Bubbling green goodness

[mrissa]

This week my steady time came on Tuesday, and I used part of it to go out to the garden to harvest tomatillos, since I'd heard we were due for a frost Tuesday night/Wednesday morning. I don't think we got one here in Eagan, so there may be more tomatillos when markgritter goes to pull the plants out. It was still trying to grow more. Still, I got hundreds of the little suckers.

For those of you who have never dealt with fresh tomatillos: the part you eat looks very much like a little green tomato, but it comes in a papery sort of wrapping. Either this makes them less prone to being bug-gnawed and worm-bitten and squirrel-stolen than tomatoes, or else the local fauna isn't as familiar or as fond, because I've had far fewer problems that way with tomatillos than with tomatoes. Anyway, once you pull off the papery wrapping, the tomatillo is sticky and often has black specks on it from where the original blossom withered against the fruit. This washes off the surface of the fruit in warm water, but it takes more effort than most vegetable washing, and it leaves the hands terribly sticky. The soaps we have took several washings to get rid of tomatillo stickiness until I made the happy discovery that tomatillo juice cuts the stickiness beautifully.

So. Peel off the papery husk, scrub the surface, set on the cutting board, repeat until cutting board is full. Then halve all the tomatillos and put the halves flat side down on a foil-lined cookie sheet. Add cloves of garlic still in their paper. Stick under the broiler until the tomatillo skins start to blacken (for my broiler, about 9 minutes). Wait for everything to cool enough to be handled. Peel the roasted garlic and put the cloves in the blender. Scoop up the roasted tomatillos and put those in the blender, too. Blend.

At this point, what you have is the base for a chili verde, and everybody in my house really likes chili verde. In theory I should have nearly five chili verde base batches in the freezer, but what I have is four, plus a little container in the fridge. That little container will be reheated and dubbed "lunch," because the main hazard to this whole process is not the amount of time it will take or how sticky your hands will get but how incredibly good roasted tomatillos pureed with roasted garlic will smell. Oh man. I have just barely managed to keep myself from licking the blender lid clean with my tongue. (I used a spoon. And then I thought of the time Grandpa reached the limits of what his spoon could accomplish at Rice Paper with their peanut sauce and stuck his finger straight in the bowl, mortifying Grandma and delighting me. So then I used my finger, too.) I know it's not really soup--it doesn't have any broth or water, no oil, no...no anything, really. Just tomatillos and garlic. Except that is apparently all I need.

At any moment, contractors should be showing up to do some more drywall and/or insulation-related things to the impending bathroom in the basement. I will be glad when all this is over and I don't have to think about letting people into my house and can schedule workouts and writing time and various other life things without worrying about whether I will be in actual pajamas when strangers want into my home. (I mostly sleep and work out in very large T-shirts, under which I can put a pair of soccer shorts or jeans and call it good, but I have some actual nightshirts, which strike me as not really okay under the circumstances.)

And there's the doorbell. So there's progress there, too.

Comments

[aedifica]

Do you mind my asking a question like this? And here is that question: when you have your steady time, do you know at the beginning of it that you'll be steady for a while, or do you just know minute by minute that you're steady right then?

The tomatillos-and-garlic sound delicious.

Has it really been ...

[freelikebeer.livejournal.com]

a year since the last tomatillo-harvest-and-cooking. It feels like only four months ago.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

The wondrous thing about this new once-every-six-days steadiness is that it's fairly predictable. It shows up in the afternoon or early evening once every six days, and it has never lasted less than three hours. When it's done, it's done rather suddenly, but at this point I'm thinking about doing something like going for a walk at the beginning of it, when I'm pretty sure that I'm not near the end of it.

(Scared timprov a bit, though, because he wandered out of his room to tell me something and found me nowhere in the house, looked out the window and couldn't see me in the garden because I was wearing a dark brown sweater similar to the wood timber color, and wondered where on earth I had gotten myself to, and why, and how.)

[halfmoon-mollie.livejournal.com]

mmmm...not all that familiar with tomatillos, but this even SOUNDS delicious.

[ckd]

Reading this is making me hungry, and I had a good lunch!

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

Nomnomnom.

Also, if you have hominy-eaters, posole is a good use for tomatillos.

If you don't have hominy-eaters, though, they may become snarky about the waste of lovely green things.

[gaaldine.livejournal.com]

We had really good tomatillo-ing recently, too.

You can buy them at Wal-Mart here.

*sigh* Wal-Mart. I can't believe I shop at Wal-Mart.

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

I was wondering too. It will be interesting to see how further progress works - if longer steady periods come first, or more frequent ones.

As long as progress comes, I guess.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I am myself a hominy-eater, but I don't think we'll be anywhere near sick of chili verde before we're out of tomatillos, so I'm not sure I'll get to it.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

When my aunt Kathy worked at WalMart Optical, my mother and I had a ritual call-and-response whenever she had to bring up WalMart:

"There's no point to going down Thursday because WalMart--"
"I Hate WalMart."
"I Hate WalMart. --has her working late that night, so by the time she gets home it'll be too late to do anything. So we might as well go down Friday morning. And then WalMart--"
"I Hate WalMart."
"I Hate WalMart. --doesn't have her working again until Sunday, so we'll have two good days at least."

But at least you can get tomatillos there, which is more than I expected.

[reveritas.livejournal.com]

Which one of you was the "I Hate" insister? You or your mom? ;) (Pretty sure I can guess ...)

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Oh, no, that was just a sample dialog. It was mutual. In the sample dialog it was me. But I could easily have written another sample where it was my mom.

It's sort of like the joke about how you can tell Lutherans at a Star Wars screening, because every time someone says, "The Force be with you," they mutter, "and also with you," reflexively.

[gaaldine.livejournal.com]

The joke would also work with Catholics.

I read the earlier anecdote as you and your mom taking turns with the "I hate Wal-Mart"s.

In its defense, Wal-Mart is pr'bly the only place in town where we *could* buy tomatillos. *sigh*

Thankfully, we found some of our favorite veggie crumbles at Target. But I must admit neither of us automatically thought to go looking for veggie crumble at *Target*.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

It is a non-Super Target? Just Target? Gosh.

[gaaldine.livejournal.com]

Just Target. This is a strange land.

[brooksmoses]

I recently had occasion to try this -- "occasion" being that I was at the local Mexican grocery getting essentials, as it's right around the block from tiger_spot's, and noticed they had tomatillos and so bought a bagful -- and it was, indeed, very quite tasty. We ended up making a sort of chicken chili verde with it, and there's a jar of the remainder in the fridge waiting for me to return.

Thank you for the suggestion!

[brooksmoses]

Now that I've gotten around to trying out the roasted tomatillos, this idea of a soup with them and hominy sounds really tasty. Any suggestions for a recipe? What I'm finding with Google seems to be a quite wide range indeed.