Tag Archives: Aztecs

A Pepper Reeducation

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blackbeansliders

Black bean sliders with chipotle mayo and all the fixins? Yes, please!

A confession, dear readers: I was recently brought face-to-face with my own alarming level of pepper ignorance. I don’t talk about it in mixed company, of course, and I try to give all peppers the respect they deserve, but I do harbor some latent anti-bell-pepper feelings. But that isn’t the half of it. A couple days ago, I realized that I didn’t know one of my pepper darlings (a model minority pepper, if you will) half as well as I thought I did.

And before you get all high and mighty, take this little test. Is the following statement true or false: the chipotle pepper is a variety of pepper (just like bell peppers, banana peppers, Thai chili peppers, etc.) If you said true, you are WRONG, my friend, as wrong as I was. Chipotle peppers are actually a preparation of pepper, not a varietal. They are jalapeño peppers that have been dried and smoked. I know! Crazy! Our little pal the jalapeño has been going incognito! And he’s been smoking his way into chipotle-dom ever since the reign of the Aztecs.

Of course, I would be remiss not to mention the mega-successful fast food chain, which is probably the reason most of us learned the word “chipotle” in the first place. I became acquainted with my first massive Chipotle burrito as an undergraduate, and if there is a time in your life when it seems like eating your weight in guacamole might just solve all your problems, then that is it.

chipotlemeco

Meco chipotles

But it wasn’t too long after that when I met the real chipotle and started buying the little cans of chipotles packed in adobo sauce (a marinade of tomatoes, vinegar, spices, etc). These are the easiest ones to score in America; they’re almost certainly in the canned food aisle of your local grocery store. It’s typically the smaller morita kind of chipotles that you find packed into the cans, rather than the larger, smokier, pricier, and more-coveted meco kind. But let’s be honest: meco chipotles look like cigar butts, and I probably wouldn’t quite know what to do with one even if I could find it easily. The canned kind, on the other hand, are super easy to use, and so, so good. If you haven’t yet tried them, here are three terrifically easy ways you can add the smoky kick of the chipotle to your own cooking. Continue reading →

Dead Man Gnawing: Aztec Peanut Paste and the Birth of Skippy (1519 & 1932)

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Among the wonders the Conquistadors discovered upon setting foot on the Americas was peanut butter.  Well, it would have been more of a peanut paste—just roasted, mashed nuts—but the essentials were there in 1519 when Cortez and his lunatics showed up.  Let’s assume the Aztecs had a long history with peanut butter because peanut butter is awesome and so are storied, long-dead ancient empires.

And now let’s jump to the 19th century.  We’re jumping because even though peanuts spread around the globe after the colonization of the Americas and folks surely smashed and ate them, the public record rarely takes note of what Average Joe and Jane ate.  It does take note, however, of issued patents.

In 1884, a Québécois named Marcellus Gilmore Edson received a patent for the process of milling roasted peanuts into a semi-fluid state between heated surfaces.  When the goop cooled, it achieved, in Edson’s words, “a consistency like that of butter, lard, or ointment.”  Yum. Continue reading →