Starting with the original Rick Bayless’s queso fundido burgers, this is a dish i keep coming back again and again with various variations.
Yesterday version was particularly successful. I made some meatloaves instead of regular burgers and used tremendous applewood smoked cheddar.

Char and peel some peppers for rajas. Slice and brown a large white onion. Add torn/sliced peppers. Set aside while you are making meatloaves.
For 1.5 lb ground beef: Chop finely in a food processor: roasted poblano, whites of a bunch of scallions, couple garlic cloves, generous handful of parsley, some sage leaves, about 4oz of bacon. Crush about 2cups of Chex Corn cereal. Thoroughly mix together ground meat, the bacon paste, crushed cereal and 2 eggs. Season. Form 6 patties about 3/4-1″ thick.
Brown meatloaves on one side for abotu 5mins, turn, brown the otehr side for 2mins mroe. Cover with rajas, and then thinly sliced cheese. Put into 400F to finish cooking and melt the cheese, for about 10mins.

Miso as a secret ingredient. Not necessarily a japanese or fusion dish. Straightforward south-western flavor – hot hatch chiles powder, oregano, roasted garlic, but with some white miso mixed into a marinade.

Irresistible!

Arroz a la tumbada is presumably one of the favorite dishes of Veracruz. And Rick Bayless chose to answer the question of Where you’ll be heading in the future by cooking this dish at the Top Chef Masters final episode…
Well, after making this dish tonight i’m fully with Bayless and the people of Veracruz. But it was Kennedy again who succeeded to nail down the essence of the flavor in the arroz a la tumbada – the careful choice of herbs.

Speaking of bold flavors – this dish is big! It’s rustic! It’s bright!
Just imagine – ancho chiles puree, paste made of two garlic heads, and plenty of guajillo chiles strips.
In the words of Diane Kennedy:”This is a very robust and colorful dish, but only for those who love garlic and not surprised by this toughish texture of the chile quajillo rings…“
You bet, we’re one of those!

Two back to back dishes from My Mexico. Shepherd potatoes and scrambled eggs with creme fraiche. Both sounded like they meant for breakfast (Kennedy doesn’t mention a particular meal except that papas pastores are generally served as a botana (snack).
The finished papas dish looks like roasted potatoes with green salsa but the recipe is smarter – it’s a one-pot dish and you build the salsa gradually adding its ingredients to potatoes while you cook them. It allows the aromatics of onion, garlic, jalapenos and herbs to deeply flavor potatoes.

Chefs, open your baskets! For the dinner tonight you have okra and shrimp.
Evidently those two are meant for each other. Think hearty gumbo. Not in this hot and humid weather though, no way. Light, spicy and still southern felt like the right approach…
Roasted okra is great but it became like a rut. Several sources suggested steaming: easy and interesting, notwithstanding the possibility of sliminess …
For a shrimp dish the first thing i checked was My Mexico (on my globe the place is south of New Orleans, hence totally legit ). And here they were, Camarones Verdes, introduced by the words “this recipe is an irresistible one…” Well i don’t know about you but i’m not the kind of person who would pass on the dish Diane Kennedy found so compelling!
The dinner was indeed delicious: bright green okra dressed simply with a bit of butter and salt, shells-on shrimp (from the Gulf of course) in its light spicy sauce, and a small salad – sliced jersey tomatoes topped with some fennel slaw, to compliment the anise undertones of the shrimp sauce.
But why hands-on you’d ask? Let me quote the Camarones Verdes piece again: “This is not dainty eating: you really have to use your fingers...” Well this applied to the okra dish too

Yes i never met a chartreuse drink i didn’t like, especially when it involved tequila.
Add to this that Yerba Mora came with a profound quote from its creator, Joaquin Simo: “The thing about good traditional Mexican food is that you can never tell exactly what’s in it. It’s the same with cocktails…”
Well, thankfully the drink lived up to that interesting parallel.

The Inspiration… It comes from all the strange places. And limitations… Like you want to bake the Diana Kennedy’s mushroom pudding but you won’t dare to start the oven – it’s damn hot and AC is still broken… Or your friend comments on somebody’s pic on FB, you click out of curiosity, and start looking at other pix and then this somebody mentions a russian resto in Mexico, only because he happens to live on the opposite side of the street… And to add to your curiosity the place is called Kolobok. And conveniently there is even a link to their site. The Kolobok web page takes a special care to explain all those exotic russian dishes to an uninitiated mexican public but you’re of course painfully familiar with every each of the items on the menu. Now Blancanieve - Snow White? What the hell is this? Oh that’s my favorite – cheese garlic salad, though i never knew it under the name of Snegurochka!..
So what’s for dinner?
I’ll cook mushrooms stove top, and serve them with tortilla chips, and russian cheese salad. And for the salad i won’t use loads of raw garlic and mayonnaise but olive oil and steamed garlic instead. And a splash of good vinegar! But with manchego cheese like they use in Kolobok

Fantastic dish i just learned from my friend, Rancho Gordo. He made it already twice in the last three days and i’m planning to do the same.

RG made it with watercress as the original idea suggested – i went with chard. There was not watercress in the store and in hindsight chard was no less appropriate anyway.

Slice the corn off the cob and cook it with a bit of water. Char sliced onion (or fat scallions – this is what i used), chiles (like jalapeno) and unpeeled garlic cloves. Peel the char off and whizz vegetables with half corn and some cream. Large bunch of chard, leaves only finely chopped, salt rubbed itm left for a min, rinsed and squeezed dry. Cook corn sauce for 10mins until reduced. Cook chard for about 9mins, add corn kernels and the sauce. I’m yet to get the ratio right but in this first version there was too much corn (4cobs)

I liked greens in Kennedy’s arroz verde so much so that i decided to use this to flavor grits. In fact, it sounded like the right thing to do. And even more than that – the sauce seemed a natural as a shrimp marinade. Don’t need to explain where shrimp came from – you know, shrimp and grits, right?
So the prep went like this. Soaked coarse grits from Anson Mills. Whizzed poblanos, romaine leaves, garlic, scallions, parsley and cilantro in food processor and moved most of the paste to a blender. Slowly added some olive oil to the stuff remaining in the processor to make a marinade for shrimps (wild from the Gulf of course). Added some water to the blender – this will be a final water addition to long cooking grits. And touch of mascarpone didn’t hurt the grits