• 8-10 cups of unripened grapes
• 3 cups of sugar
• Salt
• Rosé to taste
• 1 cup corn starch
• 3 cups heavy whipping cream
• Powdered sugar to taste (about a quarter cup)
• 1 Pie crust

Of all the pies we’ve made, this one has the most enthusiastic fan base. 

Pick the mustang grapes while they’re still green, while the seeds are still undeveloped and pasty-white. Somewhere around gumball-sized. The earlier you pick them, the less intrusive the seeds are, but the less creamy the flesh of the grapes. We’ve made this recipe four times, at four different stages of the grape development, and each time has produced a wildly different pie. 

Pick about two large HEB tupperwares worth of green grapes. Once you’ve completely de-stemmed them, you’ll have about one large HEB tupperware filled to the brim, about 8-10 cups. Put about half of the grapes through a food processor, chopped up fine. Add the remaining grapes to the grape-slurry in a thick-bottomed pot. Mix in 3 cups of sugar. A dash of salt. Splash the mixture with a generous helping of rosé wine. This gives the pie a certain tang, but also helps the sugar melt.

Cook on the stovetop for a while, stirring occasionally. Keep it at boiling temperature until the chopped grape pieces are soft, and the whole grapes are infused with sugar. Maybe 20 minutes or so.  Follow your gut on this one, and take frequent test tastes.

When the mixture gets to a point that you like, take it off the heat. Pour about a third into a heavy bowl to cool it down from boiling. Mix in a full cup of corn starch, stirring until it becomes a fairly smooth paste. Then slowly pour the corn-starchy third back into the main pot, mix in thoroughly (this process prevents corn starch lumps). Then put it back on the heat at low and stir constantly until the pie filling has thickened to the consistency of hot tar. 

Pour the filling into a pie crust. I prefer an old family recipe for the pie crusts called Hill Country Fare-brand graham cracker crust. You can go the extra mile and make a graham cracker crust from scratch, but this is one occasion where no one will notice the crust. Cover the filling with a piece of cling wrap to keep it from developing a skin, put in the fridge overnight or until it’s cooled. Once cooled, that cup of corn starch should be enough to keep any slice standing on end and not glooping once you remove it from the pie tin. 

Top with whipped cream. HEB-brand heavy whipping cream, very lightly sweetened with powdered sugar will give good results. It’s the densest, richest, most decadent whipped cream out there. 

The pie taste is reminiscent of rhubarb. Nice and sour like a pie should be.

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If you’ve had tacos from a cart, you’ve probably had this salsa. If you’ve had it, you know what we’re talking about. It has many names. Some call it “That creamy green sauce.” Others call it fake guacamole (aguatcate falso). Customers of Taco Deli call it Doña sauce, and act like they’ve discovered it, even though Taco Deli’s whole schtick is taking taco cart food and charging three times as much for it so that white people will think it’s great (congrats to Taco Deli for discovering the secret of white people: upcharging). 

Once you’ve had salsa verde cremosa, all other salsa seems like a ripoff. Contributing to the mystique is the difficulty of finding it. Some taco carts have it, some don’t. At some Jalisco diners you have to ask for it explicitly if you want it with your pre-meal chips. You will use vague and inaccurate names to describe this salsa, but the waitress will know what you mean anyways and bring out a mustard squeeze bottle filled with that rich green sauce which you dollop onto your chips one by one. 

Despite its popularity, it can’t be found in grocery stores. Some carnicerias stock it, but only unreliably, in fresh containers in mini-fridges far from other refrigerated products. You might find some canned products at the HEB which promise to be the creamy green salsa, but they are liars and universally taste disgusting. 

You might think you know the ingredients, but you are wrong. Any recipe you see which contains either avocado or tomatillo is wrong. These wrong recipes choke the internet with their wrongness, hiding the truth behind their despicable lies. You must go to Spanish-language Youtube, or here, for this one true recipe for salsa verde cremosa. 

4 jalapeno peppers

1/2 an onion, in two quarters

8 garlic cloves

2t Pepper

2t Salt

1 cup of cooking oil

Cilantro

Put all the ingredients except the cilantro in a small pot, and cook over medium heat until everything has gone soft, this may take twenty or thirty minutes. Let cool for a while. Pour the contents of the pot in a blender along with the cilantro and blend until the salsa has achieved a smooth, mayonnaisy consistency. This could take a while. Try using different speeds. Serve with chips, or over your breakfast tacos.

It’s pretty simple. Like mayonnaise, the primary ingredient is oil, everything else is just there to make us feel better about slathering that much oil over our food.

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People loved that first batch of beer. Unfortunately the original recipe went AWOL, so I had to re-create it from several sources.

Step 1:

Make a broth of chicken, about one gallon.
Ingredients

• 14oz of chicken, diced
• Cloves, 6 whole,
• Mace, 1/2 tsp
• Nutmeg ,1 tsp

After the broth has stewed, refrigerate it overnight, gunky bits and all. Skim the fat the next day. Bring broth to a boil and add to the sterilized carboy hot, to wait for the wort.

Step 2:

Make an ordinary stout but with dried fruit.
Ingredients

• Fuggles hops, 3/4 60min, 1/4 5min
• 9 lb pale ale (BE)
• 2 lb maris otter pale
• .75 lb chocolate
• .5 flaked barley
• .5 carapils
• 2 pounds of raisins
• .5 pounds of dates

Calculated ABV came out to nearly 10%. I left it in the carboys almost three weeks. I’ve only had a few tastes so far, but even after a week in the bottle it’s pretty carbonated and tastes pretty smooth. The spices are the most apparent flavors, but there’s definitely a slight odor of chicken broth.

And although I can’t say for sure, because there was a lot of sludge at the bottom of the first carboy stage which I didn’t search through, but it seemed like nearly all of the chicken had dissolved.

A spooky Halloween beer recipe for you!

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The fat can be skimmed off and added to the masa, the corn meal. You can make the masa from scratch or from a mix, but in non-drought times you can usually find this in the store, pre-mixed with lye and all the other tasty additives for a very reasonable price. I got a two-pound bag for a buck.

The post Homemade Tamales appeared first on Matthew Bey.

It had been a little while since I had visited the lunch counter at the back of the convenience store on Cedar Avenue and 14th Street. The ownership had changed, so they now offered more soul food and barbecue than they had before, but they still had gizzards. The proprietress fried me up a pile, and they were everything that gizzards ought to be, crispy on the outside, chewy on the inside, and greasy through and through.

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So with the help of gardening gloves and my cargo bicycle bucket, I picked about a gallon of the suckers. Unfortunately, my gardening gloves are only about 90% effective in warding the thorns of the mother cactus, or even the hair-like spines of the prickly pear itself. For weeks afterward I was plagued with the raspy feeling of raspy thorn heads buried just beneath my skin.

I managed to re-stick myself with more thorns as I prepared the prickly pear for consumption. If you soak the fruit in cold water and then briskly rub the skin, scraping off the patches of sharpness that spot the rind like measles, you can remove most of the near-invisible thorns.

But not all.

With a lemon juicer, I turned the pile of mostly de-fanged fruit into a bowl of viscous, purple juice, and another pile of pulp and seeds. A lot of seeds made it into the juice, but I don’t consider the prickly pear seeds a bad thing. They add texture and no doubt have significant nutritional value in their own right.

The juice retained a little of that slimey consistency that you might know from nopalito tacos. In a sorbet this is a good thing, it makes the finished product smoother and softer than what you would get from a simple fruit puree.

Getting the juice was the hard part. To that, I just added some sugar, lime juice, and rum to taste, and popped the slurry in the ice cream maker. The final result was not only eye-poppingly purple, but tasty as well.

I’ve been saving some seeds and cactus pads from particularly well-producing examples of the prickly pear fruit. Now all I need is some unkempt interstitial space to grow them in.

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The surprise addition to this meal was the pickled pork skins. My old housemate had bought me a jar of pickled pork skins several years ago, but this was the first time I’d seen them implemented in the wild.

The other recent experiment with the fruit cup stand was the bionico. This was a pile of fruit, strawberries, bananas, and apples, served in a mash of yogurt, honey, and granola. When you order it in the 32-oz size, it comes in a heaping trough. On a hot Texas day it’s surprisingly refreshing.

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There I was at the Fiesta Mexican food market, standing at the meat counter and I thought, “There’s really nothing keeping me from buying a pound of pig skin.”

The pig skin was cut into perfect pink squares. There was some dimpling, apparently from someone having hit it with a tenderizing hammer at some point. When looked at closely, you could see that the pig skins had tiny blonde hairs sticking out of the pores that glistened in the light. Some of the squares of skin actually had purple tattoos on them.

When I noticed that, the thought crossed my mind, “There’s no way to tell the difference between this pig skin and the skin of some white guy. A white guy with some very bad tattoos.”

But that didn’t stop me from eating the skin.

I started by slicing the skin into chicharron-sized strips. It was surprisingly hard to slice through the skin with the butcher knife. If I’m ever attacked by a pig, I’ll have to remember to stab it instead of slashing.

The fried bits were tasty, but they were a bit greasier than I would have wanted. I was hoping that they would puff up like pork rinds, but they ended up with the slightly chewy texture of pork cracklins.

If the distinction doesn’t seem clear to you, it’s probably because you haven’t spent that much time eating out of gas stations.

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The last time I was in the Twin Cities, my grandparents took me out to eat at the Country Kitchen. If there is any all-you-can eat buffet that stands head and shoulders above the others, it would be Country Kitchen. I feel that the selections don’t have the sad fried-intensiveness of the buffets below the Mason Dixon line.

When I am at a buffet like this, I feel that I am an artist, and that every plate is my canvas and the steam trays of food are my paints.

For the first masterpiece I assemble, I go for a general theme of meatiness, but work to draw out the conflicting elements. A piece of processed fishstick lies down in peace beside a sauce-drowned crabcake (not real thankfully, no allergic reaction) and a lone hotdog, it’s unadorned flesh temporarily elevating it to the status of “sausage.” A puck-shaped chicken-fried steak, nearly a Salisbury steak in this context presides over the affair, with hot calzone slices backing it up.

A final note of surrealism is struck by the blue-flavored slushee drink, looming in the background as a final condemnation of any pretention of naturalism.

For the second plate, the theme of carbohydrates dominates. A slop of beaned chili (this is how you know you are in the North) recklessly drapes itself over a pile of French fries. A “hot dish” casserole sits on the side, and a processed piece of fish makes a repeat appearance along with another slice of piping-hot calzone.

But these plates are simply the preliminary chords that build to the crescendo of dessert. First we build a palette of puddings and soft serve. The texture of smoothness is melded with the chewy experience of gummy bears.

But wait, this sensual chorus is not yet over! Because this is an all-you-can buffet, there is one more trip, a taboo-shattering second visit to the dessert table. Here we find not just another bowl of soft-serve, but a liberal dosage of chocolate candies, whose crunchiness catapults the artist into the promised land of buffet Valhalla.

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My freezer just happened to have some frozen banana-slash-rice-pudding with a secret core of red beans and wrapped in coconut leaves tied like little sweet packages. These had been sitting in my freezer for as long as a year because I kept putting off the hassle of interpreting the Thai, or perhaps Chinese, packaging and determining if they would be better steamed or microwaved.

It didn’t satisfy my sweet cravings the same way as a Cadbury Egg, but not bad all the same.

There’s still two left. They’ll probably be in the freezer for another year.

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