The most delicious and clean tacos ever! Sweet Potato with Greens and Plantain Tortillas, Paleo, Vegan and Awesome

Today is Cinco de Mayo (yay!) it is also the middle of a strict springtime vegan-paleo goal for me. So what to do. I looooove Mexican foods, it will be one of my favorite cuisines ever and always. My eyes were first opened to mind blowing vegan Mexican food at Gracias Madre in SF. I was lucky to eat there many times, but it was a taco plate when I first fell in love. There were piles of cooked leafy greens, spiced sweet potatoes, and all the crunchy toppings. I think there were beans and loads of their wonderful freshly made tortillas. This today is my homage to them.  The tortilla making is easy as pie, but if you love corn tortillas-by all means use those!

Paleo Plantain Tortillas 
with
Chili Sweet Potato, Leafy Greens, and Avocado

Tortillas:
Makes about 14 tortillas (taco "corn-tortilla" sized)

• 4 green plantains
• 1/4 cup hot water (or more)

Leafy Greens:

• 1 bunch collards, swiss chard, or kale
• 2 cloves garlic
• 1/2 cup water
• 1 teaspoon ground cumin
• salt

Sweet Potatoes:

• 4 sweet potatoes
• 1-2 teaspoon chili powder
• 1  teaspoon garlic powder
• 1 teaspoon cumin
• salt

Also: 

• Avocado
• Cabbage
• Raddishes
• Cilantro
• Salsa

For these tortillas I want a savory or neutral sort of flavor so we use the unripe or green plantains. Peeling them can be a little bit of a chore, here is a link to my earlier instructions how to do this quickly. The plantains need to be peeled and sliced into chunks before boiling for 20 minutes. You will see the raw plantain is a very pale yellow color, once it has cooked in the boiling water there's a much deeper yellow color to the flesh. 

When the plantains are fork tender drain into a colander in the sink. Wait 5 minutes so they cool a bit. Place plantains in the bowl of a standing mixer, mix on low for about 5-8 minutes. If you have the plastic guard that keeps things from jumping out the sides of the bowl now is the time to use it. If not you can hold a tea towel around the top of the bowl until pieces stop trying to jump out. 

At first it may seem very dry and crumbly, but there is a nice point when everything comes dough like. Depending on your plantains and how ripe and cooked they are this may take more time than you expect just keep the mixer on. If everything is looking very dry, which happens due to moisture escaping through the steam, add a splash of hot water until you have a consistency like cookie dough. 

With our plantain massa ready we can move onto shaping and cooking the tortillas:

You will need a tortilla press or two rigid cutting boards. Parchment paper folded in half or a plastic bag cut into two pieces.Some coconut oil or other oil of your choice. A hot griddle or frypan. 

1. Heat the griddle.
2. Apply a tiny bit of coconut oil to the inside spots of the full department where you will flatten the dough. 
3. Roll a ball of the dough in your hands.
4. Place in between the two sheets of parchment or plastic
5. Position this parchment sandwich in between your two cutting board or tortilla press. 
6. Press straight down, with all your bodyweight. 
7. Remove the top cutting board and check your tortilla. 
8. Peel off the parchment carefully, this is easier than you imagine.
9. Move the tortilla in hand directly to the griddle.
10. Cook on each side for about 5 minutes. They will look dry, pale, with not much color. The edges will turn out just a bit. 

Repeat until the dough is all used up! 

Cut a bunch of collards or Swiss chard into thin ribbons. Cook on the stove with two cloves of minced garlic, salt, a teaspoon of cumin, and a 1/2 cup of water. Simmer and sauté until the water has about braided and your greens are tender and bright. 

Cube your sweet potatoes into roughly half inch pieces. Toss to coat with olive oil  and 1 to 2 teaspoons of chili powder, 1 teaspoon of cumin and 1 teaspoon of garlic powder. Spread on a sheet pan in one layer. Bake roast at 350° for about 30 minutes, until they're tender. There is no need to stir the sweet potatoes while they are roasting see you can just forget about them until the timer beeps!

Clearly, tacos should be assembled right as you are going to eat them. Place a small bed of greens as a base on the tortilla, followed by sweet potatoes, then topped off with thin slices of avocado, radish, cabbage and cilantro. salsa or hot sauce is always a good idea in my book.

 Enjoy!
***The tortillas will keep for a few days in the fridge kept sealed up in a bag. Very good just microwaved for 20 seconds to warm them up again. Or even better, throw on a hot dry pan till warm.

Snow Day Worthy Chilaquiles, ie: "Breakfast Nachos"!

Nachos for breakfast! Corn chips, cheddar cheese, salsa, and eggs, we can not go wrong. I fell in love with chilaquiles while living in San Francisco. They are soul filling food, soft, layered with melty cheese and a warmth from the chilies which makes my whole body excited for the day ahead.

On the this epic snowy day in New England, this is just this food I want to eat. A warm hug of a bowl of breakfast without much washing up.

I like the chips when they are somewhere between crispy and soft. Like a bowl of cereal, there is a moment of perfect crunch balance to achieve, and then it keeps fading to to soggy soft demise of the corn ship. Beautiful and delicious.







For one portion:
Crack and beat two eggs into a bowl. Set aside.
Chop up some cheddar cheese (Yes, ya'll it's lactose free!)
Heat a skillet with a little bit of olive oil.
Pour in about a 1/3 cup of delicious red salsa into the pan. Wait till it is sizzling and bubbling.
Pour in the eggs, and a handful of corn chips. And the cheese.
Give it several stirs in the pan.
Add another handful of corn chips.
When the egg has cooked, the cheese will have melted.

The corn chips hopefully will be still crunchy.

(Chips soften up fast. I find TJ's organic yellow corn chips are great. Tostitos are too thin and get soggy, if thats what you have, add them at the last second.)

Tip it out onto a plate. Serve with hot refried beans if you've got em. And crema or sour cream if you want.

delicious quick and easy chilaquiles

Horchata Cachaca Cocktail, it is not Eggnog, but tastes like a holiday!

All good ideas come from somewhere, I found this one at La Brasa in Somerville. They feature a small but mind bogglingly global menu with local sources.

Our table was throughly impressed. A dinner full of punchy unexpected flavors and a really laid back vibe from the whole place.  

(clockwise: pickled beet eggs, lamb shepherds pie, flan, coconut tapioca pudding with spiced pears, awesome soup spoons.)

The element that stuck with me was the horchata. Spiked with rum (honestly I don't know what kind) it became a joyful creamy, cinnamon laced experience. Something like a Mexican white Russian or Eggnog. However, much thinner than eggnog, as horchata is made from almond or rice milk, and dairy free! It sparked a discussion with my friend about coquito, a Puerto Rican coconut holiday drink, which I am going to mix up and bring to her later this week. (Stay tuned for coquito.)

Here is La Brasa's dreamy horchata over crushed ice.

What is HORCHATA, you ask? A milky drink made from rice (or almonds or chufa) soaked with cinnamon. Sugar is added and sometimes other spices or vanilla. It is special, simple and refreshing.

So I had this new discovery, horchata with rum. Here I was, going along, thinking virgin horchata was perfect. So I had to try it again. However, not in the mood to make horchata or even crush ice,
here is my lazy version.
I totally just bought an horchata from my local taqueria and brought it home. Shout out to La Victoria Taqueria, you rock. (Finally a good taqueria around here. You make me so very very very happy.) When I go in there to get food I always order an horchata because it is awesome, it is delicious, creamy, sweet, goes with spicy food, makes me smile, and think of California. And when I ask for the horchata, the same girl always looks me in the eye and smiles like "Oh, yeah, good ordering, you know whats up!" I love that feeling. If I was her, I would sip on horchatas all day long.

But this is an horchata for after work, hear that everybody? So bring home your takeout horchata, try not to drink much on the way, this is the hardest part of it all.

Toss in a jigger of Cachaca and some optional ice. Done!

Cachaca is a white spirit, like rum, that is made in Brazil from sugarcane juice. It was a great flavor pairing with the cinnamon and creamy elements.  Instead of cachaca you could use white or light rum.

This is obviously not a precise science, it will likley taste superb no matter what you do. I swear you will not regret it. You will only regret when the horchata is empty and that you didn't buy a second one.

Maybe one day I will make horchata from scratch and then I will link to this post. For now, save yourself time and find your closest most awesome taqueria.

Warming Sweet Potato, Cabbage and Black Bean Vegan Casserole

Aren't sweet potatoes the most pleasing things? Comforting, soft, warm, bland but not tasteless. And they come in different colors, I got orange ones and white ones with purple skins for this recipe. They look stunning in alternating rows. This recipe takes just a bit of roasting, and is so pretty presented on the table. I made a southwestern inspired casserole here, some chipotle, some wine, some beans. All the good stuff. 

Savoy cabbage waits next to a bowl of sliced sweet potatoes tossed in olive oil, salt, pepper, sage and mexican oregano. This way they are nicely coated with oil to brown up in the roasting of the casserole process.

One head of savoy cabbage is sliced up into roughly 1/2" - 1" wide pieces. Rustic is ok! White wine, olive oil, and a sprinkling of chipotle powder are added into the pan for flavor. Lets begin the roasting, 350°.



Look, after 15 minutes or so in my convection oven the cabbage is won over. Wilted into silky strips, with charred tips which say lots of flavor.



The sweet smokey cabbage is placed in the bottom of my most beloved baking pan. (Anthropologie makes the craziest dish-ware, I love it!)
What is a casserole anyway? Instead of describing the food, its comes from the French word for the pan itself, used in both the oven and serving of the food. Casserole meaning both the very cool cookware one receives as awesome wedding gifts, and of the vegetables layered inside of it. Clearly casseroles have an image problem in popular culture, but I have no problem with them. I think anything baked together is probably better than baked alone!



Spoon a layer of black bean on top of the cabbage. Next time I make this casserole I will experiment in putting the beans at the bottom and cabbage on top of them. I feel it would make the beans more succulent. You could try it either way. So, about beans, I made mine using a dried heirloom variety, soaking and then cooking in my pressure cooker for 20 minutes. You can use black beans or pinto beans out of a can, that is easy. Remember to rinse them.



Sprinkle some chipotle on top of the beans if you are in the mood. Next comes the very fun part. Craft time with food! Arrange the slices of sweet potato in scolloped rows, alternating by color.




Bake entire cassarole in a 350° oven for 30 - 45 minutes. Crisped sweet potatoes and warmed through.

The potatoes retain their color difference after roasting, although I lack a really good photo because the evening lighting in my house is lacking and it didn't look pretty the next day. We had devoured it and it was a mangled mess of leftovers. We will make do with this one until I make this again!  Or you make it and send me the photo perhaps?

It was really impressive looking. Dinner party or pot luck worthy. Even Thanksgiving perhaps? We ate it along with salad and mustard on top. It served about 6  portions that way. Next time Ill take better measurements in the kitchen, but honestly it was really good, just wing-it, you can't go wrong.

Warming Sweet Potato, Cabbage and Black Bean Vegan Casserole

4-6 sweet potatoes
1 savoy cabbage
1 1/2 cups cooked pinto or black beans
1 teaspoon dry sage
1 teaspoon Mexican oregano
olive oil
salt pepper
1/3 cup white wine
1 teaspoons chipotle powder

Beet, Avocado, Cilantro and Goat Cheese Soft Tostada

Beet, Avocado and Goat Cheese soft tostada

I havent posted in a week because I was busy in San Fancisco doing too much of this:

How to have fun in SF

There was a little work involved somewhere in there, mostly it was eating tacos, drinking coffee, cocktails, and sitting around in the sunshine. Sitting around in the sun resulted in a nice sunburn, which my friends thought was the effects of frozen mimosas, but the next day was clearly a sunburn. (more on frozen mimosas later!)

La Palma's corn tortillas

There was a transportation strike one day, so I decided to walk instead of ride, all the way to what might be the center of the Misson at 24th and Alabama street, which is certainly the center of tortillas in San Francisco. La Palma Mexicatessen, the food there is good but the reason to go is the quality and variety of tortillas which you can buy in big stacks still hot from the griddle.


They are handmade by talented ladies in the back of the shop, and if you peek through you can see them at work. There are big tortillas, little and tiny baby ones. Double thick gorditas and hand flattened ones which are rustic with a thicker edge, like a pizza. In white, yellow, blue, and green. I bought a stack of handmade blue corn, white corn GMO free, and ones made with nopales cactus which were a grassy green.






Why did I buy so many tortillas?  The answer anyone who lives on most of the east coast would know, you just cant find them here. (If anybody knows of a place which makes real tortillas in/near Boston, let me know asap.)

GMO free corn gorditas

So there I was with my 8 pounds of still steaming tortillas, condensing in their packages and the sweet smell of corn wafting out of my bag. I carried them around most of the day, and then onto the plane. I didn't eat them the whole time. We opened the packages for lunch on my first day home, and I have had tortillas at least once a day for the last few days I've been home.


I did put some in the freezer to test if they would hold up.


When I run out, I will learn how to make my own masa and fashion homemade tortillas. It cant be too difficult, as households all across Mexico and beyond make them regularly. Ill write a post on that once I run out of La Palma's.


It is easy to come up with traditional and crazy taco variations. This one I loaded up too much and had to eat with a fork and knife like an open faced sandwich. It is neither taco nor tostada. Somewhere between. The flavors are likewise very Californian neither one thing or another. Cilantro is a fun way to wake up usual beets and goat cheese. Play around with the cheese also, a goat brie or camembert has more flavor and melting capabilities than fresh chevre.

Beet, Avocado and Goat Cheese Soft Tostada

for each serving:

1 corn tortilla

4 slices goat camembert or brie cheese

1/2 an avocado, cubed

1/2 cup roasted sliced beet

cilantro

1/4 of a lime

fresh ground pepper and salt

Heat the tortilla in a skillet until warm on the bottom. Flip over to the other side. Place sliced or crumbled goat cheese on the warmed upper side. It will soon melt or soften somewhat. Remove the tortilla to a plate cheese side up, careful not to loose the cheese!

Pile on the beets, avocado cubes and cilantro. Shower fresh ground pepper and some salt over it all. A squeeze of lime wakes up the avocado. Act fast to eat while warm with still gooey cheese.