Homesick Texan Tuesday

There's this thing that sometimes happens between me and my mom, where I'll borrow one of her cookbooks, become fanatically obsessed with it, then she ends up on Amazon, one-click ordering a new copy. This is how I acquired The Homesick Texan Cookbook. This evening I tried to make it up to my mom by inviting her over for Homesick Texan Tuesday! I made green chile posole with black beans, gorditas with picadillo, and kolaches. (I'm exhausted BTW.)

Green Chile Posole with Black Beans

HT's posole recipe is wonderful. It challenged me to use all kinds of ingredients I had never dealt with, or even tasted. 

Such as tomatillos...

...serrano chiles...

...and a poblano chile. (Lard is new to me as well, but it was used for the gorditas; not the soup.)

 

Here is the poblano in roasted form.

 

So anyway, the posole is really neat because you put all this green stuff in a blender to make the soup base. Then you add hominy (which is the English word for posole), black beans, lime juice and half-and-half. Love this soup!

Gordita with Picadillo

So the gorditas were insane. More specifically, the gordita shell was insane. You make the dough with masa and lard, then you pan-fry it, then you deep-fry it. No wonder gordita means "little fat girl" in Spanish. I know how she feels...

 I'm not sure that my gordita shells "puffed" the way they were supposed to, but we made it work.

The picadillo filling is a seasoned ground beef mixture that calls for one diced russet potato. 

That first gordita was totally staged (Josh's lunch gordita for tomorrow), but this is the actual gordita I actually ate for actual dinner. Not as picturesque, but it's covered in wonderful shredded lettuce.

This is Mom's actual gordita. She likes lettuce and tomato.

Kolaches

Not sure how I feel about the kolaches. I did half with cream cheese filling and half with apricot filling. They're not very sweet. The bread-to-filling ratio seemed off, especially with the apricot. I guess I'm not crazy about these, but I may feel differently tomorrow.