Spring Grapefruit Salsa

In Tucson the mesquite trees have fresh new leaves and bags of grapefruits are looking for homes. Happy Spring! Amy here using grapefruits a way I learned from my friend and mentor Barbara Rose of Beantree Farm. You can find the original recipe as well as so much other inspiration in a new edition of the Desert Harvesters Cookbook available to preorder now.

Salsa is commonly made with tomatoes or tomatillos, but when fresh tomatoes are months away, grapefruit are plentiful, juicy, sour and pulpy with a hint of sweet. Yum! Start by cutting the stem end and blossom ends of the fruit.

Then cut down the sides to remove the peel, including the pith. Candy the rinds if you like!

With a paring knife, cut along both sides of each segment to release the pulp in wedges. This goes more quickly than it sounds.

I don’t worry about getting every little piece of pulp since I squeeze the juice out of the membranes left behind.

Remove the seeds and drink some of the excess juice. A mix of different colored grapefruit or even oranges is fun. Use what you have!

I’itois bunching onion tops have a unique onion flavor but any color onion will work: bulbous white, red or yellow, green spring onion tops, shallots… whatever you have.

Besides a smashed clove of garlic, a splash of cooking oil (any kind), a pinch of salt, and rubbed Mexican oregano, the not so secret ingredient is crushed chiltepin! Use as few or many as you like. Allow the salsa flavors of blend and the chiltepin and oregano to rehydrate.

Wanting something to go with the salsa, I made tostadas. Sautéed onion and cooked pink beans are a great base.

Mashed beans stick to tostadas better.

Fry corn tortillas in oil until crispy. In order to not set off the smoke detector, frying outside is the best, especially in beautiful spring weather.

Lettuce or most any green or sprout can all liven up tostadas. Wild mustard greens, like arugula, add a peppery bite.

Assemble and enjoy outside!

Easy Homemade Chorizo, Vegan Cauliflower or Traditional

Cauliflower chorizo on bean tosdada

Hello, Amy here on a cold sunny day looking for spicy comfort food. I remember my grandfather made huge batches of great homemade chorizo, usually from beef, and froze it in half or quarter pound balls for use later. We had it for breakfast mixed into skillet fried potatoes like hash, or scrambled into eggs and wrapped in hot flour tortillas. Also, he would mix it into mashed pinto beans for tostadas.

It turns out that Mano Y Metate Adobo powder is nearly all you need to season homemade chorizo. I’ve made it with beef, lamb, a mix of pork and beef, or tofu with great success. Extra firm non-silken tofu, squeezed of excess water, was surprisingly realistic when well fried and scrambled into eggs.

But I recently heard of someone making chorizo out of cauliflower, and sure enough, a quick internet search turned up plenty of variations. Cooks added all manner of creative ingredients with cauliflower to simulate a meaty taste and texture. I happened to have a huge beautiful head of cauliflower from Tucson CSA/Crooked Sky Farms, so I simply substituted cauliflower for raw meat to start. YUM! While searching, I also found a dozen places to substitute cauliflower for other traditional ingredients. Potatoes, wheat, rice, look out!

The following measurements are strictly to taste, and you can always spike with some crushed chiltepin or hot crushed red chile.

I put about half a pound of ground beef with a tin of Adobo powder and two teaspoons of vinegar. Yes, the whole tin. If you use less, it could be bland. I did the same with a cup of (packed) cauliflower I had minced in the food processor.

If possible, marinate in the refrigerator for a couple days.

Then fry in a skillet until brown. The cauliflower needed quite a bit of oil to brown, the beef none. Salt to taste.

Then I heaped the cauliflower chorizo on a bean tostada, and garnished with cilantro and I’itois green onion. I’ll be serving that at a vegetarian potluck very soon!

Wild Greens and Mole Enchiladas

Hello, this is Amy Valdés Schwem, and I’m honored to be here with such esteemed plant and cooking women!

I love harvesting wild greens, but my day job is making mole as Mano Y Metate. Today I’m going to make enchiladas made with Mole Dulce and fill them with wild greens and summer squash. It won’t heat up the house, if you take the toaster oven outside! Enchiladas made with tomato sauce instead of chile are called entomatados, and those made with mole are enmoladas. So the menu can read: Enmoladas de Mole Dulce con Quelites y Calabacitas.

Quelites can refer to several unrelated wild greens, but to me they are wild amaranth greens, Amaranthus palmeri, also known as pigweed.

I grew up eating quelites with my maternal grandfather, and he knew no shame jumping fences to pick weeds. They make a few tiny black seeds, unlike its Mexican domesticated relatives that make enough blond seed to fill bulk bins at the health food store.

It is native to the southwest US and northwest Mexico, and its wild and domesticated relatives are enjoyed around the world both as a green and for its grain-like seed. It easily out-competes summer garden and field crops and is becoming resistant to glyposphate (Roundup). But you wouldn’t want to harvest from those over fertilized fields anyway, since it can absorb too much nitrate, making it unsafe for humans and animals. However, grown in native desert soil, they are safe and nutritious, high in vitamin A, vitamin C, and folate, among other vitamins and valuable minerals.

Some species and cultivars available at Native Seeds/SEARCH are used for dye and have red leaves, and some make a huge red inflorescence pretty enough to grow as an ornamental, even if the birds eat all the seed. I’ve never had much luck popping the seed I grew, but you can buy commercially popped seed, like miniature popped corn.

I just visited my closest community garden, Las Milpitas de Cottonwood, and found these beauties in the irrigated beds already in flower. If this was all I had, I would pick the smallest leaves from the stalks and use those.

Hopefully you find quelites before flowering, shorter than a foot tall. I found a few plants in my yard where other things get watered. Many more will sprout with the summer rains.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Last year I had so many from my Tucson Community Supported Agriculture share that I dried some, just like my great aunt Tia Lucy told me they used to do. I just plucked leaves from the stems and air dried them in the house. To use, I soaked in water overnight, then sauteed with the others. I’ll dry more this summer, for sure.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To prepare the fresh quelites, wash, chop tender stems and all, and saute with a little onion and garlic in oil. My grandfather always used bacon grease, so that’s what I did.

 

It’s also prime season for calabacitas, so use them if you don’t have any fresh or dried quelites. My grandfather also collected and cooked verdolagas for us, which would work here, too.

 

 

 

 

Calabacitas, sauteed with onion and garlic. This filling with mushrooms and queso fresco, inside mole dulce enchiladas, is my brother’s signature dish. Well, one of his signature dishes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now for the mole! For a half dozen enchiladas, to serve two people, I used about half of a tin of Mano Y Metate Mole Dulce powder, cooked in mild olive oil to make paste.

Then I added about half a cup homemade chicken stock and a dash of salt, but veggie stock is great, too. Water doesn’t quite do it. Simmer until you have a nice sauce, adding more broth as necessary. There will be steam and good smells.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The secret to enchiladas: start with thin corn tortillas and fry briefly in oil hot enough to sizzle, but not hot enough to make them crispy!!! DO NOT skip this step!

If the tortilla cooks too much, or if it breaks, just turn up the heat and make that one into a corn chip.

Dip the flexible tortilla in the mole dulce.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Put quelites or calabacitas in the tortilla and roll.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Top with homemade queso fresco and bake until heated though. My grandfather used the toaster oven outside on the patio in the summer to make enchiladas. No need to heat the house!

Depending on your oven, you may need to cover them with foil, but I didn’t. I like crispy edges. Serve with a cucumber, tomato salad dressed with a squeeze of lime, beans, and prickly pear grapefruit-ade.

Leftovers are best fried in a cast iron pan until crispy.

Mano Y Metate moles can be purchased from Martha Burgess of Flor de Mayo Arts at the Sunday Heirloom Farmers’ Market at St. Philip’s Plaza, Native Seeds/SEARCH, and ManoYMetate.com.