Cooking with Luz: Horchata

During Lucy's cooking class she also taught everybody how to make horchata. Here's how:

You'll need a can of sweetened condensed milk, evaporated milk, sugar, cinnamon and some short grain white rice.

Fill the bottom of a large stock pot with the rice and cover it with water. Put the lid on and let it soak overnight. 

The next day, put the entire contents from the stock pot into a blender and blend well.

Then, using cheesecloth or a very fine strainer, strain the liquid from the contents of the blender into a large container.

Add the can of evaporated milk and the can of sweetened condensed milk. Mix until well blended. Sprinkle in as much cinnamon as desired.

Pour into serving glasses over ice and drink up! 

Cooking with Luz: Chile Rellenos

Recently I help Lucy while she was teaching a small class of ladies how to make chile rellenos. I don't believe I helped so much as got in the way. But I tried to be helpful. I took "notes" in the form of photos (which is why I was kind of in the way). Here's the process:


First you need medium sized poblano chiles from the store. Then you must roast them until the skin is charred and black. You can do this by putting them directly over the burner's flame of a gas stove, or by broiling them in the oven, being sure to turn them as needed so they blacken all over.

Once they are done blackening, put them in a zip-lock bag for a few minutes to let the moisture condense so that the blackened skin can easily be peeled off. 

After you've peeled the chile, slice it open on one side and remove the seeds and fibrous interior. Then it is ready to be filled. Lucy filled these particular ones with three kinds of cheese: Muenster, Mozzarella and Queso Fresco.

After filling the chile, fold the opening closed and roll or pat the outside with flour. Let it sit while you make the rest of the coating.

You'll need one egg per chile for this part. Separate the egg yolk(s) from the white(s). Mix the white(s) until stiff peaks form. Then whisk in the yolk(s).

Dip the flour covered chile into the egg mixture and put it immediately into a pan with HOT oil. You can either gently turn the chile over once the bottom side has browned or you can do as Luzy did and spoon hot oil over the top of the chile while it fries.

 Repeat this process for each chile. 

 Serve immediately alongside rice and refried beans.

Lucy also showed us another version of this:

She quickly made a sauce out of boiled tomatoes. She put these into a blender with some salt, garlic and some cilantro.

Then she took one of the chiles that had completed the frying process and spooned this red sauce over it, drizzled some cream on the sauce and then sprinkled it with shredded cheese.
 

Crested Butte Wildflowers (and Scenery in General)

I mentioned in an earlier post that Crested Butte is the "official wildflower capital of Colorado". And yet you haven't really seen too much evidence of that in pictures from my previous two posts. That's because I've been saving those photos up for this post. This place really does deserve it's nickname. When you look around you think it actually looks staged - like some nature-loving lunatic had to have gone running around throughout the whole place with buckets and buckets of wildflower seeds, tossing them haphazardly everywhere. There should be more weeds! Where are all of the weeds? Everywhere else I've ever gone there are a few flowers nestled in loads of weeds and shrubby looking things. Not so here. I'm still baffled by it. You should go to this place.

Have a look:

This is the road we took to get home - Kebler Pass. It's closed much of the year. I decided that this drive is one of the most scenic I've taken in Colorado so far. And that's saying something because Mr X and I have done a really good job wandering about this state since we moved here.

It was like a sea of flowers nearly everywhere we looked.

Feel free to identify these flowers in the comments area as I don't know the names of most of them.

I took this photo because you can see white-capped mountains in the background, behind the aspens, and I thought it was pretty.

Wild Roses are all over the place.

Maybe these little blue ones are Blue Flax Flowers....

Are these Mertensia flowers?

These are Lupine.

 

I took lots of pictures of the aspens because the forests of these trees are so spectacular throughout Kebler Pass - the most impressive I've seen yet. I wish you could see them in person.

These might be Fairy Trumpets but I'm not entirely sure...

These were the first Columbines I've seen of the season so far. They are such a unique looking flower. I have some growing in my yard. When I did research on them I found out that they thrive in "poor soil", which I found surprising and interesting.

This particular version of the Columbine is the State Flower. The ones that I have in my yard are all yellow and deep purple.

Crescent Milkvetch Flowers? Chainpods? I don't know...

Yellow Banners maybe?

Indian Paintbrush. Or Scarlett Paintbrush. Or Rosy Paintbrush. They kind of all look somewhat similar to me.

I believe these are called Avalanche Lilies.

More Columbine Flowers, an array of colors.

Mertensia again?

More Lupine.

Crested Butte Bike: Lupine Trail

The morning of the next day Mr X and I headed out for some mountain biking. Apparently CB is a mountain biking paradise. We are beginner mountain bikers and wimps (Actually that's just me. Mr X is alarmingly brave on a bike at times.) so we opted to take the easiest trail in the area. I can't even express how exhausting this trail was. The whole time I kept thinking, "You've got to be kidding me - this is the easiest trail?" I can't remember the last time I was wheezing so hard. Unfortunately for me the pictures make it seem like a flower-filled leisurely ride. See, I'm a wimp - now you have visual proof:

We left the actual town of CB to head to the beginning of the trail. This is the view of the town.

At certain points in along this trail the Lupine flowers literally came up to my hips when I was standing. And they were really fragrant, which was nice. (That's Mr X riding in front of me because he's much faster than me.)

Me, trailing behind, as always. (But thoroughly enjoying the views and fragrant flowers.)

This was the view at the end of the trail before we looped back towards town.