The Celery Museum: Of Expectation, the Vegan Diet and a Great Chile Relleno

My introduction to Mexican food occurred before I can remember. The first house I ever lived in was in Canutillo, Texas, a tiny village outside of El Paso, spitting distance from New Mexico. So properly, it wasn't Mexican food at all that I grew up eating - it was southern New Mexican TexMex. My parents (my father, being from the area, my mother having learned the recipes from him) cooked it at home, things like fideo, pasole, tacos and green chile enchiladas. There is also one particular restaurant in Canutillo, The Tortilla Factory, where we'd get huge batches of flautas, gorditas and tamales. But my very favorite of these dishes has always been the chile relleno.

Like kids will with their first experiences of anything, I assumed this was Mexican food, as in, the only Mexican food. I am setting aside the fact that Mexico is a large and eclectic nation that ranges from desert to jungle, inland to coastal, and has cuisine as varied as its landscape...because I'm not really talking about Mexican food, but rather about what an American gringa means when she says "Mexican food". TexMex, of course. But even within that already circumscribed category the variety is huge.

Once I left the El Paso area, I was dismayed to discover that the Hatch chile is not the universal green chile, that when you order a relleno in many other parts of the country, you will receive a cheese-stuffed and battered poblano. Nothing against the poblano. Really. I love all sorts of peppers, but Hatch green chiles taste like heaven. When roasting, they smell like heaven. They have a flavor that reminds you of the sun they soaked up while they were growing. I'd love to describe the flavor more specifically, but they really only taste like themselves and they are better than any other pepper I have ever eaten.

So I lived a relleno-less life for many years, only sampling this true delicacy on trips back to Las Cruces to visit my grandmother, until a few years ago...when Whole Foods began carrying Hatch chiles! My excitement approached the ludicrous, and I purchased almost 2 dozen that first time, I think. And then a new realization dawned, as though life were intentionally setting up road blocks between me and my first love, the Hatch chile relleno - my boyfriend, Nick, is vegan and rellenos are (a) loaded with cheese, and (b) coated in an egg and milk batter.

I could have just made them for myself and let Nick wallow in his ignorance of the ambrosia that is a Hatch chile relleno, but this is not just my boyfriend. This is the love-of-my-life best friend, and one of our best-friend activities is cooking together. While not vegan, I am enormously sympathetic to his choice and to the difficulties he faces having made that choice. I found myself eating vegetarian (and largely vegan) at home, because it's easier to buy one set of groceries and cook one meal at a time, and because, if you do it right, it's tasty and I found that I didn't miss my omnivorous diet. That said, I was (and am) still on the dairy, and while I could envision using soy cheese to stuff Nick's rellenos, I couldn't envision a good batter that didn't use eggs. It's hard enough to find a good batter that does use dairy products. I once had "rellenos" that amounted to a chile-cheese omelette. Blech. So I googled and googled and I finally discovered my hero, Tofu Mom at Tofu n Sprouts.

Here's her recipe: Tofu Mom's Vegan Chile Rellenos

You'll notice, she does use poblanos (*sigh*), but her batter recipe worked brilliantly for me with only minor tweaking; namely, I use about twice as much milk, and I prefer almond to soy milk. I use EnerG egg replacer and love it for all sorts of recipes. Using this batter, I got precisely the texture I wanted and didn't miss the dairy at all - it puffs up and is a little spongy, it sticks well to the chile once cooked, and it in no way resembles an omelette. I cannot overstate my surprise that a vegan relleno batter could in anyway approximate a dairy-laden one. Minus a lack of greasiness that I did not miss, this batter is really a dead ringer for what I grew up eating in Canutillo. Angels sang when I took my first bite. The heavens opened up. I was a happy, happy camper.

I also did not use Tofu Mom's stuffing recipe, which seemed a little fussy to me. Instead, for Nick's stuffing, I boiled a potato with several garlic cloves, mashed it with butter and lime juice, salt and pepper, and then folded in some shredded vegan cheese (Follow Your Heart Vegan Gourmet cheddar, to be exact). For my own stuffing, I stuck to sliced monterey jack.

And now, thanks to Whole Foods and Tofu Mom, I don't have to live a relleno-less life any longer. Every summer since this discovery, Nick and I make as many batches of rellenos as we can handle. The following pictures are from our most recent relleno-fest on Labor Day 2009, generously subsidized by my aunt Nancy. Nancy lives in Alabama but also knows the wonders of Hatch chiles, and on a recent visit to New Orleans she was as excited as I when she discovered Hatch chiles in Whole Foods. She brought a bag of the green beauties over to me and Nick and took some home to Huntsville as well. Thanks Nancy!

Relleno Fest 2009

There are a number of ways to roast Hatch chiles and I imagine everyone who does so has their favorite way. Because I live in New Orleans, because I have only a window a/c unit not located in the kitchen, and because Hatch chile season occurs in the summer, I initially experimented by roasting chiles without using my broiler. Nick and I would roast them one at a time, each stationed at a corner of the gas range, using tongs to hold the chiles right in the flame. If you're only going to roast a few chiles, this is not a bad method, but when you're roasting a dozen or two I'm afraid that, even during a New Orleans summer, the broiler is the best method.

I recommend roasting them early in the morning or late at night, to minimize the feeling that your kitchen actually is the oven. Cram as many chiles as you can onto your foil-lined broiler pan without overlapping, broil them for 15-20 minutes, turning them every 5 minutes or so. Once the skins are fairly uniformly black and charred, place chiles on a piece of newspaper, wrap them up and put them in a paper bag. My mother just wraps them in the broiler lining foil they were roasted on, but I still use newspaper. Let them steam this way until cool. I've waited as long as a day and as short as an hour before removing them from the newspaper to peel.

To peel, use a small sharp paring knife and (IMPORTANT) gloves of some sort. The capsiacin in the peppers will burn your hands for days if you don't use gloves. Trust me. I know this from unfortunate, if humorous, personal experience. The charred chile skin should come easily away from the chile. Once peeled cut a single slit, from stem to tip, and carefully remove as many of the seeds and pulp as possible.

My mother always left quite a few seeds and strings of pulp up by the stem, insisting that you don't eat that part anyway so why should it matter. Maybe I'm just overly fastidious or maybe it's because I like to pick up the relleno by the stem and eat every last bit,

but I like to get all the seeds and pulp out.

Once your chiles are peeled and seeded,

it's time to stuff them. Don't use too much filling, whether cheese or something else, because you need to leave a flap of chile meat to toothpick closed.

Potato-soy cheese stuffing:

and monterey jack:

(NB: There's flour everywhere because I dredge them in flour as I make each one...not the tidiest of practices.) Then, toothpick them closed. There's probably a superstar relleno-maker somewhere who uses only one toothpick per relleno, but I always use at least two:

All toothpicked, ready to be dredged:

Once stuffed and toothpicked, dredge them in flour:

Then coat them in batter and place directly into hot cooking oil or vegetable shortening. Vorsicht! The batter is verrrrrry thick and gloopy. You will get messy. If you cook at all like I do, this is a good thing. If you don't, you are probably an expert at finding tidy alternatives to messy operations, so good luck!

Cook until medium brown on all sides. You can use tongs to grip the stem and flip them that way. However, stems can get burnt in the roasting process, especially if you broil them. If this happens, I use two spatulas.

I transfer them from the pan to my preheated toaster oven to keep warm. This time, we drizzled the rellenos with a little green enchilada sauce and served them with homemade spanish rice and distinctly unhomemade refried beans. They will do in a pinch, but ugh, not the same. In case you're wondering, the mystery substance on top of Nick's refried beans is leftover potato-soy cheese stuffing.