Week 8: Pozole Verde

In a way, I've been preparing my whole life to make this soup. At least, I've been eating pozole my whole life, so that in itself is similar to training. But of course, I'm changing it up from how my family has made it. We are used to the red chili sauce pozole with chicken & pork. Instead, I'm paying homage to my cousins on the other side of Mexico and going with a green chili recipe. I LOVE LOVE LOVE chile verde, so this has to be good, right....

My cook book did have a recipe, but I'm a little skeptical of dishes
with such a family signature, so I did my research for this. (Reason why I haven't attempted the gumbo despite all of the requests). I asked around, googled, and thought about it a ton! Mostly my family was no help. They are all a little afraid of the green pozole since it doesn't look like Auntie Rene's, so here it goes, my little concoction. And if it turns out terrible, mom has a backup plan. She has some of her red, traditional pozole in the fridge, ready to go!

I invited over some family and friends to enjoy this with me, so I'm making a huge batch and just kinda vaguely referencing some recipes from family & google. I will do my best to document this. I'm also starting a day ahead per my usual soup regimen. I am a working girl after all, so if we want to eat before midnight tomorrow, I'm gonna have to start cooking at 8 pm tonight.

Step 1: Cook the chicken & pork butt. I threw a whole chicken and a big pork roast each in their own pan with water, onions and garlic. I cut then in 4 parts each and cooked for about 20 minutes (?) or until they looked done. I took them out and shredded the meat, discarding any fat, skin and bones. Don't throw out the cooking liquid, you will use that later. Be sure you are left with at least 8 cups each of the cooking liquid. I refrigerated the liquid and finished the soup overnight. The next day I removed the fat and strained the broth through a paper towel and strainer.

Step 2: Make the sauce. Clean and half the tomatillos. Coarsely
chop onion, cilantro, garlic and jalepenos. Puree together, salt. Add
a little cooking liquid to help puree become smooth. In a pan with a little oil, saute sauce until it turns darker green (about 12-15 minutes). At this point, I had no idea what I was doing. My recipes were for a much smaller batch and they were all just a tad different. In retrospect, I would add another onion and 1 or two more jalapenos. The ingredients below reflect this change. At this point, it was 1 am and I was ready to go to bed. I refrigerated everything separately and resumed the pozole making the next day.

Step 3: Cook hominy. After draining, add hominy to a large pan
with water, a few cups cooking liquid and salt. Bring to a boil. Let cook until hominy is soft, about 30-45 minutes. Drain liquid.

Step 4: Make soup. Combine 8 cups of the cooking liquid from the pork and the chicken. Add the chili and hominy. Salt to taste. Add Oregano. Bring to a simmer and let simmer for 20 - 30 minutes.

Step 5: Garnish & Eat: Prepare the garnishes by shredding
cabbage, slicing radishes & limes, chopping onion & avocado and heating corn tortillas.

For my first attempt at making such a traditional dish, I think I did pretty well. I was a bit too conservative with the sauce. It needed a bit more heat but overall, everyone liked the pozole, even though it was green. Even Dad, Mr. Traditional, liked it. And now I totaly understand why this is a special meal that is prepared only a few times a year and why it's always made in a huge batch and served to the WHOLE extended family! It's A LOT of work.
So if you are going to make it, you may as well make a lot.

As for the cost, it wasn't a cheap soup to make, but considering how many servings I made, it wasn't too bad. I got 10 servings out of my big pot, plus probably enough for left overs for 4! Not bad! Also, I had many of the expensive ingriedients like the chicken and pork roast already in the fridge. I also had a big can of hominy and the corn toritllas. So, if you do not have these items on hand, be prepared to shell out some dinero at the supermercado! And of course, you can bring down the cost by omitting either the chicken or pork. I chose to use both.

Prep time: many hours, lost count, but if I were more familiar with how to make it, I would have been faster
Cook time: 2 (approx.)
Servings: about 12 - 15
Taste: 4 stars
Prep: lots of work!
Cost: can be costly, depends on your ingredients on hand

Ingredients:
Whole Chicken (4- 5 lbs) / from home
Pork butt or shoulder roast (4 lbs) / from home
2 Onions (2 coarsley chopped, 1 finely chopped for garnish) / $050/lb = $1.09 / Chavez Market
Garlic cloves / from home
Salt / from home
Tomatillos (2 lbs) / $1.09/lb = $2.29 / Chavez Market
Cilantro (1 bunch) / $0.79
Jalapenos (4-5) / $0.99/lb = $0.54
Largest can hominy / from home
Oregano (2 teaspoons) / from home

Garnishes
Limes / $0.69 each = $3.54 / Chavez Market
Oregano / from home
Onions / see above
Radishes / $0.69 / Chavez Market
Shredded cabbage / $0.99/lb = $2.69 / Chavez Market

Week 7: Black Bean & Chorizo

Wow, time flies when you are making soup. I can't believe it's been 7 weeks now. And even though I love soup, I can't believe I'm not sick of it yet. I'm sure it helps that all the recipes are so different, and soooo yummy. Also, there is just 1 more week of winter soups! Then it's on to Spring for a whole new menu.


This week, I choose the black bean and chorizo soup since I still had some chorizo in the freezer since week 1 and I thought it was time to use it. Also, I had all the ingredients except the beans, so the soup only cost me $1.48. Awesome!!!

This soup was quite easy to make. Once again tho, I failed to plan ahead and soak the beans over night. Instead, I did it the fast way by boiling water and poring it over the rinsed beans and letting it sit for an hour. This is usually not my method of choice, but I ran out of days in the week. I chopped the onion and cut the Spanish Chorizo while I let the beans soak. If you do not remember from Week 1 soup, the chorizo is actually a smoked Spanish chorizo from a sausage shop east of downtown San Jose called Goulart. If you aren't familiar with the Spanish chorizo, I recommend you take a trip to Goulart. It's $5 for two big links and so worth it. The sausage is smoked so it's not as greasy as the Mexican chorizo that we are used to (and love).

To make the soup, I sauteed the chorizo and onion for just a few minutes until the chorizo was warm. I added the oregano, salt, broth, and soaked, rinsed beans. This was brought to a simmer and covered and let simmer for about an hour or until the beans were soft. After, it simmered, I added the orange juice. If I make this again, I will even add more orange juice. Somehow only a few bites had orange flavor and that really helped to bring out the chorizo. My first taste of the finished soup was so-so. It tasted like beans and sausage. But overnight the flavors blended together and I had a great meal the next day!

After making this soup, I found out that my family doesn't like black beans. Huh, what now? A whole pot of soup and no one to eat it, so the next day I brought it into the office and I invited my favorite coworkers to east soup with me. They were a little camera shy, so I didn't get a picture, but trust me, they ate it and loved it. It also helps that it was a cold, rainy week and that put people in a soup mood, but also, the soup was good. I might even play around with this soup a little more and see what I could add to it. I think it's on the verge of being something really awsome. I can imagine eating it with corn tortillas. The recipe suggests a bit of sour cream. That might work. Or I wonder what would happen if I ate it over Spanish rice. Hmmmm... that sounds quite yummy. A little cheese on top. I think I might be on to something :-)

Ingredients:
1/2 pound dried black beans / $1.48 / Lucky's
8 ounces chorizo (more for more chuncky soup) /Goulart
1 cup onion / from home
4 cups broth / from home
1 tablespoon oregano / from home
salt / from home
1/2 cup - 1 cup orange juice (to taste) / from home

Prep time: 5 minutes (plus 1 - 8 hours soaking beans)
Cook time: 1 hour
Servings: 4
Taste: 4
Prep: super easy
Cost: $1.48

Week 6: Tomato & Fennel Soup

Only 3 more weeks of winter soups, and still so many yummy soups to make. I've never cooked or eaten fennel (just the seeds) so I was very curious how this would come out. A woman at the farmer's market even asked me what I was going to do with all that fennel, and I answered "soup" with a big smile, and then she asked me what it tastes like and I answered "I don't know," pretty embarrassed.

I mostly choose to make the tomato & fennel soup since I had some creme friache left that I needed to use up. It was a costly ingredient, so I didn't want to let it go to waste. Also, with all this soup making, I've been freezing the extra chicken broth, and was able to use it for this soup. So by far, this was the best bargain soup of the Souper Challenge. Because many of my ingredients came from home, I spent $5.45 on this soup. Still, it's more of an appetizer than main dish, so your family would still need an entree. But it was super quick & easy to make, so I'd say to go for it! I will absolutely be making this again.


Oh, and another cool thing... I was thrown off by my search for fresh tarragon. It was not at my farmer's market, and it was not at Real Produce, and I really didn't want to buy a whole jar of dried spice knowing I would never use it again and it would probably cost more than all the rest of my ingredients combined. I remembered Whole Foods sold bulk spices, so I went over there and filled a little baggy full of dried tarragon (using the rule of half as much dried herb than fresh herb) and went to the checker to pay. Free! My baggy wouldn't weigh, so Whole Foods gave me some free herbs for my soup this month. And it was kinda fun putting a itty bitty plastic bag of dried herbs in my purse too. I got a little chuckle out of that. ;-)


To make the soup, I chopped the fennel, carrots and onions. The fennel was easy to cut and so fragrant. I was sure to cut off all stalks and remove the middle core. Once chopped, I sauteed all the veggies in olive oil until soft and then added the tarragon, salt, tomatoes and broth. This was brought ot a simmer and continued to simmer for 20 minutes. After 20 minutes, I pureed the soup in batches and returned to the pot. I whisked in the creme friache and added more salt to taste. And thats it! Done! Easy! I served with a dollop of creme friache, but that was not necessary since there was plenty in the soup already; it was more for the presentation. The fennel really came through in a good way. It gave an earthy flavor to the soup and the smell was amazing. Consensus: I like fennel! It was a big Superbowl Sunday hit for the fam. Definitely a starter to a much bigger menu and not too filling at all.


The recipe also called for a bit of Pernod liquor. Apparently this is a licorice flavored liquor. I chose not to include it since I'm not a huge fan of licorice and I didn't want to go looking for this liquor and purchasing it just for this soup. I thought of adding an anise extract to it since I did have some on hand (left over from holiday baking), but again, I thought the fennel gave enough of the earthy licorice flavor, and I was already very happy with the soup. I suppose I can try the extract in my leftovers in a small amount, but might not. I think the soup is great just the way it is.


Ingredients:
1/4 cup olive oil / from home
3 cups (4 fennel bulbs) / $1.00 each = $4.00 / farmer's market
1/2 cup chopped carrots / $0.50 / farmer's market
1 cup chopped onion / from home
1 28-ounce can diced tomatoes / $0.95 / Smart & Final
1 tablespoon tarragon / free / Whole Foods
4 cups chicken broth / from home
Salt / from home
Creme Friache / from home

Prep time: 15 minutes
Cook Time: 20 minutes
Servings: 6
Taste: 4
Prep: super easy
Cost: $5.45