Tag Archives: chuck wagon cooking

Cold Weather and New Mexico Style Green Chili

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Cold weather always stimulates a need in our household for hot food, like gumbo, chili, and especially New Mexico style green chili!

We used to take pilgrimages to Taos in the fall to purchase fresh roasted green New Mexico chilis, and box them up to fly back to Texas and put them in the freezer.  Now we buy already processed roasted, peeled, and chopped autumn roast, hatch chiles.  Then the fun starts.

In a heavy iron kettle (aka dutch oven), get some oil good and hot and brown some chopped meat.  I use venison, but a combination of pork and beef is good.  Or if you want to “go Navajo”, use lamb.

Take out the meat, chop up an onion and saute it.  Then put the meat back in, a few drops of vinegar, a chopped up Irish potato, and cover it with water.  Finally, throw in a box of chopped chilis (we like ‘em HOT!) and a teaspoon or so of cumin, oregano, thyme, and garlic salt.  I usually chop up a few garlic cloves and throw them in.  Bring to a boil, then simmer for hours.  The longer and lower it cooks, the better. After it is well cooked you might want to thicken it with a roux.

“¡Buen Provecho!”

Salsa Colorada

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In the Cochran Corral kitchen (and the chuck wagon) one of our favorite sauces, used for breakfast, dinner, and supper dishes, is salsa colorada.   Essentially enchilada sauce, it has its historical origins in Native American-Asian, African, and European cultures.  For example, I am lucky enough to use New Mexico chili sent by my friend Carl in Santa Fe

not, as Stella Hughes said “that store-bought stuff,”

combined with spices from all over the third rock from the sun, and blended using the French roux (roo) method.  It’s a good example of the fusion of cultures here in Central Texas.

In a heavy iron skillet, at medium heat, I dump approximately equal amounts of flour and oil.  You can even use gluten free flour, and the oil can be olive, lard, butter or even bacon grease.  Stir them together until a creamy emulsion develops (and muscle cramps in your arm).  Keep stirring as you sprinkle red chili powder on top (open the window), then small amounts of boiling water until an orange, semi liquid gravy appears (work out the lumps…more cramps).  Now add comino (cumin), tomillo (thyme), oregano, and a sprinkle of garlic salt.  Turn down the heat as low as it will go and keep stirring while you add the mystery ingredient – four or five non-sweet chocolate chips!  What you are looking for is a thick red gravy-like sauce.  If you do use New Mexico chili like we do, I hope you like your food Picosito!

Love and Haight

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My all time favorite chuck wagon cook/teacher is Stella Hughes, who in turn idolized a Texas cowboy turned-Arizona-camp-cook for the famous Hash Knife outfit in Winslow: Clair Haight.  His big specialty was son-of-a-gun stew, but since organ meat is not so popular nowadays, I decided to share his other specialty, peach cobbler, for which generations of Arizona cowboys remember him.  This is a great Valentine dish.

Put your twelve inch dutch oven on a bed of coals and drop in a stick of butter.  Open a gallon can of quartered peaches, pour off the liquid and chop up the peaches a little more, then dump them into the sizzling butter.  Then dump in a smaller can of cherry pie filling and stir.  When the fruit starts to bubble, take the oven off the fire and stir in a heaping tablespoon of cornstarch dissolved in cold water.  Add sugar and cinnamon, nine drops of almond extract and a jigger of Uncle Ezra (Ezra Brooks bourbon whiskey).  Then make a pie crust (Aunt Betty’s recipe) and lay it on top of the fruit.  Cut vents in the crust to let out the steam, your brand, or stars, or tree limbs like mom did.  Then put on the lid and pile on a shovel full of live coals.  Rotate the lid a quarter turn every few minutes.  Check it in about 20-30 minutes.  When the crust is baked, the cobbler’s done!  

Happy Valentines!

Don’t burn the biscuits!!

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Second only to nutty-flaky pie crust in terms of the heartache of non-lightness is the almighty biscuit!  Chuckwagon cooks are judged by several criteria, and one of these is whether your biscuits can be used as ammunition, or hockey pucks, or if they are light and flaky!  My own were pretty much in the door stop category until I was saved by my soul brother – cowboy cook Carl Hawkins.

Now my mother-in-law emphasizes the importance of working fast and keeping the ingredients cold, much like working in pie dough.  Carl just says, “don’t mess with it too much!”  He put me to work early one Sunday morning, saying

“okay, get out your flour and shortening and you’re going to make a couple batches of biscuits!”

In a cold bowl he had me dump a cup of flour, then add two tablespoons of baking powder, half a teaspoon of salt and blend it with a fork.  Next he had me cut in a tablespoon of shortening until the dough looked grainy, kind of like cornmeal.  Finally, we added about half a cup of buttermilk and kept working with the fork until the sticky dough just began to come away from the sides of the bowl, it looked too wet.  We dumped in out on a lightly floured surface, flipped it over, rolled it out to a half inch thick and cut out rounds with a juice glass.  I put them in a well greased dutch oven and after about fifteen minutes at somewhere in the vicinity of 400°F they floated out of the pan!

Don’t burn the biscuits — you’ll never hear the end of it!