I generally write about sports, but there are few things I love as much as cooking. I love to cook, to spend time in the kitchen whipping up something quick, or labor all day over a complicated recipe. It is one of the few things in life that simultaneously stimulates and relaxes me.
I find a certain grace in taking the time to really understand foods that I've made for years, tweak recipes, go back to the old ways of doing things and just get inside of them. After a lifetime of making my great-grandmother's ravioli, I'm just now starting to understand them. There is beauty to that kind of depth.
But I also love trying new things, everything from brining pork chops, finding a new twist on baba ganoush or attempting tandoori.
For a while now, I've been wanting to try my hand at making menudo.
Not the boy band, silly.
The traditional mexican tripe soup said to have magical properties and the capacity to revive the near dead. Or at least revive the severely hungover. I'm not sure why eating cow's stomach lining cures hangovers, but I have heard reputable inebriates and reprobates vouch for its restorative powers. However, every time I mentioned cooking Menudo, I got a look, not a sneer mind you, but more of a dismissive, "yeah, okay honey, whatever you want," kind of look. The over-riding impression was that really, nobody wants to eat stomach lining unless absolutely necessary. I was not encouraged.
I have eaten tripe a few times and once accidentally ordered it at a lunch counter in Peru. (Needless to say I had overestimated my 'menu Spanish.' Greatly.) My considered opinion of tripe was that it wasn't bad, really, but it's not good either; certainly not something I'd go back for seconds. So, with my own ambivalence about the main ingredient and the less than enthusiastic reception the idea got, I just never got around to giving menudo a go.
Saturday morning, I was feeling a little crapulous after a late night and I decided to make a namby-pamby version of menudo, keeping the spice, but leaving the tripe. Instead of tripe, I used some garden variety stew beef and stock bones, plus the rest of the usual suspects: dried chilis, mexican oregano, garlic, onion, hominy, etc.
Now, other than my variation, i.e., substituting a sissified cut of beef for stomach lining, it's a layered process and most recipes I found on line were not easy to follow, so I was guessing wildly from jump go.
I am also guessing that my bastardized version is to traditional menudo what Chef Boyardee is to my homemade ravioli.
But still, I'm a pretty good cook, I reasoned. I got this. I browned the stew beef and added the water, some shredded dried peppers, onion, garlic, stew bones, cumin, mexican oregano and a splash of fresh lime. In no time at all, the house smelled amazing. Then I started the process of making the chili sauce, which, so I gather, replicates most of the flavors in the soup and which sauce you add to the soup late in the process. I toasted the chilis, then soaked them and then ran those through the blender with more oregano, garlic, cumin and lime.
Meanwhile, the soup simmered all day (instructions were to let it cook for eight hours) and I wondered, unless one were actually planning to be hungover, this soup seems pretty out of reach. And if you have a hangover that lasts the entire day, are you really going to get out of bed to go to the butcher shop or grocery store to buy tripe to start making menudo?
Finally, my big head was gone, but I was nearing the menudo finish line. Menudo! Delicious, peasant, rib sticking food! Out with the bones and in with the hominy and chili sauce.
"Um, it's kinda greasy."
"Kinda?"
"And not really as flavorful as I hoped."
"Uh huh."
In short, it was not horrible, but not the rich, flavorful, provincial goodness I was geared up for. Still, I thought, "I can save this!"
My plan was to refrigerate it overnight and skim off the grease off in the morning after it congealed. It would be less greasy, but would it have that blast of flavor I was looking for? Beyond which, maybe it was the grease that was the hangover cure? After all, many of my ne'er do well friends swore by greasy diner food for their hangovers.
So much to consider.
Two hours later, I left the comfort of the bed, trudged down the stairs to the kitchen. "My menudo," I said to myself, "cannot be saved." Fortunately, this is food of the people, by the people and for the people, which is to say, the ingredients were cheap, cheap, and cheap, so down the disposal it went.
Still, I want to try proper menudo. Maybe it's an acquired taste. Maybe the tripe just makes it, hard as that is to believe. Anybody out there have any suggestions for menudo?
Or better yet, anybody have an abuela who will invite me over for menudo?
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