What We Eat When We Eat Alone - Deborah Madison [17]
For his frijoles, or pretty plain pinto beans, he soaks pinto beans, “a dried bag of them,” cooks them with salt pork and lard, and then eats them with tortillas. “I make a meal of this with salsa out of a bottle. But in the summer, I make a salsa fresca out of tomatoes and onion, chopped fine, and celery for texture. Sometimes I throw in corn. And I add cilantro, and vinegar, and oil.” We suspect this might be as close to salad as we’re going to get.
His chilaquiles is a good, messy dish and is another practical approach that blends time at the stove with chips from a bag. “Shuck tomatillos and boil them in chicken broth with garlic and jalapeño peppers,” his recipe begins. “The key is the peppers. Some are a lot hotter than others, so you need to taste them. Sometimes it takes three peppers, other times just one. In any case, throw it all in a blender and give it short, jerky jolts until you have the consistency you want. You can put this in a jar and keep it in the fridge. Once you’ve got a supply of sauce, you take tortilla chips, put them in a skillet and pour the sauce on top. Put a couple of fried eggs on top of that and drizzle over Mexican crema.” And there you have it.
This may sound funky, and it is. But it’s also really good. If you’re lucky enough to find a good fresh tomatillo salsa made by some enterprising local cook, then it’s a matter of very few minutes before you’re sitting down to a delicious dinner, or breakfast, for that matter. If not, make your own. It’s easy and it’s worth it.
Let us introduce the one-ingredient driven cook, Dan Welch, who has been, among other things, a traveling pizza maker, an artist, and a Zen monk with an appetite for all foods hot and fiery. Dan has been cooking with a beginner’s mind for more than thirty years. When you eat with Dan, you have to ignore the mess he makes in the kitchen, overlook the excessive amounts of dripping fat from bacon and olive oil, deal with the heat, and just dig in without reserve. It’s always worth it.
As a lone eater, Dan has never gotten sloppy and skipped an opportunity to make food, especially tapenade, which is, in effect, his most basic ingredient, the very base, in fact, of his personal food pyramid. He’s made children cry and adults wither with this condiment, which has far more chile flakes than any authentic version. There’s a certain theme to Dan’s food. In fact, it’s all variations on a theme, but what a theme! There’s always tapenade, chile, pork in some form (unless he’s behaving like a vegetarian), tongue-searing salsas, and some pungent goat cheese, Gorgonzola, or gooey melting cheese. These ingredients are variously folded into tortillas, sandwiched between slices of toasted levain bread, or tossed with hot strands of spaghetti. These dishes come from an era when Dan was taking a break from monastic life. At that time, poison eggs were a big part of his diet.
“I get poisoned rain or shine, company or no,” he used to say. And he still gets poisoned, but not every day.
Here’s an easy version of the recipe.
“I make two poach-fried eggs, which means you start frying them in olive oil, then add a tablespoon of water, cover the pan, and steam until the yolks are as firm as you like them to be. Then I fold them in a warm flour tortilla with tapenade, Muenster cheese, avocado, salsa fresca, bacon, sausage, prosciutto, steak, or whatever meat is leftover from another time.” Or, you can skip the meat. The only part you need is the recipe for tapenade, which, in Dan’s words, goes like this: “Combine in descending order of quantity, chopped kalamata olives, capers, anchovies, olive oil, lemon juice, garlic, and red chile flakes.”
The open-faced melted cheese sandwich that Dan consumes on a regular basis is also made with tapenade. It’s easy and, not surprisingly, predictable.
“First melt cheese (Muenster, again, is named) on levain bread in a toaster oven, top it with tapenade, then add cucumber, avocado, or tomato. Wash it down with a Dos Equis, then take a nap.”
Chipotle chile is another one of Dan’s basic food groups.