The Fuzzy Chef & Friends

This was one of our side dishes from Thanksgiving, and my sweetie liked it a lot, so I wrote it down.  It's based on a recipe for Nopales from Roberto Santibáñez, except that his recipe was for a salad and I wanted a hot dish.  Also, I wanted to use pumpkin for the season, and wanted to include cheese.

Nopales, for those not familiar, are prickly pear cactus leaves, and are readily available year-round at Mexican grocery stores.  Most of the time, this means some careful shopping so that you don't get stuck.   Those spines hurt! And they don't come out easily, as my sweetie discovered the hard way.

The trick to making this an easy recipe is to find a Mexican market which will sell you de-spined fresh nopales.   Otherwise, you'll need to remove the spines yourself, which adds 45 minutes or so to the prep time.  It cannot be made with canned, jarred or pickled nopales.  Click through for the recipe.

For TY Day this year, I decided to do "Real American" food, by which I mean Mexican food.  Modern Mexican food is a lot closer to what some people on this continent ate 300 years ago than anything in the formula Thanksgiving lineup.  If I was trying for a "Real Historical" Thanksgiving, I might do a feast of oysters, small game, and cornbread but I'm not fond of the first two items and neither are most members of my family.

Besides, I've been dying to make a serious mole since I got Roberto Santibañez's cookbook.

The menu:

First course:

• Hot avocado soup

• Tomato rice
• Nopales and pumpkin with queso fresco
• Halibut and dungeness crab enchiladas in blackberry mole

• Flan impossible

I just made Nasi Goreng for the first time at home, and it turned out pretty well. Nasi Goreng is the classic Indonesian fried rice dish, eaten everywhere and by everyone (Mie Goreng is the fried noodle equivalent).  I pretty much never make fried rice dishes, mostly because they require day-old leftover rice, and I just don't have that around as much as an Asian family would.  Most of our leftover rice gets eaten at lunch.

I combined two different recipes, one from Epicurious and one from Dina Yuen's Indonesian Cooking.  I'm sure my version is not at all traditional, but it was quite good and requires only one specialty Indonesian ingredient.  Click through for the recipe.

Everyone seems to love sweet potatoes now, and I'm no exception.  They're tasty, versatile, and full of vitamins and fiber.  They're a lot less healthful, though, when fried in lots of oil, so that's how I decided to make them.  

I also added some green garlic, since our grocer is stocking it already.  I guess the unseasonably sunny weather this February has caused the garlic to come up early.  The green garlic makes these pancakes extremely savory; they could be a side dish for dinner as well as a brunch entree.  If you can't get green garlic, just use green onions, but it won't be quite as good.

No pictures, though, sorry!  Click through for recipe.

Thanksgiving this year was a NOLA theme, and we had some fairly specific requirements in terms of food preferences and seasonal availablity (especially after the California crab harvest was delayed).  So I borrowed all of the Cajun and Creole cookbooks the San Francisco Public Library had available and went through them.  Here's a series of one-paragraph reviews of various New Orleans cookbooks, so that you'll know what you want for yourself.  Click on through ...