ysabetwordsmith | Recipe: "Crockpot Sloppy José Filling"

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Recipe: "Crockpot Sloppy José Filling"

Today we went to the farmer's market and bought ingredients for two batches of freezer food. One is new, the other an old favorite. This afternoon I made Crockpot Sloppy José Filling. Tomorrow's project will be Venison Spaghetti Sauce.

"Crockpot Sloppy José Filling"

Ingredients:

1 1/2 lbs. tomatillos
1 white onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic
1 lime (zest and juice)
1/4 cup dried cilantro flakes
1/2 teaspoon pink salt
1/2 teaspoon smoked black pepper
1/2 teaspoon liquid smoke
1 lb. lamb chorizo
2 lb. ground beef
3 tablespoons tapioca starch

Directions:

Peel the husks off the tomatillos, wash the tomatillos and then chop them. Put them in the crockpot, cover, and turn it on Low.

Chop 1 white onion. Mince 2 cloves of garlic and add that. Scrape those into the crockpot.

Zest the lime, then juice it. Add to the crockpot. Cook for 2 hours, or until the vegetables start to get tender.

Add 1/4 cup dried cilantro flakes, 1/2 teaspoon pink salt, 1/2 teaspoon smoked black pepper, and 1/2 teaspoon liquid smoke to the crockpot.

Put the chorizo and ground beef into an electric skillet and turn it to low heat. Carefully break the meat into tiny pieces, mixing together as much as possible. Cook until browned. Chorizo tends to retain a reddish color even when cooked, so gauge from the beef. Scoop up the browned meat, allowing the grease to drain, then transfer the meat into the crockpot.

Cook for 2-3 more hours, until the meat and vegetables are well blended and the flavors have matured. Add tapioca starch as needed for thickening.

Makes about 10 servings. Filling may be divided into containers and frozen. The finished filling is flavorful but not hot. (No esta picante.) If you want to make it spicy-hot then consider adding salsa verde, jalapeno, or serrano peppers.

Notes:

Tomatillos are Mexican green tomatoes that have a papery husk. They provide one of the main flavors for the sloppy josé. If you can't find these, you may substitute ordinary green tomatoes.

Dried cilantro soaks up the moisture and helps bind the mix together, but you can try this with fresh cilantro if you wish. Parsley flakes should work if you don't have cilantro.

Pink salt is a gourmet salt with a moderate amount of trace minerals. Popular varieties include Himalayan and Australian. Another good salt for this recipe would be any kind of smoked salt. If you don't have the fancy kinds, then sea salt or plain table salt will work instead.

Smoked black pepper adds to the smoky flavor of the filling. If you don't have it, substitute ordinary black pepper.

Chorizo is a Spanish/Mexican sausage, usually very spicy and made from pork. We found a lamb version at a farmer's market, which is spicy and flavorful but not hot. It mixes marvelously with the beef here. Other alternatives would be to use a small amount of hot pork chorizo with some ground lamb, or the 1 1/2 pounds of hot pork chorizo for a much spicier sloppy josé.

In addition to making sandwiches, this could also be used as taco filling or tostito chip dip. This recipe is gluten-free as made, and can be eaten with other things than wheat bread.

This is a recipe in active development. It's quite tasty but my partner Doug and I agree that it needs something more. We have discussed possibilities including hominy, sweet corn, and cheese.

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as much as additional flavors. I'd try draining and rinsing hominy, then toasting it in a dry cast iron skillet, then sprinkling a generous amount on the dish just before serving. And since I'm thinking of what would mix with the spices listed, I'd toast the kernels with a teensy, tiny pinch of both gumbo file and ground cinnamon.

Since I'm hitting the Mexican market tomorrow (along with the Farmer's market)- I'm going to print this out and try a batch ourselves, using the new pyramid salt we found at Trader Joe's.

>> as much as additional flavors. I'd try draining and rinsing hominy, then toasting it in a dry cast iron skillet, then sprinkling a generous amount on the dish just before serving. <<

It came out about the consistency of taco filling. The tomatillos cooked down more than I expected, although there are still bits of them and the onion visible. Next time I might leave the pieces bigger and add the meat sooner.

Doug doesn't want whole hominy, although I'd be fine with it. That's what got me thinking of white sweet corn as a possibility. We've done a fried corn salsa with some similar ingredients.

>> And since I'm thinking of what would mix with the spices listed, I'd toast the kernels with a teensy, tiny pinch of both gumbo file and ground cinnamon. <<

I'm happy with the flavor. The chorizo is plenty, and the rest of the spices just help connect the vegetables to the meat.

>> Since I'm hitting the Mexican market tomorrow (along with the Farmer's market)- I'm going to print this out and try a batch ourselves, using the new pyramid salt we found at Trader Joe's. <<

Yay! Let me know how it works out for you? I'm always interested in feedback on recipes. Feel free to tinker according to your family's taste.

Our family's tastes-- rule 1. Add at least an ounce of garlic, freshly minced, per person. Then another for the pot. (No, we don't make garlic tea... yet...)

Mix spices according to mood, season, time of day, phase of the moon and how many words spoken per person in the last hour. Quiet days mean bland food.

If you think anything is predictable after meeting house rules 1 and 2... you've got a sturdier grasp of reality than I do!

White corn is in season here, in a BIG way. If you cut it fresh from the cob and heat it just long enough to blend ingredients, it might be a really good compromise between the two of you.

I've got it on my list already.

Edited (extra idea.) 2014-07-27 05:11 (UTC)

>> Our family's tastes-- rule 1. Add at least an ounce of garlic, freshly minced, per person. Then another for the pot. (No, we don't make garlic tea... yet...) <<

Garlic tea is good for colds, if you have the stomach for it. The Stinking Rose in San Francisco has garlic ice cream.

>> Mix spices according to mood, season, time of day, phase of the moon and how many words spoken per person in the last hour. Quiet days mean bland food. <<

Huh. Yeah, when I'm feeling low I tend to favor comfort food that isn't overstimulating.

>> If you think anything is predictable after meeting house rules 1 and 2... you've got a sturdier grasp of reality than I do! <<

That must suck.

>> White corn is in season here, in a BIG way. If you cut it fresh from the cob and heat it just long enough to blend ingredients, it might be a really good compromise between the two of you. <<

It's a thought. I love white corn.

It doesn't suck for us because every meal is a little different in flavor, even if they're technically the same dish, like spaghetti.

Which reminds me-- since you say it's already the texture of taco seasoning, try adding shredded zucchini when you add the tomatillos. Gives an overall lighter feel and taste without a huge 'zucchini' flavor.

I am envious of your tomatilloes - I'd love to get my hand on some, but I've not seen them either in greengrocers or plant nursery. The closest thing I've found are called Cape Gooseberries (Physallis something that won't come to mind right now), which I tend to dry and then use as spice.

Next year you might start them from seed, I've had them volunteer in past years and reach maturity for pretty good harvest, so shouldn't be too hard to get them going inside. There are purple ones which I don't have personal experience of but am intrigued by.

I've not seen the seeds anywhere. And we have very strict quarantine laws, so just ordering them in from elsewhere isn't easy - even places that do mai lorder plants to here don't always do that for all their catalogue. The one place I can think of requires an annual subscription to get the catalogue, and I haven't been doing enough gardening to justify that.

If someone in the US bought a packet of commercial seed (not random seeds in an envelope, very clearly) and mailed that to you, would they be allowed? Or is the plant itself not allowed, like kudzu? (That stuff is the GODZILLA of the plant world, I tell you! Google pics, and you'll find houses, vehicles and more completely overrun by the stuff!)

I would guess that they would be seized by quarantine. I will look in to it though, if I remember when my current list of 'urgent, panic now!' Is dealt with (trying to get work and family stuff sorted before I go on holiday in another country for three weeks!)

Seeds are available year round. Drop me a private message when you are ready to think about it, and I'll check into how to ship from this end.

I'm frustrated by the growing tendency to charge for catalogs. Used to be, they were always free. Now a lot of them require you to spend money before you can spend money.

I think the mob I'm thinking of have always charged for the catalogs, because they are actually one of the main 'products' they sell - the mob are Digger's Garden Club, and I know that there is a core part of their members who just join to think about gardening, when they have time.

yeah, that's steep. Maybe check in at stores that cater to more recent arrivals?

That is going to take some thinking about/asking about. I can find a South African store, and there are lots of Indian/Sri Lankan/Pakastani grocers around us, and a recent influx of Korean grocers, but I'm not aware of any that cater to South and Central American groups (I've never been able to source jicama either).

good luck on that.

These were the nicest tomatillos I have seen. The ones at the supermarket are often shabby.

You could try substituting green tomatoes. The flavor is similar though not identical.

Where do you get the venison you plan to use for tomorrow? Or are you substituting something else?

This particular packet came from a food pantry. Previously we've gotten it as gifts from friends who hunt. Once in a while we've found farmed venison for sale, but most of what we find that way is either elk or bison. These are somewhat substitutable, but not entirely

Any of them can be stretched out with domestic meat. I have several recipes for venison meatloaf. My favorite, Deer-in-a-Thicket, is one I borrowed from some characters of mine, and it involves wrapping the venison around a handful of blackberries, then wrapping a layer of spicy pork sausage around the venison. Venison is so lean that it needs extra care in cooking, so the sausage adds fat. My all-venison Deerloaf with Bacon just has strips of bacon around the outside.

This is Dialecticdreamer-- checking in the middle of the day from the local library because I really, really want to know how the spaghetti sauce came out!

GRIN.

Awesome. The venison is a luscious, velvety, meaty sauce with a dominant umami note.

The beefsteak tomato sauce came out sweeter, although this time we added ground beef to it. The mushroom medley, which I'm also hoping to do again this year, is tangy-sweet with strong earthy notes from all the shrooms.

We've put together two bags of stuff for my parents (since they bought us a massive amount of ingredients) including a whole batch of sloppy joe mix with the mild spicy barbecue sauce; and a sample carton each of the wild tidy joe, sloppy jose, venison spaghetti sauce, and beefsteak spaghetti sauce. Dad figured out that the sloppy joe mix could be turned into spaghetti sauce simply by adding a can of tomato sauce.

Something tells me that if you *do* have access to fancy salts, the black Hawaiian lava salt would go well (it compliments beef wonderfully, and also has a certain *zing* (knowing look))...

I'm surmising you have access not so much to big upscale supermarkets but more to little ethnic tiendas that happen to carry interesting stuff... the only thing there I wouldn't expect to see in your average carnicería y tienda *is* the pink salt.... easy peasy to get here, but then this *is* Seattle...

>> Something tells me that if you *do* have access to fancy salts, the black Hawaiian lava salt would go well (it compliments beef wonderfully, and also has a certain *zing* (knowing look))... <<

We have it. I don't tend to cook with it, because I don't like the taste of charcoal. I do like iron, hence using red and pink salts. I favor the red for pork, and the pink for beef or chicken.

>> I'm surmising you have access not so much to big upscale supermarkets but more to little ethnic tiendas that happen to carry interesting stuff... the only thing there I wouldn't expect to see in your average carnicería y tienda *is* the pink salt.... easy peasy to get here, but then this *is* Seattle... <<

Locally there's not much, but if we drive a bit then we can get to better supermarkets, international stores, health stores, and a farmer's market actually worth getting up for. The international one has the selection of a couple dozen salts.

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Recipe: "Crockpot Sloppy José Filling"

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