Day thirtyseven

Last night we made a most excellent dinner. The heart of this dinner was the famous Browning salsa, which I have been making for most of my adult life. I adapted this recipe slightly for a low fat, low sugar, low salt diet. Here is the modified recipe:

• 6 large onions chopped
• 20 cloves of garlic crushed
• 6 large bell peppers (red or orange are best) chopped
• 20 medium Roma tomatoes pureed (a blender works best)
• 4 large boxes of cherry tomatoes (about 4 pounds) pureed
• 1 large bunch of cilantro picked over and chopped (throw into the blender with some of the tomatoes)
• 4 Tbsp of cumin
• 5 cans of diced tomatoes (low salt preferred)
• Depending on taste, up to 20 jalapeño peppers, sliced in half, deseeded, and then chopped fine (canned jalapeño can be substituted, but be careful of the salt)
• About 2 Tbsp of olive oil

You will need to be very careful while chopping the jalapeños. They are quite spicy and juice on you hands can easily burn your eyes. Do not touch your eyes or face while handling these puppies. You should probably wear gloves while doing this. While canned jalapeños are safer, I like the fresh ones better. Also the canned ones I have been able to find have a lot of added salt.

Put chopped onions, bell peppers, jalapeño peppers, crushed garlic, and cumin in a large pot. Add the olive oil. Saute over low heat until soft. Add fresh pureed tomatoes, cilantro, and canned diced tomatoes. Simmer over low heat, stirring frequently.

Be careful of the amount of jalapeños you add. It is easy to make this salsa too spicy. Also, the spiciness of the jalapeños can vary greatly. Add a little more during the simmering stage if you did not add enough earlier.

What you will end up with is a salsa that has a big kick in terms of flavor, but has no added salt and almost no added oil. There is naturally-occurring sugar in the tomatoes, but no added sugar as well.

This recipe makes a lot. It fills up the biggest pot we have, which is quite large. We take this salsa, put it into large zip lock bags and freeze it. It can be thawed at any time to become the basis for a vegan Mexican dish.

Now for our dinner. We roasted vegetables in the same manner as described earlier in this blog. In this case, we used onion, bell pepper, broccoli and portobella mushrooms. Once the vegetables were roasted, we grilled corn tortillas on the cast iron griddle. (I do not use flour tortillas. They have more than twice the calories of corn, as I have discussed previously on this blog. Also, corn tortillas are whole grain, and flour tortillas are basically just white bread. I avoid flour tortillas like the plague.)

Using a large clay pot with a cover, we began layering as follows:

A layer of salsa
A layer of grilled tortillas
A layer of roasted vegetables

And so forth until the pot was full.

We then baked the entire pot in an oven at around 400 degrees, until everything came up to temperature (about 15 minutes).

Note that this recipe is completely meat and dairy free. Some of my family members miss the cheese, but I do not. I find that the vegetables mixed with the salsa and tortillas are very delicious. Those who are unable to eat Mexican food without dairy are welcome to put shredded cheese on top. A maneuver of which I heartily disapprove, but one which I cannot control. My daughter did this, for example. She is still consuming some dairy. But eventually I suspect that she will come around.

More later.