Cookbooks

Although used with onions and bell peppers here, this pickling brine works wonderfully well for any type of vegetable you want en escabeche, a common preparation in Mexico. In late summer in New Mexico, as the days begin to shorten and nights get cooler, home cooks will often pickle the remaining abundance of their kitchen gardens to enjoy throughout the winter.

This is the classic vegetable layer for the familiar ground beef taco. It adds freshness and crunch to the taco and absorbs some of the meat juices, but you can use it with any number of other fillings—up to you. The addition of salsa fresca to bland iceberg lettuce adds vibrant color and flavor.

One of the preparations that make Thai cuisine so fresh and refreshing in the tropical heat is its raw vegetable salads that serve as backdrops to fish or meat. The sauce used on these salads is typically a blend of chiles, fish sauce, fresh lime juice, and herbs, with fresh cabbage as one of the side dishes. This Thai slaw is inspired by those classic recipes. Use it as a base for Thai Shrimp tacos (page 59) or for other shrimp or seafood fillings.

Refritos—refried beans—are one of the most common side dishes in Mexican and Southwestern restaurants. Finding a good rendition, though, is rare. Most places use flavorless canned beans for a base—already a poor start. And they don’t take the time to slowly cook and stir them to infuse the mixture with flavor and texture. The best refritos are made from beans cooked from scratch with many different seasonings so the beans absorb the flavors and the cooking liquid is intense and balanced. Here are two recipes for refritos. The first is for black beans cooked from a dried state, which takes several hours to prepare. The second requires just forty minutes and uses canned black beans that are already cooked as a base.

If you don’t have time to cook your beans for refritos, for a better base, buy a Mexican brand of canned black beans like La Casteño, which have more flavor, or the Ranch brand, which have been cooked with jalapeños.

Here is another great side dish for tacos. The beans have a smoky taste from the bacon and smoked salt that makes them a particularly good match for meaty, northern-style dishes featuring beef, lamb, or pork. These pintos are spicier than black beans because of the jalapeños, and you don’t need to cook them as long—just until they are soft. Serve them in bowls with their juices—a perfect addition to any barbecue menu. They’re also hearty enough to be served alone as a meal.

Guacamole means “sauce made with avocado” and comes from Nahuatl, the pre-Columbian language still spoken in some parts of Mexico: guac—avocado—and mole—a sauce made of more than one chile or ingredient. The best guacamoles are prepared in a stone mortar or molcajete. The chiles and cilantro are ground with lime and salt, and the avocados and tomatoes are mashed in, layering the flavors and creating a coarser, more interesting texture.

“Red or green?” means what color chile sauce do you prefer? It’s the usual question posed to anyone ordering a main course in traditional New Mexican restaurants. This is my version of the favorite cooked green chile sauce served with just about everything in New Mexico and other parts of the Southwest. It pairs well with all kinds of dishes, from eggs to roast beef. Make it hot or hotter by the type of chile you use—up to you. I prefer the fall chiles, roasted when they are turning red from green and a little sweeter.

Perhaps expecting the red-tinged, tasteless, so-called Mexican or Spanish rice you see in most restaurants, guests at Coyote Cafe are pleasantly surprised as soon as they take a forkful of this rice. This is a real trailblazer of a side dish, with plenty of personality. For best results, use a good, fresh, pure chile powder. The rice will keep for 2 to 3 days in the refrigerator.

One herald of fall’s cooler weather in northern New Mexico is the ristra—the strings of ripe, red chiles that hang outside to dry alongside doorways and against brown adobe walls. Once dried, the chiles are stored to use throughout the winter in sauces like this one. This recipe is a classic New Mexican red chile sauce and the perfect stage for a whole range of Southwestern foods or as a base for other, more complex sauces from barbecue sauce to moles to stews.

This sauce is offered at most taco stands throughout Mexico and is probably the one most widely served with tacos. Chile de árbol—literally “treelike”—is searingly hot, with a smoky, grassy flavor, but its heat is tamed slightly in this recipe by the tomatoes. A variation using serranos follows.

This is one of my favorite sauces—it’s simple, but often poorly executed. When it’s done right—the tomatoes and serranos blackened, the onion and garlic sautéed, the sauce gently fried with some cilantro and roasted poblanos—it’s a rustic, vivid, soulful sauce that goes great with eggs, chicken, pork, tamales, and seafood.

Plantains are cooked at all stages of ripeness, but for this recipe, they should be bought and used green for ease in slicing and frying. These chips are great for buffets and go well with tacos with seafood fillings.

This green rice is the side dish that we have used at the Coyote Cantina for over twenty years. Its bright balance of herbs and chiles works well with almost every dish because it is not the usual “red-chile Mexican rice.” It tastes of pureed vegetables and chiles, but doesn’t overpower some of the milder tacos. And as most tacos contain smoky grilled flavors, this rice provides a fresh accent, rather than duplication of what’s already there.

When you want a chile with distinctive flavor and a blast of heat for a salsa with Caribbean roots, the habanero is an obvious choice. It is native to the Caribbean basin, which includes the Yucatán region of Mexico. The flavor of habaneros has tropical overtones that perfectly complement fruit like mangoes and bananas. A little goes a long way—despite its diminutive size, it is the hottest of all chiles available in the United States and Mexico. This salsa makes a great condiment for pork, chicken, or fish.

Here is the recipe used at the Coyote Café. Along with chopped onions, fresh cilantro, salsa tomatillo, and red chile sauce, it’s always offered as a basic condiment with tacos, regardless of whatever special salsa is paired with a particular taco filling. Salsa fresca is used in Mexico like we use ketchup—to wake up plain foods. But salsa fresca is better than ketchup because it is made fresh—ripe tomatoes, a bit of onion for crunch, the heat of green chile, the tang of fresh lime juice, and the refreshing lift of aromatic cilantro.

This recipe highlights the wonderful flavor of the fresh green chiles widely abundant at roadside stands throughout New Mexico during the late summer and all through the fall. Often the chiles are roasted on the spot in hand-turned, butane-fired drums. You can smell the roasting chiles long before you can see them. Just follow your nose to find a vendor, as the air is thick with fiery oils that can clear your head. I look forward to fall in Santa Fe every year mainly because of that nostalgic, pungent and spicy aroma I have come to love.

Shake the small, dried medium-hot cascabel chile, and its seeds rattle (in Spanish, cascabel means rattle). Woodsy and smoky, it is a wonderful choice for this richly flavored salsa made with roasted tomatoes and garlic, toasted pumpkin seeds, and caramelized onion. Good with hearty meats from grilled beef to dark-fleshed game like buffalo.

Why make this versatile sauce yourself instead of buying it already prepared? You’ll get a smokier, more interesting result that’s free of additives and excess amounts of salt and vinegar of the commercial versions. It’s also a great base for other ingredients—tomatillos would be a flavorful addition. Use it in marinades, soups, as part of other sauces, or as a spicy table condiment at a taco party.

Tacos are served at all the Mexican markets for workers and shoppers who want a quick bite, including breakfast, as the markets usually open at sunrise. In the Southwest, small restaurants offer whole menus of breakfast tacos (my favorite, Taco Taco, in San Antonio, Texas, offers fifteen morning choices). And breakfast tacos and burritos have become an increasing familiar option along with bagels and pastries at most major airports in the United States and at the drive-throughs of many national fast-food chains. Not only are these vegetarian tacos a fiery morning wake-up, they’re good anytime as part of a larger meal, particularly alongside grilled or roasted meats or fish.