So here’s a book I’ve had for a long time, maybe fifteen years or more without, to my surprise, ever using it.
The cuisine at its heart is pretty much my favorite kind of food in the world, in that culinary triangle between Mexican, Tex-Mex and Southwestern food. (I swear this isn’t tied to my having just done a Read column on Aztec history.)
I maybe haven’t cooked as much as I would personally like to inside that triangle because my daughter doesn’t like it much, or at least has felt she wouldn’t, sometimes based on no particular experience of eating it. But I do make fresh tortillas, cook chile verde, make mole sauces for meat and fish, make carnitas, mix a variety of salsas, and so on, etc. Some of that is tolerated, a bit of it is more actively liked.
I don’t think that’s the only reason that’s kept me out of this book. The other reason is that it shades pretty hard towards “you gotta live in the Southwest or you gotta have access to a specialized pantry AND a good butcher”—it’s a book that more or less says, “You wanna do this right, like we do here at our restaurant in Santa Fe? Let’s take it up a notch”. It’s a slightly less demanding version of an even more forbidding challenge of another cookbook I’ll eventually feature here, which is John Sedlar’s Modern Southwest Cuisine.
Don’t misunderstand me—Coyote Cafe has some lovely, accessible home-styled classic dishes in the last section of the book—huevos rancheros and the like. The problem there is the opposite for me—they’re a bit too dialed down from how I make them. Miller’s chile verde is just pork and anaheim chiles. I make a chile verde with tomatillos as well as anaheim chiles, and I usually mix in poblano peppers and a small mole made with dried red chiles, pumpkin seeds, chipotles, etc. and maybe some hominy corn added to the stew the end if I’m in the mood. (As you might infer from what I said earlier when I make that I’m the one who eats the leftovers for the rest of the week by myself.)
So the issue here is maybe mostly that I just haven’t felt that the effort to fix the recipes that attract me in the book is worth it unless we are having guests over, and it’s the kind of food where I feel a need to know in advance if the food will be welcome. Maybe that time is coming in this rough, uncertain transition out of the pandemic! So it’s time to really crack into this book and see what it can do in preparation for that moment.
What I settled on were two dishes that need a long overnight marination and a quick cook at the end, because I’m going to be away most of the day. I decided to go to the unusual end of the scale, so one of them is grilled venision and the other is quail. Miller calls for a whole leg of venision, boned, but that is just not happening unless I really want to go all-in on sourcing it, so I settled for two small tri-tip cuts of venision from D’Artagnan, because I think they’ll really benefit from a long marination. I got one little packet of four quail too, and they’re meant to marinate and then be cooked in a deep fryer. I’ll probably be making the accompaniment for the deer, which is a sweet tamale with canela and currants, but that might go by the wayside if time is tight or energy in short supply. None of this is everyday food (again, yes, there’s some more everyday dishes in the book) but I figure I should start with a bang if I want to see what the book’s recipes taste like.
That said, I have had to do a bit of fiddling already. The venison marinade, which is built around strong herbal tones (juniper berries, sage, rosemary) gets its liquid from a prickly pear sauce you’re supposed to make with it. I could actually order fresh prickly pears online but I’ve tried it once before and they came partially rotted. Pickled nopales have a really strong taste, and I might use those in the end. I ended up putting a small amount of tequila and bit more white wine in the marinade along with a really teeny bit of pomegranate syrup to get a very small amount of sweetness into the marinade. We will see.
THE RULES FOR COOKBOOK SURVIVOR
There are no rules. I’ll substitute ingredients if I want or if I have to, I’ll pick recipes capriciously, I’ll keep a book in contention for weeks or toss it after a single week. Authors are free to write me and tell me I’m incompetent or a jerk.
Also HERE’s THE DEAL: You get Cookbook Survivor in TWO INSTALLMENTS. One on Saturday morning telling you what I’m gonna do, and one on Saturday evening telling you how it went.