Cookbooks

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.

The green tomatillo has a bright sharp flavor akin to that of green plums or rhubarbs. In the winter months, when it’s sometimes hard to get fresh red tomatoes, I use tomatillos, which are available all year. This sauce makes the ideal cool counterpart to spicy salsas. The unusual addition of ice keeps the cilantro green when pureed with the other ingredients.

Bacon, red chile, and honey are a heavenly combination that I first tried in Santa Fe. I had found a really delectable red chile honey made in the Taos area of northern New Mexico. The combination of sweet, aromatic honey and earthy piquant red chile is a wonderful marriage that enhances both. You can make your own version: add a good fresh red chile powder or puree of fresh red chiles to a wild honey that isn’t too sweet. For these tacos, buy the best quality bacon you can find—it will make a huge difference in taste. For a more authentic Mexican flavor, you can substitute guava jam for the honey.

Spicy breakfast foods are the norm in Latin America or Asia, but not in the United States. I have always liked a spicy breakfast, finding that bland, starchy choices like bagels, toast, or pastries with sugar tend to make me sort of sleepy in the morning. This taco filling is another simple version of spicy scrambled eggs and would also make a great omelet when you don’t want tacos. Dry-roasting the jalapeños gives the dish a heady, smoky quality and cuts the richness of the eggs. A natural cream cheese would be another tasty accompaniment, with smoked salmon slices for garnish.

Chorizo was one of the first dishes that I learned to cook at home, prompted by a longing for it after visiting Mexico as a youth, where it was usually served for breakfast with eggs. No more dried, tough, salty bacon for me. I was a chorizo convert, and I was determined to have it for breakfast. While there were good local Mexican markets at the time, I found a simple recipe for chorizo in a Mexican cookbook of my mother’s (which I still have almost fifty years later). That homemade chorizo became our Sunday morning ritual. I measured out all the spices—the chile powders, the canela, the cumin, and other seasonings—and added them to the pan along with fresh ground pork. I stirred the mixture slowly, keeping it moist, until it was ready. Breakfast had become exciting again! For this filling, I prefer chorizo that has not been ground too fine and with plenty of fat. You can add additional spices and seasonings like red chile powder or roasted fresh green jalapeños to it while cooking to enhance or alter flavors.

These knife-and-fork (not grab-and-go) egg tacos can be found on almost every breakfast menu in New Mexico and the southwestern United States, and throughout Mexico. They’re called huevos divorciados—“divorced eggs”—because the eggs are “separated” by their chile sauces, green spooned on one, red on the other. Chorizo or bacon is a nice addition. Two tortillas and two eggs make one serving.

In Mexico, slow-cooked meats like this are sometimes first wrapped in maguey leaves (from the maguey cactus), which are not available here. In this recipe, the rabbit is braised in aluminum foil with the fresh green aromatics of cilantro and mint, the earthiness of garlic, the tartness of tomatillos, and the heat of jalapeños. The recipe also works well with chicken thighs. Buy the same amount as rabbit and cook as directed here, but remove the skin from the thighs and check sooner for doneness, as they might finish in less time.

If you are in a rush and don’t want to make the Ranchero Sauce, buy a jar of roasted red chile salsa, drain off the liquid, and use what remains. Scramble the eggs over low heat, turning them gently with a wooden spatula or spoon. If the eggs turn white while cooking, the pan is too hot. The chopped cilantro adds bursts of fresh green, herbaceous flavors. For a more robust and traditional finish, squeeze fresh lime juice on the eggs when they are almost finished cooking.

This is a very simple taco, common throughout Mexico, that I ate at whatever local market was nearby on almost all of my mornings there. It was always accompanied by copious amounts of orange juice freshly squeezed with a portable juicer at a neighboring street cart. They are a great way to start a day and one of my longtime favorites. Consider this recipe a tasty base for ingredients—whatever sounds good to you. Green chile powder is a nice addition, as is chipotle powder.

Buffalo was (and still is) the primary game meat of the American Indians of the Southwest pueblos. They either hunted buffalo or, if they were an agrarian society like most pueblo tribes, they traded corn and other supplies for buffalo jerky and buffalo skins. Originally, there were over 60 million buffalo or bison roaming the continental United States from the Northwest all the way to Virginia. But by the 1920s, they were almost extinct from overhunting, with only 1,200 left. Fortunately, they have been brought back through effort and careful husbandry, and there are many suppliers of buffalo meat today. When planning my fall menus, I always include buffalo and pair it with local New Mexican fruits like our excellent apples from the Velarde Valley. Any high-quality buffalo sausage will work for this recipe, or substitute a game or lamb sausage.

A great game meat, elk is more flavorful than deer and not as dry as ostrich. At Coyote Café, elk is a signature dish of chef and partner Eric Destefano, who I say makes the best elk dish in the United States—very juicy and not at all gamy. The trick is to marinate the meat, cook it rare, and let it sit for awhile before slicing. When purchasing elk tenderloin, be sure to have your butcher trim off all the silver skin. If you cannot find elk, axis deer can be substituted (see Sources, page 167). Sautéed wild mushrooms, such as morels, are a nice accompaniment.

The meat from the shank is the tastiest part of the lamb. As lamb is a grazing animal and stands probably 90 percent of the time, the leg muscles get more developed and flavorful. Braised meats take a little more time to cook, but not much time to prepare. They’re really very simple and almost foolproof, and the end result is really luscious, flavorful meat. It takes a little longer, but you get the best results if you cook them at as low an oven temperature as possible—around 200°F. Serve these tacos with this richly flavored filling during the colder months, when appetites yearn for something earthy and substantial. Shredding the meat along the grain produces pieces that better retain both moisture and flavor. The meat is best eaten the day it is cooked. Place the meat back in the sauce to reheat.

The “aha!” moment when I thought to combine porcini and grilled beef with chiles came to me in Argentina, home of the world’s best grilled beef. Specifically, I was in Mendoza, the capital of Argentina’s wine country and settled by Italian immigrants in the nineteenth century—probably why beef with porcinis is such a common pairing there. This dish is delicious prepared outdoors over a wood-fired grill, but you can also cook it stovetop on a cast-iron griddle or ridged grill pan. Look for porcini powder at specialty food stores or buy dried porcinis and grind them yourself in a spice grinder.

I lived in Morocco for a time in the mid-1970s studying textiles as part of my anthropology training. While there, I learned to cook with the full array of the expressive, aromatic spices of the Moroccan kitchen. Cumin is one of the most important and widely used of these spices, and I find that its pungent, woodsy aroma gives most meat dishes a “meatier” or “gamier” flavor that I like. Cumin is also widely used in Tex-Mex cooking for the same effect. This brine will work for up to double the amount of meat called for here. When making a brine, use a five-to-one ratio of sugar to salt, which works well for twenty-four-hour brines such as this one. For a North African accent, garnish the tacos with grated carrots, chopped fresh mint leaves, and quartered cherry tomatoes. Look for cinnamon oil in the baking and candy-making sections of well-stocked specialty food stores or online.

These smoky, wonderfully juicy tacos mix two great culinary traditions—Mexican and Texas barbecue, both notable for their intense, but subtle seasoning. In the United States, the cooking of the Old West was heavily influenced by the charros (Mexican cowboys) who cooked over open fires that infused meat with a smoky essence that so many of us find addictive. In Texas, the wood both of choice and necessity is mesquite, usually mixed with oak to soften the hard green tones of the mesquite. This recipe is easy to do, but requires some advance planning, as the brisket must sit in its rub overnight, and a little patience during the slow cooking. But the results are some of the best tasting barbecue that you have ever eaten. Buy fresh, not prepackaged, brisket that isn’t overly fatty—the fat should cover no more than one-third of its surface. Or, you can buy the leaner, thinner end, if you prefer. A piquant cabbage slaw makes a good accompaniment.

Tongue—la lengua, in Spanish—is a very popular food in Mexico, especially in the central and northern parts of the country, where good grazing land supported a large ranching culture. On ranches, most prime cuts are sold to markets, and the lesser cuts, like tongue, are cooked for the ranch hands. The use of tongue and other secondary cuts of meat, often overlooked, is at the core of peasant cooking. Made rich with brines, marinades, chiles, complex spice mixtures, and rich accompanying sauces, these preparations are some of the most flavorful in all of Latin American cuisine. Tongue is naturally succulent, but needs slow cooking to become really tender and luscious. The flavor is pretty neutral, so this filling has lots of additions to spice it up. A bright salsa is the finishing touch, much like the hot spicy-sweet mustard that was slathered on the tongue sandwiches that I used to eat at my old neighborhood delicatessens.

Be sure to purchase the meatiest short ribs available, without too much fat. They should be thick-cut, 1- or 2-bone size, about 4 inches long, and almost 2 1/2 inches thick. As an interesting alternative to beef, you could try buffalo short ribs. Either way, be sure the meat is fresh and bright red. For the richest, most succulent short ribs, seek out a premium butcher shop where they sell prime beef short ribs, which will have an amazing marbling of fat. Cook over the lowest temperature possible, always below a simmer (you’ll see evaporation, but no movement of liquid) until the meat is ultra-tender and falling off the bone. The flavors here are sweet-and-sour Latino, matched well by your favorite dark beer. Caramelized onions make a hearty winter garnish, and very thinly sliced red onions are a fine partner in the summer.

This is a very rustic, traditional recipe created for its portability. The charros, the nomadic first cowboys of Mexico and the American Southwest, traveled by horseback far from home so their food was limited to simple choices like jerky that stayed fresh on the trail. You’ll find a wide variety of commercially prepared dried beef and buffalo jerky available today, including ones flavored with chiles. Be sure to use an all-natural, preservative-free jerky with consistent color that is fresh and flexible and packaged in an airtight bag. Jerky can be rehydrated directly in boiling water, but most of the flavor will be lost in the water. A tamale steamer or vegetable steamer works well for this process.

The first time I had these tacos was as a teenager on a working ranch owned by family friends outside of Guadalajara. A cadre of cooks from the same family—grandmother, mother, daughter—ran the kitchen. I was fascinated by how they used a comal set over a wood fire to dry-roast the tomatoes. I had never seen tomatoes cooked that way, nor had I ever stood before a live fire in a kitchen, with its bright, dancing flames and the crackling of the wood. The smoky, earthy atmosphere of that kitchen permeated the sauce made with supersweet tomatoes, vibrant onions and garlic, fiery chiles, and aromatic cilantro—so different from any other tomato sauce I’d ever eaten, such a different world of flavors and techniques. That day was one of the transformational moments in my cooking life.

This favorite of American households is the usual “starter” taco served at schools, airports, and drive-ins, and undoubtedly what most of us picture when we think of tacos. It’s the familiar fried folded corn tortilla shell layered with shredded iceberg or romaine lettuce, piquant fresh tomato salsa, and a cumin-flavored ground beef filling topped with grated cheese—but this one is so much tastier. As with any taco served in a crispy shell, fill and eat it right away or it will get soggy. Try to buy a high-quality ground beef, preferably pure ground chuck with a 25 to 30 percent fat content. Less expensive hamburger grinds will work fine, but they won’t be as flavorful or juicy.