I love Chiles! They are so diverse and yummy and fun to cook with. My number one favorite chile is the poblano, and I have several poblano plants growing in my little backyard "salsa garden".
To roast chiles, I just put them in my toaster oven with the heat as high as it can be (450F for my model). I keep an eye on them as the skin begins to blister, and turn them occasionally to make sure they roast evenly. Once they're thoroughly blistered up, I put them into a big tupperware container and put the lid on for 5 minutes or so. This gives them an opportunity to release a lot of heat and steam, which loosens the skin, which makes it easier to peel them. Once you have a lovely pile of roasted, peeled (and stemmed and seeded!) chiles the possibilities are endless. Chop them up and add them to just about anything- Mac N Cheese, casseroles, soups, salads, paninis, pastas.....
My two most recent roasted chile recipes were rajas and green chile salsa.
For rajas, I roasted poblanos and red bell peppers, cut them into strips and then added them to sauteed onions and garlic (I cut the onions into long thin strips to match the size and shape of the peppers). Then I made a creamy, cheesy sauce and combined it with the chile mixture, which resulted in a delicious dish for dipping tortillas in or for spooning over rice and beans or adding to burritos... it was spectacular!
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| Rajas (the photo definitely doesn't do it justice!) |
The green chile was an attempt at re-creating Paul's Grandma Emma's chile, which we have tried to do several times. This time wasn't *just* like Grandma's, but was our closest yet and absolutely delish. For Grandma's green chile (the vegetarian version), you need a combination of 6 jalapenos, 6 green chiles, and 6 yellow chiles. I added 2 poblanos to the mix, because.... well... I wanted to. So, we roasted the chiles in the toaster oven, set them aside in a covered container to steam, and then de-stemmed, de-seeded, and peeled each one (without running them under water!). We diced the roasted chiles and combined them with 3 cloves of diced garlic (this makes a very garlicky chile, 1 clove would suffice if you're not big on the raw-garlic flavor), 2 chopped scallions, and 1 chopped yellow tomato (that was a random addition, simply because I had the tomato and it needed to be eaten.). This chile wasn't nearly as liquidy as Grandma's is for some reason, so it's more like a chile salad than a salsa. We have been sprinkling it onto everything for the past several days, and it is addictive. It's quite spicy, but not painful to eat. I'm totally pleased with how it turned out this time but am still looking forward to playing around with the recipe a bit more, too.
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