What to do with dried chiles

A while back I purchased a couple bags of dried chiles. I didn't know what I was planning to do with them I just wanted them. Imagine my joy when I discovered that I could easily make my own chile or red enchilada sauce. I saw it in a magazine, I'm not sure which one but I saw it fleetingly in a waiting room somewhere. I looked it up when I got home and found a slew of recipes online all basically saying the same thing. Toast them, clean them, soak them puree and use. So I finally had a chance to start early this morning and do exactly that.

I had a 2 ounce mystery bag of mild red chiles and a 2 ounce bag of Pasilla chiles languishing in a cupboard. Before this morning I had only admired their color and wondered what to do with them. Now that I knew their secrets I was no longer content to admire, I needed to create. And so I did.

I started by lightly toasting them in a dry skillet. Then I cooled them while bringing a pot of water to boil. When they were cool,  I cut them open, shook out the seeds and pulled off their stems. Then they went in the pot of boiled water taken off the heat. I didn't want to cook them but simply reconstitute them. I let them set for at least a half an hour, then I pulled them out and set them aside until I had time to work on them again. We were busily easy baking, working on counting to 100 and following directions to fold paper airplanes for school work so the chiles simply had to wait.

Once I came back to working on them I pulled out the food processor fitted with the chopping blade and plopped all the chiles in the bowl. I wish now I had done this in 2 batches because the fatal flaw of the food processor is, of course, if you fill it too full it will ooze out through the blade hole and make it impossible to enjoy grinding the daylights out of stuff.

When I discovered it was leaking I knew I had to get some out of the processor, so I poured it into a jar and stuck it in the fridge to use later this week. I added some of the water I soaked the chiles in to thin down the sauce. When I discovered it was bitter I switched to plain water. I also added a very small garlic clove and some salt and pureed the hell out of it.

I browned a small amount of cubed pork meat in a dutch oven, deglazed with a splash of water and poured in the chile sauce. I let it simmer for about an hour and a half and served it over creamy polenta.

What a fantastic dinner it made. Mr. 4 year old didn't like it because he likes polenta plain but everybody else loved it! I'd never in my life thought of making homemade chile sauce but it was good and I will be making it again for a whole mess of enchiladas and to put inside some tamales. This is my Dinner at Christina's  Friday Firsts entry be sure to clink the button

and check out what other bloggers did for the first time this week!

Peace and Love,











Guess what else we did today? Yes, those are my Keen hiking shoes, strapped to snow shoes!