Shredded chicken thigh, pork chili, tortillas, refried beans, Spanish rice

1/3 Cup warm water

2 Tablespoons butter

1 Cup flour

1/4 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon baking powder

The dough is kept wet and soft and oily. 

I watched a video on refried beans that took hours, with overnight soaking of hard pinto beans.

These are Anasazi beans, sort of a protopinto bean. These are cooked with salt in a pressure cooker for 1/2 hour and blended with emersion blender. Two entirely different techniques with the same result. With a mere teaspoon brown sugar added the beans actually taste like candy, and blended it looks like chocolate pudding. It is a bit too sweet.

Pork chili, French fried potatoes

This is the pork roast that was braised earlier to desiccation. The roast was brined and it released its liquid into the pot to mix with the intense flavors there, cranberries and ginger, so now discs are cut from the dried roast and cooked back in its original liquid. Shredded, it absorbs the liquid like a mop. Flavored with onion and various chiles in vegetable and powder forms. And Man is it hot. 

Pork and rice omelet

Basil from the heroic three month old grocery store plant shown here.

Pork chile shown earlier here and many more times since.

Masa cooked earlier for tamale eggrolls here.

Rice and peas as a side for a steak earlier here and a few times since.

Grated Italian cheese from  ...  the store, silly.

Two eggs from the cloacae of two separate female chickens but I'm trying not to visualize that, darn it, just did. 

Pork chili, saffron rice, scrambled egg

I plated this wrongly. It is not a huge mound as it appears. That is wrong. It is two mounds, rice and scrambled egg, with pork chili spilled out between them. I should have poured out the chili onto the plate then went boink boink with the mounds. 

The rice has saffron threads dispersed in heated butter and then doused with white wine. It took a few minutes and another douse for all that to completely stain the rice.

The eggs are so close to sauce that they barely stack and they shimmer like gelatin when the plate is touched. They are so light and evanescent without being foamy that they are barely recognizable as scrambled eggs. When you see what the eggs have become you go, "whoa." When you taste them you are transported. 

The method to achieving extraordinary scrambled eggs is a tightly held secret that only us magician-types can perform. It takes years of practice so just forget about even trying. Although, a few rogue chefs, like Gordon Ramsey have revealed the secret method on YouTube. Don't watch the videos, they will only hurt you. And this is not reverse psychology either. And I am not a fibber.

Did I ever tell you of the morning I discovered how to lie? It was a momentous occasion. 

Scrambled eggs, pork chili

It is a delicate flower that buds all month and blooms an hour.

I dislike those kind of flowers. But evanescence is not so bad with scrambled eggs unless you are an MRE developer or something. Silky and light as an airy sauce but more substantial than that. Whipped with cold butter and finished with sour cream -- fat and acid -- just like a sauce, except sturdier than that. Heavier than a souffle, denser than meringue, lighter than an omelet, weightier than synthetic sponge but lighter than a steel gauntlet and more buoyant than a sack of nickels.

Pork with green chiles from before. 

The idea is to shred the pork but I did not do that. I liked the cubes too much to go around smashing them to bits. But later at the table, just pressing down steadily on a pork cube with the back of a fork smashes it to smithereens quite satisfyingly. So shouldn't that be an enjoyment left for the diner? Leave something to play with. Then push the smashed cube around and it <begin sound effect> slurps <end sound effect> up the sauce.

Pork chili

Pork chile using tinned mild green chiles and various other pantry items. Homemade flour tortillas using both AP and WW flours with lard. Lard? Yes, lard. For soft and puffy tortillas totalmente auténtico.

This is the pork shoulder from yesterday with one of the strips removed from the package. 

The remaining strips are cut into cubes. The cubes are salted and browned on each side in three batches. There is enough pork to nearly fill the largest pot. I think it is the largest pot, I never actually measured. 

Most of the fat is removed from the pot but not all of it. The following flavors are included in unmeasured amounts that seemed to be right for this quantity of pork without overdoing it. 

* three large garlic cloves, smashed

* fresh sage

* sea salt

* black peppercorns

* Mexican oregano

* whole coriander seeds

* whole cumin seeds

* whole fennel seeds

* house mixed dry chile flakes

White wine halts the frying action on the garlic and lifts off the fond stuck on the bottom of the pan from frying three batches of pork cubes. Something different this time: vinegar. The liquid in the pot is now officially a dressing. Water is added to the top of the pile of pork cubes. The liquid is brought to a boil, the heat cut back to low. The pot covered to simmer and the pork left to braise.

Pork cooks a lot faster than beef. 

ARTS !

The broth was tasted after the inclusion of the whole green chiles in the large can. The two cans of chiles on the left, serano and chipoltes, were not included. Those would increase the capsaicin quotient significantly but they were deemed unnecessary. This is a very large pot of chile. A number of options are still available if along the way a hotter chile is desired for whatever purpose. See? Now that there is maturity -- leaving open options. 

The cooked pork cubes are shredded with a fork. 

The finished chile is good but fairly simple. Another bag of sun-dried dried tomatoes is included doubling the amount of tomatoes. This bag is smoked sun-dried tomatoes which alters the flavor of the whole pot slightly. A tin of corn is included as well. This is the first time that I ever put corn in green chile, and the first time in my life I ever used corn from a tin. I wanted it out of the pantry. It's not at all bad. A few tablespoons of masa harina is whisked into the liquid to thicken the broth slightly from a water consistency and to impart its uniquely Mexican aroma. 

So that is it for the chile. It is quite good, addictive actually. It is impossible to have just one bowl. 

Flour tortillas are fashioned from 1 cup AP flour with 1/3 WW flour, 1 rounded tablespoon lard, 1 rounded teaspoon baking powder, 1/2 teaspoon sea salt, 3/4 cup warm water. The dough is torn into golf ball size wads and rolled immediately one at a time as they are quickly fried in an un-oiled cast iron pan. To keep the tortillas soft, they are fried less than 1 minute. 

I just now realized I totally spaced the onion. Oh well. I didn't even miss it. Diced onion can be added as condiment at any time.