Three Bean Mexi Salad

This is a quick and colourful summery salad you can serve at any time, as a side dish and as a standalone meal. It’s easy and appetizing and full of flavour. And, as it’s Labour Day, you should take a break, and enjoy this simple salad.

Start with your beans. Crack open a can each of black beans, red kidney beans, and white navy beans. Or whatever beans you like, really.  Drain them and give them a rinse in a colander. Set that aside while you chop up some veg.

Chop up 2 red peppers into whatever size you think is appropriate for a bean salad.  Who am I to tell you what to do?

Do the same with 2 jalapeños.  Be careful not to touch your eyes while you’re doing this.  I like to mince mine up super fine.

Chop up as well 1 red onion.

And slice up about 4 green onions.

Huck all those things in a bowl with your beans, and add to that about 1 1/2 cups frozen corn kernels.

For the dressing, start by mincing up a huge bunch of fresh cilantro.

Drop that in a bowl with a few cloves minced garlic and the juice and zest of 1 lime.

Add to that 2 tablespoons granulated sugar, a dash of salt and pepper, another dash of hot pepper sauce, and 1 tablespoon ground cumin.

Mix that all together, then add in 1/2 cup olive oil and 1/2 cup red wine vinegar.

Dump that on top of your salad and toss until well combined.

This salad is best if you cover it and leave it in the fridge overnight to let the flavours mingle.  Serve it cold.

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Antojitos!

Sorry again about the picture glitch folks! I thought I fixed the problem but I guess not …

Happy Thanksgiving!  Let’s celebrate by making Tex-Mex food.  Seriously.  It’s been raining solid for like two days.

I need something to remind me of warmer times and milder climes.

There’s a restaurant chain here that we used to go to all the time.  Recently, we’ve been getting short-changed by them, with bad service, bad food, and, well, short change.  So we’ve stopped going.  The only thing we miss is their recipe for antojitos, a bizarre appetizer made of cream cheese and peppers.  It’s heavenly.  Fortunately, my hero Karen over at The Art of Doing Stuff, knows someone who knows the recipe and she posted it.  With a few modifications to reflect what was in our cupboards at the time, here it is.

FINELY dice up a red pepper, a bunch of green onions, a jalapeño pepper or two (I used two fresno peppers because when I cracked open the jalapeño there was a WEEVIL in it), some pickled pepperoncini, and some parsley.  Also, not shown, is a diced red onion, which I didn’t have.

Preheat your oven to 350°F and find yourself a baking tray.

Take a large flour tortilla and spread it with softened plain cream cheese, all the way to the edge.  Not too thick, but don’t be stingy.  Use your judgment.  Then take some hot sauce (we used Tabasco) and dot it all over the cream cheese.  Use a knife to spread the sauce out so it covers everything evenly.

Then take all your ingredients and sprinkle them evenly across the tortilla.  Not too much.  You’re going to need to roll this up later.

Then add some grated cheddar cheese.

Now roll the whole thing up tightly.  Shazam.  At this point you can wrap them up tightly in plastic wrap and freeze them to bake at a later date.  You know, if you don’t want to just stuff them all in your face.

Put the roll on the baking sheet, seam side down, and do it all over again with another tortilla.  Using an entire block of cream cheese and the ingredients at hand we ended up making about six of these rolls.  Bake them for 20 minutes, then remove from the oven and allow to cool for a little bit.

With a sharp knife (serrated helps), slice the rolls diagonally into 6 pieces or so and serve with sour cream.

We had a few leftover, and boy were they good the next day!

Sweet and Sour Pineapple Relish

My grandmother came over for coffee yesterday (which for you is about ten days ago) and brought with her about two dozen canning jars she didn’t use anymore.  As well, she brought me an early Christmas present: Catherine Atkinson and Maggie Mayhew’s Complete Book of Preserves & Pickles.  Today the book is already covered in stains, just like every good cookbook should be.  I am in love.

Each recipe is simple with regard to ingredients and the instructions are straightforward.  I’ll prove it to you by showing you a fantastically easy relish I made in less than an hour.  I am relishing my first attempt at this particular preserve.

I tripled the recipe in the book and came out with 7 250mL jars of relish.

Open and drain 6 14oz cans of crushed pineapple.  You can use rings, which drain faster, but then you have to cut them up.  Reserve about 1 1/2 cups of the juice.

Set the pineapple in a sieve over a bowl and leave that for a while to get all the drippings.

Chop up 12-16 green onions (scallions), and mince 6 jalapeno peppers.  The recipe calls for red chillies but I didn’t have any.

Pare the rind from 3 lemons and juice them while you’re at it.

Put the lemon rind and juice in a large saucepan (I prefer a maslin pan for the evaporation) together with 9 tablespoons white wine vinegar and 1 1/2 cups granulated sugar.

Heat on low, stirring, until the sugar has dissolved, then bring to a boil.  Cook like this on medium, stirring, for about ten minutes or until the syrup has thickened slightly.

Add in the chopped onions and peppers, together with your reserved pineapple juice as well as any that has dripped out while you were waiting.  Cook this for about five minutes, until things get quite syrupy.

Increase the heat and add the pineapple.  Cook until most of the liquid has evaporated.

Can according to your canner’s instructions.  We’ve got some tips on canning here, as well.

This relish keeps for about three months, and, once opened, should be kept in the refrigerator.  Great with chicken, pork, and white fish.

 

Barbecue in a Bottle

This recipe has been adapted with thanks from PickYourOwn.org, who set out all the steps for this delicious tangy tomato goo, including the entire canning process.  For other tips on canning, check out some previous posts here.  I doubled the batch laid out below (of course) and ended up with about 8L of sauce.

In a very large pot, start simmering 5 14oz (796mL) cans diced tomatoes.  This is roughly equivalent to 16 cups or 4 quarts (I did the math).  In one of my batches I substituted one can of crushed tomatoes for diced.  It didn’t seem to make much difference, save I had less seeds in that one.

Once those are going strong, chop and chuck in 4 stalks celery, 2 onions, 3 red peppers, 2 jalapeno peppers, and 2 cloves crushed garlic (or garlic-in-a-jar).

In addition to that, add in 2 teaspoons ground black pepper, 1 tablespoon dry mustard, 1 tablespoon paprika, 1 tablespoon sea salt, and 1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper.

THEN add in 1 teaspoon hot pepper sauce, such as Tabasco, 1 cup brown sugar and 1 1/2 cups 5% (white) vinegar.

Remember you can adjust any of these flavourings to suit your own tastes.  I added extra cayenne and brown sugar, as well as a few dobbles of sweet chilli sauce and a can of tomato paste.

Simmer everything for about 30 minutes or until it’s all softened.

Now here you have two options.  If you have tremendous patience, you can run the cooked sauce through a food mill, which will remove the seeds and give you a lovely velvety smooth sauce.

If you’re me, you can use an immersion blender. 

Tomato sauce will end up everywhere, and you will still have seeds in your slightly chunkier sauce, but you will end up with more sauce for preserving.

All you have to do at this point is cook down your processed sauce until it’s the consistency that you like.  Just keep an eye on it and stir frequently to avoid burning.  Remember that the sauce at this point is thick enough to interfere with proper convection so stirring is essential.

Pour into sterilized jars and can according to your canner’s instructions.  And that’s it!