This is the way I cook now and you can too! The recipes are simple to prepare, nutritious, and flavor packed.
Shredded Beef Salad (Salpicon de res)
Photo by Lazaro Azar
“Salpicon” is not exactly a precise term. Depending on the context, it can refer to different kinds of hash or salad. In the Ciudad Juarez-El Paso border area where I began my catering career, it meant a colorful salad of shredded beef with other sliced or diced ingredients — onion, radish, avocado, and Monterey Jack or cheddar cheese were usual, but there was no one standard formula. It was great for parties because it could be served at room temperature with most of the preparation being done well in advance. It also made an ideal taco filling.
Today I find that minus the cheese, beef salpicon is a light but satisfying dish, good for either everyday meals or special occasions. The rich-flavored beef stock I get from cooking the meat is an added bonus. For the meat, choose a cut that can be easily pulled into shreds after cooking. I usually prefer flank steak. Brisket makes slightly coarser shreds.
Beets Vinaigrette (Betabeles en vinaigreta)
Photo by loaquin Martinez
This is one of the most flavorful and beautiful salads imaginable if you follow a few guidelines. First of all, it is important to oven-roast the beets for maximum sweetness. The will never be the same if boiled. The next thing is to slice the peeled beets into thin, even rounds that will look like glistening jewels on the serving platter against the translucent pink of red onions, the orange of habanero pepper, and the spring-like green of thyme sprigs. Be sure to slice the onion and habanero very thin.
If you have visited marketplaces in Yucatan, you have seen colorful mounds of different spice pastes in many shades from black or green to yellow or red, for home cooks to buy in small quantities. These are the famous regional recados, complex and intensely flavored mixtures of herbs and spices. At home, people dilute the concentrated recado with water or bitter orange juice, and skillfully blend it with the other ingredients of a sauce or marinade. Sometimes, of course they make up a particular recado from scratch and store it for future use instead of buying the paste. Or they grind dry spice-herb mixtures to use as rubs, or to convert into recados by diluting and blending them with roasted garlic and/or onion just before cooking a dish.
Cauliflower Pancake (Torta de coliflor)
A favorite appetizer at my restaurant Zarela used to be small deep-fried tortitas (fritters) of broccoli florets in a delicate batter. They’re not something I’d cook for myself at home, but they were the inspiration for this streamlined dish based on cauliflower. It’s less like the American idea of a pancake than one of those southern Indian savory snacks called “uttapam,” the size of small pizzas.
