New Mexico Cooking Lessons: Chile Rellenos

I failed miserably at making chile rellenos last winter. While I had been cooking up a storm of dishes IMG 2742I had learned when I lived in New Mexico to treat my suburban Chicago neighbors, the time that I made chile rellenos I missed a major step: beating the egg whites until they are fluffy. I'm not sure if the recipe I used even said to to do that. I simply dredged them in flour and then soaked them in beaten eggs. But after I moved back to Albuquerque my friend Veronica came to the rescue when she told me it's a dish she sometimes make, one that she learned in her native Mexico.

We spent Saturday afternoon creating the steps below (complete with a short video!) of how to make chile rellenos so you can avoid the embarrassment I endured several months ago.

For this dish Veronica used:

  • 15 green chiles (they are more easily found throughout the country and not just in New Mexico anymore)
  • 10 eggs
  • 1 pound of mozzerella cheese
  • oil for cooking
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The chiles should be roasted on the grill or on a gas stove to remove the skins. Be careful not to IMG 2745touch your eye or any other sensitive part of the body during this process as the seeds are hot! After roasting, I run my chiles under cold water to remove the skins but Veronica slathers them in oil for the same outcome.

Once the chiles are cleaned, she put a small slice in them and slid a piece of cheese inside the chile. IMG 2748At this time, the tops of the chiles could be removed as well; the seeds can be hot for those you not used to this type of cooking!

The key step (the one that I missed) came next. She mixed ten egg whites until they were fluffy, at the end adding back two yolks for color.

With the chiles stuffed, we moved outside where I placed a cast iron pan filled with oil (she chose olive oil) on the gas burner and heated it. Veronica had filled a plate with flour and she first dredged the chiles and then soaked them in the egg mixture before taking them to the grill. You must move quickly in this process before the egg mixture disintegrates. See the video for more instruction. The oil should be hot and the chiles covered as completely as possible. Fry them until they are brown, just a few minutes on each side and serve with a chile sauce or salsa. The salsa shown in the finished dish is sauteed onions, garlic, chipotle peppers, and tomato sauce.


Merging Food with Our Holistic Selves

We can’t separate food from ourselves because it’s tied to our existence on multiple levels.
Often we forget that for us to be a complete person we have to be balanced and we need to nourish our physical, emotional, and spiritual selves. We can’t just set goals for one aspect because it will throw the balance off. If we want to lose weight, then we need to make sure we are doing something emotionally and spiritually as well.

It’s easy to think, oh, I’ll just lose some weight and everything will be well. What we aren’t realizing is that some of our weight gain might be related to emotional issues. Maybe we are an emotional eater and when we get upset, we eat. Or maybe we haven’t cared about what we look like so we also don’t care about what we eat. Only will we make headway into losing weight and keeping it off if we make sure to set an emotional goal to understand why we do a certain behavior and then work at changing it.

And it’s not much different with our spirituality, something many people neglect. By taking some time each morning to prayer or meditate, we are setting ourselves up to cope better with the day ahead. We also are putting our bodies in a strong place so whatever the day brings bounces off us. We can’t control what happens to us but we can control our actions.
In the process of setting these goals, we also realize we must give our body the best nutrition possible. It’s not easy as life is busy but I also don’t believe anyone should deprive themselves of anything unless it’s a life or death matter. Have that occasional ice cream cone but don’t eat a half gallon of it every night. Eat pizza sometimes. Enjoy an evening of dinner out with friends.

As you work toward your goals, you’ll see you feel better when you eat better. You’ll want to eat better because it gives you more energy to have the productive day you yearn for and you’ll feel the changes in your body as the foods you give it leave you feeling satisfied and energetic, not lethargic or empty.

The first step is wanting to make change in your life and that’s what brought you here. Don’t stop now. Life is too short to give up on an opportunity to be happier and more hopeful.

 

Paper Bag Pizza

My mom began making pizzas on paper bags when we were growing up although she isn't sure where she got the idea. She thinks maybe she read it somewhere. And despite what anyone thinks, the bags don't burn. In fact, they create a very tasty crispy crust.

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Mom used the Chef Boyardee pizza mixes and there was no cooking spray yet so she would rub the cut paper bag with margarine. When I began making pizza using the recipe below (out of the Naper School cookbook- Mrs. Hall's recipe), I tried using a metal pan but I found the crust wasn't as crispy, thus I went back to the paper bags.

I honed my pizza-making skills at Oodles Pizza in Naperville on Ogden the summer after my freshman year of high school for $3.35 an hour and I've been making pizza since. The only problem now is that paper bags are made much smaller and my friend Jim's mom suggested using some of the sides of the bags to make the pizzas larger. I also spray my hands with cooking spray and use my hands to form the pizzas rather than roll them out. I have tried to used wheat flour with this recipe but because it's more dry than white, it's best to mix the two flours together.

Paper Bag Pizza

  • 2 c. flour
  • 1 1/2 tsp. salt
  • 1 1/2 tsp. sugar
  • 1 pkg. dry yeast (approximately 1 1/2 Tbsp.)
  • 1 1/2 c. lukewarm water
  • 2 1/2 Tbsp. vegetable oil
  • 2 c. flour

Mix flour (2 c.), salt, sugar, and yeast together. Add water and oil. Beat mixture until just blended with electric mixer. Stir in 2 c. more of flour. Form into ball, let rest for five minutes. Cut in half and roll out in flour for 2 pizza crusts.

Placed on greased paper bags and add your favorite sauce and toppings. Bake approximately 15 to 20 minutes in a 425-degree oven. I let the pizzas sit for a few minutes after coming out of the oven on a cooling rack before I use a spatula/turner to separate the pizza from the paper bag and cut it. Doing this helps the pizza crisp up.

Bon appetit!

 

Love and Sticky Date Pudding

While this is an older writing, it remains a favorite of mine and I’m sharing it in memory of my “UK dad” John Peters who died in April. This was the kind of work he wanted me to continue to pursue and revamping the Chef Chelle web site and devoting myself to creating more food and blogs are my way of keeping him alive in my life. Each time I went to visit him and his wife Jean in England we were sure to find a piece of sticky date pudding for me.

On my second trip to Australia, I was in a Melbourne restaurant with several friends for dinner when one of them, an Australian, went with me to pick out a dessert. There was this gloppy mess of a cake and I asked Susan what it was. “Oh, that’s very Australian,” she said. “It’s sticky date pudding.” As she would later say, it’s mostly made up of butter and sugar (plus some dates). While looking quite like a messy cake, and obviously very sticky, it’s a wonderful dessert that I easily fell in love with.

Life is messy but nothing is messier than love. I think of that sticky date pudding, and the sweetness of the cake and smooth texture. But also the gumminess of it on the fork, the plate, and your hands if you’re not careful. We expect that love will be perfect, that when we love someone we won’t hurt again, and we won’t fall out of love with them. Some of us grew up dreaming about fairy-tale love or fairy-tale families that loved us. We thought about how love would conquer all, how love would make everything perfect, how once we found that perfect person to marry, all would be great. There would never be another worry because love would take care of it.

Love is work though. Sometimes we want to wring the necks of people who love (be honest, you know it’s true!). It forces us to reach outside our comfort zones, to do things for the people we love even though it’s difficult for us. We become better people because we love and force ourselves to take part in it. While we enjoy the sweetness of it, we also must get the fork and the plate dirty if we are to truly grasp the full meaning of what it is to love. And be loved. We must reveal our whole selves to be loved. Many songs have lyrics that say something along the lines of, “I’ve seen the best of you, now I want the rest of you.” We don’t often realize the difficulty of revealing everything about us if we are to be loved. Dust bunnies under the couch, chipped nail polish, and all.

The reality of love is that it appears on our doorstep at our house, dressed as the white glove lady, while we stand there waving our hands and looking at the mess in the house saying, “But I wasn’t ready for you!” Love doesn’t come when we want it to. We might think we have to work more on our career, that we aren’t fully recovered from a previous relationship, or that our lives just aren’t where we want them yet if we are to let love in the door. But love comes to us when it’s supposed to. The universe’s timing is perfect even though we often don’t understand it.

Love didn’t come when we were ready nor could we use an all-purpose cleaner to keep it growing in a straight line. Love doesn’t work that way. Life is unexpected and love comes in unexpected places. My friend Jeff said to me a few weeks ago that the element of not knowing is what makes life so great. I thought about banging my head on the table, thinking of the many unknowns in my life. I long used up that all-purpose cleaner trying to control love and make it perfect. Or at least make it the perfect love I dreamed of. Love can hurt. Sometimes it makes us hurt the people we love or the people we love hurt us. It comes to us when we don’t feel we are ready although it has a reason for appearing. And we might not understand that reason as we step on the road to travel with it.

In times of loss and change, it’s easy to overlook the love in our lives. As I heard last week, sometimes we have to love people for what is best for them, not always easy for us though. We have to let go of our own needs and wants for someone else’s. That can be extremely difficult when we feel pain for what we have lost, for what has changed, for what we aren’t sure is next. That’s because, love, like life, is messy. And that’s what makes it worthwhile. Just like sticky date pudding.

Here's the recipe I used the last time I created this dessert. 
 

 

The Smoothie

I was never a fan of breakfast, even as a kid. It also took me a long time to realize that while I loved bagels and pancakes, the heavy carbs would leave my sleepy and unproductive. In the quest to make some changes in my life several years ago, I adapted a smoothie recipe from Martha Stewart’s Everyday Food in 2011 into my morning drink.

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What I like about the smoothie is that it leaves me full for several hours and gives me the energy that I need to be productive, especially because while I don’t jump out of bed in the morning, I am my most productive in the am hours.

Recently I made the change from regular peanut butter (I used the unsalted kind from Trader Joe’s that has nothing added to it) to the powdered kind by PB2. It’s become readily available as I have found it at my local grocery store and Target, however, to get a larger container of it I order it from www.vitacost.com. I’m using the powdered peanut butter to cut down on fat content.

While it’s important to have some fat in our diet, right now I’m doing a little tweaking with my body and needed to find places to cut fat and calories without sacrificing taste. I have used almond milk in the recipe in the past and I add coffee as a small caffeine boost– just enough for me. Finally, I add unflavored protein powder because I don’t want to taste it!

This recipe has saved me on days where I don’t have time for lunch but I need to keep myself going. If I didn’t make the smoothie, I might not get to lunch until 2:00 or 3:00 pm.

Feel free to adjust the amounts as they work for you.

The Michelle Smoothie

  • Several ice cubes
  • 1 banana
  • 1 scoop unflavored Jarrow protein powder
  • 2 tablespoons PB2 powdered protein powder
  • 2 cups milk
  • ¼ cup coffee (warm or cold)

Add the ingredients as they are listed above and then blend until everything is mixed well.