Coming home

Tonight I returned to the kitchen after a long, long week away.  

I've been on a juice cleanse for the past five days, and was cutting most cooked foods out of my diet for several days beforehand, so I've had no business being in the kitchen except to open the fridge door and remove yet another bottle of fresh fruit or vegetable juice and walk right back out again.  But I break the fast tomorrow, so tonight I went to Diana's apartment to retrieve what was left of my half of our farm share.  What better way to reintroduce my freshly-detoxed body to food than with local, organic goodies!  

When I walked into my kitchen, dropped my bags, flipped on the lights and went to put on some music, I felt like I was home again.  I had been so focused on my cleanse and what was happening there all week that I hadn't realized that I wasn't just missing food, I was missing making my food.  Truly one of the joys of joining this farm share is that it's inspired me to (and necessitated that I) spend a whole lot more time in the kitchen, preparing my own food -- instead of heading out to eat yet again. 

My diet will continue to be limited for the next few days, so tonight's task was a pretty simple one -- use up the cilantro and tomatillos and hot pepper and create some sort of delicious sauce to accompany the many many (raw and steamed) vegetables I'll be living on in the days to come. Pulling from various recipes, I created my own version of a tomatillo salsa verde:

4 tomatillos, husked and rinsed

1 bunch cilantro

1/2 cup mint leaves

1-2 garlic cloves

1 hot chile, seeded and deveined

1/2 cup extra virgin olive oil

juice of one lime

1/4 to 1/2 tsp ground cumin

1/4 to 1/2 tsp ground coriander

salt

Place the tomatillos in a saucepan with water barely covering them.  Add a pinch of salt and bring to a boil.  Reduce to a simmer and cook until just soft (about 5 minutes).  Drain, reserving cooking water, and run under cold water.  Put aside.

At this point, you have a few options.  To prepare this sauce, you can use a food processor, a mortar and pestle/mocahete or a cutting board and chef's knife.  The food processor will yield a creamy sauce while the cutting board and chef's knife will produce a more traditional salsa verde with the chopped ingredients suspended in oil.  I opted for the mortar and pestle because I love bashing things up in there, and like to think that it makes them taste better, too.  The resultant texture is rather like a traditional salsa verde, but a bit more blended.

So, assuming you proceed as I did, chop up your garlic and throw it into the mortar and pestle with a few pinches of salt and mash it into a nice paste.  

Next, add the cilantro and mint (roughly chopped or not) and bash that until it breaks down and blends with the garlic paste.  I had to do this in batches because my mortar and pestle wasn't big enough to do it all at once.  

Add the chile, finely chopped, and blend that in.  

The tomatillos are a little trickier.  Cut them open over a small bowl and scrape out the insides. Then chop up the firmer flesh and mash that into the mixture, the same as you did with the chile. 

Once everything is well blended, scrape it into the bowl with the remainder of the tomatillos. Stir in the lime juice, olive oil and spices.  Taste and adjust the spices accordingly.  If desired, thin the sauce with some of the reserved cooking water.  Serve immediately or store, covered, in the fridge.  

As mentioned, I'll be using this to add some different flavors to the veggies I'll be eating over the next few days, but use it as you would any salsa verde.  It would be delicious with grilled meat, roasted chicken, tortilla chips, over cooked eggs, in a sandwich or to top off home-made tacos or burritos.

All ingredients can also, of course, be adjusted per your taste.  And here are a few more variations to think about:

• If you don't have tomatillos on hand, don't worry -- it will work just as well without.  In fact, Diana makes a deliciously-addicting sauce with the same base ingredients: garlic, cilantro, jalapeno, salt and olive oil.  Bash it all up in the mortar and pestle and serve over skirt steak -- it's absolutely divine.
• I debated adding a small yellow onion, chopped.  In the end I didn't, but I think it would be a worthwhile addition.
• Warm the sauce up with a bit of oil in a skillet for many of the uses recommended above.