Six Recipes Enter, One Soup Leaves
I love eating Mexican food. Since I live in Chicago, but not in walking distance from Pilsen, that means I need to cook Mexican food. This is not a particularly onerous burden, except for the burden of finding the right peppers, which is harder than it should be considering that I have a produce store about 100 yards from my front door. But you didn't come here for my whining; you came here for the:

CHICKEN CORN TORTILLA SOUP

(serves four at dinner, with a bowl leftover for lunch the next day)

2 TBSP corn oil
2 boneless, skinless chicken thighs (or more)
1 TSP kosher salt
1 TSP cumin

4 ears of corn, kernels stripped (or a 16 OZ bag of frozen corn kernels)

2 large dried pasilla peppers (but see Insane Pepper Discussion below)
15 OZ can fire-roasted tomatoes
1 large onion, diced (you can use red onion here for extra Mexicanity, but I think a Vidalia onion here is pretty nice, and sweetens the soup up)
3 cloves garlic, sliced (don't bother chopping it too fine, since it goes in the blender anyway)

6 CUPS chicken stock (I have converted entirely to Kitchen Basics, and renounce Satan and all his broths)
2 TBSP cilantro, chopped

1 or 2 TSP of salt (to taste)
2 scallions, chopped (green and white, or just green)
2 limes

2 avocados
1 CUP or more queso fresco (or Chihuahua, or white cheddar, or whatever)
Big no-brand bag of yellow tortilla chips

Sour cream for the table

Set the corn oil heating up in a deep saucepan or soup pot over medium-high heat, while you cut the chicken up into bite-sized chunks and toss with kosher salt and cumin. Fry the chicken chunks in the corn oil until golden brown, call it 5-7 MINS, then spoon them out of the saucepan with a slotted spoon and keep them handy somewhere. Dump the corn kernels into the saucepan and saute over medium-high heat for 10-12 MINS. Then pour the corn into another bowl and put it near the chicken.

Meanwhile, toast the pasilla peppers in a dry pan over low heat until you can smell them, probably no more than 2 MINS; flip them over and toast another 1 MIN or so. Then chop them up. If you like things hot, keep the seeds, if not, toss 'em. Put the chopped, toasted pasillas into the blender with the tomatoes; blend.

If your saucepan needs more corn oil, pour a little in; then add the onion and garlic and saute over medium-high heat for 7 MINS. Then wield that slotted spoon once more, transferring the onion and garlic to the blender. Blend again.

You now have an empty saucepan over medium-high heat, and a blender full of tomato-peppers-onion-garlic goo. Once the saucepan is smoking, dump the goo into it and cook, stirring often, for 5 MINS. Add the corn and stir together, cooking for 1 MIN more or so. Add the chicken stock and cilantro, and stir to combine. Bring it all to a boil, then drop the heat to a simmer for 20 MINS. Add the salt, chicken, scallions, and the juice of both limes; let everything cook through for about 2 MINS and pour over bowls of goodness.

Which you prepared during the simmering: plop half an avocado (chopped up) and a quarter cup of cheese into each of four bowls. Top each bowl-mound with a handful of tortilla chips, broken in your clenched fist like it was the skull of your enemy. The hot soup will melt the cheese and soften the chips. Serve with sour cream, for mollpeartree. So very tasty.

A more involved version has you roasting or frying corn tortillas to make your own "chips," but on the authority of none other than Rick Bayless I skipped that part and went with chips from the Big Off-Brand Bag. Withal, the Wonderfulness ceiling is reached.

And now, the promised Insane Pepper Discussion: When I say "pasilla," I don't mean "ancho pasilla," which is just ancho peppers (dried poblanos) by another, stupider name. I mean these, aka chiles negros. Long, black, spearhead-shaped. So now that we're clear... When I first went to make this soup, I discovered that my bag of dried pasilla peppers, scored during my last Pilsen run, had turned weirdly fuzzy. So I used two dried ancho peppers instead, since one of my six recipes had called for poblanos and one had called for anchos. To approximate the earthy tones of the pasilla, in consultation with gnosticpi, I added a cinnamon stick, which went into the pan with the blender goo and came out just before serving. The result was a very clean, sweet flavor that mollpeartree preferred to the more earthy, robust, textured flavor of the pasillas, which I had to buy in Freaking Omaha For Chrissake. I like the pasilla version myself, and it was the pepper recommended by four of my six recipes, including Rick Bayless and Diana Kennedy, which is pretty much the end of the discussion, I would think. Unless you're married to mollpeartree, of course.



Because it's me, and because this is what I love to do, I built the recipe out of six other recipes, from Mark Bittman's The Best Recipes in the World all the way down to Rachael Ray. No stone unturned, I mean to say. Although everybody already no doubt knows Rick Bayless (I bought his Mexican Everyday, just to have a Bayless book -- and it's a pretty good one to have) and Diana Kennedy (whose The Art of Mexican Cooking I scored off Amazon Z-shops for THREE LOUSY BUCKS!), let me give a big shout-out to Jim Peyton's New Cooking from Old Mexico. This was a sheerly serendipitous find, used on the Cookbooks table at Brandeis-Booksale-That-Was a couple years back, and I still haven't gotten to the bottom of its magnificent potential. (Nor will I ever -- it has a day-and-a-half mole recipe adopted from the original convent in Puebla from whence mole sprang.) For example, I still owe kaynorr and gracefuleigh Peyton's Pork Loin Vampiro. Maybe closer to Halloween.