Farm-Fresh Vegetable Tamales

He carries tamales,
And a few maize ears…
And out in the pond,
There is no salamander,
Nor frog nor fish
He would not devour

– Mateo Rosas de Oquendo

This poem, by a 17th Century Spaniard in Mexico, denigrates tamales as the food of the lower class mestizos. I quoted it in a paper that I wrote about the colonial Mexican culinary scene to stir up my professor, who was half-Mexican. The paper was basically like, “Mexican food rocks! Spaniards were assholes!” It seems like all of my papers end up like that.

The fact that tamales are still around despite Spanish efforts to eliminate them from the Mexican diet speaks to how appealing they are. Making them definitely has to be a community event — otherwise, that mountain of corn husks ain’t getting filled any time soon. I found a recipe for the dough at Veggie Num Nums, and improvised the filling. We didn’t really have meat or cheese, so this time the filling is vegan.

Another thing we did differently was the corn husks. Traditionally, you use dried out corn husks, but we had plenty of fresh ones to use. I asked Rick Bayless on Twitter (yes, yes) if that was kosher and he said it’d be fine. They made smaller tamales but the green husks made a pleasant contrast to the yellow tamale dough.

Sitka, one of the kids at the farm where I worked, helped us out. The poor kid might have had swine flu, but he promised that he washed his hands before assembling the tamales. Hahahaha! I’m not sick yet, so I think I should be fine. (Famous last words…)

Tamale Dough (Lifted from Veggie Num Nums)

• 2 cups masa harina
• 1-2 C stock
• 1 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 C olive oil, frozen (I didn’t freeze mine and it was fine.)
• salt
• chili powder

I kind of threw everything into a food processor until it got doughy, and that seemed to work fine. Remove to a bowl. That’s all!

Vegetable Filling

• assorted sweet peppers
• onions
• chili powder
• olive oil
• corn

Saute until the peppers and onions become tender. Throw everything into the food processor and chop up. Cut the kernels off of the sweet corn and put aside.

To assemble, spread a tablespoon or more of the dough onto a corn husk. You can use several different methods, which are outlined here. I used the first one because I thought it was the cutest and most simple. Once you fill the husks with dough and filling, steam them for about 20-40 minutes, depending on their size. The dough should firm up quite nicely.

Thoughts on Salad

Salad mix sure is pretty, isn’t it? It’s hard to believe that all of that goes into your run-of-the-mill mesclun. Despite all of the work that goes into cultivating salad, it really gets the shaft at restaurants as a filler food, or even just as a platform for better things.

When I was working as a waiter, I absolutely despised salads because tables of people would always order them as their main entrees, dressing on the side. C’mon, guys! Don’t fall for that race to the bottom! I felt like they were stripping salad (and food at large) of its gustatory properties and just using it as an “I’m not fat look at how little I’m eating” food.

However, one thing I would definitely recommend trying is a Greek salad. At the Phoenix Café, you can also get one with grilled chicken on top, which works well too. In this preparation, the salad can really stand on its own. No shame!

The Phoenix Café’s Greek Salad

• A large plate of mesclun lettuce mix
• 1 tbsp crumbled sheep’s milk feta cheese
• 4 kalamata olives
• 4 anchovies
• 4 tomato wedges
• 8 cucumber slices

Assemble ingredients in a manner that is aesthetically pleasing! Dress with your own top-secret-recipe Parmesan vinaigrette (here’s one).

The First CSA Box I’ve Gotten Around to Photographing

Hi guys! Sorry it’s been so long since my last post. We’ve been so busy every day that life generally sucks and all I want to do is play Plants vs. Zombies (Michael Jackson zombie! Ahhh!). But enough of my bitching! Pictured above is the typical CSA box; we’re just about in the peak of the season, so we have to fit a ton of certified organic shit in these things.

Included are: scallions, broccoli, summer squash, cilantro, turnips, three kinds of lettuce heads, garlic scapes, sugar snap peas, dandelion greens (ew), tatsoi, dill and curly kale. We assemble these boxes after a two-day harvesting bonanza and deliver them to numerous drop-off points in the Twin Cities metro area. I’ll take some more pictures of boxes as the season progresses!

Also, today myself and the other interns held a bunch of big sticks and herded two cows into a truck and therefore to their doom.

Garlic in Progress

We’re growing three rows of garlic in our west field, and as you can see they’re coming up very nicely. We tossed some organic nitrogen fertilizer on them this week to help them out, too. Like ramps, garlic belongs to the Allium family, and even the leaves smell pungent. Our boss, Gary, told us that good garlic bulbs are indicated by the thickness of the plant’s stem. Most of these are probably a centimeter wide now. They’re big, too! Most are about a foot-and-a-half tall.

Since these aren’t ready yet, we’ve been buying our own garlic from the grocery store in town. (Do you say “grossry” or “groshry”? Midwesterners talk so weird!) The garlic we’re growing will probably all go out to the CSA shares later this summer, but but BUT I’m hoping that we’ll be able to snag some scapes once those come out. The scapes will kind of snake out from the main joint of the plant in a few weeks.

I use garlic in just about everything, so it’s hard to choose a single recipe for this post. I’ll do a two-fer!

Roasted Garlic

• 1 garlic bulb, with the first third chopped off
• olive oil
• kosher salt

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Place the bulb on some tinfoil and sprinkle the oil and salt over it. Wrap it up and toss into the oven (probably on a baking sheet if you’re not reckless like me) for about 45 minutes to an hour. Eat on everything. You should definitely add it to hummus, pasta sauces, bread and pizza.

Chipotle Salsa

• A bunch of tomatoes, chopped roughly
• 1/2 an onion, chopped roughly
• A can of chipotle peppers in adobo sauce
• 3-4 cloves of garlic, chopped
• cilantro
• salt and pepper
• olive oil

Saute the onion and garlic with the olive oil over medium heat. Once they’re nice and browned, add the tomatoes and chipotles. Stir and let the mixture simmer for about 10 minutes. Let it cool off, and put the whole mix into a blender and puree with cilantro, salt, pepper and additional chipotles if you want it spicier. (I usually do.) Also eat on everything.

New Banner Image and Also…

Hey everyone! I’ve decided to change this blog’s banner image to reflect the crazy circumstances in which I’ve found myself these days. As of yesterday, Chris and I have started to work on an organic and sustainable farm in Minnesota! It’s about 140 acres, with a greenhouse, loads of vegetables, fruits and livestock. We are really pumped — we even got up at 5:30am today, and we don’t even work on the weekend!

The above image is a closeup of some baby Bright Lights chard seedlings that we’re starting by the greenhouse before we plant them in the field. One amazing bonus is that we get to eat the vegetables we grow, so we’ll probably be eating a lot of these soon. It’s really awesome to be able to walk from the kitchen into a field of crops and just cut some off for our meals. As a city kid, I’ve never experienced anything like this — I’ve done it with herbs and tomatoes, sure, but this is really something else.

I’ll make sure to update once a week with videos and stuff! This’ll be crazy!