Today I felt like going back to the keyboard and write something. Ever since the sudden death of my brother, I've been feeling pretty down and uncharacteristically uninspired. Normally, my head is buzzing with ideas, yet for the last couple of months, it's been all slow and fuzzy... I've been doing just the bear minimum and coping the best way I can. A few weeks ago, I went back to the kitchen and forced myself to cook again.
This is not a traditional Mexican salsa verde recipe, if you're looking for that, check out my tomatillo salsa verde or my avocado green salsa, which are both delicious and way more traditional. This post's salsa verde is a tad bit less conventional.
Today I was feeling a little run down and tired. I've been struggling with a headcold for a week and I couldn't hack it any more. I headed to the kitchen determine to make something tasty that would make me feel better.
This is the continuation of a post I did last week on the challenge of Food Styling with the super talented Ajda Mehmet and maybe the result of a lot of testing, tasting and hard work...
Salsas are at the centre stage of Mexican Food. A taco is not a taco without a good salsa, so there are so many recipes for them it will make your head explode! One funny thing I discovered last year is that a lot of people seem to think that chopping fresh tomatoes and adding onion, chilli and other raw stuff makes a salsa... In Mexico, mostly all our salsas are cooked. What Irish people refer to as 'salsa' is really a salad for us, a sort of pico de gallo that we use to garnish or accompany a dish with.
One of the first things I learnt to make from scratch when I was little was mayonnaise. I loved making it, mam showed me how to do it and although it was nothing like what we would buy in the jars, the sheer fact that I could play with the flavour, made it special.
There is one ingredient and one ingredient only that I miss the most living in Ireland, and that is fresh Tomatillos. They are also known as Tomate Verde (green tomatoes) or Mexican Tomatoes and they are widely used in most Latin American Countries. They are related to the cape gooseberry (that little orange colour fruit in a yellow husks that seems to top nearly every cake in the supermarkets?). They are the size of a large cherry tomato and grow in an inedible, paper-like brown husk. They are green in colour and are meatier and slightly more acidic than regular tomatoes.
As many of you know, I had an accident recently and damaged my left side arm, neck and shoulder, which explains why I had been so quiet lately. I did a lot of cooking and took tons of photos over Christmas and New Year, but after my fall down the stairs, typing was very, very sore... still is, so short post for a while.
Salsa is one of the most annoyingly misrepresented items in the whole of the Mexican Cuisine (it's up there with Enchiladas and Burritos). Everywhere you go these days you see claims of fresh, authentic, or real Mexican salsa: it is in uninspired menus, in horrid jars in supermarket shelves and in cookbooks with interpretations of Mexican dishes by people who ha
