Homesick Texan in October

As October drew dangerously close to ending this past week, I knew I needed to deliver a Homesick Texan recipe. I needed something relatively simple and straight forward, due to the time I was able to devote to cooking, and since the weather is getting a bit nippy I settled in on a recipe for green chile chowder. Short ingredient list - all things I'd seen and was able to mentally locate in the Kroger, throw it in a pot, let it simmer a bit, wham bam easy as pie. Wrongo.

I made a few rookie mistakes on this one, folks. More like, for the duration of the preparation I was planning and dreading a post that detailed every single mistake and the nasty outcome and some self-deprecating humor thrown in for good measure to showcase my "hey, I don't take myself too seriously and neither should you! *thumbs up*" attitude.

Let's start with rookie mistake number one: not giving myself enough time. When a recipe says "for 30 minutes" or "about 10 minutes on each side", you can pretty much guarantee that it will take that and then some. My good intentions were to punctuate studying for a test with taking things out of the oven, stirring the pot, turning down the heat, etc., every thirty minutes or so. Ended up the soup took all of my attention and, were I thinking clearly, I would have anticipated that and saved myself a lot of flustration. (Flustering? Being flustered?)

Rookie mistake number two was following the suggested times in the recipe instead of using my own eyes, nose, and instincts. I didn't roast or steam the poblano peppers long enough, but I don't really think it ended up making a difference at all. Just caused a little more of that flustration and added to my growing suspicion that this soup was going to be disgusting.

I'll spare y'all the details of my other mistakes and get on with the recipe, now. Chowders are thick and creamy and therefore call for heavy cream. I wanted to lighten this up a bit so I looked up some ways to make soups creamy sans cream. The most common method was potatoes, which were already included in the recipe. Nice! I sub sweet potatoes for potatoes on reflex, so that was my first adjustment. Another intriguing search result was someone who used tahini to cream up a soup. I have a wealth of tahini at the moment, so my second adjustment was to omit the cream and instead add a dollop of tahini. I ended up pureeing orange sweet potatoes, browny-green peppers, green cilantro, and brown tahini into a mucky brown/green/orange color that tasted pretty darn good. Huge sigh of relief after that first taste!

So since I'm feeling pretty good now that my disaster soup is actually really tasty, I decide that I will, in fact, share it with Jeff. But, for the two of us, a bowl of soup does not a meal make. Jeff offered to contribute some fish, which got the wheels turning and I called on another Homesick recipe to both use up some produce in my fridge and round out the meal. She has a fish taco recipe with spicy-marinated fish topped a red cabbage slaw. I needed to use up red cabbage, cilantro, and lime. We had spicy soup. We had fish. We had fish taco soup!

Verdict:

(I decided this month that my rating is going to be based on if I would make the recipe again or not. 4/5 means that I would make it again on occasion, 5/5 will be if I think I'll add it to my weekly/monthly rotation.)

The goal for next month is to figure out what Jeff doesn't think is average.