mango salsa, tortilla chips

Today this was dinner. Actually, it's the only thing I had all day.

I woke up and started running around doing all sorts of things. Right off the bat while exiting the building a very strange appearing lady approached me as if she intended to enter the door I was exiting, and I thought in that moment, "Here we go." She warned me of an imminent storm. She was dressed as a bag lady except her clothes were newer than that. Encouraged by my listening and by my response, she continued conversing. People walked by in groups wearing beads resembling Carnival beads. The lady asked what all the activity was down the block by the library in the direction she was headed. I didn't know. Then she expressed shock at the noise she heard the previous night, the music festival that I already mentioned in the previous post. She said she never heard of such a thing allowed within city limits. I answered it's an annual thing. Then it became immediately obvious there were gay people all over the place, walking in all directions, coming and going, it looked like Castro Street over here. I learned immediately by overhearing an inquiry from another woman who was parking her car to the attendant that the gay pride parade terminated in something huge just two blocks away at the Civic Center, but I didn't even bother to check out the festivities because I was busy with other things. Although I did notice colored chicken feathers here and there on the sidewalks in my neighborhood, like a trail of Hansel and Gretel biscuit crumbs, presumably from colorful feather boas. On the way back home I even noticed a few colored feathers had drifted down into my building's parking level. And you know what that tells you? It tells you those feather boas sure do shed. Or is it molt? 

I came home exhausted and this was confusing, and then I realized I hadn't eaten anything before starting off and then I thought, "You need fuel, you dumb ass." 

These two things are excellent for parties, mango salsa and homemade tortilla chips. The people I entertain really dig these things. I usually have another type of salsa, too, say, pico de gallo (guy-yo -- beak of the rooster, for its peck), some kind of mole, like guacamole, probably the most well known, or hummus. All homemade, of course, or else what would be the point? I'm telling you, and this is no brag, when these things are done well then people really do go nuts. I always make an overabundance, and they are always all gone. 

Mango salsa is simple, just a few ingredients, this version includes pineapple which is not necessary. I decided to Mexican-ify with the customary south-of-the-border spices that I like so well. The cilantro I had on hand was on it's last leg as you can see in the photo, so I used what I could and supplemented with a bit of curly parsley which is not customary, but I did want that touch of chlorophyl. 

This is all shown in previous posts so you're having it now in animated GIF form which necessarily entails lower quality photos. (Incidentally, I took 118 photos as I proceeded with this. See what I do for you?)

This is the mango salsa ↓ starting with the pineapple which is not required for mango salsa. Mangos can be either fresh or frozen. Depending on where you live, frozen can be more reliable. This particular jalapeño pepper happens to be quite hot for a mere  jalapeño, but I did want to include all the membrane that holds the seeds. That is where most of the heat is, in the connective membrane.  You can experiment on this yourself by carefully separating seed from membrane from flesh and taste each one individually. You will  find the seeds are 100% inert, the flesh flavorful but barely hot at all, and most if not all of the heat concentrated in the connecting membrane. FACT !

* Pineapple

* mango

* onion

* jalapeño

* cilantro (coriander leaves)

* powder coriander (seeds)

* powder cumin (seeds) 

* salt / pepper

I've shown this corn tortilla-making process many times ↓. You can skip this whole thing by buying a bag of tortilla chips. They do make very good ones. But I'm telling you what, the chips are simply extraordinary when you make them yourself. Plus it's fun. Alternately, you can buy a bag of whole corn tortilla discs, they're quite inexpensive around these parts, then cut the stack like a big fat pizza, and then shallow fry the triangular chips. I found that different brands behave differently. Some brands are better than others for this sort of thing. Most brands tend to puff up like a balloon when shallow-fried rendering them into two delicate triangles connected at the edges and virtually useless for heavy scooping. 

* equal parts masa harina and hot water. 

Not shown below: the tortilla triangles shallow-fried in oil. 

Oh! I just now realized, you know what my salsa is missing? It's missing LIME! That's what. 

mango salsa

This was dinner. A very very late dinner. For some reason, I wasn't hungry all day long. And then finally it hit me, POW! Hunger that could not be denied. 

A mango salsa is prepared from fresh mango, cucumber, jalapeno peppers, onion and lime.

Masa harina is used to fashion corn tortillas. The tortillas are pan fried to stabilize, cut, then deep fried and seasoned. 

How to cut a fresh mango.

Regard the mango in all its aspects.

Top, where the stem was.

Front

Back, where the sun probably didn't shine directly.

Bottom, standing upright on its head. Note the ovate form. It is not a circle. They never are. This determines the axis of the cut. 

Starting at the bottom, or the top if you wish, attempt to slice downward. The knife will hit the pit located in the center of the mango. The pit is a strange disc-like seed. Now that the knife hit the seed and you've located either the seed's top or its bottom, gently slide the knife to the right of the seed to skid alongside it as close to it as possible. Wouldn't want to waste any precious mango. 

Do the same thing to the other side. 

Laying the seed disc flat, cut around its edges to recover the portion of mango flesh still on the fleshy side of the seed disc. 

Lay the mango strips skin-side down. As if skinning a fish, lay the knife flat and cut immediately on top of the skin holding the knife flat with the work surface. Slice off the entire skin this way. Discard the skin. 

Slice the two halves with the bulk of the mango flesh into strips.

De-skin the strips in the same manner as performed on the strips on both sides of the pit. Like this: ↓ Fun! Except it does gets tedious because there are so man slices to de-skin. 

There. Now all the mango strips are de-skinned.

Dice the mango strips. 

Ta daaaaaa. 

Mangos are iffy. You can never fully trust they will be perfect. An easier, and more reliable way is this: ↓ Frozen. They're quite good, actually. The benefit is that all the rejects are already culled and they last nearly forever as these have. 

Now for the cucumber. Peel and de-seed the cucumber. 

Get rid of those awful seeds. They make you burp. I bet'cha if you planted those seeds, they'd grow. That makes me want to try it. 

Jalapeños. Reasonably hot, low on the Scoville heat scale, flavorful, but one-dimensional, if you ask me. 

Contrary to popular wisdom, the heat of chiles is not in the seeds. The seeds are inert. I know for a FACT ! because I tested chile seeds. Using an X-ACTO blade, I carefully removed the membrane from the hottest chiles on earth then bit them open and held them on my lips and tongue. Nothing. Utterly harmless. However, the membrane that holds the seeds onto the flesh will burn your face off. And then, if you handle these barehanded as I did, then go potty, the capsaicin-laden alkaloids will transfer to everything touched by your fingertips including your tender bits. Washing your hands with soap doesn't get it all off. So heed my warning, unless you like that sort of painful uncertainty, and I sort of do. At any rate, you can control the amount of heat by controlling how much inner membrane you allow into your dish. Here, most of it is removed, but not all of it, and that little bit that remains on the flesh is quite enough to heat the entire bowl of salsa, even though jalapeños are considered kind of mild as far as chiles go. 

See? some membrane is left on.

The onion is diced as you do. I was taught to slice the onion in half from root to tip, then bisect each half. So, quarter the onion so that each segment has two flat surfaces. It is positioned so that half-moon onion rings are showing and available for dissection.  The half-moon rings are carefully cut through from broad end to rounded end, root or tip, laterally, that is with the knife flat with the work surface in a stack working up the onion, slicing through all the rings to produce slabs. This is a two-handed operation, one hand is applying downward pressure on the quartered onion section and the other hand is slicing through flat with the work surface. You can imagine then where hand and knife would intersect without an intervening onion. Worse, the onion gets smaller as the cut completes toward the root or the tip, so the lateral cuts require constant readjustment in pressure to account for the narrowing onion. So one wrong move and WHAP there goes a finger tip. Then few downward slices are made to assure cuts are made through the half moon rings that evaded being cut by virtue of their curved surfaces. You usually see these done perpendicular to the work surface and to the original slices but radially as spokes to the onion's concentric half-wheel makes more sense mathematically. I do not care for this common onion dicing technique. Too unnecessarily dangerous. Instead, I cut off half-moon discs, stack them, then chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, all the way around the half-moon stack as if the knife is the radius of the half-moon rings, until it all falls to diced bits in highly-controlled uniform size. Then repeat that until the entire onion is perfectly diced. I feel more comfortable with this technique, which I developed myself, although it is less efficient, it is safer, more accurate and more ninja-like. 

So there's that. And Man, I am telling you, this mango salsa is delicious. It really is the best salsa ever. The mango-sweetness combined with the coolness and freshness of the cucumber is incredible. Then the piquant onion, here a sweet onion so not nearly as biting as usual, with the capsaicin-heat of jalapeño. The breathy aromatic cilantro as if drawing a minty Happy Face directly into the chopped bits. Then, to paint the lily, gild the already golden, the gentle kiss of citrus lime sends this simple dish, much more simple than this photo set belies, right over the top and over the edge. Zoooooom. 

You know what this needs? Chips, that's what.

These chips are made fresh tonight, and they will be made fresh tomorrow too. Fresh fresh freshy-fresh. The freshest chips around. 

1/2 cup masa harina is dumped into a bowl. That same cup is filled with hot water, but not all of it is used. But you never know for sure. So it's available. 

The powder took almost all the water. There is about 1/8 cup water left in the little metal cup.

I could tell by rolling the balls that the mixture was slightly too dry. Had I used all the water then it would probably have been slightly too wet. Wet masa balls smash more easily than dry masa balls, but they are more difficult to peel off the plastic intact. So I left them dry. That resulted in thicker tortillas than usual, but that was okay with me. They'd be sturdier for carrying salsa. 

Flatten with your hand, and fix the edges before smashing. 

Smash, open, rotate 1/4 turn, close, smash, open, rotate 1/4 turn, close, smash, open, rotate 1/4 turn, close, smash, open, rotate 1/4 turn, close, smash, open. Peel off plastic, flip, peel off other side of plastic. Fry. 

I watched a few videos on YouTube and the ladies doing this skip the frying step. That one day when I skipped this frying step, the chips dissolved in the hot oil when I deep-fried the raw masa segments. So I've been frying them first ever since then. For I am a careful sort of chap. 

Smash, open, rotate 1/4 turn, close, smash, open, rotate 1/4 turn, close, smash, open, rotate 1/4 turn, close, smash, open, rotate 1/4 turn, close, smash, open. Peel off plastic, flip, peel off other side of plastic. Fry.

Smash, open, rotate 1/4 turn, close, smash, open, rotate 1/4 turn, close, smash, open, rotate 1/4 turn, close, smash, open, rotate 1/4 turn, close, smash, open. Peel off plastic, flip, peel off other side of plastic. Fry.

Smash, open, rotate 1/4 turn, close, smash, open, rotate 1/4 turn, close, smash, open, rotate 1/4 turn, close, smash, open, rotate 1/4 turn, close, smash, open. Peel off plastic, flip, peel off other side of plastic. Fry.

Smash, open, rotate 1/4 turn, close, smash, open, rotate 1/4 turn, close, smash, open, rotate 1/4 turn, close, smash, open, rotate 1/4 turn, close, smash, open. Peel off plastic, flip, peel off other side of plastic. Fry. Done. 

Five masa balls smashed and fried into five corn tortillas, cut all at once into six chips each = thirty tortilla chips. 

MATHS !

Boy, that's not very many tortilla chips, is it? That's okay. I'll keep everything out and do it again tomorrow. 

This time I seasoned the chips with coriander, for I love it so, and garlic powder, because, eh, and kosher salt. So the chips are really loaded up with season-y goodness. 

mango salsa, bison steak

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mung bean crackers, mango salsa

As stated, I'm all about sauces now. Crackers without sauce? Inconceivable!

Salsa = sauce, gravy, dressing, relish.

Incidentally, "mole" mo-lay, also means sauce, mole being the generic name for several different sauces, the most famous containing chocolate. It's Mexican Spanish from a Nahautl word for concoction. It could just as easily be called "brown sludge" because that's what I always see, no matter how delicious.

Mango salsa:

Mango chopped finely
diced onion also chopped finely
grated fresh ginger
lime, but I got no lime, so I used lemon
cilantro
mint
scant 1/4 teaspoon sugar
scant 1/8 teaspoon cumin
my house mix of Brittany sea-salt/tellicherry peppercorn, and cayenne pepper.

Now how 'bout that? Mint and cilantro. Wow! Is that stuff ever good. I want MOAR!

I went to the bulk bins at Whole Foods and rummaged around for odd grains. I love those bins but I must admit to being a little bit disappointed with my local Whole Foods. They seem big on rices. I was looking specifically for triticale, a cross between rye and two types of wheat. Blasphemy! Frankenfoods! Genetically manipulated! Oh wait. We've been doing that in slow motion for millennia. Never mind then, all is well. I see Triticale on Amazon in grain form, flour and flakes. But all that makes me wonder, as far as crackers go, how different could it be from just mixing rye with wheat?

I was also looking for teff but the neighborhood WF is also teff-less.

I bought Quinoa flour (keen-wah). After I bagged the flour I then noticed the grain. I'd prefer the grain and mill it myself. Flax flour, azuki beans (red, Japanese) and mung beans (green Chinese) and something else. Oh yeah, kemet wheat grain.

The kemet surprised me. The grains are huge. I figured they'd be tiny considering it's an earlier version of wheat. Egyptian wheat. Not like spelt or anything, actual genetic wheat. The size of the grain makes me think it's a modern hybrid version of the earlier grain. You know how they do, to make each grain stalk more productive.

Did you know Kemet is the Egyptian word for Egypt? Well it is. Trust me, I know these things. Imagine, naming Egyptian wheat grain "Egypt." Why, the audacity! Here lemme break it down for ya, it goes like this: I drew that myself. The zig-zaggy thing is a piece of crocodile skin. It stands for the consonant sounds "k-m." The owl means a lot of things but here it stands for the consonant "m." This type of redundancy is characteristic of hieroglyphic writing. It's reaffirming the m in k-m, not repeating the sound. You just have to know when the letter is repeated and when it's not. The little half circle stands for the sound "t." It is supposed to represent a loaf of bread, in fact, it's first in category X, loaves and cakes, in Gardiner's list of Egyptian signs. Just to show you how fundamentally it's thought to be bread. But I dispute that categorization. That's right, I said it. I dispute the sainted Gardiner whom every English-speaking Egyptologists who followed has studied and at whose feet they worshiped. Here's why I am so bold. The sound t is indeed used for the word bread, in fact, that is the word, t, probably with some unknown vowel either in front of or behind it, and so it's used quite often because bread figures so broadly in offerings, and offerings figure so importantly in Egyptian life, but the sign itself never does represent bread pictorially in art. All the other bread signs that follow in Gardiner's category X, also pronounced t, do appear pictographically in art, not just in words. As hieroglyphics blend into art painted on walls and on papyrus, and chiseled in stone, you could expect the sign to at least be stacked up with all the other breads on the offering tables, but it never is. Moreover, color is also a symbol. Egyptians had three types of black and all three types mean different things. One type blending into blue, means something entirely different from the shiny jet black of the universe void. And those two mean something different still from the soft flat matt black of the Egyptian mud. In Egyptian painting, when all the colors are used, which isn't always, that sign is inevitably painted black. Not a toasty bread-brown, but black. And not just any ol' black either, the dull flat black of mud. The color that tends to fall off the walls and leave a blank spot that sometimes appears unpainted. This group of signs for Egypt, k-m-t, means "the Black Land" and that t is colored the black of Egypt itself. The Red Land refers to the desert. So. that little half circle, I believe, does not represent bread at all, rather, it represents a mud mound. The type of mound one can reasonably expect to appear as the annual flooding recedes, a welcome sight indeed. The primordial mound. Nobody knows what the vowels are that go in-between the consonants so it's anybody's guess. Generally guessers guess "e" except in those cases where a better guess is available through some other cross reference. The full circle with the cross in it that looks like a wagon wheel means "town," or "city," or "state." It's a determinative sign meaning "a named place." It is not pronounced. So there you have it. Kemet means Egypt in the ancient Egyptian language.

I milled all those grains and beans including the kemet one at a time in the Nutrimill. I'm a little self-conscious using that thing when people are around because it sounds like a gigantic vacuum cleaner. Whiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiirrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. It takes a long time to wind down and then sounds like a jet aircraft when the milling chamber is empty. Now I have bags of all kinds of off-the-wall grains to experiment with making crackers.

These are mostly mung bean crackers and they're, er, a little bit different.

I love them. Not everybody will.

2 cups mung bean flour
1 cup brown rice flour
1 cup white A/P flour
1/2 cup vegetable oil
pile of cilantro
4 tablespoons soy sauce
3 tablespoons Sriacha sauce
3 tablespoons honey
2 tablespoons toasted sesame seed oil
2 level tablespoons wasabi powder (the harsh fake kind)
1 level teaspoon baking powder
1 cup water.

This produced a sticky dark green mess that bogged down the processor and required adjustment. I added another handful of A/P flour and 1/3 cup more water on the work table. Abandoned the processor and kneaded the mass there on the work surface.

The first tray was a little bland for my taste. Insufficiently salty, insufficiently hot. The following trays I sprinkled liberally my house S/P/C mixture. and pressed it in with the rolling pin. That fixed it nicely.

The crackers forfeit their lovely green color through baking.

The aromatic quality of cilantro, so outstanding fresh, all but disappears when baked.

I thought maybe last time the wasabi was undetectable in the crackers because it was added to the surface of the crackers without being moistened first. So this time I doubled the amount and mixed it in with the dough. Two full even tablespoons full for four cups of flour and it is still barely detectable. I did catch faint glimpses of it, and I'm sort of glad it wasn't much stronger because it doesn't add much that is pleasant to the finished cracker. It tends to dominate the profile of anything it flavors or otherwise warp it unpleasantly. I'm glad the bulk of the flour held it in check by deadening it. I don't think I'll use it again. (Except maybe if I fell like it.)

I over baked the first tray. Threw out about 1/3 the tray. Took me by surprise there how fast they cooked. Boy, you gotta watch those things because they go: Not cooked. Not cooked. Not cooked. Cookedburnt. Just like that.

The first cracker was disappointing. But then the flavor developed in my mouth after it was gone and I was soon craving another one. Then another, and another. They don't hit you as super duper right off but they sure do grow on you. This became my dinner -- mung bean crackers and mango salsa. I abandoned my original idea for dinner and settled for this. I couldn't be more satisfied.