Sounds great. I'll skip my beloved xtianos y morros and try it. But shouldn't that be half a cup of garlic?
Jenny Brown
-----------
You gotta explain xtianos y morros. My Spanish is non-existent, even though I lived in Guadalajara as a kid---forgot it all. It's a figurative expression, something and noses for a rice and beans dish with the beans as the noses? If you feel like it post the recipe.
After I posted, I talked myself into making black beans last night, so at something like two in the morning the windows were steamed up and I was munching away, with that critical attitude, okay if they fix it exactly like I wrote it up will it turn out? I had to use cumin powder because the store was out of the seeds. I used a third of an regular spice bottle worth of powder. I think it really helps to crush the seeds with a pestle and then fry them in oil for a better flavor. Any way, I was thinking of the elephant style garlic cloves which are usually a little larger than a golf ball. If you cup your hand and close the side in with the thumb and fill it with chopped garlic, its about that much (my hand is medium large). More garlic won't hurt. Can you have too much garlic? Naw. The jalapenos vary a lot too, and I put in five large ones. If you get really hot ones, then it might be a little over the top. Maybe flame toasted bell peppers, anaheims and tomatoes with their sweetness would help bring out the jalapeno's flavor more. This reminds me that putting in sugar or honey would turn it in a sweet direction for a similar effect.
The other thing that is really great is cheese on the top. Goat cheese is great, but I usually use mozzarella because I have it around.
As I remember each state in Mexico has its own favorite set of dishes. I can't remember what Jalisco was noted for, but I liked the smallish lard fried tacos with chicken as a kid---and the horrible looking fruit punch---it looks like sewer water but it tastes great. I was absolutely forbidden to buy it or limeade but I did anyway. In fact I was forbidden to buy anything to eat---ridiculous when the streets were lined with food. (I know, but I never got sick.)
So, for Chuck0's new Anarchist Cookbook, it would be great to have lefties from around the world put in recipes with a story about fighting the evil Empire, using the Mexican state model, where characteristic dishes embody something of the people, the place, and the history of the struggles there. Making food (aka labor) a tribute and celebration to solidarity in global struggle.
Is it a co-incidence that many places where the struggle is intense also have great food, mostly hot and spicy? Maybe it's just a reflective phenomenon, in that the white Republican heartland of the Imperium has mostly terrible food: flavorless boiled tough roast with gag dumplings and saltless gravy paste, served with weak tea or thin coffee, made of course with brackish well water. No wonder McDonald's is considered a treat.
Anyway, food has something mystical about it. Most beans for example make me laugh. There is something funny about them--not just the fart jokes---something else. On the other hand studying black beans for example, their dark pearl like sheen, evokes another quality, a kind of mystery like earthen ware or lava bowls and plates, adobe and sage, pine nuts, Native America, the Americas.
Lentils do something different. Looking at them and thinking about them and their colors evokes the time of old world civilizations, well deep in ancient stones and water. So Chuck0 needs lentil recipes in there too.
Happy New Year. I read somewhere that the Italians make a lentil dish with sausage for good luck on new year's day.
Chuck Grimes