Sopa Seca

I first encountered this recipe in the Cook’s Illustrated cookbook The Quick Recipe. This has become one of our favorite dishes. Sopa Seca is essentially a Mexican casserole, based on pasta or sometimes rice. The pasta or the rice is browned before being combined with liquid and other ingredients and baked.

The recipe we like is made with pasta. Traditionally, the pasta used is fideo, a coiled vermicelli (sometimes fideo also refers to a dish similar to sopa seca.) I just use gluten free spaghetti. Tinkyada is the best brand that I have found.

The browning of the pasta was a surprising technique to me at first. (It also freaks out anyone who may be in the kitchen with you when you are cooking). It adds a rich nutty flavor that stands up nicely to the other strong flavors in the dish.

Browning the pasta

It works best to brown the pasta a handful at a time, so that you have more control. It can go from brown to burnt quickly. As each batch browns, transfer it to a baking dish.

All the browned pasta

Once all of the pasta is browned, you can use the same skillet to saute the onions and spices (cumin and chipotles). After a few minutes I add beans and veggies (in this case spinach and shredded zucchini, or sometimes broccoli chopped small) to make this a one dish meal. Then in goes the liquid that will cook the pasta, in my case veggie broth and the liquid from the tomatoes. Once it’s come up to bubbling, carefully pour the whole thing over the browned pasta.

Black beans, onions, garlic, chipotles, cumin, tomatoes, and shredded zuccini

You just have to have faith when you brown the pasta in the first step, and you just have to hang in there for the next part as well. When you pour the broth and veggies over the pasta, all of the veggies and the beans just kind of sit on top of the still hard noodles. It really doesn’t seem like it’s going to work at all.

The hot onion bean and tomato mixture goes over the noodles

After it’s been in the oven for 15 minutes or so, the liquid is absorbed by the noodles. When you give it a stir, you can see that the noodles are soft.

The pasta has cooked

Once the pasta has softened, you top the whole thing with some shredded cheddar or Monterey jack (pepper jack if you fell like having a really spicy dish), and return it to the oven for another five minutes. Creamy, spicy and delicious, I like this with some cilantro, avocado, a little sour cream and a big squeeze of lime juice. Make a big batch, it reheats nicely.

Tempeh and Black Bean Chili

I had all of the ingredients on hand yesterday, so I decided to make another one of my favorite recipes from How to Cook Everything Vegetarian by Mark Bittman: Tempeh Chili with Black Beans. Since trying it a little less than a year ago, it has absolutely become my favorite chili recipe, I haven’t made any other kind. One of the key elements is well browned tempeh. I also prefer to use one that is all soy and in particular I like SoyBoy for it’s firm and dense texture (some tempeh brands have grain in them, which are great but not as good in this recipe) . Instead of crumbling, as the recipe suggests, I chop it into tiny squares roughly the same size as the black beans, which I think make for a better texture.

Very Brown Tempeh

The foundation is some seriously browned chopped onions which make for a terrific back bone, which is later echoed by the addition of roasted garlic. The recipe calls for chopped carrots, but I’ve expanded that to include equal amounts chopped carrot, celery and red bell pepper. I’ve made this with canned beans when I was short on time, but I do think it is much better with dried soaked beans. The heat is supplied not only through the traditional chili powder (mine is mild, just a touch of heat) but also with chipotles in adobo.

Chipotles, Minced to a Paste

To go with the chili I made All Purpose Cornbread from the January 2005 issue of Cook’s Illustrated which has become my one and only cornbread recipe. This recipe surprised me a bit with it’s components. Honestly I guess I don’t know much about cornbread, being a New Englander and making it from a package for most of my life. Buttermilk is the liquid which adds a nifty tang. Blending thawed frozen or fresh corn kernels really boosts the corn flavor. However I cut back on the butter a bit in the recipe and I add just a wisper of maple syrup for sweetner. I also use more baking powder, since my previous favorite recipe used quite a bit more than you’d expect (6 tsps) and I think that it gives it a nicer texture and height. Baked up in a pyrex dish, it has a lovely chewy bit of crust on the outside.

Both the chili and the cornbread reheat beautifully and are terrific leftovers.

Cooking the chili

A small Flickr set is here.

My next chili experiments will be with modifying white chili to a vegetarian dish. This is apparently a southwestern US favorite. It’s similar to what most of us think of as chili, minus the tomatoes and the heat being supplied by an assortment of green chilies.