Kitchen Zink - Disaster!!!

I love Rick Bayless, I really do.  But for some reason his food and my kitchen just do not seem to get along.  For those who don’t know Rick, he’s a celebrity chef type, owning the popular Frontera restaurant in Chicago.  Frontera has since branched out into salsas that you can buy at the store, and his TV show, Mexico: One Plate at a Time is on PBS and is really good.  Rick’s thing is Mexican food, and he is incredibly energetic about it to the point that it’s pretty infectious.  Add in how much I love Mexican food, and cooking from Rick’s recipes seems like a no-brainer.

The first effort was the Super Bowl carnitas.  There were a lot of problems here, few (if any) of which were directly Rick Bayless’s fault.  First, there was the bad mojo we incurred by not making Nachos as Big as Your Head on Super Bowl Sunday, as we have every year we’ve been together.  Then we had to use mediocre pork, since it was winter and we couldn’t easily get nice local stuff.  And carnitas is made from pork shoulder, which is fatty as heck to begin with, so it was a lower quality cut of a factory farmed pig.  And finally, the smallest pork shoulder we could find at Hy-Vee was like 5 lbs, so we had a ton of it.

The final product was quite tasty, though.  We made a tomatillo salsa, had some real Mexican cheese, some sour cream, and used authentic corn tortillas.  It was great… for the first three tacos.  Then we looked at our pile of meat and saw it was nearly as big as when we had begun!  Each of us was stuffed and we had hardly made a dent in the carnitas.  So over the next week, everything was carnitas.  And as tasty as some carnitas is, when you eat fatty pork every day, you do start to feel gross.  Much as I hate to waste food, in the end we just got damn sick of eating carnitas.  That was in February.

Fast-forward to this week, meal-planning time, and we’re on the subject of seafood.  We’ve had salmon (oily fish) last week, so non-oily or shellfish were an option.  We start bandying about ideas, and Stacia comes up with a great one.  There are ads all over the place for shrimp tacos lately – why not make our own?  The only question is how to season the shrimp so we get some zip to them.  I scour my cookbooks, peruse the usual websites, and eventually hit upon a recipe of Rick Bayless’s that I literally can’t even find as I write this – maybe it’s gone from the internet!  Anyway, all systems go, let’s make some shrimp tacos.

At the store we pick up some wild US shrimp (Seafood Watch “Good Alternative”) and a few very pale looking tomatoes – more about them later.  Cilantro, tortillas, cheese and we’re on our way back home.  The first step was to roast everything.  Four cloves of garlic, in their skins in a pan.  I’d never done this before, but it did roast them up and soften them.  Pretty neat, actually.  Then some onion, also dry, in a pan until it turned a little dark.  And we did the usual broiler method of roasting the sad little tomatoes.  As I worked on this, Stacia made the one appetizing result of the meal, some very tasty guacamole.  Kudos, Stacia!

Meanwhile, everything of mine had roasted and been peeled, which was normal except for the tomatoes which had now lost all of their red color and were orangey-pinky mushy blobs.  Rick says coarsely blend it all in the food processor, so who am I to argue?  Now I have a pulpy orangey-pinky mixture with white specks, which I’m supposed to cook in a hot pan until it darkens and thickens.  Dutifully I press on, add some chipotles in adobo sauce, and finally throw in the shrimp as directed.  Looking into my pan, I start to have a bad feeling about what we’re making.

Because, and I apologize for being gross, but it looks like I am literally cooking shrimp in vomit.  But we’ve come this far: we’ve got cooked shrimp, a slaw we made earlier, yummy guacamole, cheese and tortillas.  At this point, sometimes you just have to say that you’ll try to eat the barfy shrimp.  So we did.  And you know what the surprising thing is?  Well, no, actually there wasn’t much surprise, because they tasted about how they looked.  Not sure if it was just very very poor tomatoes, the huge amount of garlic, or the addition of ground cloves to the sauce, but it was just quite unpleasant to eat.  Of course it didn’t look pretty, but wrapped up in a tortilla we could kind of avoid that aspect.  We each at 1 taco and most of a second (amazingly), before we decided to quit while we were ahead.

So you might think this was an abject failure, right?  Well, technically it was, since we made awful food.  But on the other hand, you can always learn from failures.  And in this case, I don’t think the lesson is that you need better tomatoes, or a little less clove, or you shouldn’t eat food that it looks like someone threw up, though those are all good lessons.  I think the bigger moral of this story is that recipes aren’t infallible.  I have no doubt that when Rick Bayless makes this meal, it tastes fantastic.  But that shouldn’t make me assume that his directions are perfect and following them rote is the way to go.

I am absolutely not a chef, and to a certain extent I’m not even sure I’m a cook.  The thing that I long to be able to do, and that I’ve been hesitant to try, is to be able to make up dishes on my own.  But if following directions leads me to vomitacos™ then maybe I can’t do much worse.  I need to do it in small steps, but disasters like these, strange as it may sound, make me think that perhaps I’ll be ready soon.