We've been blowing through series television lately—rewatching the entire umpteen seasons of Deep Space Nine, being charmed by the more recent Ted Lasso and drawn in by the Canadian show Kim's Convenience—and, when we need a break, watching a documentary here and there. Recently we took in a biography of Diana Kennedy, the famed English-born authority on Mexican cooking, filmed in her home in the hills of the state of Michoacán and who, in her 96th year, is still as feisty and fiery as ever.

It was twenty years ago that our son took a three-week foreign studies tour to the town of Morelia in Michoacán, a city of almost a million not far from Ms. Kennedy's home. He and five of his fellow high school students from his Spanish class stayed with Mexican host families in the city, taking language classes and touring the area with their teacher.

The other students were mostly consumed with going to bars (though the official drinking age was 21), eschewing Mexican food in favor of hamburgers and pizza. Our son was more intrigued with exploring Mexican regional specialties like the varieties of moles—he still waxes poetic about one exceptionally bitter version—as well as a garlic bread soup called Sopa de Ajo and another, a puréed bean soup called Sopa Tarasca. (His teacher was quite impressed.)

After watching the documentary about Kennedy, I was browsing through my not-insubstantial collection of her cookbooks and came across a recipe for that very bean soup. I happened to have a quart of cooked borlotto beans from Ayers Creek Farm left over from a dinner earlier in the week, so it presented an opportunity I couldn't well refuse.

Sopa Tarasca is named after the Tarascan Indians of Michoacán—the popular, if somewhat derogatory, name for the indigenous Purépecha culture which continues to maintain a significant population of nearly 200,000 in the state. It is a deeply flavorful bowl of puréed beans, tomatoes and chiles topped with fried chiles, tortilla strips and other condiments.

The soup itself is a fairly simple affair and comes together quickly, and the idea of the fried chiles crumbled on top will come in handy in the future as a crunchy topping for salads, tacos, nachos, dips or other dishes needing a crispy, smoky saltiness. See what you think!

Sopa Tarasca (Tarascan Bean and Tomato Soup)

Slightly nodified from a recipe in The Cuisines of Mexico by Diana Kennedy

For the toppings:
Vegetable oil (canola or grapeseed)
3 dried chiles pasilla (dried ancho chiles work here, too), cut with scissors into small pieces
4 corn tortillas cut into strips
Queso fresco, crumbled
Sour cream

For the soup:
2 dried ancho chiles
2 medium tomatoes or 1 1/4 c. roasted tomatoes
3 cloves garlic
1/4 onion
3 Tbsp. lard or filtered bacon drippings
4 c. cooked pinto or borlotto beans with their liquid
2 1/2 c. pork or chicken stock
1 tsp. oregano (preferably Mexican oregano)
Salt to taste

For the condiments, place large frying pan over high heat and pour in 1/2" or so of vegetable oil. When a small piece of tortilla strip is dropped in and sizzles with lively bubbles, it's hot enough. Put half of the tortilla strips into the oil and brown slightly, remove them from the oil with a wire scoop (spider) onto paper towels. Salt as soon as they come out of the oil. Repeat with remaining half of tortilla strips. While tortilla strips cool, put the pasilla chile pieces into your wire scoop and submerge in hot oil for three seconds. Remove to paper towels and salt.

In a heat-proof bowl, tear the ancho chiles into pieces, removing the seeds and veins. Add one cup boiling water and soak for 20 to 30 minutes.

In a food processor, blend the tomatoes, garlic and onion into a smooth purée. Melt the fat in a large Dutch oven or soup pot over high heat. Pour in the tomato purée, being careful since it may splatter when the mixture hits the hot fat. Cook for 5 minutes, stirring to make sure it doesn't stick. While the tomato mixture cooks, purée the beans, bean liquid, softened ancho chiles and their liquid in the food processor. Turn down the heat under the tomato mixture to medium-low and stir in the the bean purée and oregano. Cook for another 8 minutes, stirring frequently to keep it from sticking.

Add stock and stir to combine. Add salt to taste. Simmer on very low heat, stirring frequently, until ready to serve. This is supposed to be a thick soup, and it will thicken as it simmers, but you can add more stock as needed to get it the consistency you prefer. Serve with crumbled cheese, sour cream, tortilla strips and fried chiles.

You can also make the soup ahead of time, then fry the tortillas and chiles while you reheat the soup.

Unlike the mysterious run on toilet paper—no pun intended there—when folks found out that they may have to "shelter in place" for several weeks due to the coronavirus, it made sense to stock up on dried goods that can last in the pantry for at least that long. As local food missionaries Katherine Deumling of Cook With What You Have and Jim Dixon of Real Good Food have preached from their respective pulpits, you can cook up a pot of beans at the beginning of the week and use the beans in several different dishes, or whip up a big batch of one dish to divide and freeze for later.

My recipe for chili takes a middle road, cooking the beans separately from the meat and chile sauce. The beans versus no-beans in chili seems to depend on whether you hail from north of the Mason Dixon or to its south, but there are also cultural elements at play, not to mention the most important indicator: how your mom made it. Me, I grew up with beans in chili, but because I'm a natural contrarian, sometimes I just feel like keeping the two unsullied until they consummate their union in my bowl, showered with the happy blessings of chopped sweet onion and grated cheese.

I'm also not doctrinaire when it comes to the type of beans to use. I've even been known, in straitened moments, to use canned kidney beans, but my preferences run to heritage varieties like cranberry or scarlet runner, or organic Borlotto Gaston from Ayers Creek Farm. The night before, put three-quarters of a pound of beans in a pot, cover with water by one inch, put a lid on the pot and leave on the counter to soak. The next day, drain them, put them in a pot, cover them with fresh water and cook on the stove until tender, or you Northerners can drain the soaking water and add them to the chile sauce to simmer with the meat.

Beef Chili

For the chile sauce:
6 dried ancho chiles, seeded and torn into pieces
2 dried cayenne chiles, seeded and torn into pieces (optional)
3 1/2 c. boiling water
1 Tbsp. cumin seeds, toasted (see below)
2 Tbsp. (6-8) garlic cloves
4 tsp. oregano
1 Tbsp. smoked Spanish pimenton
2 Tbsp. paprika
1 Tbsp. sugar
1 Tbsp. salt

For the chili:
1 large onion, chopped in 1/2" cubes
2 Tbsp. flour
3-4 lbs. chuck roast, cut in 3/4" cubes (pork shoulder also works)
2 bay leaves
1 qt. roasted tomatoes, or 28-oz. can whole tomatoes
Salt

In a small, dry frying pan over medium heat, toast the cumin seeds briefly, stirring constantly, until they release their aroma.

Place the torn chile pieces in a heat-proof bowl and pour the boiling water over them. Soak for 30 min. until they are soft and pliable. Drain them, reserving the soaking water, and place them in the bowl of a food processor or blender. Add remaining ingredients (including the toasted cumin seeds) and 1/2 c. soaking liquid and process till smooth, gradually adding the remaining soaking water.

Heat oil in large Dutch oven over medium high heat. When it shimmers, add the chopped onion and sauté until tender. Add flour and stir continuously for up to 2 minutes until the flour loses its raw taste. Add meat, chile sauce, tomatoes and bay leaves. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to simmer for 1 1/2 to 2 hours. Stir occasionally, adding water if it seems too dry. Add salt to taste.

Serve with cooked beans and rice on the side, along with finely chopped sweet onion and grated cheese to sprinkle on top.

I was thrilled to find the latest farm update from contributor Anthony Boutard of Ayers Creek Farm in my e-mail in-box this morning, detailing the results of the year's harvest. Please make plans to attend at least one of the open days outlined below. Your holiday table will thank you!

Autumn with his cold and wet demeanor came stomping about early, necessitating careful staging of the harvest. We have accommodated his early entrance and are now in a good state of affairs, able to schedule the remaining open days of the year. We will be open next Saturday and Sunday (9 & 10 November) from 2 to 5 p.m. We will also be open the Sunday before Thanksgiving (24th), as well as the 8th and 22nd of December.

The tomato harvest came to an abrupt end three weeks earlier than last year and we lost all of the zolfini and Dutch Bullet beans; sometimes a farmer has to walk away from a soggy mess rather than try to salvage a harvest of inferior quality. No point in that, tears at the heart worse than simply turning it under. There is fine crop of wheat sprouting there. We do have a few left over from 2018. Fortunately we have a good crop of Borlotti, Wapato Whites, Tarbesque and Purgatorio.  We will have Roy’s Calais flint and Peace, No War cornmeal, and whole kernels for hominy. Pumpkin seeds, cayennes and the small grains also fared well. We are able to shrug our shoulders and admit that this was a much better year than last.

Among the fresh goods, we will have plenty of Sibley squash, beets, spuds, melons, apples, big white onions and greens. Late August, we planted a mix of bok choi, napa, daikon and turnips as a soup green mix for our own table. We had enough seed to plant about 1,000 feet, so 1,000 feet were planted as it was easier than cleaning out the seeder. We will bag up some as a field run mix. We have dubbed it the Rorschach mix, because there are so many ways you can approach the vegetables. You can pickle them, or use them in salads, stir-fry or soups. Whatever suits the moment and your character.

We have, essentially, run out of preserves, so don’t expect any until the 24th of November. We should have a full selection on the 8th of December if you are looking for Christmas gifts.

The good Borlotti crop inspired a new label (top photo); funny how that works. Carved from a cherry block, it was inspired by the lettering of Hector Guimard's signs for the Paris Metro stops. A similar lettering style graced the cover of the Modern Jazz Quartet's album Concorde (1955), over a photo of the Place de la Concorde. Preparing tomorrow’s breakfast, take a moment and listen to Sigmund Romberg’s "Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise" as performed on that album. The opening bars are a canon from Bach’s "The Musical Offering" with Percy Heath taking the theme on the double bass, and Milt Jackson (vibraphone) and John Lewis (piano) working the counterpoint.

The whole album is a masterpiece.

A new label for the Ayers Creek Cayenne is in the queue. It will be in the Arabesque style carved from a block of shina, Japanese basswood, the same wood as used for the barley label. The asymmetric leaves of our cayenne are very beautiful, and we have a bunch carefully pressed as models. The softer wood carves and prints differently. Shina also chips slightly as the knife moves across the grain, which provides a softer effect. A bit more difficult to carve as a result. American basswood is another wood available. As an aside, King City, Oregon is home to McClain’s Printmaking Supplies, an excellent resource for those of us who are attracted to the medium. They are exclusively mail order.

Queue up Tom & Jerry performing Beethoven’s "Turkish March" as an inspiration for the cayenne label? Nah, a mouse is already used for the flint corn label, and we have no appetite for a copyright infringement claim. To our knowledge, Tom and Jerry never performed an Arabesque anyway.

On the matter of the Ayers Creek Cayenne, we had an excellent crop this year, both in terms of quantity and quality. We have been working with this cayenne for a decade and a half, teasing out its best qualities. The effort has paid off as the fruits is now well-characterized and no longer erratic in quality. They are an amiable companion in the kitchen with a fruity complexity, very much a pepper of Oregon. The “fresh” cayennes measured 13° Brix out of the field, and after two weeks on a rack, the fruits had risen to 23° Brix as the sugars continued to develop and concentrate.

This year we sold some fresh to our restaurant accounts but we much prefer selling them dried. That said, we process fresh cayennes for our own use. We remove the seeds and placental tissue, run the fruits through a meat grinder, salt at 2.5%, and let the mash ferment. When it has aged for a few months in the garage, we will run the ferment through a food mill to remove the skins, then add some vinegar to extend and stabilize the resulting sauce. In the meantime, a jar of the fermented mash is always handy in the refrigerator.

The caps with placental tissue and seeds attached are beautiful, worthy of an ancient mosaic. It is not strictly necessary to remove these parts of the fruit, but they are where most of the heat resides and are inconsequential contributors to the overall flavor. Moreover, the corky fiber of the placental tissue detracts from the texture. We find the lighter dose of heat makes the pepper easier to use and savor, fresh or dried.

We also make an oil flavored with the cayennes. The dried cayennes are stripped of the cap, seeds and placental tissue, cut up into 1-inch (25mm) pieces. For a quart of oil, we use a quarter pound or so of prepared peppers (100 grams per liter). The oil is heated to 150 to 160°F (60 to 70°C), the heat is turned off and the cayennes are added, steeping until the oil cools. We have used raw sesame oil, grape seed oil and sunflower oil. The result is a beautiful red cayenne oil. Because of the high sugar content in the fruit, do not overheat the oil as you will end up burning the sugars.

The oil extracts the fat-soluble carotenoid pigments and aromatics from the flesh. The water soluble components remain in the fruits; specifically the dark anthocyanin-based pigments and the sugars, and these move to the front of the flavor profile. After draining the oil, we run the peppers through a meat grinder to make a separate condiment. The anthocyanin pigments in the ground peppers lend a pleasant touch of bitterness that plays well against their sugars, reminiscent of bittersweet chocolate. 

The photo (above) shows the deseeded dried fruits, the oil, the ground dry peppers after the oil is drained, and the fermented fresh fruit. At the open days, we will have samples for tasting.