A Month of Vegetables

February is a great, transitional month. January has ended and we've already forgotten those resolutions to lose weight and exercise more.  The seed catalogs are coming in the mail every day, and every now and then there are a few hours of clear skies and warmth to remind us that Spring is just around the corner.  In honor of this almost-Spring month and the transition it places on our souls, I have decided to blog about Vegetables every day in this month.

Why vegetables?  Well, two reasons.  1: I love to cook,  and  2:  I love to eat.  Anyone who loves to cook and eat usually has a hard a time with Vegan people -- how can they give up bacon, braised meats, butter, and all those incredibly tasty animal things that make food taste so good? That is the boat I've been in for a while, since my husband gave up the aforementioned foods (now dirty words in my household) following heart bypass surgery in 2010.  At least there were still carbs.  Carbs are good. Yum. I love carbs.  At least, I loved carbs, until I was diagnosed with the onset of Type II Diabetes, which runs in my Hispanic family. That happened last year, and since then I have been trying to figure out what to eat and cook to satisfy our somewhat mutually exclusive dietary requirements.  And the common ground for both of us was Vegetables.

For the past several months, I have been on a quest to find vegetable recipes that are so delicious they make me forget about carbs, and make my husband forget about butter and meat.  I was inspired by a post I read in Food and Wine magazine showing 20 different ways to prepare brocolli, and I decided that with a little help from resources like Yotam Ottolenghi (the master of exquisitely flavored middle eastern-influenced vegetables), Angela from OhSheGlows.com (a really great Vegan blog and series of cookbooks), and some other popular veggie and foodie enthusiasts, I could do this.

So here we go - look for the good, bad, and ugly of my attempt to prepare the best possible veggies every day.  I can't guarantee they will all turn out like I am hoping, but the result should be fun and healthful. Read on below for the first recipe.

Feb 1, 2016: Mushroom Chile Verde with Smoked Tomatillos

Before you get all excited and try this recipe, please know that it did not turn out that great and I would not recommend it.  As with many first attempts at anything, it needs some refinement.  But I'll put a sketch of it up, so I can stick to my resolution of posting about a vegetable a day.  I did promise the good, the bad, and the ugly. I am also hoping that this will help you understand that even great cooks make bad food every now and then.

Ingredients:
1 dozen tomatillos, husked and washed
4 Anaheim chilies
1-2 tbsp olive oil
1 medium yellow onion, diced
2 large cloves garlic, minced
1 serrano pepper, minced
1 bunch of cilantro (this was my first mistake, more on that below.  Quantity should probably be about 1/4 cup of leaves, loosely packed)
1 cup salted vegetable broth (mistake #2, needed more broth - maybe an addl 2 cups -- and more salt - probably another 3/4 to 1 teaspoon)
3 portabella mushrooms, washed and diced in 1/2 inch chunks
1 cup black eyed peas, cooked (mistake #3 - tried to repurpose these which I had leftover from earlier in the week, but a firmer, meatier type of bean would have been a better choice.  These were too soft and bland)

After a very a long day of work, I was dealing with a nearly 2 hour commute to my tap dance class. I was starving and knew that after class I would be even more hungry, so I sent a text to my husband asking if he would consider making this dish for dinner, and I provided him the recipe.  He was tired too but he is a saint so he obliged me and put it all together based upon my instructions.

I have a smoker and love to smoke anything and everything.  I love the smoky taste of salsa and thought the smoke would add something special to this chile verde sauce.  Bob spread the chilies and tomatillos on a baking sheet and placed them in the smoker, with a temperature setting of about 300 degrees (when you set my Traeger smoker to 325, it cooks at about 300), for 20 minutes.  This was another mistake - it wasn't hot enough.  A better choice would have been to crank it up to really hot and let the veggies roast a little more quickly.  After cooking for 20 minutes, he realized he would need to increase the heat.  He cranked up the smoker to its highest setting and ended up cooking the veggies for about 10 to 15 minutes longer to get them to soften up. Whether you cook them in the smoker or roast them in the oven, they should look collapsed and oozing juice, but not dried out when they are ready.  And if prepared in the smoker, they need at least 20 - 30 minutes to pick up a light smoke taste.

While the chilies and tomatillos were smoking, Bob sauteed the onions in the olive oil, then added the garlic and serrano chili and cooked until they were also softened and the onions were opaque.  Once the chilies and tomatillos were ready, he scraped them into a high-powered blender with the onions, cilantro, and broth and pureed everything.   I mentioned above that the quantity of cilantro was mistake #1 - I was going by memory and I thought I only had a few sprigs left when I instructed Bob to use all of it he could find.  However, it turns out I had a whole bunch left, and when Bob prepared it, he just chopped off the bottom stems then added the whole lot to the blender. It gave the sauce a very dark green color and the flavor was a little off. So, lesson learned. Next time, less cilantro.

The next mistake was the volume of fluid -  I only instructed Bob to use 1 cup vegetable broth, under-estimating the amount of fluid that would come from the peppers and tomatilllos.  It needed to be much thinner, like a soup - so an additional 2 cups of veggie stock (or any stock you like) was needed.  And the brand of stock I use is very lightly salted but this preparation needed more salt.

After the sauce was ready, Bob poured it back into a pot and simmered it with the chopped mushrooms and leftover beans.  The beans I used (actually black-eyed peas-- Bob is so funny, he thought he could find these "fresh" peas in the veggie crisper;  he reported to me that all we had were sugar snap peas but there were none with black eyes).  I had made these a couple days earlier by simmering them with onions, oregano, and salt.  But they were really bland and definitely needed something to give them some kick. Unfortunately, this sauce did not do the trick.  I think next time I will use a larger, firmer, meatier bean like a kidney bean or some of the really delicious Rancho Gordo ayocote beans.

So, how did it taste?  Well not great.  The tomatillos have a a very tangy flavor, sort of acidic.  Usually this is toned down and softened by the mild-flavored chilies. This time, I think the acidity overpowered everything, and when combined with the huge amount of cilantro and not enough salty broth for dilution, it was just not a pleasant eating experience.  It was edible but not my best effort.

However, Spring is the season of hope and renewal, so I guess it's OK that sometimes in getting to Spring you might have to shrivel up and fail.   I will try again later in the month, hopefully to achieve some redemption!