Nacho Much to Talk About

It's been a few weeks in the making. Not just this post, but the food involved. I planned it out precisely: One week for beano refrito; next week for making the green salsa; and the third week finding someone to make jumbo nachos with.

Bean week started with soaking pinto beans with double water to the volume of beans. To keep down the fartiness, other than using the usual epazote, I following my crazy uncle's advice, who lived in TJ because he's crazy, and added an inch strip of seaweed to the water.

After letting this business go on overnight, I dumped the water and refilled my pot with fresh water along with the seaweed and brought it to a boil and then a simmer uncovered for two hours minding that the beans remained covered with water throughout.

The next few days were spent rendering a pound of self-cured pork belly that was cut into cubes and finally being able to saute the onions, garlic, a couple serrano peppers, cumin, and oregano in the pork fat. After this went on for about 7 minutes, I roughly mashed the beans and added them to the skillet.

Seventy-two hours of reduction and stirring time made this:

then I entered the sea of beans

Salsa week was characterized with the tender slow dance of making a tomatillo salsa. First I spent four days lovingly slow roasting the tomatillos. Then I tossed them into a blender with a couple cloves of garlic, a chopped onion, a small handful of cilantro, a serrano chili, the juice of four of the dryest limes one can find at the discount grocer, and all this while listening to Salt-n-Pepa.

The final week, I basically harassed one friend day after day until she ultimately relented to let me come over to watch South Park and exploit her fresh vegetables to create one of the most gigantic plates of nachos I have seen, created, and dispatched from this world.

If you can't determine from the photo below, the veggies include radish, cut corn from the cob, fetal tomatos, spring onions, and cilantro. Oh, and my friend had the cheese and fried the segmented tortillas into chips. It probably took her several weeks to prepare these items, so we were on the same page in terms of quality.

One might think that such a platter could be thrown together in a single day, maybe two at the most, but I like to take my time and get things right because anything worth doing is worth doing well; even when it takes three weeks.

P.s. No farts.