Turkey tacos and mexican coleslaw

I had ground turkey in the freezer and a desire for some comfort food, so I turned to my old standby (adapted from Casey Pitts and Mark Bittman).

Ingredients for coleslaw:

Half head of cabbage (red is much much better, but you can use green if you must)
One green pepper
One bunch scallions
One bunch cilantro
Six cloves garlic
Olive oil
Approx. three limes
Salt and pepper to taste

Ingredients for tacos:

1-2 pounds ground turkey
One onion
One jalepeno pepper (optional)
1-2 tbsp cumin
1-2 tbsp oil
One can chipotles adobado
Tortillas
Fage greek yogurt (spoonful)

Recipe:

First the coleslaw:  Thinly slice cabbage.  (I do this by slicing the head into quarters and then making paper thin cuts crosswise across the wedge.  You've probably seen coleslaw, so you have a sense of what we're going for.)  Throw out the very tough core at the brainstem of the cabbage.  Place in a bowl.

Thinly slice scallions, garlic cloves, and green pepper too.  (I also cut the green pepper into quarters and use the same technique.)  I suppose if you have a mandoline or a cuisinart it might do a decent job of this, but I do the slicing by hand because I think it's fun, and simpler.  Add to bowl.

Dress cabbage salad mixture with large quantity of salt (2-4 tbsp, more or less), olive oil to coat (maybe 2 tbsp) and juice of three limes, plus some grindings of pepper.  Toss and let sit-- for several hours if possible.  When you're ready to eat it, add one bunch of chopped cilantro, taste, and adjust seasoning.

This makes a large quantity (you could do the whole head of cabbage but I rarely have a bowl big enough), and it keeps very well, growing a little softer and mellower the longer it sits in the fridge.  I make this almost every week during the winter, so that we always have a raw vegetable dish that we can take to work.

[You can also make this in "spicy coleslaw" variation by adding cayenne pepper or, better yet, 3 seeded thinly sliced jalapeno peppers.  I think it's better that way, especially in the winter when bright crunchy flavors are hard to find, but I've learned from experience that spicy meat topped with spicy coleslaw makes for a really overwhelming taco.]

Now the filling:  Finely chop onion and jalapeno (seeding it if you can) and saute in oil until they soften and just start to brown.  Add meat, breaking up and stirring occasionally.  After meat is no longer pink, add cumin, stir again.  When meat is somewhat browned, add can of chipotles.  Stir and add a little water if you need to get it to coat the mixture.  Let simmer on low for a few minutes.  Add salt and pepper to taste.

Make a taco (or burrito, depending on the size of your tortillas):  Warm tortilla in microwave or skillet or (my preference) by holding in the flame of a gas stove.  Place spoonful of yogurt in tortilla.  Place meat in tortilla.  Add coleslaw on top.  Roll or fold, and eat!  (You will probably be inclined to overstuff them.  Be careful.)

From the Archives

In praise of mackerel.

Ad hoc Italian Stir-Fry

Mark Bittman reports:

I found myself with the ingredients for a quick stir-fry: shreds of cooked chicken, two or three kinds of mushrooms, asparagus trimmings (the flower ends had mostly been used at a television shoot), basil.  But I also had a loaf of bread I wanted to eat, so I was caught in a cross-cultural conundrum: eat bread with a stir-fry, or try make an Italian-style stir-fry. The second seemed more logical.  And I tried — I used olive oil, I added a bit of white wine, I threw in a few thyme sprigs, I finished the dish with more olive oil and even a bit of lemon. But it really wasn’t very successful. I sat there munching on my bread and eating the dish and thought, contrary to much of what I usually think, that sometimes the style of cooking will conquer the nature of the ingredients. A stir-fry is somehow always going to seem Chinese.

I was faced with a refrigerator of leftover odds and ends and decided to attempt something similar.  Maybe I just have lower standards, but I surprised myself by how happy I was with the result.

How to puree an entire watermelon

The first time I pureed an entire watermelon, it was in the course of making Smitten Kitchen's watermelon lemonade (which was almost as fantastic as Deb's pictures look).  For our housecooling party, we decided to make aguas frescas, so it seemed like another pureed watermelon was in order.

Now, that first pureed watermelon was definitely harder than I expected.  The chief difficulty is that we don't have a blender, only a cuisinart food processor.  Food processors can do almost anything blenders can, except deal neatly with large quantities of liquid.  Well let me tell you:  a pureed watermelon is a large quantity of liquid.

This time around, I had a flash of insight-- the immersion blender we had just gotten as a wedding present!  No problem.  The only hard thing I foresaw was cutting all that melon off the rind.  [That problem, it turned out was easily solved-- just cut the melon in thick, round slices with a big chef's knife, and then cut the rind away from the outside.]

However, I had accidentally bought a melon that was not seedless.  This required a colander and a lot of paper towels.  [See right.]  We left a bunch of the watermelon to strain and went off to see a movie, and it worked pretty well.  I squeezed a bunch of the pulp through the paper towels at the end to make sure we weren't missing too much of the good stuff.

So, learn from my many mistakes!

How to puree an entire watermelon:

1. Buy a seedless watermelon.
   
2. Cut it into slices with a big knife.
3. Cut the rind off of each slice and throw it away.
4. Roughly chop the watermelon flesh and put it in a big bowl.
5. Attack it mercilessly with an immersion blender.
6. Strain it only if you are the kind of killjoy who won't accept pulp in your orange juice.
7. Enjoy!

Are Cookbooks Dead?

One of CrescatK's other two readers says, in a comment below, "it would seem now, more than any time else, cookbooks are dead." I'm not so sure.

It's true that 5 nights out of 6, I cook dinner from memory, instinct, or necessity without cracking a cookbook. (As I have been dodging gainful employment for weeks, my mind is not currently on these weeknight-I'm-starving-and-lets-get-it-on-the-table dinners, but they'll surface on this blog sooner or later.) And it's also true that when I do turn to a recipe-- or (rarer still) feel inspired by a recipe to actually go out and acquire the ingredients to make it-- it is just as often one I found on the internet (almost always SmittenKitchen). But I still have a stock of cookbooks I use regularly.

To wit: How to Cook Everything, How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, Fish, and, more recently, The Perfect Scoop. (The clever reader will notice what those first three books have in common.) I hope that someday Julia Child's book goes on that list, and at some point I intend to finally conquer my twin fears of baking and of desserts, but I don't yet have a cookbook I fully trust on baking. [N.B.: I feel as if total trust is required to conquer this new and feared area of cooking-- I'm not yet in a position to glance at a cake recipe and know that I should cut the sugar in half, add an egg yolk, and expect the finished product to be better. Thus far, I trust Deb and my wife and no one else.]

Now, the commenter still makes a very good point-- that serious cooks are much more likely to use the internet rather than a cookbook much of the time. Even if cookbooks are not yet dead, the genre is sure dying. Just look at the cookbook section in your local Barnes & Noble. Nearly every one in the store is either pointlessly gimmicky ("95 vegan things you can make in a pressure cooker") or full of too many pictures and too little cookery (aka "food porn"). These items should be moved to "self-help" and "art" respectively.

But I'm not sure how much worse the world of cookbooks is than it ever was. I recently read Julia Child's retelling of her attempts to publish Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and even then she and her co-authors were being pressured by their publishers to make their books more like mainstream mass-market American cookbooks. Maybe we only notice because blogs are finally providing some competition.

Cooking for company

I loved this mouth-watering post by Mark Bittman about a going-away potluck for Frank Bruni. Not only because the food sounded great (what do you expect when Florence Fabricant, Melissa Clark, Mark Bittman, and their friends get together?), and not only because Bittman is entirely right that there should more meals like this in the world. I liked that Bittman confessed that he was "was nervous about cooking for [his] peers . . . was rushed, and (not surprisingly) . . . probably put in less effort than all or most of them."

I love to cook, but this is the story of my life. Cooking for two already requires a great deal more attention than cooking for oneself (attention to whether it's legitimate to have clafoutis for dinner, to put peanut butter on a hamburger, and so on). Cooking for guests is yet another level. Like Bittman, I'm often making these dishes at the last minute, while rushed or rushing out the door. But the bigger problem is that I like things spicier, saltier, sourer, and stronger than the average bear (as, thankfully, does my wife), and those preferences creep into many of my workaday recipes. Vinaigrette: three parts vinegar, one part oil, more salt than you want to know about. Most Indian recipes: double all spices, then proceed. Sorbet recipes: cut sugar in half, then proceed. And so on.

Sometimes these preferences win converts at dinner parties. (Nobody has ever complained that our desserts were not sweet enough, or that I oversalted the salad.) But some of these preferences are just idiosyncratic. People whose brains have not been properly trained just shouldn't eat chipotle or cayenne pepper in the same quantities I do. I'm so used to cooking without recipes, without worrying about what normal people eat, that I don't even know how to taste-test my own cooking for mixed company. Normally I cook dinner by asking "what do I want?" and then "how can I best make that happen in my kitchen with the ingredients I have on hand?" I hardly know how to cook in any other way.