OMG a Recipe: Konquering Kiwi

Food Confessional: I'm just not that into kiwi anymore. It's important to say "anymore," because as a kid, I LOVED kiwi. The first time I had it, I felt so proud of myself for eating something so strange and exotic, and really enjoying the tart/sweet fruit with its edible fuzzy skin and inner ring of crunchy seeds. But these days....? Meh. If it's already in a dish, I'm happy to eat it, but I just don't get a hearty yen for this funky fruit, especially when our Full Circle produce delivery bag is full of the little buggers. It was the one fruit I'd either give away, or make sure I sliced up and served at brunch with friends, to get rid of it, ASAP. But I managed to conquer (konquer?) my lack of enthusiasm for kiwi in the form of salsa, specifically served atop quinoa crab cakes!

Konquering Mt. Kiwi-Crab Cake - Photo by Wasabi Prime

UnRecipe: Cooked Green Food Looks Terrible, But It Tastes Amazing

Salads look refreshing! A verdant pesto made with garden herbs looks great! But fully-cooked green food...? Not so much. Split pea soup? Baby poop. And green enchiladas? Don't even get me started. Which is why it's ironic that the one dish that tasted great looked so horrible. So, with that in mind, here, look at some fresh garden-grown tomatoes!

Food blogging subterfuge -- look at this thing, right now, and not the other thing! - Photo by Wasabi Prime

The last, gasping handfuls of our vegetable garden aren't a total blog-beard -- they were pivotal in my Green Food Frustration post. As with every year, I always wind up with a lot of green tomatoes. Our growing season in the Pacific Northwest is annoyingly short, and my patience for babying tomato plants wears thin. Cherry tomatoes are my favorite, as even the greenest little underripe buggers manage to ripen in a bowl on the counter if I let them sit long enough. But I always get optimistic and get a few large-fruiting tomato plants like Romas or Sweet 100s, which supposedly grow fast. I wind up with maybe a couple fully-ripened tomatoes and way more green ones, but like they say, when life gives you green tomatoes -- make green food.

Green (and yellow) food -- looks great when it's freshly picked! - Photos by Wasabi Prime

I actually like green tomatoes, and not just for an excuse to watch that charming, yet surprisingly disturbing movie, Fried Green Tomatoes. Green tomatoes are tart and have a unique flavor all their own, so I like roasting them with an onion and blending it all into a sauce, usually salsa. I combine this with other green foods like cilantro, lime zest and juice, and season it with a lot of cumin and chili powder. Everything goes into the blender, I love it -- no fuss, no muss, and there's enough liquid from the roasted vegetables and a lime or two, to get everything blended to a smooth consistency. Shazam.

I did this with ripe tomatoes as well, which I have to say, the studies about certain colors like red, yellow or orange being more enticing to the appetite is totally right. It's basically the same salsa ingredients, just red tomatoes versus green ones, but the red salsa looks exponentially better. I made this with ripe tomatoes kindly given from another person's garden, one who is not as blessed/cursed with green tomatoes as myself. I added some of my own ripe tomatoes to the great vegetable roasting, as well as some tomatillos for tartness, as I didn't have fresh lime. A very tasty salsa, enjoyed warm or cold, I pretty much ate one jar's worth all on my own before eventually sharing the other jar with friends.

Let's face it, red salsa just looks better - Photos by Wasabi prime

I found myself with a couple of pounds' worth of green tomatoes towards the end of the season, so I repeated the salsa recipe and wound up with a pretty pesto-like mixture. I even threw in some roasted/peeled hatch chiles. But I didn't want to push myself along that same dark alleyway of me on the couch with a bag of tortilla chips and a big bowl of salsa for dinner the next few nights, so I thought: Green Enchiladas. In my mind, I envisioned enchiladas filled with chicken, the last of our garden's yellow squash and ricotta, to give it an extra creamy texture. I enriched the salsa verde with some Mexican crema, and that gave it a smooth, velvety texture to coat all the filled tortillas before baking. I covered everything with crumbled cotija cheese and into the oven these enchiladas went.

From green... to baby poop, but damn, it tasted good! - Photos by Wasabi Prime

And... baby poop. Heat just kills the fresh colors of food, especially green things, there's not a lot you can do about it. I remember buying crazy multi-colored bell peppers, and making the mistake of putting them into a stir fry and they turned dirty brown, even though they tasted fine. Not even a sprinkling of fresh cilantro or extra cheese was going to save these enchiladas. So why even bother posting? Aside from the fact that I love the idea of cooking stuff grown in our garden, and as super-grody as these enchiladas looked on the plate -- they were probably the best enchiladas I'd ever made! Doesn't that just kill you when that happens? What resembles little Junior's explosive diaper accident, was freakin' delicious. But the photos will never do it justice. Mixing ricotta with cooked chicken and vegetables, spicing it with some cayenne and cumin, makes for a wonderfully smooth enchilada filling. Think of a hybrid between Italian stuffed pasta and a typical enchilada. The ricotta and a light seasoning keeps it mild, which makes me think a typical red enchilada sauce would be overwhelming. The baby poop green sauce was citrusy, fresh, but rich from the combining of the crema. The night I made this, I had double servings, I loved it so much. I probably ate it so fast, I barely noticed the fact that it looked like hell.

I'm in love! But the object of my affection is ugly as sin and likely something you'd courtesy-flush before eating. So therein lies my food-quandary. I will definitely make this again, but it's a "Just Us," dinner, as the Mister had no qualms about eating Salsa Verde Turdy Enchiladas -- he pretty much bypassed all other leftovers for this green monstrosity. But take my Beauty and the Feast advice: even the ugliest of meals can still make your tummy very happy, even if your food blogger aesthetic is like, what-the-what?! 

UnRecipe: The Mango is to Blame

I don't have anything against tropical fruit, I assure you. It's just interesting to see how some meals come about, which leads us to this sunny little post: The days of better weather are finally sinking in, and I was in need of some sunny, bright food after so many months of slow cooker stewing. You know what I'm saying. So let's sit out in the sun and have some fish tacos, shall we?

I found Nemo, and he was crispy-delicious - Photo by Wasabi Prime

It's rare that I do a seafood post. I think I can count on one hand how many times I've written about seafood I've cooked. I like eating it, I'm just not big on preparing it. It's so much about how we're raised -- my mother never cooked fish because my dad is not a seafood eater, the end. There was the odd tuna salad sandwich now and then, but that was it. I grew up with an baseless dislike of seafood, assuming it was gross or icky or something irrational like that. Common sense kicked in at some point and I got over it, but I never became really good at preparing the creatures of the sea. I'm always worried I'll overcook it or season it improperly. And quite frankly, this post is no exception -- I totally cheated with these fish tacos, the filets were frozen! Boooooooo, I know. I didn't want to fuss with hot oil on a warm day, so I picked up some frozen beer-battered fish filets from the store. There you have it -- haul me off to Sandra Lee's Semi-Homemade Jail. 

My plea to the jury: blame it on The Mango. Not all mangoes. Not all tropical fruit. Just this one mango we had delivered amongst our CSA box of mystery goodies. I had some time to consider what to do with a single mango while it ripened, staring back at me from the fruit bowl. Stir fry? Nah... been there, done that. Bread? Mom said most good mango breads really need two mangoes. What about a mango relish? Now there's an idear.

Steps towards relishing a mango relish - Photos by Wasabi Prime

I love cutting a mango, scoring the fruit and flipping it inside-out to get a freaky turtle-shell/cleaning sponge-looking thing. I don't like using the knife to blindly identify the ridiculously large pit in the center of a mango, that's always hit or miss. I swear these fruits are just as much seed as fruit. Yet another reason why it's challenging to do something with just one mango. But making it into a relish-salsa concoction was a good way to showcase its mango-riffic attributes. This was an UnRecipe mango relish, to be sure. I used what was left of some pickled red onion in a jar that was done months ago for the We Can Portlandia That pickle-themed post. I also finely minced some of the preserved lemon peel. It feels weird talking about ingredients that were prepared months earlier, but that's the joys of pickling and preserving. The fresh mango mixed with the spicy-sweet-sourness of the onions and lemons made for a nice overall flavor. Refreshing, tart and with enough punch to stand out against a lot of strong flavors.

I had a false start on using the mango relish on dinner -- I added it as a topping on a pork and zucchini stir fry. Food Fail. The flavors of the stir fry were fine on its own, the relish was just adding too strong of a flavor and drowned out everything else. I thought it would maybe compliment, like when you have pickled vegetables with a meal. No, it was like a Battle of the Bands with Pantera vs GWAR, just a big mess of dirty noise. But hey, you live and learn. I enjoyed the rest of the stir fry with a veggie-heavy mapo tofu, sans mango relish, for the rest of the week, no harm done.

Colorful, but not a flavor-win, adding the relish on top of stir fry - Photos by Wasabi Prime

I still had a bowl of mango relish seeking its Special Purpose. In a flash of inspiration and hunger, I had a specific food-image in my head: the citrus bite and freshness of the relish going nicely with a beer-battered fish taco, all looking like the color of a sunny day. Done. I had some small corn tortillas in the freezer and just needed to find Nemo in the friendly neighborhood frozen seafood aisle. It was a shortcut, but worth it when I could prepare a few quick tacos with the help of a toaster oven to crisp up the fish, and to help warm the tortillas. I made these very simply and UnRecipe-like -- a smear of mayonnaise for richness, a crispy filet of fish, then the mango topping. Roll and eat. Repeat as necessary. Served with a side salad, they were a super-easy way to make a lunch or dinner in a matter of minutes.

While I wouldn't normally say, "get thee to the prepared frozen foods aisle," I'm never going to say no to a shortcut. And even if you're still shaking a finger at me for hitting the "lazy" button, I cast my gaze to a tropical fruit and insist that The Mango is to Blame.

Say what you will about frozen food shortcuts - they can still be tasty! - Photo by Wasabi Prime