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Refried beans with salsa and chorizo

This photo reminds me that the kitchen really, really needs painting in a colour that doesn’t look like bloodless frogs.

Anyway. About the food. This is my slightly European-ised (and it’s no worse for that) take on Mexican refried beans. You can serve yours in chi-chi little towers like this if you’re feeling all…retentive, or you can just dollop piles of beans, salsa and avocado/crème fraîche on the plate however you fancy. I have a sense that life is probably too short for chi-chi little towers.

This recipe makes more in the way of beans than you’ll eat at one sitting; you’ll probably get two or three meals for four out of the amounts below. (The salsa amounts below are for one meal.) This is because the long simmering of the beans and the making of the sauce that flavours them is quite time-consuming, so it’s worth making plenty and freezing the remainder before you mash them to cook quickly at a later date if you want to save yourself some work. To keep the chorizo crisp, you’ll need to fry some up each time you make this (although you can, of course, leave it out, especially if you have a vegetarian to feed); chopping and frying the sausage is not so much of a hardship, though, given how good it tastes.

Refritos, despite the title of this post, doesn’t actually mean ‘refried’, but ‘well-fried’. These are really worth the effort; they’re silky-smooth in the mouth, and intensely savoury: a billion times better than anything you might have had out of a can. Amazingly, they also do not make you fart. To make a large panful of beans for three meals and enough salsa for one meal, you’ll need:

Beans
500g pinto beans
3 bay leaves
5 cloves
2 dried chillies
1 large onion
1.5l water
1 can tomatoes
4 banana shallots
6 anchovies (yes, even for anchovy-haters – see below)
1½ tablespoons smoked Spanish paprika
2 tablespoons chipotle chillies in adobo
Bacon fat or chorizo fat to fry
1 dried chorizo

Salsa
Six medium tomatoes (vine-ripened is your best bet at this time of year)
½ banana shallot
1 small handful (about 15g) coriander
A squeeze of lime juice
1 avocado
crème fraîche

Chop the onion into rough dice and put it in a large saucepan with the rinsed beans, bay leaves, cloves, dried chillies and water. Bring to a simmer, put the lid on and simmer for 2½ hours, until the beans are soft. Check during cooking to make sure there is plenty of water for the beans to swim around in, adding a little more if you think they need it.

When the 2½ hours is up, halve the shallots and cut them into half-moons. In a large frying pan, saute them in two tablespoons of bacon fat or chorizo fat (using these fats does simply astonishing things to the flavour of this dish, but you can use olive oil if they make you nervous or if you are not the sort of person who keeps jars of such artery-clogging things in the fridge) with the anchovies. The anchovies will melt and break down. They will not make the dish taste at all fishy – they just add an unidentifiable and delicious richness and depth to its structure. Keep sauteeing, stirring every now and then, until the shallots are golden. Add the tin of tomatoes to the pan with the chipotles in adobo and Spanish paprika, and simmer until thickened. Using two different kinds of smoked chillies may look like overkill, but they both have very different characters, the chipotles dark and chocolatey in their heat, and the paprika much brighter. Together they’re fantastic here.

Add the thickened mixture to the beans pan with a tablespoon of salt (smoked Maldon salt is good, but isn’t totally necessary) and return it to the heat, this time uncovered. Simmer, stirring occasionally, until the liquid in the pan takes on a texture like the sauce in a can of baked beans. You’ll be able to tell when it’s ready; it can take anything from 45 minutes to a couple of hours.

You can serve the beans now as a kind of baked bean. This is also the point at which you should stop to reserve two thirds of the beans for cooking later on. Set the third you are using for refried beans aside until you are nearly ready to eat.

For the salsa, just peel and seed the tomatoes, dice and mix with the diced shallot and chopped coriander, and squeeze over lime juice to taste. Chop a chorizo into coins, quarter each of these coins and dry-fry them until they are crisp and rustling in the pan. Set aside in a small bowl, reserving the fat for another go at the beans.

To fry the beans, eat 2 tablespoons of bacon or chorizo fat in a large saucepan until very hot. Mash the beans in their sauce with a potato masher. They shouldn’t be completely smooth, but work at it until most of the beans are reduced to a paste. Dollop the paste into the hot fat. It will hiss and spit. Use a wooden spoon to stir the beans around in the frying pan, and keep stirring every couple of minutes until all the fat is absorbed and the liquid from the beans has evaporated to leave them thick and dense.

Stir the crispy chorizo into the beans and serve with a hearty spoonful of the salsa, some sliced avocado and a good dollop of crème fraîche. This makes a great meal on its own. If you’re feeling greedy, it’s also a brilliant accompaniment for a steak.

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Mexican pickled red onions

These crisp, pink onions are a traditional Yucatan accompaniment for cochinita pibil, and oh, my beating heart, they’re good. Red onions are par-boiled very briefly, then semi-preserved in a citrus, sugar and salt mixture spiked with chillies and cumin. They’ll keep in the fridge for up to a month, which is good, good news, because besides being a perfectly pitched addition to a taco, these are one of the best accompaniments for strong cheeses I’ve come across. (Try some alongside a Stilton or some Gorgonzola.) They’re great to look at, too; the acid in the preserving mixture turns the red onion, which acts as a universal indicator, a really vibrant pink.

I’ve used a little home-made habanero vinegar in the preserving mixture. It’s a particularly delicious vinegar (and very easy – just steep a few whole habaneros in a bottle of white wine vinegar for a couple of weeks) – it picks up all the citrusy, fruity undertones of the habaneros and packs plenty of heat.

To make a large bowl of Barbie-toned pickled onions, you’ll need:

2 medium red onions
Juice of 1 orange
Juice of 3 limes
Juice of 2 lemons
2 tablespoons habanero vinegar (white wine vinegar in which you’ve steeped a few habanero chillies for a week or so – see above)
1 teaspoon cumin
1 tablespoon sea salt
1½ tablespoons caster sugar

Halve the onions, and cut into slices. Bring a saucepan of water to the boil and drop in the onion slices. Count to twenty and drain the onions, and set aside in a large bowl.

Stir the citrus juices, vinegar, cumin, salt and sugar together in a saucepan and bring to the boil, stirring until the sugar and salt has dissolved. As soon as the mixture starts boiling, remove it from the heat and pour it over the onions. Cover the bowl and refrigerate until cold (a couple of hours).

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Cochinita pibil

This red-cooked Mexican pork is marinated in an acidic dressing, then cooked slowly for hours, with meltingly tender results. It’s a traditional recipe from Yucatan, where pork would be marinaded in the bitter local orange juice with achiote paste, then wrapped in banana leaves and buried in a fire pit for hours (pibil is Mayan for buried). Those of you without a handy banana tree and fire pit can make it in the oven in a dish sealed tightly with tinfoil – banana leaves, although very decorative, don’t really add any flavour, so you’re not really losing out here. The juice of bitter oranges can be approximated with a bit of vinegar and some lemon juice blended with sweet orange juice.

Unfortunately, while you can do clever conjuring tricks with your lemons, vinegar and tinfoil, there’s not really anything you can substitute for the achiote paste in this recipe. Achiote is what gives this dish its lovely red colour. It’s a made from crushed annatto seeds – in the UK you can sometimes find achiote powder (Barts make it and it’s stocked in the spices section in some supermarkets), but the paste is far preferable. The Cool Chile Company, Mexgrocer and Casa Mexico are good UK suppliers of Mexican ingredients, and will mail you some paste.

To serve four, you’ll need:

825g fat pork shoulder
3 tablespoons achiote paste
1 tablespoon cinnamon
1½ teaspoons each fennel, coriander and cumin seeds, ground in the pestle and mortar
½ teaspoon freshly ground nutmeg
1 crumbled bay leaf
1 teaspoon oregano
10 cloves garlic, crushed or grated
Juice of 2 oranges
Juice of 1 lemon
2 tablespoons cider vinegar
2 pointy peppers
1 large onion
1 tablespoon salt

Start by chopping the pork into chunks about 3 inches square. Don’t trim the fat away – it will moisten the meat as it cooks. Put the pork in a large bowl with the herbs, spices, juices, vinegar, salt and garlic, stir well to blend all the ingredients and marinate overnight.

When you come to cook the pork, chop the onion into large chunks and brown the chunks in a dry frying pan. Chop the peppers into long strips. Spread the pork and its marinade evenly in a shallow dish, layer the onion and peppers on top, and cover tightly with a couple of pieces of tinfoil, making sure you make a good seal all around the edge of the dish. Roast on a low rack in the oven at 150°C (300°F) for three hours.

When the cooking time is up, unwrap the dish and leave to rest for ten minutes. Serve on tortillas (corn tortillas are great if you can find them – again, they’re sometimes hard to find in the UK) with guacamole, a good dollop of sour cream or crème fraîche (crème fraîche is closer to the crema you’d eat in Mexico), some fresh coriander and Mexican pickled onions. Those onions are the gorgeous pink things in the picture at the top, and they’re a traditional accompaniment for this dish – I’ll put up a recipe for them later in the week.

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Chilli con carne

It is with a degree of trepidation bordering on downright terror that I post a chilli con carne recipe. Chilli is one of those dishes which people have very set ideas about – your family chilli will probably differ from mine, the canonical chilli recipe from your town will differ in some subtle and important way from the canonical chilli recipe from the town next door, and I fully expect howls of outrage in the comments section because there’s some detail in my chilli which you think is downright barbaric in comparison to yours. Howling makes me nervous. Let me know what makes your own chilli recipe special – and if you can do it without the howls I will be super-grateful.

This is one of those recipes which rewards you for making extra. Like all casseroles, it’s best eaten when it’s had a night in the fridge for the flavours to meld, and I like to freeze several portions for those lazy evenings when you just can’t pull together the energy to cook from scratch.

I’ve used Ancho peppers here – compare them to the fresh Poblanos (their non-dried cousins) from the crema earlier this week. If you can get the fresh peppers, it’s really worth making the crema to accompany this dish. The Anchos and another two varieties of chilli work with the bell peppers to achieve a gorgeously rounded, fruity base to the dish, packed with chilli heat.

To make between eight and ten portions, you’ll need:

1kg lean steak mince
2 large onions
6 fat cloves garlic
6 stalks celery
3 yellow, orange or red bell peppers
3 Ancho peppers
2 teaspoons cumin
1 teaspoon fennel seeds
1 cinnamon stick
2 bay leaves
2 teaspoons cayenne pepper
2 tablespoons Chipotle peppers in adobo
1 litre passata
1 large glass red wine
2 tablespoons tomato puree
Juice of 1-2 limes
2 x 400g cans kidney beans
Olive oil
Salt and pepper

Dice the onions, celery stalks and bell peppers into even pieces, and use scissors to chop the Anchos (seeds and all) into bits about the same size. Chop the garlic into small pieces. Take a large, heavy-based casserole dish, and blanch the diced vegetables with the cumin, fennel, cinnamon stick, cayenne and bay leaves in a couple of tablespoons of olive oil, stirring all the time, until they are turning soft, but not taking on any colour.

Add the steak mince to the casserole dish and cook over a medium heat, stirring well, until the meat is browned. Pour over the passata and the wine, stir the Chipotle peppers and their sauce, the tomato puree and a large teaspoon of salt into the mixture and bring up to a simmer. Turn the heat down low and put on the lid, and leave to simmer for 1½ hours, stirring regularly.

At the end of the cooking time, stir the drained beans in and continue to cook for ten minutes. Taste for seasoning – you will probably have to add a little more salt. Add the juice of one of the limes, taste again and judge whether you will need the other one. (Limes vary in sharpness and juiciness, so you may be able to use just one.) Decorate the finished chilli with chopped coriander – I like to have a bowl on the table so diners can add as much as they like.

If you haven’t made the crema, a bowl of sour cream on the table will be tasty and will help take the heat of the chillies down a little. There are plenty of easy Mexican recipes on Gastronomy Domine you can pep this up and add interest with – it’s great for an informal party – try one of the salsas, some guacamole or a gorgeous corn and squash puree. You can serve your chilli on rice, as I have here – it’s also great in tortillas, on a baked potato or even with chips for dipping.

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Roast Poblano crema

I live about ten miles from Ely, where there is a cathedral, a very, very good bookshop, and an excellent twice-monthly farmers’ market. There are about 30 stalls, and it’s a great place to pick up local meats (a slab of belly pork is lurking deliciously in the freezer as we speak) and things like good free-range eggs, pork pies and ostrich products from Bisbrook farm. Because this area is right at the heart of East Anglia’s patchwork of farms, the stalls are packed to the gills with interesting fruit and vegetables. The bread in particular tends to run out early – if you do visit Ely for the market, try to get there before 11am.

Edible Ornamentals, a Bedfordshire farm growing chillies, usually has a stall full of chilli plants, pots of sauce and chillies both fresh and dried. I love their chilli sauces (some so hot it’s amazing that a glass jar can contain them without dissolving in protest), but their fresh chillies can be downright amazing, and I was delighted to score five big, fresh Poblanos for £3.

Poblanos are the fresh pepper which, when dried, become Ancho and Mulato chillies. (An Ancho is dried more than the slightly soft and fruity Mulato.) They are a mild, purple pepper with a deep, fruity background – lots of flavour and very little heat, although the redder pepper in my bag was a little hotter than the others. I was planning a chilli con carne, and had some Mulatos in the cupboard ready for deployment in that. What better to eat as a side dish than a Poblano crema – those fresh Poblanos roasted, skinned and mixed with crème fraîche, lime and coriander?

To make enough crema to accompany a chilli for two or three, you’ll need:

5 fresh Poblano peppers
5 tablespoons crème fraîche (or Mexican crema, if you can find it)
6 spring onions (scallions), chopped
1 large handful chopped coriander
Juice of 1 lime
Salt and pepper
Olive oil

Rub the whole peppers with olive oil and arrange in a baking tray. Cook at 180° C (350° F) for 20 minutes, until the skin is browned and blistering (see picture). Put the whole cooked peppers in a plastic freezer bag, seal the top and put aside for five minutes while you chop the spring onions.

The business with the freezer bag will help the peppers steam from the inside, loosening the skin so you can peel it off easily. When the peppers are cool enough to handle, peel off their skins and discard, then chop open and carefully remove all the seeds. Some people like to do this under a running tap, but I recommend keeping the cooked peppers well away from water to preserve their delicious juices. Slice the silky peeled peppers into long, thin strips and put in a bowl with any juices. (I really enjoy this bit – peeled, roast peppers feel beautiful between the fingers.) Reserve a few strips on a plate to use as a garnish.

Stir the crème fraîche, pepper strips, spring onion and coriander together with the lime juice. Taste, and add salt and pepper. Garnish with more coriander and the reserved peppers, and chill for an hour before serving.

This is deliciously cooling served alongside a chilli con carne – it also makes a fantastic filling for baked potatoes and is gorgeous slopped on a baguette.

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Mexican squash and corn cream

butternut squash pureeDo try this one – it’s seriously good and has worked its way up to being a frequent star alongside my roast dinners. This silky, sweet puree works unbelievably well as an accompaniment, especially with poultry – I hope some of you will try it with your Christmas turkey. It’s rich and packed with flavour; and like many recipes which utilise creamed corn, it’s a favourite with children. It also works as a great quick main dish (and is lovely if you’re entertaining vegetarians – try it over rice with an interesting salad).

Butternut squash originates in Mexico, and it has an affinity for other Mexican ingredients like the corn, the coriander and the chillies. I’ve used crème fraîche here to loosen the mixture – an authentic Mexican dish might use crema, the thick, Mexican, sour cream, but really the difference between the two products is minuscule. If you can’t find smoky ground chipotle chillies where you are, just substitute your favourite crushed, dried chillies or chilli powder.

To serve two as a main dish or about four (depending on greed) as a side dish, you’ll need:

1 butternut squash
1 can creamed corn
3 heaped tablespoons crème fraîche
1 tablespoon salted butter
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
¾ teaspoon ground chipotle chilli
1 large handful roughly chopped coriander

Peel the squash (you’ll find a serrated knife the best tool for this job – that peel is tough), remove the seeds and stringy pith, and chop the flesh into pieces about an inch square. Cover with water and simmer for 15 minutes until the pieces of squash are tender and soft when poked with a knife.

Drain the water off and return the squash pieces to the pan. Add the corn, butter and crème fraîche to the pan and mash with a potato masher off the heat until smooth. Season with the salt, pepper and chillies – you’ll find this dish will require quite a lot of salt for maximum flavour because of the natural sweetness of the vegetables.

Return the pan to a low heat and bring to a gentle simmer. Remove from the heat again and stir in the coarsely chopped coriander. Serve immediately.

This squash and corn cream freezes well.

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Pathetically easy guacamole

Easy guacamoleI am almost ashamed to be calling this a recipe, given that it’ll take you about three minutes to make. All the same, it’s very tasty, and it’s a great partner to the other Mexican recipes I’ve been making this week.

I have an interesting piece of avocado trivia for you today: the word guacamole comes from the Nahuatl word ahuacamolli – literally ahuacatl mole, or sauce. Ahuacatl is the Nahuatl language word for avocado…and it also means ‘testicle’. Be gentle as you chop your avocados.

Some people assert that tomatoes have no place in guacamole. I think it’s much, much nicer with tomatoes, which offer sweetness and a little acid to the mixture – if you use tomatoes, you can get away with a little less lime. Experiment at home and see what you think.

To make guacamole for four, you’ll need:

4 avocados (I used the Hass variety)
6 cherry-sized tomatoes
1 medium onion
1 handful coriander (cilantro for Americans)
2 jalapeño chillies
1 lime
Salt and pepper

Cut the tomatoes into eighths, and cut the onion into small dice. Chop the coriander finely. Remove the seeds and ribs from inside the chillies and dice their flesh finely. Finally, chop the flesh of the avocados roughly and mix vigorously with the other chopped ingredients, squashing things around a bit in the bowl. Squeeze over lime juice to taste and season with salt and pepper.

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Carnitas

CarnitasCarnitas are one of my favourite Mexican dishes. This is a luscious way with pork, which brings out a deep flavour from the meat and gives it a superbly silky texture. Unfortunately, I can predict as I type this that some of you are going to balk once you’ve read the recipe – because all this deliciousness comes about because the meat is poached in nearly its own weight in pork fat, then drained. I know that the word ‘lard’ is about as popular as the word ‘anthrax’ in recipes these days. It’s a great, great shame – there is joy in good foods, and some of the very best are thick and unctuous with glossy animal fats.

We appear to have developed a terrible national neurosis about fat in general, and animal fats in particular. In moderation (after all, you’re probably not going to be eating carnitas more than a couple of times a year at the most), fat is just part of a balanced diet. It provides a vehicle for vitamins A, D, E and K, which are only made available to your body when dissolved in fat. Fat maximises flavour, creates exceptional textures (think of a lardy puff-pastry, a potato cooked in goose fat, a crisp slice of bacon), and, quite simply, fat can make you happy, which is as positive an outcome as I can imagine. Fat is, undoubtedly, fattening…but I encourage you to take a trip to the supermarket and look at the average size of the glum people stuffing their trolleys with low-fat spreads and low-fat ready meals. Worst of all, there have been reports recently that parents have been so worried by the dire messages we’re all getting about fat that they are feeding their children a diet unnaturally low in fats, resulting in deficiencies in those fat-soluble vitamins and, surprisingly, obesity later in life. If you’re worried about your cholesterol level, the best advice I can offer is to follow your carnitas up with a bowl of porridge for pudding.

So here is an unapologetically fatty recipe. Please cook it and enjoy it rather than worrying about it. To serve six, you’ll need:

1 kg lean pork, cut into 2-inch cubes
750g lard (this is best purchased from your butcher if he cooks on the premises – otherwise, a block from the supermarket will be fine)
1 onion
1 handful coriander
2 green chillies
Sour cream or crème fraîche, salsa and tortillas to serve.

Make sure the pork is well trimmed of fat. I bought a whole, boned leg joint and diced it myself, removing the skin – this can sometimes be cheaper than buying ready-diced pork. Put the pork in a large bowl and season it generously (use a little more salt than you think you will need) with salt and pepper.

Melt the lard over a medium flame in a large, heavy-bottomed pan. Tip the pork into the lard and simmer for between 1 hour 15 minutes to 1 hour 30 minutes. When the pork is ready it will just be beginning to brown, and it will be soft to the fork. Use a slotted spoon to remove the pork from the lard, and put it in a baking dish. Preheat the oven to 200° C (400° F).

CarnitasUse two forks to shred the meat well. Chop the onion into small dice, and slice the chillies. Chop the coriander finely. Mix the onion, chillies and coriander with the meat in the dish, then cover the whole lot tightly with tin foil.

Bake the dish for 15 minutes. The carnitas will be warmed through – the onion, not completely cooked, will be sweet, but will still retain its crunch. I poured some heated mole verde from Sol at Mexgrocer over the dish, but this isn’t necessary – I just felt like some delicious Mexican overkill.

Serve your carnitas with some salsas, soured cream and tortillas, (and watch this space for a pathetically easy guacamole). Summer might have finished, but if you eat like this you can almost convince yourself that your dining table is temporarily in Mexico.

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Mexgrocer – Salsa Verde recipe

Mexican ingredientsThose of you who read this blog regularly might remember that about a year ago, I mentioned in passing that I couldn’t find any tomatillos in the UK. There were a few Mexican ideas I wanted to try out with some of the little green beasties, but besides growing my own, it looked as if there was no way I’d be able to find any.

Eventually, I gave up on tomatillos. Then, about two weeks ago, I had an email from Sol, half of the husband and wife team that runs Mexgrocer.co.uk. After we’d chatted for a bit, Sol sent me a lovely box of Mexican ingredients to play with, and nestling at the top of the box, I found a bag full of beautiful fresh, ripe tomatillos, wrapped up in their papery husks. Other things in that box went to make a big meal for a group of friends (you’ll read more about that meal later on this week). Sol and his Mexican wife have made sure that you will be able to find ingredients which have been unavailable in the UK for years. There are chocolatey moles (a thick, savoury sauce which I used to smother some sticky sauteed chicken pieces), tamales, nopales (prickly pear cactus – a very delicious vegetable), a breathtaking selection of fresh, dried, smoked and bottled chillies, and some herbs and spices I’ve never seen on this side of the Atlantic.

TomatillosSo then, you ask. What are these tomatillo things? It’s probably simplest if I explain what they aren’t. They’re not cape gooseberries, even though they have a papery, Chinese-lantern-type husk protecting the fruit (cape gooseberries and tomatillos both come from the physalis family). They’re not unripe tomatoes, even though a tomatillo without a husk looks precisely like a green tomato. They have a fresh, lightly acidic, juicy taste, lots of tiny seeds, and are firm and gloriously green when ripe. They feature very heavily in green sauces in Mexican cooking, and if you’ve not tried them before, you’re in for a treat.

TomatillosTomatillos keep very well in their husks – pop them in the fridge and they’ll last for a couple of weeks. You can also freeze them successfully if you’re going to be using them in a sauce.

An uncooked, emerald-coloured salsa is the ideal way to show these little fruits off. This salsa couldn’t be easier to prepare, and it’s fantastic with rich foods, its fresh zing cutting through fatty, creamy sauces. To make salsa verde for six, you’ll need:

400g tomatillos
2 mild green chillies
6 spring onions
1 large handful coriander
100 ml water
1 teaspoon salt

Tomatillo salsaRemove the husks from the tomatillos and wash them to remove their natural sticky coating. Halve them, removing the woody bit where the stem met the fruit. Remove the seeds from the chillies, and wash the spring onions and coriander carefully to remove any grit.

Put all the ingredients in the food processor, and whizz until you have a slightly chunky mixture. Chill before serving. This salsa is great used as a dip, and it’s also delicious as a topping for rice, or as an ingredient to lift the flavour of a lovely meaty taco.

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Smoky tomato salsa

Another recipe for a tomato glut. Foolishly, I planted out five Tumbler tomato plants earlier in the year, a little worried that five would be insufficient for the family’s tomato needs. It appears, however, that Tumbler is a prolific plant – kilos and kilos of tomatoes are coming ripe all at once.

The sweet and flavourful little tomatoes are excellent in this cooked salsa, a version of a salsa served at the Border Grill in Las Vegas and Santa Monica. The Border Grill (and its sister restaurant, Ciudad, also in LA) is owned and run by Mary-Sue Milliken and Susan Feniger, who have a TV show in America called Too Hot Tamales. I’ve never seen it, but whenever we’re in Vegas or LA, Dr Weasel and I make a point of stuffing ourselves silly at one of their restaurants, where the Mexican food is about as good as it gets.

The Border Grill serves three salsas with chips before the meal – something like this one, a zingy green tomatillo salsa (anybody know where I can get young tomatillo plants in the UK next year?) and a raw pico de gallo. It’s hard not to say ‘Yes please!’ to the nice server when he offers to get you more salsa and another bowl of chips. Don’t. You won’t have any room left for the rest of the meal.

This salsa keeps for five days in the fridge, so if you have a lot of tomatoes make plenty. Don’t worry about the large amount of garlic; cooking it like this makes it very mellow and removes any harshness. You’ll find yourself eating this salsa on baked potatoes, with tortilla chips, with crudites…I defy you to make it last five days. You’ll need:

2 lb raw tomatoes, freshly picked if possible
1 large onion, sliced roughly
1 bulb of garlic, peeled
3 tablespoons chipotles in adobo (you can buy these chillis in Sainsbury’s in the UK – use less for a less fierce salsa)
1 small handful fresh oregano (or a teaspoon dried)
1 teaspoon sugar
Salt and pepper
Water

If your tomatoes, like mine, are cherry-sized, you don’t need to chop them. If you have large ones, quarter them and remove the pithy cores.

Place all the ingredients in a saucepan and cover with water. Bring slowly to a simmer with the lid off, and simmer gently for 20 minutes. Set aside to cool. Add the oregano and blitz in a food processor or liquidiser, taste for seasoning and add more salt if necessary.