You Are Just Like Enchilada Sauce And So Am I

Interesting thing, enchilada sauce. Rumor has it that when you’re doing something mundane you’re using your brain’s ‘First Tier’ and the juicy bulk of your gray matter, the part associated with complex reasoning, is free to roam. Making sauce of any kind is mundane, but enchilada sauce is also a revealing metaphor. How so? Here. When I first started making my own enchilada sauce I copied the ingredients on a can and experimented until I got it. Easy enough. I did the same thing with BBQ sauce at one point. Mustard. Pickles. All this was years ago. With the enchilada sauce, once I had a grip on the ‘common’ version of it, the sauce we’re all use to, the sauce that in this metaphor represents ‘The norm’, or the baseline, I began experimenting. I started with the chiles themselves. Chili powder, or any powdered ingredient, totally blows. Garlic powder, onion powder, chili powder, paprika, all them contain an aluminum based anti-clumping agent. It irritates my stomach a little, probably yours too. So I started there. Dried anchoes, dried Californias and New Mexicos, rehydrated, were a good start. It got more complicated. Better, then worse, then just different, then better and different. Time passed. Eventually, my very own recipe emerged, an enchilada sauce like no one else’s. Mine. Tailored to my taste. I just made it and not only is it good, but in some ways it’s just like my life. Yours too, probably. Time, continuous effort to evolve into something better than the baseline, and voila. A highly customized human mind is just like a dramatically evolved enchilada sauce. Here in the time of the Great Sabbatical, I hope you’re all working on something tasty. If you aren’t, you can still start right now. These are dark, shitty times, and maybe the world (America anyway) really is headed for the Republican Hell and the best the 99% can hope for is a leaky FEMA trailer and a boot on the neck, but you don’t have to go with that plan, do you? Fuck that. Feed your notion of individuality, unpopular as that is right now. Here’s my enchilada sauce recipe, give it a whirl and maybe you’ll see something.

In medium sauce pan-

Toast 1 teaspoon cumin seeds

When browned, add 2 tablespoons (or so) of olive oil, frying the toasted seeds.

Let cool (you now have 2 tablespoons of toasted cumin seed oil), add-

5 ancho chiles, deseeded (also remove the white tissue)

2 California chiles, deseeded (the seeds and the white tissue are the hot ingredients)

5 cloves crushed, peeled garlic

1 and ½ cup water

Some black pepper, ground right there

Heat to boil, cover, turn heat off

Let sit for 15 minutes, blend, salt to taste

It is dark, dark red. Thick. Sweet. Smoky. You can also use this as a substitute for The Sauce of Lust and Violence to baste a chicken. See Green Chili Stuffing Roasted Chicken for instructions.