer and closer to winning the World Series, my will began to unravel. First and foremost, I stopped being able to talk about anything other than baseball. Rather than hiding the true reasons behind my sartorial leanings, I instead began to randomly point out to other people that they, too, were wearing the Giants colors. Whether or not I actually knew said people was not of concern to me.  By the end of October, when I would pick up my son from preschool and the other parents would casually ask about our afternoon plans, I had lost the ability to speak in a rational manner or utilize complete sentences.

“The Giants are in the World Series!” I would blurt out, quickly shuffling my son towards the car. “It’s an afternoon game. Early evening. East Coast time. Pregame coverage starts in an hour. Giants are up two games. Can’t talk. We have to go now.  I’MSORRYWEHAVETOGONOTIMETOTALK.”

Throughout the duration of the Series, I also started making game time meals for us that were entirely orange and black.  Things with poppy seeds and cheddar cheese, baby carrots and black beans. I was possessed with the spirit of Giants baseball, and I had sucked everyone else in with me. Sure, my dad was already along for the ride, but when my son began to wake up every day and make an immediate beeline for his Giants cap and baseball glove, I really began to understand what was happening. Much like my dad had passed on the Giants to me, I, too, was setting up my son for a lifetime of agony and despair as a Giants fan.

But not last year.  My son, that lucky little devil, got to see the Giants win the World Series before he had even started kindergarten.  On November 1st, 2010, we all watched the Giants’ Brian Wilson (and his beard) strike out the Texas Rangers’ Nelson Cruz to end Game 5 of the World Series and take home the crown.  As it was repeated by Giants fans all around the country, the torture was over.  My father’s 52 years as a fan, along with my 33, were finally rewarded with the biggest win in baseball.  85 cumulative years of fandom between us, and our souls were finally released from the clutches of sadness.

That was last year. Things, as you might know if you have spent any time around me since about April, did not go so well for the Giants this year. Plagued with injuries and softened by lackluster offense, my memories of the 2011 Giants will not be as filled with excitement as my memories of the fellows of 2010. Since the Texas Rangers are getting their second chance at the World Series title this year, it seems only fitting that I would revisit a little bit of 2010 and recall one of the many orange and black meals I made during the month of October (and one day in November). This pizza, textured and flavorful, was a definite highlight. Chunks of roasted butternut squash atop a layer of creamy, tangy chevre and ricotta cheese. Intense and salty dry-cured olives. It’s the essence of fall on a pizza, or, if you’re a fan of the boys in orange and black, it’s a tip of the cap to the excitement of 2010 and the greatest autumn of my baseball-loving life.

Butternut Squash and Dry-Cured Olive Pizza with Ricotta and Chevre

Pizza dough for 1 pizza (this is my favorite no-fail pizza dough)

1 small butternut squash

2 tablespoons olive oil

2/3 cup ricotta cheese

¼ cup chevre

1/3 cup dry-cured black olives, pits removed if not purchased already pitted

salt and pepper

Preheat oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit.

Using a sturdy vegetable peeler or shaver, remove the peel from the squash, then cut it in half and remove the seeds.  Slice the squash into ½-inch chunks.  Place squash chunks on a heavy baking sheet, add the olive oil and salt and pepper to taste, then toss to combine.  Roast the squash until it is soft but not falling apart, and the bottoms have just begun to caramelize, about 20-25 minutes.  Remove squash from oven and allow to cool slightly while you prepare the other ingredients.

Turn the oven up to 500 degrees Fahrenheit and place an oven rack at the second-lowest level.  Place a heavy baking sheet or pizza stone on the rack while the oven preheats.

In a small bowl, combine ricotta and chevre and set aside.

Using your hands (not a rolling pin, which will force all the air out of the dough and make it tough), coax your pizza dough into an approximate circle of about 12 to 13 inches in diameter.  Place your dough round on a large piece of parchment paper.

Spread the ricotta and chevre mixture over the surface of the dough.  Add 2 cups of roasted butternut squash chunks to the top of the pizza (you can refrigerate any remaining butternut squash chunks).  Sprinkle with olives.

Slide the pizza, still on the parchment, onto a rimless baking sheet, or onto a baking sheet that has been overturned.  Using the rimless or overturned baking sheet, slide the pizza, still on the parchment, onto the baking sheet or pizza stone that has been heating in the oven.  Bake pizza for 8 to 10 minutes, until the edges are dark golden brown and the cheese is just beginning to turn brown in places.

Pizza can be eaten piping hot or slightly cooled.  Enjoyed best when accompanied by the sweet taste of victory.

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