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Taste of HomeMy take on Italian street food, these fried tortellini are crunchy, gooey good. For the sauce, use the best quality tomatoes you can find. —Angela Lemoine, Howell, New JerseyFood and WineSalsa macha is the kind of condiment that stops you in your tracks and as soon you taste it. It also shatters your expectations of what you think Mexican food can be. Directly translated into English, it means “brave salsa.” It’s olive oil. It’s toasted smoky chiles. It’s toasted nuts and seeds. It’s fried garlic. The sum of all these delicious parts is a convenient and crunchy salsa that virtually never goes bad and tastes amazing on pretty much anything it touches: quesadillas, tacos, Mexican-style street corn, salad, pizza, crusty bread, and seafood. It’s Mexico’s answer to the infused olive oils of Italy and the fiery chile oils of Asia.You can experience this unique salsa in Mexico City at street food stands and in nut-growing regions like Michoacán, where macadamias are added to the mix. While it’s traditionally a very spicy salsa, we like to temper the heat just a bit so we can taste the grassy qualities of the good olive oil (we love a buttery Arbequina variety). The beautiful thing about this salsa is that once you get the ratios down, you can experiment with other nuts, seeds, and chiles. It’s also great because you can make it any time of the year, unlike tomato salsas that only taste their best during peak season.When you add a couple of spoonfuls to cubed raw fish, salsa macha is a game changer that transforms an everyday ceviche into an extraordinary dish. Paola created this recipe as a heartier way of getting her ceviche fix during a weekend getaway in the desert with friends. She grew up eating salsa macha at her grandfather’s restaurant in Puerto Vallarta, where it is spooned over butterflied, wood-roasted whole fish. I love the meaty tuna that she uses in this recipe—it stands up to the boldness of the salsa. This ceviche is great on top of tostadas or eaten like poke as an appetizer. And the best part is that you can make the salsa ahead of time, and just stir it together with the remaining ingredients just before you’re ready to eat. But no matter what you serve it on, once you make and taste your first salsa macha, it will earn its place in the corner of your fridge forever.YummlyThis recipe is featured in our Recipe of the Day Newsletter. Sign up for it here to have our test kitchen-approved recipes delivered to your inbox! I'm a bit of a restaurant snob, self-admittedly. I love to eat, but I also love to cook so if I’m going to drop a pretty penny on a dinner out, it better be worth it. Since moving to the suburbs, it’s gotten even trickier to find a restaurant that I deem worth the schlep (often with a toddler in tow) and better than our standard chopped-style “WTF are we having for dinner” meals I miraculously pull out of thin air on the daily. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not tooting my own horn. Those meals often take the form of a humble egg sandwich or some version of 10 minute lettuce wraps, but at least I know those are tasty and will be made with wholesome ingredients. That all changes when I cross over the Bourne Bridge (same goes for the Whitestone Bridge, but that’s a restaurant story for a different day!). When I’m on the Cape Water Street Kitchen in Woods Hole, MA is a must-visit. They have a seasonally inspired menu, gorgeous views, amazing cocktails, funky wines and a familiar atmosphere that makes putting in the effort to go out truly worth it. I’ve never had a dish I didn’t like there, but the menu item that is always top of my list this the Radish Butter served with warm homemade Sourdough. At 5 bucks, I can say it’s the best money I ever spent. It’s creamy, salty, crunchy and a tad bit spicy from the fresh locally-grown radishes. It’s my philosophy on cooking and eating in a nutshell (or butter dish); use quality ingredients and prepare them simply. This radish butter is my ode to Water Street! It certainly is not the same without the view, or fresh ocean air but it comes pretty close! I’ll probably whip up a batch for dinner the next time my husband suggests we hit the local average pizza joint. Recipe and Headnote Molly AdamsFood and WineOne of Roy Choi’s favorite Honolulu spots is Side Street Inn. “The first time I went there, I was blown away by the dive bar scene—TVs everywhere, empty beer glasses, a mismatched hodgepodge design—and the quality of the food, which is really good,” he says. Side Street’s sticky fried ribs really stand out for Choi: He makes his version with a mixture of staple Asian sauces, including hoisin, black bean sauce, oyster sauce and Sriracha. Slideshow: Asian Beer PairingsFood52For the uninitiated, Fernet-Branca is a digestif (that means alcohol that makes your stomach feel less crappy) that tastes roughly like ass and anise if you try to drink it alone. Imagine a strip of black licorice that’s been dragged under a semi for a few miles and then squeezed into a tiny cordial glass; that’s about what straight Fernet tastes like. Which begs the question: why would anyone put it in a cake? Well, despite it’s more tire-like qualities it plays pretty nice with a glass of coke, and even better with chocolate. In other words, it’s the liquor equivalent of the curmudgeonly old man down the street who spends the day yelling at kids, but forms a special relationship with that one boy who reads him the paper because he’s blind. Insert your favorite hallmark original movie about an old person with a heart of gold or whatever; it works. So when you take some classic coke, a ton of cocoa powder, and a bit of that bitter Fernet, tell them all to hold hands and get along in the stand mixer. You’ll get a real, real tasty game of ring-around-the-rosie happening in your kitchen, trust me.Food52I thought about entering a chai recipe, but then saw that a few had been posted already and was going to skip it. Then I read those recipes and felt that I needed to set the record straight and tell everyone how to make pukka (proper) chai. In India you’ll never get a pukka chai in a restaurant. It is widely held that the only place to get pukka chai is on the street, generally from a man sitting on the ground with a small white spirit stove and a saucepan. No water is involved, and the quality of tea is the cheapest of the cheap. The milk is generally a blend of cow and buffalo and so the fat content comes in at an artery clogging 6% or so. You’ll be forgiven for substituting ordinary whole milk, but bonus points to those of you who do the math and add a bit of cream to up the ante.Food52For weeks now, my boyfriend and I have been obsessed with the “Baguette Lady,” or, the woman who sells real, French-style baguettes at Red Stick Farmer’s Market that are so lovely and perfect you can even pick them up by the “lip”–that crusty texture created by the cutting of bread dough with a lamé. She’s studied at the French Culinary Institute, eaten her weight in multi-grain baguettes in Paris (her wording, not mine), and now bakes bread in a professional-grade oven manufactured for the cooking of artisan loaves, brioches, and like bakery goods at “Forte Grove” in Plaquemine, Louisiana. To think we have this woman at our disposal in Baton Rouge boggles my mind. Paris has been a life-long goal of mine (romanticized a little too much here and here) and with the ongoing presence of these artisan loaves at my Saturday market, I feel as if it’s just a little bit closer, actualized, or possible. Sure, it’s just bread. But it’s real French bread. In Baton Rouge. Think about that for a minute. Having recently stumbled across David Lebovitz’s elegant and simple post for Oven-Roasted Tomatoes (here) in which he coaxes out the flavor of under-ripe tomatoes with a simple oven roast, I thought Kathleen Cooper’s multi-grain baguette deserved some natural seasonal attention with ripe Heirloom Tomatoes. Heirloom Tomatoes have been available for two weeks at Red Stick Market, and I found them to be the perfect tomato variety for the task of oven-roasting. With their peculiar deep ridges, heirloom tomatoes have a natural line on which to cut disc-shaped slices. Roasted and plated on Forte Grove’s multi-grain baguette represents the perfect way to bring a little bit of Paris into any summer kitchen. For tonight and for tomorrow, I will be repeating this recipe on end. The flavor of the artisan loaf and the sweet roasted tomatoes tastes so good it needs little other than a dip in good quality olive oil, salt, pepper, and basil. Any of my readers can make this dish just about anywhere, but if you have the unique advantage of finding yourself in Baton Rouge this Saturday, visit Forte Grove’s booth inside Main Street’s marketplace and pickup a $3 loaf and $5 of tomatoes. But, prepare yourself to be just a little bit obsessed.
