by: Anna Frost
“Can you have a bad day more often?” asks my housemate Nick, as he swallows a mouthful of pie. “Yes, definitely,” agrees Jo, digging her fork into her slice for another bite.
Earlier in the day, I arrived home after working the early morning shift – 4:30 a.m. to about 11:30 a.m. – baking a plethora of bread and bagels at the market I work at on the Vineyard, in a mood. I fell down onto the couch, looked Jo in the eye and said with the determination of a battered soul, “I need to cook today.” Her eyes proceeded to widen as I listed off the meal I had planned in my head during a particularly chaotic day at work: chicken enchiladas, homemade refried beans in my slow cooker, and a peach-blueberry pie.
Though my sudden plan probably made me seem like an insane person, it was a necessary step. As a graduate from The Culinary Institute of America and an aspiring food writer, it seems downright banal to announce that I love to cook. The act of cooking centers me; it gives me something that I can control amid the chaos of life. After a long day where things went badly because of forces both in and out of my control, I needed to cook and regain my balance.
This deep-seeded need to restore order to the universe through food reminded me of a passage in Julia Child’s “My Life in France,” which I have been reading fervently this summer. When she fails her first attempt at the exit exam for Le Cordon Bleu – not because she was unprepared but because they tested her on trivially simple dishes while she had studied advanced techniques and recipes – she found the recipes that she had not recognized on the test, cooked them all and ate them. Though she knew she deserved the degree and it was ridiculous that she had not passed the test, she proceeded by centering herself in her culinary universe and then conquering.
So there I was in my Vineyard Haven kitchen, metaphysically dizzy from my day. Like Julia, I needed to cook something familiar – pie and enchiladas – and I needed to succeed at making something I had never attempted before – refried beans, which I had always purchased in a can. This would explain my near encounter with an Amy Adams in Julie & Julia-style meltdown when I thought I had ruined the refried beans, which my housemate pulled me away from with reassuring words of reason. In a moment of clarity, I realized that it probably needed more salt. So, thanks to common kitchen sense and, of course, sea salt, the beans were saved.
Eight hours (if you include the 3 hours the beans were in the slow cooker before I started making everything else) and a $112 trip to Cronig’s later, we were eating enchiladas with a side of the not-ruined refried beans.
Spicy – but flavorful – is the word that comes to mind when describing the enchiladas. Nick cooked the chicken for the dish in some of the water from the still-cooking beans, along with tomatillos and some canned Goya chipotle peppers, before we shredded it with forks and mixed it with roasted corn, peppers and more tomatillos. We topped this filling off with a heap of cheddar cheese before rolling up the medium-sized tortillas and placing them packed together in the pan. For the sauce, I mixed together equal parts hot and medium Old El Paso enchilada sauce, adding more finely chopped chipotle peppers and the sauce they were canned in. Finally, more shredded cheese topped the sauce-covered enchiladas: perfection.
The beans were perhaps a little too pureed, due to overzealous use of a blender on my part, but the overall flavor was better than any canned refried beans I have encountered. Reminded of the beans served at one of my favorite Mexican restaurants in San Diego – homemade and fresh – I am satisfied with my first attempt. If only they did not take so long to prepare: 6 hours in the slow cooker, followed by the process of smashing and refrying.
We followed up this feast with the peach-blueberry pie, in which the flavor of the fresh fruit was highlighted by the maple syrup I added along with the sugar in the filling. The flaky, buttery crust provided a bit of welcome contrast in texture and flavor to the juicy, sweet filling. It was more than enough to cure the case of the blues. And while I know that my housemates truly do not wish me ill, I know that they are secretly waiting for another day that will bring them homemade pie.
