he found the pictures!

A couple years ago when I was visiting my sister and some friends in LA, I went to an awesome Mexican restaurant for a late night drunken after the art show dinner and this awesome stuffed poblano pepper covered with some kind of creamy walnut sauce...

When I told the story to Recipe Guy, he immediately knew I was talking about Chiles en Nogada and showed me how to make it. 

Then I got home and somehow managed to lose the picutes I took of the process.

Of course Recipe Guy has now shown me how to do a search by file type that looks everywhere on my computer. (really, it's a small laptop, things shouldn't be hard to find in it)

This post is dedicated to Recipe Guy. He's fucking awesome.

Chiles en Nogada

It looks fancy as all hell, but it's actually pretty easy. It can take a bit of pre-planning if you want to do it old school, but if you make a couple compromises, you could easily do this in about 45 minutes. If you want to impress someone, this is the way to do it.

The Chiles:

• 8 poblano chiles

We were planning on feeding 6, but it's best to do a couple extra in case you mess one up, and because someone always wants seconds.

The Filling (aka Picadillo):

• 1 lb ground pork
• 1 lb ground beef
• 1 onion
• 1 peach
• 2 apples
• 1/2 c currants (or raisins if you prefer, but if you do, you're weird)
• 1/2 c chopped dates
• 4 cloves garlic
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1/2 tsp black pepper
• 1/2 tsp allspice
• 1/2 tsp oregano
• 1/2 tsp thyme
• salt

The Sauce:

• 1 c walnuts (plus milk to cover them)
• 4 oz cream cheese
• salt
• 2 c Mexican crema (this is the same as french creme fraiche)

or

• 1 c sour cream
• 1 c milk

To Make it Look Almost as Awesome as Recipe Guy is:

• 1 pomegranate
• cilantro

Old School Steps:

If you want the fast version skip forward to "What you gotta do."

If you want to go all the way and make your own Mexican crema (aka creme fraiche) heat 2 c of heavy whipping cream in the microwave to between 90 and 100 degree F.

Add 2 tbsp buttermilk.

Shake.

Cover and leave on the counter (yes the counter) for 24 hours. You might want to warn your cohabitants what you're doing. People have a tendency to refidgerate dairy products that they find on the counter.

Basically, you're culturing and souring milk here. Which is why you could also use a sour cream and milk combo as a time saving, planning-schmanning alternative.

The next old school thing you can do is roast the walnuts in a 350 degree oven for 10 minutes and then rub their skins off.

Tell me how it goes if you do because there's no way in hell I have the patience to remove skin from walnuts. They come shelled and that's good enough for me.

Since we were planning ahead with the crema, we also planned ahead with the nuts. You can soak the walnuts in milk overnight if you want to, but it's not necessary. If you do though, I totally recommend using the nutty milk in a savoury bread pudding. Best one I ever made was with the walnut milk.

Now that we've got the shortcuts out of the way, we can start cooking.

What you gotta do:

Grill the chiles over a medium high flame until the skin is blistering and blackening.

Dump them into a plastic bag and let them steam for a few minutes.

If you chop the onion, apples, peach, dates, and garlic while they steam, they'll be just cool enough to handle.

After steaming in a bag for a while, the skins will slide right off the chiles.

You'll probably have a few stubborn strips that hang on for dear life. You're free to beat them to death, or let them live, depending on what you have patience for (one guess at how much patience I had for them). Once you've got them all done, just set them aside while you make the filling.

The filling should take no more than 20 minutes if you chopped the fruits and veggies while the chiles were steaming.

In a large pan brown the beef and pork with the onion, and then add the spices

and then add the fruits.

Recipe Guy is fond of his mortar and pestle, and will grind whole spices into powder whenever he gets the chance. I know you're just going to use the pre-ground stuff and that's fine.

Cover the filling, turn the heat down to low, and you're done with it. It will probably need a stir from time to time, but really, that's all it is.

While it hangs out in the pan you can make the sauce.

Spoon the walnuts out of the milk and into the food processor. If yours haven't been soaking, just dump them in.

Add the cream cheese and the crema (or sour cream and milk) and the salt. This really needs salt or it comes off as kinda dessert-y. If you're using sour cream and milk, warm them to room temperature in the microwave, or take them out of the fridge before you start cooking. This sauce doesn't get cooked, but it shouldn't be cold either.

Turn on the food processor.

I find it's impossible to get this perfectly smooth, but once it looks about like this

I'm willing to call it done.

So, there you go. All of your components are ready to go. Well, except the garnish. You need to bust some arils out of the pomegranate.

Do this underwater in a large bowl and the arils will sink while the rest of the pomegranate floats. It also helps prevent pomegranate juice from getting everywhere.

Okay, now we're ready to go.

See, it's really not that bad when you think about it. Each of the components is pretty simple, and doesn't take too long to prepare. I mean, browning the meat probably took more time than everything else combined. If you're really into the planning thing, you could even roast the chiles the day before. They keep quite well in the fridge and will warm them to room temp on the counter while you do everything else.

To stuff the chiles, cut a slit down the side and remove the seeds.

(It goes a little faster if you remove all the seeds and then stuff all the chiles)

Let the chile rest in your palm and the slit will fall open.

Spoon in picadillo until it's nice and stuffed. Then, set it cut side down on a plate.

Don't worry if a few crumbs fall out. You're going to be covering this with sauce anyway. Even torn chiles can make it to the dinner table looking fancy if they're covered with enough sauce.

Spoon the sauce over the poblano

until it has a lovely white blanket covering it.

and then sprinkle with pomegranate arils and cilantro leaves.

Holy hell do they look impressive when they're done.

And if you work it right, you can do this all in less than an hour. If you preplan and do a few things the day before, you could probably even make this on a weeknight. But really, this is way too impressive to waste on a Wednesday.

What simple thing impresses you?

Where's my cake?

I want to smash my face in it, cry, then have a nice long nap.

Why?

We're 1 today!!And that's what 1 year olds do on their birthday.

Well, technically tomorrow, but the party's today. One year olds have no clue that it's their birthday so it doesn't really matter when it happens. All they see is cake, lots of weird people, and shiney wrapping paper.

There are lots of weird people around here (we love our commenters, tell your friends) and are much too distracted by shiney things. My last attempt at cake was an epic fucking fail (don't worry, I'll post it soon so you can laugh and cringe too) so we're going to have to wait a couple weeks for Taneasha to make one.

When Taneasha told me we'd made it a whole year (see, totally oblivious, may as well be a toddler) and warned me it was closer to my post day than hers, my first thought was to do a "clip show" post, but she'd already done that to cover my ass over the holidays. Crap. Okay, fine. The first year is always full of firsts, new things learned, and first attempts at things that really need practice.

Here's what I've learned:

1) Preheat the fucking oven. This is where the shiney paper effect comes in. We get all excited about the prospect of making cookies; we sift, we cream, we add moar choklits! and then when we go to bake them, we have to sit for 15 minutes staring at a wall while the oven warms up. It's like a time out for naughty bakers.

2) Kitchen timers are your friend. When the recipe says bake the cookies for 13 minutes, they're not kidding. Granted there's a bit of leeway, but really, they don't need 17. Four minutes is a long time for cookies to be at 350 degrees. Plus, when you're trying to prove that it really is possible to make dinner in 20 minutes, it's nice to watch those last few seconds count down as you take your first bite.

3) Beginners luck is a fickle bitch. The first time I made hollandaise sauce (years ago) it came out awesome. I've never been able to make it quite the same since. But this is not always how things go. Sometimes it takes a couple tries to get a recipe right. Sometimes no matter how many times you try the recipe just won't come out right. Yes, there have been times when we've posted first attempts, but we've done it for a reason. We're here every week writing up recipes, acting like we know what we're doing, but really, we're just trying to feed ourselves and our families something other than cereal for dinner. Shit happens, some recipes suck (I fully expect that sometimes the stuff that works in our kitchens won't work in yours and that's okay). Sometimes you get it right on the first try, sometims you don't. Sometimes you never will. And if you don't, there's always cereal for dinner.

4) Tinfoil is the only thing that will stop guacamole from turning brown.

Taneasha here.  This looked like so much fun, I decided to jump in too.  Here are some things I've learned in our first year. 

1) Putting together a post will always take 3 times longer than you think it will.  I don't know how many times I've gone into the kitchen thinking, "Oh, this will only take me 30 minutes or so."  2 hours later, flour in my shirt and hair and butter all over the camera, I finally have the food cooked and the pictures taken... but haven't even started on picture editing and actual post writing. 

2) Don't make something for the first time for a post.  Ok, obviously I haven't really learned this because I still do it, but it's really not a good idea.  It has a habit of turning into chaos. 

3) Cooking is going to be messy.  There's just no way around it.  Almost without fail I'll need something from across the room while whisking batter.  Also without fail, I'll let the whisk rest against the side of the bowl, checking to make sure it's stable, but as soon as I turn my back, the thing falls out of the bowl, flinging batter much further than physics should allow.  Things are going to spill, drip, and boil over.  It just happens, and it's ok.   

Ok, back to Seeley.

There are also a couple things I'd like to post about again.

Chicken Picatta. This was a first attempt. I was totally winging it to the point that I didn't even know how much of each ingredient I used. I've made this a few times since and really want to post an actual recipe for it. Plus, it's way (like way) way better with basil than parsley.

Smoothies. While this wasn't a first attempt, it was a bit of a half-assed one. I want to do a bit more with them and show some of the actual fruit combinations that are tasty, rather than just telling you to dump a bunch of fruit in the blender for a while. But hey, at least it wasn't just cereal for dinner.

Pizza. I've shown you the quick and easy pita version, now I want to try the real thing. On real dough. With yeast. One of these days I'm going to make dough that actually rises. I swear I can feel the poor little yeasties dying. I kill them with my bare hands.

Well, I guess this did turn out to be kind of a clip show. But at least I can prove that I learned something in the last year. I sure didn't learn much calculus. No, seriously, someone show me how to take the partial deriviative of a multivariable function. Anyone? Bueller?

So tell us... what would you like to see us make in our second year?