Chile

My aunt Martha swears that this smoky, sweet, tropical salsa takes her back to Yucatán no matter where she is when she makes it. It works especially well with Cilantro Tandoori Chicken (page 110), but it will enhance any grilled fish or meat. If the grill’s fired up, throw the pineapple right on it; a grill pan will do just fine if you’re cooking indoors.

The smoked salmon gives this sauce great texture and is also a wonderful flavor complement to the smokiness of the chile mulato. Try the sauce on pasta or with a char-grilled chicken breast.

Nuts and seeds have been making their way into Mexican sauces and salsas for centuries. The nutty sesame seeds in this salsa, which is served at a very popular small restaurant in Tijuana called Mi Rincón Cenaduria (My Restaurant Nook), give it body and depth. Use this on steak tacos or even with grilled chicken. Peanuts can be substituted for the sesame seeds.

A fresh salsa verde, or green sauce, made with tomatillos is a perfect condiment for almost any meal (I like it on grilled chicken tacos), and just as good as a dip for tortilla chips.

“Drunken” salsas have been around forever. They were originally prepared with pulque, an alcoholic beverage made from the fermented juice of the once-sacred maguey (agave) plant. Pulque, which is not easy to find outside of Mexico, is not distilled and has a much stronger flavor than tequila, which I use in its place in this recipe. The alcohol is mostly burned off in the cooking process, leaving only its musky flavor. The sweetness from the freshly squeezed orange juice gives this salsa a wonderful balance.

This is one of my favorite ways to eat rice: spicy and with nuts! The spice from the chiles is perfectly balanced by earthy pine nuts. To cut down on the heat, you can always use one ancho chile instead of two, but I encourage you to try it with two the first time around. You might be surprised at how well the flavors work together. Because they are picked by hand, pine nuts can be expensive. Feel free to substitute chopped or slivered almonds instead.

Couscous, made from semolina, is a staple in North African cuisine. Here it is infused with spicy chiles and cinnamon in this easy-to-whip-up salad that would pair nicely with grilled lamb or poultry.

This spicy, cheesy rice dish was served on a regular basis at my parents’ house. It’s also perfectly delicious if you prefer to omit the crema and cheese and just serve the poblano rice on its own, saving you a few calories.

This dish is one of the standouts at the Valladolid Thanksgiving table. Roasting acorn squash—or any vegetable—caramelizes the flesh and brings out its natural sweetness. Your veggies will be exponentially more flavorful than they are when you boil or steam them.

Thankfully, in Tijuana we don’t have to wait for summer to get the grill out. One of the benefits is that we can eat grilled corn on the cob any day of the year. Jalapeño butter is easy to make and adds the perfect finish to the slightly charred corn. If you have any left over, store it in the fridge for up to a week; it’s great on a baked potato or green beans.

It really is good to eat your brussels sprouts, and this morilla cream sauce, made with toasted sunflower seeds, will make a believer out of anyone. My father owns a plantation in San Quintín, Baja, where he grows and exports vegetables, including brussels sprouts. When I was young he would bring them home by the overflowing crateful—leaving me and my mother to come up with new, exciting ways to prepare them. This is my favorite recipe for serving the sprouts with a meal. For snacking, I love them coated with a little olive oil, sea salt, and black pepper and roasted until very crisp.

My dad, Antonio (a.k.a. Tony), inspired this dish. Like a painter’s body of work, his culinary life is marked by distinct periods. When he went through an osso buco period, I decided that if I was going to be making a lot of osso buco, it was going to be a Mexican osso buco, spiked with lime, chiles, cilantro, and garlic.

An ancho chile is a dried poblano, perfect for adding a little heat to this bread crumb crust. If you don’t have a spice grinder, a clean coffee grinder will work just as well. (Grind the chile first and then make the bread crumbs in the grinder to clean it out.) Traditional mint jelly works fine as an accompaniment, but I like to surprise my guests with jalapeño jelly, which you can find in Latin markets and well-stocked supermarkets.

Chocolate and chiles have been paired up for centuries in Mexico. Ancho-infused hot chocolate was a drink reserved for royalty, believed to produce strength and virility. The combo is especially tasty with beefy short ribs. You can substitute bittersweet chocolate for the Mexican chocolate; just add a pinch each of sugar and cinnamon and a few drops of almond extract—the ingredients that make Mexican chocolate unique.

This is a simple dish with an impressive presentation, and it works with any combination of grilled meat, fish, poultry, or vegetables. A molcajete is a mortar made of lava rock that is usually used with a pestle (also made of lava rock) to make fresh salsas. Because it is made with a natural rock, it has an excellent ability to preserve heat and keep a dish hot, and that’s how I use it in this recipe. If you do not have two molcajetes, ovenproof earthenware bowls (about the size of cereal bowls) are an acceptable substitute.

I’m a little obsessed with mole (Mexico’s national dish, also known as mole poblano). I even visited its birthplace, the Convent of Santa Rosa in the beautiful colonial city of Puebla. Traditional mole takes days to make and is just as marvelous and multileveled as the most complex French sauce. Here you get a much easier version with nearly authentic results in terms of flavor. Do a little experiment and taste your mole right before you add the chocolate and then right after you add it. If you don’t get what it means when gourmands talk about “depth of flavor,” you’ll get it when you make this comparison. My great-grandmother, grandmother, mother, and I all like to sprinkle it with plenty of additional sugar and a dollop of sour cream after it’s on the plate. You can make the sauce on its own and use it for very impressive enchiladas—or do as I did when I was a kid: spoon a few tablespoons over Mexican rice and chow down.

This recipe is one of my favorites ever. It comes from my aunt Marcela, a chef who inspired me to enter the magical world of the culinary arts. We not only share the same name and the same career, we also agree that sweet and spicy is one of the best combinations when preparing Mexican food. Store-bought apricot preserves, used here, work well; just be sure to buy the best you can find. A kitchen syringe is a useful tool for injecting the hens with a flavorful mixture of broth, butter, and tequila. The result is a moist and succulent dish.

There was always a roast chicken in our fridge when I was growing up—but I’d be lying if I said my mom cooked it. There was a wonderful rotisserie place a few blocks from my house and they would deliver a succulent roast chicken, fresh salsa, homemade tortillas, and frijoles charros (like the frijoles on page 155 but with tons of bacon in the mix). We’d all stand around the kitchen table and make soft tacos, adding a few slices of avocado. We used leftovers for chicken salad, flautas (rolled up and fried chicken tacos), or tostadas (fried tortillas spread with refried beans, topped with shredded chicken, shredded iceberg lettuce, crema, salsa, avocado slices, and, in my house, a drizzle of olive oil and red wine vinegar). This recipe is so easy and yields such a flavorful, succulent chicken that I doubt any rotisserie place in your neighborhood can rival it. And I doubt you’ll have leftovers. But if you do, go to town with tortillas, beans, avocado, and any of the salsas in this book and make tacos.

Yes, I use canned tuna for this dish—and you will love it. I generally prefer fresh ingredients over packaged items, but these stuffed peppers are worth breaking the rule. The mild flavor of the canned albacore allows the flavor of the pickled onions to shine through. My aunt Laura, who passed this recipe on to me, makes it with canned chiles (they are available in Mexico already charred, peeled, and ready to stuff). But for me, half of this dish’s success is the exquisite smell of the chiles charring on the burner. You can’t buy anticipation in a can.

I have eaten more than my share of fish tacos while living in Baja. But the beach is a half-hour drive from my house, so I was on a mission to find a fish taco recipe that I could make at home—one that was as delicious and authentic as the taco they serve at my favorite Rosarito taco shack. This is what I came up with—and I’m happy to say it competes!