Cookbook Project, Book #196

[ladysprite]

"The Mitsitam Cafe Cookbook," Richard Hetzler

The Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian is one of my favorite museums. I love everything about it - the displays, the cultures, the details, the way I can lose an entire day just wandering through and staring at all of the beautiful bits and pieces... but I also love the fact that the cafe there has some of the best food in D.C. Seriously, I still daydream about the fry bread tacos with buffalo chili that I had while I was there.

So a couple of years ago when I was browsing secondhand bookstores and found that the cafe at the museum had an official cookbook, I absolutely had to have it. Unfortunately, shortly after buying it, the book somehow got shuffled off to the library instead of the cookbook wall, and I wound up forgetting that I owned it until I restarted this project.

The hardest part of using this book was deciding what to make. I'd love to try the buffalo chili, and someday I will, but mostly right now I'm just cooking for umbran and myself, and that's more of a show-off dish. I wanted to try one of their enchilada recipes, but most of them called for fresh corn, which is hard to find right now. So instead we wound up making Corn and Tomato Stew, which oddly enough allowed for frozen corn.

Unsurprisingly, it was delicious. It's a fairly simple vegetarian dish, without a huge number of ingredients, and while it cooks for about an hour, most of that is unsupervised simmering. I'd quibble with calling it a stew, since the texture was more soup-like, but it was still amazing - the depth of flavor gotten from what amounts to tomatoes, corn, bell peppers, veggie broth, and a handful of aromatics is impressive. And when I made a batch of simple buttermilk dumplings to simmer in the leftovers, it became absolute perfection.

So. The recipe itself is a keeper, and I'm just waiting for an event big enough to justify making buffalo chili, fry bread, and the corn-and-chocolate dessert tamales....

Comments

[z-gryphon.livejournal.com]

There's always room for bison!

[ninjarat.livejournal.com]

Y'know, just because the recipe says "fresh corn" doesn't mean that you can't use canned or frozen or otherwise preserved instead. As a matter of fact, the people who are responsible for the recipes in that book didn't always used fresh vegetables. They dried them for storage and soaked them in water when the time came to use them. Go ahead. Use the frozen corn. Use what you need and seal up the rest in a ziploc bag for next time.

Suggestion for next time: corn fritters. :)

[bess.livejournal.com]

Wow -- that sounds delicious.

How many people would warrant making the buffalo chili, fry bread, and desset tamales?

[mermaidlady]

This is the only review of the cafe I had seen before. I'm glad you had a good experience.

[ladysprite.livejournal.com]

The specific recipe that I had been looking at did, in fact, require fresh corn - it called for roasting the whole cobs, then cutting off the kernels and using the milk.

I do know that for some recipes you can substitute frozen/dried/canned/other, but the specific original recipe I picked wasn't one that could work with substitution....

[grum]

Wow, that's a bad review. I've enjoyed it every time I went there (it's a standby for "I'm on the mall and need lunch on the weekend, what's open"). It's a bit pricy, but I'm not too price conscious when I'm looking at museum food.. If you get dessert and a drink, it'll definitely cost more than if you stick to an entree and a side, but everything looks so interesting.

[evcelt.livejournal.com]

That is indeed a very cool museum... and the food at the cafe is amazing!

[ninjarat.livejournal.com]

I've seen frozen corn on the cob at Roche Bros. You could also try pan roasting thawed or canned kernels.