RMTTB has a garden and we’re not afraid to use it.  Ideally we’d have a vast expansive hop garden and lovingly craft our own fabulous beers from hand grown, hand picked, hand rolled hops.  And people would taste our beer and feel inspired to acclaim it online!  Except that our few forays into homebrewing have met with disaster and our garden’s about the size of a postage stamp.

But we digress…. right now we have a bumper crop of green tomatoes and chilli peppers to be taken care of

   

And they just scream modern Mexican cuisine.  Which begs the question – what Irish beer would go best with a bit of spicy Mexican on a warm autumn evening in Donnycarney…?

It took a bit of testing.  Sometimes spicy food needs a beer that won’t challenge it, that will complement but not compete.  Micro-brewed beers are usually anything but bland and often too complex to go well with highly spiced cuisine but, after an evening of trial and error, we came up with this menu:

Starter of Tomatillo Salsa, Guacamole & sour cream with tortilla chips.

Pork Carnitas with Mexican coleslaw

Churros with Chocolate Stout

Recipes below, diary & beer notes to follow!

Tomatillo salsa

Take about a half kilo of green tomatoes and two or three chilli peppers (we used one jalapeno and one scotch bonnet both lovingly cultivated under the stone cold skies of Dublin).  Method of preparation is very much a lifestyle choice, you can boil, pan fry or oven roast the tomatoes & chillies until they are soft.  We roasted with a couple of cloves of garlic in a hot oven (220C) for about 15 minutes.  Allow to cool and then whizz in a blender with the juice of half a lime, a handful of chopped coriander, a spoonful of honey and a chopped scallion.  Chill for an hour or two and serve with nachos or toasted tortilla bread.

Guacamole

Another recipe chosen to help us dispose of this year’s bumper crop of chillies.  Take a couple of ripe avocados (soft to the touch but not yet brown on the inside) and mash the bejasus out of them until you are left with a texture that’s pleasantly lumpy and not quite smooth.  Throw in half an onion finely chopped and one or two seeded, chopped jalapeno peppers.  Squeeze the juice of half a lime and, if you’re feeling frisky, a spoonful of tequila.  Mix in some chopped coriander to taste y aqui – guacamole!

Sour cream

Run to the shop.  Buy sour cream.  Tip it into a fancy bowl you picked up somewhere on a sun holiday.  Sprinkle with chopped coriander.  Sit back and accept plaudits for food styling and sophisticated presentation.  Smirk.

Pork carnitas

Source a shoulder of pork or a couple of pork shoulder steaks (say 3 steaks for every 2 people).  Chop a couple of chillies (we used about 5), a whole large Spanish onion and a head of garlic.  Mix with two teaspoons of ground cumin and a handful of chopped oregano.  Cover the shoulder or cutlets in the combined ingredients and give them a good rub in.  Heat a pan on high heat with a dollop of olive oil and a good sized knob of butter and brown the meat well before tossing into a slow cooker or casserole dish.  Fry any remaining bit of onion etc until soft and add to the meat.  It should look something gorgeous like this:

Cook in a slow cooker on high for about 6 hours or in an oven at 140C for about 4 1/2 hours. When done, the meat should be falling apart into spicy cooking juices.  If the meat juices are too hot, you can reduce the heat by adding lime juice or sugar.

Mexican coleslaw

There are many variations on this recipe – this is ours.  Get a half head/quarter head, depending on how much you want to make, of white cabbage and an equal amount (in volume) of carrots.  Shred the cabbage and carrots (get your hands on a food processor – RMTTB did this by hand, tedious is not the word…).  To the sliced veg add a thinly sliced red pepper, the juice of a lime, a handful or coriander and some sour cream.  We’re not going to specify quantities here: mix and match until you find the balance you need.  We used just enough sour cream to barely coat, leaving the overall slaw texture very crispy and fresh.

Churros

Desserts not being our strong point – we robbed the recipe from the BBC.  All you need to know is here.