Wednesday, December 5, 2012

Chile Relleno

I don't think either LJ or I have blogged about our attempt to make chile rellenos for a number of reasons.

  1. We had very high hopes for them
  2. They didn't turn out well
  3. And we had one of our biggest fights in the process of making them
To be fair, it wasn't really a fight, just a few tense moments as we realized our attempts to make them were failing pretty horribly and we both were pretty bummed out.  Harsh words were said and apologies were quickly made and we got back to trying to salvage something to eat for dinner.

The attempt to make these started when we received a bunch of peppers in our CSA.  The farm had a touch of frost that week so they harvested all the peppers at the same time to distribute to the CSA members.  We had leftover taco meat in our fridge and I had just made my first batch of lard, so frying chile rellenos made sense.


LJ prepared the peppers by putting them under the broiler to blacken the skin and remove the peels.



It was as we tried to stuff the peppers that things got tense in the kitchen.  The peppers had lost their texture from the roasting so now were mostly a pile of gunk and impossible to stuff.  We tried one, hoping that the batter would hold it all together.  It disintegrated in the hot fat and we thought we might have to eat cheese slices, raw onions, and cold taco meat for dinner.

Luckily we had a few uncooked peppers left in the fridge.  We decided to forgo the oven and toss them on a hot burner on the stove top for a few seconds to blacken the skins.  This step was crucial because it allowed the skins to be removed which was necessary for the batter to stick (I tried battering a raw pepper but the batter didn't hold when I tried to fry it).

At this point we were able to stuff and batter the peppers and they fried up nicely in the wonderful lard.


Probably not something we will try again, so that it won't bring up the bad memories, but at least we learned our marriage can survive a few failures.

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