Albondigas with a twist

For the many Sephardim that read this blog (and there are so many of you I can hardly count you all on my fingers), you'll be familiar with the traditional version of albondigas that we've been eating (and loving!) since we were all tiny. They're red, it's all about the tomato. Well tonight I went off the beaten path, well onto the somewhat beaten path of Mexican flavours that I've embraced and turned the blessed albondiga of my youth on its ear! Tonight's were green, that's verde, yes!

I had some tomatillos sitting in the fridge that I had picked up at a farmers' market a while ago. I needed to use them. I was not willing to let those beauties go to waste but I needed something one step up from salsa verde, because that does not a dinner make. So a little searching and a little cobbling together and here's what I came up with.

Albondigas verde

• 1-2 pounds of ground beef
• 10 or so tomatillos
• 2 poblano peppers or a couple of jalapenos
• 3 cloves of garlic
• 1 big white onion (1/2 cut into chunks, 1/4 chopped super finely)
• 1/2 cup of chopped cilantro
• 2 tbsp of uncooked rice
• few tablespoons of oil
• salt 
• 1 or 2 eggs

Clean and remove the husks from the tomatillos and put them in a pot of water to boil for about 15 min until they turn a little yellowish. If using jalepenos, boil with the tomatillos and remove seeds etc once cooked.. Once ready, drain the water from the pot.

Roast the poblano peppers (either under the broiler or over the flame of a gas stove) until they are fairly charred. Put in a plastic bag and let sweat for about 10 minutes so the skin will be easy to get off. Clean the skin off, remove the seeds and rinse the pepper to get all the black bits and seeds off.  

Chuck the cooked tomatillos, poblano peppers/jalapenos, chunks of onions, cilantro, garlic, and about a cup of water into a blender and blend until it is a very nice green colour.

To make the meatballs, mix the eggs, ground beef, finely chopped onion, rice and a couple of pinches of salt into a bowl and then form into walnut sized balls. Not too tiny but not big either.

In a pot large enough to fit the balls essentially in one layer, add the oil and let it get hot. Pour the tomatillo mixture in (and enjoy the sizzle). Mix and let it come to the boil. You should add a bit of water to thin it out now (I used the blender and got all the rest of the tomatillo mixture out with the water). 

Once the sauce comes back to the boil, add the balls, turn down the heat, and let it simmer partially covered for 30 minutes. Add salt etc as required to taste.

I served this over pink rice and a little Mexican style salad with chopped onion, a few of the last stragglers from my tomato crop, chopped lettuce, and some chunks of avocado dressed simply wiht some lime juice, olive oil and a bit of salt.  They don't look all that fantastic in pictures but we're about flavour here, not looks!

Feel good food

I realized tonight that making a good meal, or at least one that I enjoy eating, makes me feel good about myself. So tonight's dinner was feel good food. I wll say that there's nothing bad about a meal that starts with this:

That is a bowl of delicious spices and chopped parsley that got turned into some beautiful beef kebabs that we had with a bit of rice, some Bick's pickles and some pickled beets that I whipped together just before Christmas. Here's the recipe. The flavours really hit the spot with me.

Ground beef kebabs

• 1 pound of ground beef (or lamb if you're feeling so inclined)
• 2/3 cup of chopped parsley
• 1 small onion finely chopped
• 2 tsp paprika
• 1 tsp ground cumin
• 1/2 tsp ground coriander
• 1 tsp salt
• 1/8 tsp chili powder

Get 6 to 8 skewers. If you're using bamboo ones, soak them in water. Basically put all the ingredients together in bowl and mix them up making sure the parsley and onion is all evenly distributed.  Then make 6 to 8 evenly sized balls. Go fire up the bbq. Take each ball roll it into a bit of a cylinder then put a skewer through it. Mold the meat onto the skewer by squeezing it a bit. Pop them on a med-heat bbq and cook for about 12 minutes turning them occasionally.

Take 'em off and serve right away with rice, pickles, and even some yogurt dip if you like.

2 for 1 roasts

Metro had some eye of round and outside round roasts on 2-for-1 special this week, so I thought I'd drop by and see what was what. The thing about shopping at the store that's right in the confines of Ryerson University is that they have lots of smaller sized cuts of meat, which is great if you're cooking for just a few people rather than a whole family. So I managed to find a couple of smallish roasts, being quite chuffed to get the deal.

Apparently with the eye of round, some people cook them in the oven but they are also okay as a pot roast. As a someone who hearts her pressure cooker, I decided to go the pot roast route as you can really get a lot of flavours in there and you don't have to have the oven on for ages! Oh and just in case, I've not shared my great pressure cooker with you, here's a pic of her. It's a Futura brand and I love it because it has the easiest and least scary pressure valve that I've ever seen on a pressure cooker. And it is pretty easy to clean.

Once you've prepared everything - sauteed some onions and garlic, browned the meat, then added beef stock, a bay leaf, some thyme, and - it takes about 40 minutes of cooking time (maybe a little less). While it was cooking I cut up some carrots and fingerling potatoes that we got from our Cooopers' Farm box this week. I added them after the 40 minutes and let them get up to pressure and cook for another eight minutes. Then I made a gravy by thickening and reducing the sauce, adding some sliced up mushrooms and a little bit of worchestershire sauce for a bit of zing. It all came together very nicely and the potatoes were just out of this world!! And there were lots so J could carbo-load before her 10K race that she was going to run the next morning!

We also got heirloom tomatoes and beets in the box this week. And never one to pass up a chance for a beet salad, made one to go with our lovely Friday night roast dinner. This one had some soft goat's milk cheese and candied walnuts to go with the beets, onions, and tomatoes. Delicious and I roasted enough so we can have a rerun of this fab salad again.



I was up at Cooper's Farm this past week and they assure me that they are growing poblano peppers, which I am thrilled about. We'll be doing some of our picking soon as the tomatoes and tomatillos are ready to roll. I have purchased new canning bottles and salsas are on their way!! Can't wait.

Getting tippy with it

I recently bottled some chipotle en conserva and there was quite a bit of sauce left over once I had put most of the conserva into bottles. I kept the saucy onions that were left over and figured I'd use all that juicy goodness as a base to cook up something spicy in the pressure cooker. Well tonight was that night and I decided to make sirloin tips in chipotle sauce.

I obviously used sirloin tips and the leftover conserva sauce. I also added a poblano and a couple of cloves of garlic, dry roasted on the comal. I browned the meat and added everything else to it in the pressure cooker and cooked it for 15 minutes. I wanted to use up some other vegetables that were in the fridge so cut up and added a zuke and a combination of beet greens and swiss chard after I opened the pressure cooker. Let the veggies boil in the sauce for a a few minutes and presto, a quick and delicious meal. J had said she wanted polenta so I kind of obliged. We only had white corn meal but I made it up and managed to get a pretty good consistency.


The meat come out nice and tender. I really enjoyed the flavour of the greens, which were stronger than spinach. And all of that sauce, which was a little sweet as the conserva was made with quite a bit of sugar as it's supposed to be kind of marmalade-y, absorbed by the polenta. Mmm, mmm. Served the whole thing with a small salad of lettuce, tomato, onions, cilantro and a lime vinaigrette. Salad brought the whole thing together, aha! :)

The best Mexican restaurant in town

Last Saturday J & I had some old friends and their kids over for dinner - we hadn't seem them in ages and I was excited to have some adventurous eaters over so I could cook with some gusto. So I'd planned the meal for ages and was excited to once again dive into the Rick Bayliss-inspired Mexican.

A few weeks ago I made some tamales that were okay but I used the wrong corn masa so despite not really wanting to have another bag of ground corn in the cupboard, I did bite the bullet and buy the right one for tamales - it has a coarser grain - which made all the difference. I made green chile chicken tamales. Now I don't want to toot my horn, but they were fantastic!! We ate the whole lot of them (save one tiny little one that made it as a lunch snack the next day).

The filling was really easy. I whipped up some tomatillo salsa (a can of tomatillos, one roasted jalepeno, few cloves of garlic, half a white onion, big handful of cilantro all wazzed up in the blender). Then put it all in a pot, added about a tablespoon of masa harina and thickened up the sauce a bit and then just mixed it with some shredded cooked chicken.

The corn husks were boiled for a few minutes and then left to sit soaking in the water for about an hour. I just followed the instructions on the tamale masa package for making the dough.

Now I don't have any type of steamer so I jerry-rigged this one last time that is essentially a big colander set in the top of our biggest pot and then filled with tamales, covered it up with leftover corn husks and the lid and steamed it all for about an hour and a half. Presto, delicioso. Time consuming, for sure, but I sure do like seeing all the little soldiers standing up ready to be counted in the steamer.

The other main dish I made was one of the first Mexican dishes I found: braised short ribs with poblano peppers, tomatoes, and herbs. Ordinarily this would take forever to braise in the oven but I used the fabulous and fast pressure cooker and the whole thing cooked in 15 minutes.

I can't say enough about the pressure cooker's efficiency. Let it cool for a few minutes and you have fall-off-the bone meat and saucy deliciousness ready to be wrapped in a tortilla!! The poblanos give it an extra taste dimension that's less spicy than chiles but also just a bit more fortified than bell peppers.

The meal was rounded out with a few salsas: quick tomato-chipotle that had quite a bit of bite, classic semi-pickled onions and cilantro, and a crunchy tomatillo avocado salsa that was just a slightly different take on the beautiful avocado than the regular guacamole. Refried beans and rice rounded out the offerings.

I would like to report that our guests said the tamales were some of the best they've ever had. The kids were gung ho and got stuck into everything and a great time was had by all.

Eating Lakeside.

This was the view from our dock. Just a beautiful expanse of freezing cold water. Lovely. G says it wasn't freezing cold, but to this girl, who was getting over a bitter cold, it was too cold for comfort.

But it did inspire lovely light lunches on the dock. I didn't take photos of most of them because they were just run of the mill incredibly delicious sandwiches and the like. BUT, I did take a picture of our lovely antipasto lunch...

We had bought some odds and ends at the St. Lawrence prior to heading up to the cottage, as well as a wonderful asiago cheese at the Gravenhurst farmer's market! (I was definitely glad that I had my wellies the day we went to the farmer's market. There had been an absolute killer of storm over-night and teh ground was quite muddy!) The cherry tomatoes were brilliant. The meats were lovely. The crackers crunchy. The eggplant skewer thing... grim grim grim. Blech.

For dinner, we wanted to stay away from the traditional hamburger, even though I am a hamburglar. Instead, we decided to make some beef keftas with brown rice (which I love) and fresh green beans and tomato with garlic aoili.

I even took a photo of the keftas grilling...


Lovely.

The keftas were spiced with some red pepper flakes, cumin, pepper, and whatnot. G made up that recipe, so I am at a loss as to what went into it. I made the brown rice which, as per usual, cooked up more like a risotto. I can't make it fluffy. It's lovely and I will eat tons of it, but it's always really creamy in consistency.

The garlic aioli was made with our very pungent Ontario garlic. I love it. Everything on our plate was local.