Saturday Dinner II: Garbanzo-Vegetable Soup with Smoky Broth and Fresh Avocado (Caldo Tlalpeño)

For the first course of our Saturday dinner, I made a soup that is nice and light, unlike the main course, as you will see. Well, let's get on with it! Here's the mise:

Yes, it's true, I use store-bought chicken broth. We don't eat much chicken, and, when we do, we usually just eat chicken paillard or something made from boneless chicken breasts. Kind of makes it hard to make chicken broth. We do make our own vegetable broth, but that just wouldn't be the same. Those following along with the cookbook will note that there is no sprig of epazote, only dried epazote, because that's all I've been able to find thus far. I also don't have slices of chipotle because I pureed my canned chipotle when I opened it; I used it instead. I also didn't include the pork fat in the mise, but, don't worry, it's in there. I did not add a chicken breast because we were having it as a light starter (Bayless even suggests omitting the chicken breast when the soup is served with our main course).

Because I was going to make the soup after everyone arrived, I made everything I could first and added all of the ingredients to the broth to simmer, with the idea that I could leave the kitchen. It didn't exactly work out that way because of all of the other things I was busy cooking, but it did free up some time for me. So, I added the onions and carrots to the pork fat to cook:

I cooked them for a while; until the onions were starting to brown, and added the garlic. I cooked it for a bit longer, then added the beans and dried herbs:

When everyone arrived, I heated up the broth, added the onion/carrot/bean/herb mixture to it, and simmered everything for about 30 minutes. When it was ready, I added some diced avocado to the top, and here's the final plating:

Okay, I forgot to take a picture of the finished dish (idiot), but I thought it looked very nice. It certainly did not have any swimming pool floatie noodles in it.... In fact, the soup was excellent, if I do say so myself. It was nice and light, but also full of flavor. As I said earlier, I offered chipotle puree instead of chipotle slices, with a warning because it is very spicy. I thought that a bit of it gave it some interesting depth, but it was easy to take a bit too much and overwhelm the delicate flavors of the soup. One of our friends declared that the soup tasted like spring, and when Katy had a stomach ache a few weeks later, she said that it was all that she wanted to eat (of course, it was gone by then). Not bad reviews, I think.

Sources:

Central Market Organics chicken broth

Goya beans

Everything else from Central Market or our pantry

Saturday Dinner I: Goat-Milk Caramel with Spirits (Cajeta de Leche Envinada)

This is a fairly simple "dish," but it is delicious. The only problem is that I went out of town right after I made it and Katy ate all of it before I could have more than a couple of tablespoons (out of about a cup and a half of cajeta). We made it for some friends who came over to our house for dinner. This is the first of four posts about that meal.

Anyway, our friends are French, but one of them travels to Mexico regularly, so I was interested in running a good weekend dinner by him. I started cooking the night before, because that's the kind of cool guy I am on Friday night, particularly since the baby was born. Anyway, our friends made crêpes a few weeks later and gave us a couple when we went to the park with them. The cookbook suggests eating the cajeta with crêpes, which we could have done except -- did I mention that Katy ate all of it? In case you're wondering, yes, it was the first time in my life that anyone had stopped a stroller on a jogging path to hand me crêpes -- maybe I just don't get out much. The cajeta would have been really good with the crêpes, but it was also really good as a topping for ice cream, which is how we used it.

On to the cooking! Here's the mise:

It was much easier than I had feared to find goat milk, and goat milk made all of the difference in the flavor (not surprisingly). We don't keep grain alcohol around the house (at least for long...), so I used some Black Seal rum instead. I know, Bermuda is not exactly Mexico, but I'm not the first person to cook with it, at least.

I put everything but the baking soda and rum into our Le Creuset pot:

I brought the pot to a simmer and added the baking soda (I was careful about stirring the mixture to keep it from foaming up, but it wasn't really a problem). I kept simmering, stirring it every once in a while:

How did I manage to take a picture from the right side while stirring the pot with my right hand? I have three arms. Also, no, my Rice ring does not have that much schmutz in it, and we don't actually employ the steamer in this dish; we just made some food for Charlie at the same time. Whew.

Anyway, this is what the pot looked like after a while (I don't know, something like half an hour; I didn't really pay attention):

Mmm...caramel. (And yes, the camera is still misrepresenting the amount of schmutz in my ring.) It reminds me of my friends who were married in the Caramel Valley, which I understand is next to the Land of Chocolate, although, sadly, I never got to see it while we were out there... (Yes, Jon, I'm still beating that joke to death, as is my wont.)

Once the caramel was ready (a bit thinner than corn syrup when hot, and making fairly hard droplets when they are cooled to room temperature), I strained the caramel into a jar, careful to leave certain undesirable things like the cinnamon stick behind:

I added the rum and put the jar into an ice bath to cool:

Could the ice bath have been deeper? Probably, if I had used a more appropriate bowl, but, you know, it was late. We ultimately served it on vanilla ice cream (homemade, of course) at the end of a long meal and a long day in the kitchen, so we were a bit lazy with the prezo (all together now, "like with the ice bath?"):

Later, we found that putting the cajeta under the ice cream looked much better and less drizzly. Overall, the cajeta was great, and it was really easy. Not that I really did so often before, I don't think I'll ever again be able to eat jarred caramel on ice cream. The goat milk flavor (for those who have not partaken, it tastes like goat cheese, duh!) is really interesting and makes it virtually impossible for the caramel to be cloying, which it can sometimes be. And a bit of 140-proof rummy goodness certainly doesn't hurt the overall flavor... I will definitely make this again, but I'll wait until I'm not about to travel for a while so (maybe) I can eat some of it.

Sources:
Goat milk from Meyenberg
Karo corn syrup
Gosling's Black Seal Rum