Fideos y Colorín

Mexican food themed dinner party on sunday. There's a blogger/Portland Trail Blazers fan who cooked a dinner every game this season based on the city of the opposing team -- for the 1st game of the Suns playoff series she made Fideos -- vermicelli in spanish. Basically you toast pasta, then add a liquid sauce which cooks the pasta and ends up the right thickness to be a proper sauce. It's gonna be my new favorite camping meal -- when you're camping (in Baja) it isn't trivial to get more fresh water, so you try to be frugal, so I've never liked cooking pasta in water when camping. I didn't really follow her recipe, just the proportion of pasta to liquid in order for the final product to be right. Recipe below.

One of the books I got recently was the Art of Mexican Cooking by Diana Kennedy; have a couple of her other books already. Paged through it thursday night and she mentioned that coral tree (colorín) flowers are edible, and are commonly used to make tacos. There are a ton of coral trees right by my office here. And they are in flower right now! Stoked. Alas, I forgot where in the book I'd read that, so spent some time saturday/sunday looking at every-damn-recipe in the book. Kinda lame, but there were a bunch of recipes that looked great, and I probably wouldn't have identified so many cool ones! The funny part, I started at the back ~p. 500. The colorín mention was in the intro, p. vii. Brutal! There's very little info on the web in english about colorín, about the only thing I saw was a suggestion to cook them with garlic and onion, and then they taste kinda like beef. I did and they did. A huge success. Only bummer is they lose the vibrant red when you cook them. C'est la vie. Recipe Below.

Also made chongos zamoranos again. I started too late in the day, so the whey syrup didn't cook down as much as the 2nd time I made them. That was the best batch so far.

Fideos:
8 oz vermicelli (I used spaghetti)
olive oil
cumin/corrainder/ancho/garlic/onion
salt
15oz can tomatoes
1c stock
2 chipotles
some tomatillo salsa

Colorín:
a bag of freshly picked colorín flowers (~1Q)
cumin/corrainder/ancho/garlic/onion

Grind cumin and corriander seeds in a coffee grinder
Toast for a couple of minutes in a cast iron skillet
Add ground ancho chilies ~1t, toast maybe 30 sec
Oil, garlic cook a couple of minutes
Add 2 onions, salt, cook 10 min or so
This is the flavor base for both dishes.

Toast pasta in maybe 2T olive oil in a wide pan for 3 min or so. Turn/stir for even color.
Add 1/2 of onion mixture, tomatoes, salsa, stock, chipotles.
Cook ~20min.

Add colorín to remaining onion mixture and cook ~5 min.


The compost bin afterwards. Limes, cilantro, onion, avo for Andrew's yummy guac; a colorín bud. Good times.

Update: I've made fideos at least 3 times now. Made it once with just a tomatillo sauce and didn't like that as much. Seems like a can of tomatoes plus some chilies is the way to go. Thus far I've only made it with spaghetti and it's fine, just takes longer for the noodles to cook.