New Mexico Style Shepherd's Pie

I've been trying to learn how to cook and, in typical fashion, everything I want to make is hugely complex. This is the 4th meal I've ever made that didn't involve a grill, a smoker, or breakfast. It is the 5th meal if you include the abortive attempt I made last night, when I spilled a bunch of rock salt into the meat and ruined it. But I learned enough to make tonight's attempt absolutely spectacular. I had an inspired idea for going off recipe, and I suspected it would be magic, so I documented the whole damn process. Enjoy. And seriously - you should make this.

Start with some fresh Hatch Green Chiles - Whole Foods has them, which was a shock to me, but greatly appreciated, since I don't live anywhere near New Mexico.

No, Wait! I try to learn from past mistakes. Let's try this one, instead.




Slice 'em and spoon out the innards. I'm not particularly anal about it, since I like my food really spicy. There's still quite a few seeds inside. Lay 'em on tin foil and throw them under the broiler.



They are ready to flip when they look like the ones on the right side. Get both sides like this




Wrap 'em in a damp towel while they are still hot and let 'em sit for 10-15 minutes. This steams 'em and makes the skins really easy to remove.



Meanwhile, prep a kilogram of these. I'm using a mix of Russets and Yukon Gold. No particular reason why I mixed 'em up. It's what I had.



Do this to the potatoes and get 'em in boiling water. By the way, I had no idea what a joy a really good knife makes cooking until I went out and spent $75 on one. I wish I'd gotten the 8" instead of the 6", though. That things cuts through potatoes and onions like they aren't even there. "Like slicing through butter" would be an insult to the knife.



After the chiles have steamed for a bit. Peel the skins off of 'em. The skin ought to slough right off if you got them roasted well enough. See, lots of seeds still floating around.



Potatoes are done. Time for mashing.



Looks like the sous chef finally bothered to show up



Add 2 egg yolks and a dash of milk. This adds creaminess and helps the potatoes brown when the shepherd's pie bakes



Here's some young Gruyere and a wedge of parmesan. The Gruyere is an experiment, but I think it will blend nicely with the chiles. I must have tested at least 10 cheeses at the store before I found one that I thought would complement the green chile really nicely.



Grate in a bunch of cheese. Your guess is as good as mine as to how much. This turned out to be just right. It is much more gruyere than parmesan.



Time for the coup de grace - the green chile - my favourite food. I wound up using about 3/4 or 7/8 of the 4 chiles and got the perfect amount of spicyness and flavour.



Do try to resist the urge to dig in and eat all the mashed potatoes. We need them for the shepherd's pie.



Grab a sprig of rosemary and a handful of thyme



Remove leaves (which is a pain in the ass with the thyme)



And chop them up nice and fine



You'll need all of these. I've got a little more than a pound of meat, so I figure about 1-1/4 onion and 1-1/4 carrots. Those are Serranos and Jalapenos - the serranos for heat, the Jalapenos for flavour. I've never made this before, so I have no idea how much of either should go in.



It turns out that grating onions is lame, so I whipped out the nifty soup blender attachment that my mom, ever so wisely, made me buy, and chop the onions up super fine.





I grated the carrots, chopped the garlic and 1 Jalapeno and 1 Serrano. I wimped out on the double. If it is too weak, I'll know next time.



Get some nice olive oil pretty hot



Add meat. Flame shoudl be medium hot. We want it to brown pretty quickly. That's a total of 1.2 pounds according to my brewing scale. That's half 94% lean ground beef and half New Zealand ground lamb



Break it up. This is a mincemeat dish. I use that fork - very carefully in my nice pan.



Once it is almost cooked, like this, it is time to add veggies



First comes the carrots and onions



Then garlic and peppers. And I forgot to take pics of the tablespoon and a half of tomato puree and a couple tablespoons of worcestershire sauce that went in, too.



Add 1/3 of a bottle of cheap, screw-top red wine



It will look and smell really yummy - like this:



Then reduce it almost back to dry - like this:



Add chicken stock, bring back to a boil and simmer



reduce the chicken stock until the meat is thick enough that it isn't going to slide out from under the mashed potatoes to refill the dish after you remove a piece.

Something like this:



By this point, the dogs were well and truly aware that there were delights happening in the kitchen. Under foot is an understatement



And now there was a 3rd, cause my companion for dinner has a husky, too.

It proved impossible to get them all in a single frame



Well, almost impossible, though it looks like Bella was only in frame for part of this exposure, somehow, so she looks like a ghost dog



Layer the meat into some kind of oven-safe dish.



Spoon the potatoes on, starting from the outside and working in. If you start at the middle, it has greater potential to sink, I think. I haven't tested this. This is the first time I've made a shepherd's pie.



Once you've got all the potatoes on, you can make a fancy pattern with a fork. Apparently, I did this wrong. You are supposed to create relatively deep furrows so that just the top of each ridge browns in the oven.



Put in in the oven at 360 degrees for 20 minutes or so. YOu want the potatoes to brown a bit and the meat should be audibly bubbling.



20 minutes later, serve it up







This proved to be, by a wide margin, the best shepherd's pie I've ever tasted. The southwestern thing really added to it. I had asparagus and lemons from the backyard for making a lemon butter for them, but by the time we were ready to eat, neither of us wanted to deal with it. It would have been a nice addition, I think.

I owe the inspiration and original (bland, english-style) recipe to Gordon Ramsay. I saw the Hatch chiles at the store when I was buying ingredients to make it according to the recipe and I knew I had to spice the thing up somehow. Then I remembered my ex-wife's inspired green-chile-cheese mashed potatoes that were a turkey day staple and I knew just what I had to do. This is pretty much the first time I've ever gone significantly off-recipe - and it was bloody awesome, even if I do say so myself.

For the record, the spiciness level was about perfect. I like my food pretty spicey. This could have been hotter, but too much would have been a distraction from the flavours. If you don't tend to order your food spicy, I recommend using only half a serrano and dial back the green chile in the potatoes some, too. If you like it pretty hot, this won't even cause you to break a sweat, but it is very flavourful. Goes really good with beer.

Folding bike

Just in case anyone is curious about the bike and how it is packed.


Here's the bike and its accessories stowed in the suitcase (which is a standard Samsonite model). You can see the only tools necessary for the packing job up on the lid of the bag. The only parts that are removed are the pedals, handlebars, and wheels. Everything else simply folds up into a compact package.


Here's the same bag with about 10 days of riding clothes also packed in. Everything cycling related is in the bag except for my helmet.


And here's the bag, all closed up and ready for travel.

Pretty cool, eh? The suitcase provided by the company costs $150 more than the one I bought at my local luggage store, but it is exactly the same size (possibly exactly the same model?).

Hyderabad Wrap Up

Unfortunately, the rest of my trip was pretty uneventful. I had planned to head north the weekend after my Goa trip, but without taking yet more time off from work, a 2 day excursion was not worth the expense or effort. Hyderabad isn't the most well connected airport in the world, so any trip requires at least one transfer and a fairly long airport wait. I really wanted to see Darjeeling, but with a 4 to 8 hour transit from the nearest airport into Darjeeling, it just wasn't in the cards. In the end, I wound up spending my final weekend in Hyderabad, conducting interviews of potential engineering candidates. That effort paid off, at least, and I was able to settle on two candidates, one of whom has already accepted the position. In truth, the weekend was a waste of time, since all but one of the candidates who were scheduled cancelled at the last minute, but since the temps were soaring up over 110 all weekend long, I didn't really miss much by sitting in the office working.

I have to admit, however, that India started to demoralize me after a while. 2 weeks in, I was having a hard time maintaining my enthusiasm. I blame finishing "A Fine Balance" to some degree, as it made it impossible not to focus on the abject poverty that is in evidence everywhere you go in Hyderabad.

On the day that I left, I took some real photos of the slum/ghetto just underneath my hotel. Bear in mind that this is the nicest neighbourhood in Hyderabad - where all of the state government officials live. These were all shot just as the folks 'downstairs' were getting ready for the day. In all probability, all of these people have some kind of job. They are not homeless, at least not in the sense that we think of it in the US.






There's something particularly tragic about watching a child play in such conditions.


She was woken up by the rooster, who insisted on crowing right by her head.


As crappy as it looks, it wasn't for lack of caretaking by the residents. There was all kinds of sweeping and cleaning going on while breakfast was being prepared.


This guy was bathing as best he could - with absolutely no privacy and very limited access to water.


Not surprisingly, chickens weren't the only livestock wandering around the area.

And these kinds of scenes really were visible everywhere, and were far from the worst things I saw. On my final saturday night, I went for a midnight ride around the city, and everywhere I went, the one constant were the groups of people sweeping the streets clean in front of corporate office buildings. In Russia, seeing old women sweeping the streets was a common occurrence, and the fact that they had sticks cut from local trees tied to their broomsticks was something of a surprise. But in India, even the broomstick is a luxury. Everywhere you go after dark, you see women (and men) bent over at 90 degrees, sweeping the ground with handfuls of branches. Now try to imagine an economy in which providing broomsticks to your street sweepers isn't economically useful. Cheaper to just hire more poor people and let them destroy their bodies doing the meanest of manual labour.