il a fait

I’m finished. My Masters report is turned in, both of my seminar papers are turned in, and I submitted my students’ grades early this morning. The problem is, now I don’t know what to do with myself. I feel sort of anxious and confused, and I have an overwhelming feeling that there’s something I desperately need to be doing, but I don’t know what it is. Probably just the residual anxiety of the busiest semester ever. Hopefully it will wear off soon!

My TA assignment got switched around multiple times yesterday, from 11am to 8:30am to 1pm and finally to 2pm. I think (I hope) it’s settled now. 11am was ideal, but 2pm won’t be bad. Hopefully the gym class schedule will be decent and I can get a good workout right before or right after the lecture. I’ll be TAing for American lit again, too, which will be a nice change after three semesters of British. I have yet to find out whether I’ll actually be leading a discussion section for six weeks, or just grading tests and going to lectures. In any case, I’m happy to be getting a paycheck this summer! Even just for six weeks. Last summer I spent a lot of money traveling but didn’t have to pay rent; this year it’ll be the other way around, plus the cost of London if the school doesn’t end up giving me much funding. Still waiting on that…

This afternoon I finally took my car in for its oil change and tire rotation. This time they didn’t even try to push any other maintenance on me! Usually they try to sell me all kinds of expensive crap that I can’t tell if I need, and I have to play dumb and tell them, “I’ll ask my dad.” This Civic is in great shape, though; it didn’t even have dirty air filters. I’m spending the rest of this evening reading Lucky Jim, watching ‘Midsomer Murders,’ and wallowing around. Earlier in the day I thought I’d feel like going out tonight, but now that I’m finally at home, drinks don’t seem necessary and my apartment seems really pleasant. I did a body conditioning class around noon, and I can tell I’m going to crash early and sleep hard tonight.

In the morning I’m making eggs benedict. I went through a phase of making hollandaise sauce a lot–despite the incredible butter content–but haven’t made any in about a year. In the evening Alex and I are getting some beers and going out for dinner to celebrate the official end of my second year. I feel like it went on for so long even after the Masters report was complete!

Honestly, I can’t believe I’ve been in graduate school for two years. Or can I? There’s a strange feeling to how the past three years, since I left college, have passed. They’ve seemed to go by very quickly, but they’ve also been crammed full of transformative events, travel, new people, huge life changes, big decisions, tons of learning, etc. So it feels like less than three years’ worth of time has passed, but more than three years’ worth of events have occurred. Interesting.

Here’s today’s bizarre internet tidbit: I discovered, through a convoluted series of links from Facebook, that there is a website–maybe more than one website–devoted to hating on some of my favorite food bloggers. It seems to be written and maintained by a bunch of malcontents who hate their day jobs and spend 99.9% of their free time hate-reading food blogs online. Obviously I knew that there were websites out there devoted purely to making fun of things, but food bloggers? Sure, some of them are bad writers or have iffy taste or are boring, but the pure vitriol here really surprised me. There are people out there with almost unlimited stores of bitterness and free time, apparently. What really stinks is that they aren’t even funny in their so-called “snark.”

So tomorrow night . . . to try Evangeline for the first time, or to go back to Michi? I think I’ll see if my parents want to try some ramen when they get here on Friday, and if so then Alex and I will just wait on that meal. I can’t wait to see my family! My brother won’t be here, but I’m looking forward to a weekend with my parents.

Rogan Josh

Alex and I made one of Madhur Jaffrey’s recipes for rogan josh the other day. It was a little time-consuming, but absolutely delicious, and perfect for the strange, fluctuating weather we’ve been having in Austin lately. This recipe is from Madhur Jaffrey’s Indian Cooking, a fantastic book worth grabbing on Amazon.

Unfortunately, I only had my iPod with me when we made this, so my photos are not good. But I couldn’t not share this recipe!

2 lbs lamb stew meat
6 tbs plain whole milk yogurt
10 tbsp vegetable oil
2 cups water
2 medium onions, small diced

And now the long list of spices…
2 inch chunk fresh ginger
8 cloves garlic
10 whole cardamom pods
2 bay leaves
6 cloves
10 black peppercorns
1 stick cinnamon
1 tsp ground coriander
2 tsp ground cumin
4 tsp paprika (a good one, but not smoked)
1/4 tsp garam masala
cayenne to taste (we used 1/4 tsp)
salt to taste

Begin by blending the ginger, garlic, and about 4 tbsp water into a paste in the food processor or blender. Set aside. Dice your onions and set aside. In a bowl, combine the cardamom, bay leaves, cloves, peppercorns, and cinnamon. In another bowl, combine the coriander, cumin, paprika, cayenne, and salt. Now you’re ready to cook! Begin by browning your lamb in the pot you’ll be cooking in with the vegetable oil, moving the browned lamb aside if you must work in batches.

Add the cardamom spice mixture to the pot, now empty of lamb, and wait a few seconds for the bay leaves to color a bit. Then add the diced onions, cooking until they are browned and fragrant. Add the ginger and garlic paste and cook for thirty seconds. Then add the remaining spice mixture and stir-fry for about thirty seconds more.

When everything is quite fragrant, add the meat back into the pot. Add the yogurt in one tablespoon at a time, stirring vigorously to combine. It might be difficult to stir the large chunks of lamb, but the meat will become very tender eventually.

When the yogurt looks blended, add 1 1/2 cups of water and boil, stirring and scraping to remove spices and lamb from the bottom of the pot.

Cover and simmer carefully for about one hour, or until the lamb is tender to your liking. We cooked ours for about an hour and fifteen minutes. Stir the stew every ten minutes or so; however the heat should not be so high that the lamb sticks to the pot.

Once the meat is tender enough, uncover the rogan josh, increase the heat a bit, and reduce the sauce to the consistency you prefer. It will thicken fairly quickly. Once finished, turn off the heat, stir in garam malasa, and adjust for seasoning with salt, cayenne, and/or freshly ground black pepper.

We ate this with Indian spiced rice that I made, and another Madhur Jaffrey recipe for carrot salad with mustard seeds that I love. I’ll do a brief post on it soon, since we’ll be eating a ton of it this summer. Enjoy!

bright yellow with hot

This is my current computer background. Go, corgi, go! Your legs are short but you are ever so determined!

The university is driving me slightly bats with its policy of not notifying you of anything ever. I submitted my Masters report materials . . . no notification or confirmation or receipt. I submitted my application to attend convocation . . . ditto. I get that there are tons of us getting degrees, but can’t they just send an automated message when someone files our stuff? I feel like I’m sending everything off into the ether and it’s disappearing, never to be seen or heard from again.

I had reservations at Justine’s for the evening of the 18th, but I have to cancel them because my brother isn’t coming for graduation. They only take reservations for parties or six or more, and I figured we could get away with just five (“One of us couldn’t make it!”), but just four is implausible. Not to mention mean-spirited, because they would reserve two extra indoor seats for us and lose tips on them. Oh well; we’re eating early so we shouldn’t have to wait too long. We’ll get drinks first. Graduation is at 9am, so we’ll do some kind of brunch right after and then a nice early dinner. Mmm.

Yesterday I had copies of my report bound for myself, my parents, and my adviser. I just did spiral binding on regular paper; hopefully that’s all my adviser had in mind. I picked the copies up this afternoon, and the guy who works at the shop completely creeped on me and it made me really angry. I can usually tell when someone is a big creep, but this was one of those instances where he was simply friendly and so I was friendly back, because he was working on this binding thing for me, and because I used to work service and it’s boring, and it’s always nicer when someone politely chats. Then suddenly he’s saying, “I used to be a hair dresser and I’m always looking for girls to come sit for me so that I can practice makeup on them. You have a really great face. Is that something you’d be interested in?” I gave him a look and just said, “I’m working on a doctorate right now. I’m pretty busy, obviously.” And then I got out of there. Because what the hell?! How 1) clueless or 2) creepy do you have to be to say that to a woman? You’re either socially incapable to the point that you have some sort of personality issue–which I do not think was the case with this guy considering how normal he came off at first–or you’re such an overtly creepy asshat that you think telling a woman that she has a “great face” will get her number into your phone or, god forbid, her into your apartment. Bleh! It was very unpleasant.

Working hard to finish my seminar papers by tomorrow afternoon. It is difficult. But I really want to feel relaxed when Alex and I go out! He says he is researching restaurants. I told him that I want a surprise.

to dramatize the prosaic figures

I got my MA report signed yesterday! And by this afternoon, the PDF version will be uploaded and the paper forms turned in and then I can stop fiddling with it for at least a few weeks until I start turning it into a conference presentation and then a potential article. I was afraid that I’d have to ask for signatures, but my adviser just said, “You’re done! There are still a few edits I’d like to see, but at this point, we’re working towards article, not report.” Whoo! Then my second reader signed immediately when I visited him, and I felt so relieved. My adviser even wants a bound copy of the report. Apparently she’s been teaching Lions and Shadows for years and trying to get someone to work on Isherwood, and no one ever does! She said that they say he’s “weird” and never get into him. But he’s weird in the best possible way! Smart, funny, self-aware, and fascinating, not to mention an excellent writer.

A good sign: When I turned in my undergraduate thesis, I didn’t feel particularly proud of it and I never really wanted to see it again. It always felt like a bit of a rushed job–which I would argue wasn’t really my fault–and I never felt like I completely mastered the material or made the writing sound as nice and I would have liked. This time, I’m eager to keep working on this project. I feel a lot of pride for what I’ve done. Much of that is due to my adviser and reader: they really made me work on my writing, to the point that I feel like I’ve earned this. It’s also due to my own academic development: I’ve learned how to read, how to find what to read, how to pace myself in my writing, even how to ask for the kind of feedback/support/criticism that I need. I chose my committee for this project well.

There is so much nostalgia amongst my fellow alums for our college. On the one hand, I under stand this completely: it was a near-magical place and I absolutely loved being there. On the other hand, hearing people talk about it the way they do often makes me feel uncomfortable. There’s a pronounced tinge of “those were the best days of my life” to most of this talk, and I simply cannot agree with that sentiment. What makes me sad is that if someone had asked me, “Were those years at college the best of your life?” when I was working at the bike shop before grad school, I would have said yes. Which suggests to me that the people who still think of college that way still haven’t found their proper place in the post-college world. Which is no big deal, really–it can take ages to figure out where and how you belong. But it does make me feel lucky. I’m lucky because I feel that I am where I belong right now, and I’m lucky because I seem naturally to grow out of things when they’re ending. I was ready to leave when I graduated college, so I didn’t feel like I was being torn away. When I started grad school, I was ready for a different lifestyle, so I didn’t feel like one was being imposed upon me. College was great, but damned if I ever want to live like that again! I feel too old for it now, which is funny because I am still young. Funny what a big difference just a few years makes when you’re in your twenties. I have a feeling that this might be the most change-filled decade of my life, from one perspective. I probably changed more in my teens, but I think my life will have more changes in my twenties. Cool!

This week is so very, very busy. Even now that my MA is technically finished, I am living on this kind of low-level adrenaline rush that I’ve had for the past couple of weeks. It’s good because it keeps me going, but it’s bad because I always feel a little nervous, like I’m always about to have to speak in public.

Today: final edits on my third chapter before I officially upload the MA document; an office hour for my panicking pre-final students; return a bunch of library books; print and bind some copies of my report at the copy shop; turn in official MA forms to the main office; work on my New Historicism paper since I finally got the book I recalled; hang out with Alex tonight if possible. Normally I could spend Wednesday at home writing, but today I have all of these on-campus errands and stuff for my students. I am going ahead to campus pretty early, too, because if I stay here until 11am, I’ll get nothing done!

I can’t wait til Friday, y’all.

the greasy leather orb

I have a new roommate lined up for August! Katie will move in at the end of that month, just before Fall classes start on the 28th. This does mean that I need a subleaser or something for most of August, but that is okay. I have a feeling that this will work out fine. Even if I can’t find someone else to live here for a while, there is so little happening during August that I could probably work my part-time SEO job pretty hard.

On a related note, I am dealing with some nonsense in my current living situation. I thought that middle school-style cattiness had gone out of fashion for my generation about ten years ago, but I guess I was wrong! What bothers me is that all of this anger is misdirected: things that are my roommate’s fault are taken out on me, things that have to do with me are taken out on Alex–or on her idea of who Alex is. When people criticized my previous boyfriend, I felt very defensive because deep down I knew that they were often correct in their criticisms. In this case I don’t feel angry or defensive, just baffled and disappointed. Baffled because it’s hard to believe that anyone could be so unaware of where their feelings are actually coming from, and disappointed because clearly they can be that unaware. Also disappointed that someone who was my friend is wilfully misinterpreting my partner’s behavior and our relationship so as to make me and my partner look bad in her own eyes. Yuk.

There are so many things that I want to read but can’t yet. The rest of For Whom the Bell Tolls, several of Faulkner’s novels, Goodbye to Berlin, Christopher Isherwood’s first diary compilation, A Single Man, Regeneration, some books about London, and several cookbooks that I plan to order off Amazon the second I am done with this semester. It’s going to be a literary summer.

Next weekend is going to be so much fun. On Friday night, Alex is taking me out for a surprise celebratory end-of-the-MA dinner. On Saturday my whole cohort (plus whoever else wants to come) is going to drink.well for celebratory end-of-the-MA adult beverages and fancy snacks. On Sunday morning Alex will have got home from a gig in Houston at something like 4am, and after he finishes sleeping and I finish jogging/yoga-ing we are going to Las Cazuelas for Cinco de Mayo chilaquiles. Three days of heaven, y’all.

Tonight I am making banana bread and chickpea tikka masala, watching Midsomer Murders, and writing at least four more pages of my Modernism paper. Alex is stopping by after a gig much later. He’s playing at Whole Foods and I was kind of excited for an excuse to go there and buy some expensive treats, but the event is a fancy fund-raiser, so no such luck. Ugh. I would actually prefer to finish my paper about widows in the Renaissance than to keep writing this one on Joyce. That’s saying a lot.

jokingly but rather maliciously

I met with both of my MA advisers yesterday, and they both like what I’ve written. Even my second reader, the toughest professor I’ve had in grad school, said, “I’m quite pleased with it.” When I mentioned how much I still had to do, he said, “Oh don’t worry, you’ll make it.” He’s one of those people whose confidence means a lot. I’m looking forward to working with him–and probably with my main adviser, too–for the next few years.

Before I met with them, on Sunday and Monday, I was feeling incredibly anxious. My hypochondria is really flaring up: I’ve been prodding my lymph nodes like a crazy person and convincing myself that lymphoma will kill me dead within the year. Did you know that the human body is incredibly lumpy and that some of its lumps feel like they definitely shouldn’t be there? Probably particularly when you’ve been prodding them incessantly and making them swell and ache? I’ve had dreams about cancer and dreams in which I was editing a huge document about Christopher Isherwood and could never get the paragraphs in an order that made sense. I’ve felt that “caffeine overdose” feeling when I haven’t had coffee in twelve hours.

There’s still a lot left to do, but it’s all doable. I’m having to use my “relaxing” time productively these last couple of weeks. There has been very, very little TV watching and a lot more cooking, baking, reading, and exercising in my “empty” time, because I don’t have time for “empty” time and cooking, reading, etc. They’ve been combined. This works well, but it’s exhausting, and I do not think I could live permanently at this pace. It’s nice to know that I could probably sustain it for a month or so, though, because I’ll need to if I’m ever under pressure to finish a big book or article or review or edit or any kind of big professional project.

It looks like I can visit Marple when I go to London this summer. It’s easy to catch a train there, and High Lane is on the way. Why do I want to visit these English villages? Well, for one I’ve never seen a real Midsomer-style English village, but more importantly, Christopher Isherwood was born at Wybersley Hall in High Lane and his family’s estate was at Marple Hall. When the big Hall was passed on to him, Christopher let it fall into disrepair, and by the time it was offered to the village council, it had to be razed to the ground. So, you can visit the ruins of Marple Hall, where the cornerstone is still standing, and you can visit Wybersley Hall about three miles away, which is now privately owned. I’m excited to visit, especially since I doubt I’ll ever visit any place as adorable as Marple. I mean, really. You cannot imagine how much I look forward to drinking a pint in this village.

Today: thesis format check, editing my third chapter, meeting with a potential roommate, working on my final paper for Modernism, dinner with Alex. I have such a good feeling about this roommate thing; I am so hoping that she’s as compatible as I feel she will be.

There are so many books I want to read this summer, chief among them now the copy of Christopher Isherwood’s diaries, volume one, that arrived in the mail the other day.

Ten more days. Or thereabouts.

the construction of a personality

Food triumph: I have discovered the marvel of organic frozen turkey burgers. They sound like the most disgusting health-food product ever devised, but they’re great. For some reason the veggie burgers that I used to enjoy occasionally made me feel physically ill the last couple of times I ate them. The turkey burgers are healthy, non-greasy, and far more satisfying than a sandwich of cold-cuts, a lunch that I never eat. This could be due to the fact that eating a “burger” psyches you into thinking you’re eating something extremely filling, but I don’t care.

Food failure: Alex and I went out for some delicious Indian food last night. As we walked away from the restaurant, I remembered that I hadn’t picked up my leftovers from our table. I dashed back, but in the intervening twenty seconds our server had whisked everything away into the trash. She was very apologetic, but no amount of contrition could make up for the loss of $6 worth of amazing paneer kashmiri.

Two potential housing options have arisen. One is a possible excellent roommate, a girl a year ahead of my in the comparative literature department. We’re meeting this week to discuss living preferences, but I have a good feeling about her. The only problem would be that she can’t move in until the end of August, leaving me with 5 – 6 weeks of half-empty apartment. If I could find a subleaser or some AirBnB guests, that would be fine. The other option, which I do not prefer, is a back-yard efficiency apartment on Alex’s street, opening up in July for $650/month. More expensive than what I pay now, much smaller, and it would involve moving again. I definitely prefer to stay in this apartment, especially if this roommate works out. She’s studious but fairly relaxed, has no problem with Alex visiting, loves dogs, etc. Hopefully this will get arranged soon so it’s one less thing on my mental plate!

I’m mildly panicking about my Master’s report, not because of anything I have done but because of the age-old supervisor dilemma. The busiest time of the semester for you is also the busiest time of the semester for your professors, and they can take quite some time to get back to you about projects that aren’t dissertations. It might be nice to eventually be at the top of everyone’s stack of reading! Although the dissertation stage certainly has its share of stressors . . .

What I have left:
8 pages for New Historicism
10 pages for Modernism
finalization of my third chapter
formatting the thesis
2 more discussion sections
grading 52 final exams

Should be doable. But not easy.

maladroit figure recently appeared

Now, for the first time, I feel like I am really being challenged by graduate school. It isn’t just “kind of a lot of work,” or “wow I’ve really procrastinated and now I have to bust my ass for a few days,” or “I should have planned this out more carefully.” I have a series of difficult tasks to complete and I am not sure there is physically enough time between now and when they have to be finished. I’ll get them done, of course, because that’s what I do, but at the moment it feels potentially impossible. [As I write this, I keep automatically drifting the cursor up to the top left corner of the web page, looking for the "save" button. But this is not a Word document! For once!]

Yesterday I emailed what I am considering “final” copies of the first two chapters of my Master’s report to both of my readers. I haven’t heard back from either of them. They’re both very busy lately, seeing as it’s the end of the semester, but it is making me a bit nervous. Hopefully this just means that the Master’s report isn’t that big of a deal, and that they’ll basically sign whatever I produce? In any case, I know that those first two chapters are respectable now. I feel proud of them, and I didn’t before.

The projects that are really getting to me are my seminar papers. I have to finish two of them within the next couple of weeks, plus the Master’s report, and damn: it is just a lot of writing.

I am still trying to work up my nerve to purchase my flights to and from London. Every time I sit down to buy them, I am paralyzed! When you don’t have a whole lot of money, spending that much as once is difficult. With any luck, the school will be helping me out, but I won’t find out how much they’ll be helping me until the end of May. Yikes! On the other hand, I will get paid at the beginning of May, and that will even things out enough regardless of how much I am gifted by the school. So I need to stop hesitating before flights get even pricier!

It’s just so hard to concentrate lately. I feel like I have worked quite hard this semester. I’ve been a much better teacher, much more prepared for classes, much more organized, and a much better writer. I’ve been doing great since I came to graduate school, but this semester I’ve really had it figured out. It makes me glad that I’m not leaving with an MA right now, because I think next year will be even better! But I am ready for a break. I want to see my family, do graduation, and then spend several extremely lazy weeks of summer with Alex. I want to make a lot of salsa, drink cheap beers with limes in them, and go swimming at night. I want to hide in the air conditioning and read all of the books I haven’t had time for lately. I want to wear hats and drink Pimm’s and watch entire TV series because I have nothing more important to do at 11pm on a weeknight. I want tohave nothing hanging over me. Oh, the luxury!

So. That’s what I’m working towards.

some highly tuned radar

Things have been busy, but it’s time for a journal entry anyway. I should probably try to write more when I am stressed, and not neglect it. This might be a little jumbled . . .

My roommate has decided to move out when our lease is up in mid-July. This is good because it means that I will finally be able to get a dog! Something I’ve been wanting to do ever since I left college. I can also, potentially, live with someone who doesn’t think I am a thief and who is okay with my boyfriend. The bad part is finding the new roommate. A friend from school has said she would like to live here, but I’m nervous to live with another person from my cohort at school. On the other hand, this is a different friend, and I think it would be preferable to living with a Craigslist stranger, which could end up being a much bigger disaster. We’ll see–luckily I have another month or so before it becomes urgent.

On the roommate front: My current roommate has started duct-taping lots of her food shut and labeling everything with little paper or masking-tape name labels. This is really awkward, because now when other people are in our apartment, it looks either like I am a thief or my roommate is insane or both. I’m not sure how to address it without starting a “I don’t steal your food”/”Yes you do steal my food” fight. I can’t prove that I don’t use her stuff. (For the record, I don’t.) I’m thinking of leaving a note about it, but then I am being just as passive-aggressive as she is. On the other hand, she’s moving out fairly soon, so why should I confront her if I don’t want to? Would a note be an okay response? Argh.

I had my Fall advising appointment this week, and it looks like I’ll be taking our rhetoric cohort class, a seminar with my second MA reader on Joyce and Beckett, and some kind of one-on-one seminar with my MA advisor on queer theory and/or British culture. Sounds great.

Alex and I talked about The Future last week, explicitly this time instead of in the abstract. We are on the same page and we want the same things and I feel incredibly lucky to have found this guy. He is wonderful.

Speaking of which, I was on the verge of an anxiety attack yesterday after turning in drafts of my MA report to both of my readers. I have this terrible writing style of introducing and rephrasing and looking at from a million perspectives and coming to new realizations as I write . . . which results in something like eight pages of introduction and no “meat.” I usually turn that crap in, a few days go by, and then I sit back down and rearrange and rephrase and eventually have a real paper and not just a mess of my boring thoughts. I didn’t realize how anxious turning in the not-so-great version of my work would make me. I spent the rest of the day feverishly re-reading, re-planning, and re-outlining to get started on re-writing today. By the time I met Alex for tacos, I felt like I was going to burst into tears any minute. But then we ate and talked and he bought me a beer and I realized that, hey, I still have more than two weeks of working time on this project, and if my advisor didn’t think it was going to happen, surely she would have said something to me by now. Even if I get terrible feedback, I am very determined and hard-working, and I will write and write and write until I produce something acceptable. So there.

Can you tell that I’m still not feeling very confident? Haha. I’m finding it difficult with this much work hanging over me. The whole MA report, two seminar papers, still three more weeks of teaching and a final student exam to grade . . . but, as everyone has been telling me, it will get done.

The good thing about all of this intense stress is that it’s making me look forward to the summer instead of dread it! I don’t care if it’s miserably hot, I am ready for a couple of months in which I teach an easy class, read a lot of books, and hang out with my boyfriend watching detective shows, playing ping-pong, making salsa, and drinking cheap beers with limes stuffed into them. That sounds awesome. If you watch me complaining about boredom this summer, remind me how I felt when I was writing this.

Chilaquiles Verde

I love chilaquiles. Like pretty much all Mexican and Tex-Mex food that isn’t those awful crunchy-shelled “tacos” or the ubiquitous giant burrito, I didn’t even know what chilaquiles were before I moved to Austin. In Florida, Mexican food meant big flour tortillas, lots of melty cheese, little bowls of bland salsa, and maybe some cheap margaritas. Moving to Texas meant discovering a whole new cuisine. Now I eat more good Mexican food in a week than I ate in my entire life before coming here.

So what are chilaquiles, for those of you who aren’t blessed with an almost unlimited number of Mexican restaurants in your city? Chilaquiles are a dish of fried corn tortilla strips, slathered in sauce and topped with a wide variety of proteins and vegetables. Like migas (which I think are particular to Austin) or huevos rancheros, chilaquiles are most often eaten for breakfast, topped with a fried or sunny-side egg or two.

The only hard part of making chilaquiles is frying the tortilla strips. Luckily, you don’t need to deep-fry them; Alex and I used less than an inch of oil in the bottom of a Dutch oven and they were perfect. We used two-day-old corn tortillas from El Milagro here in Austin.

Chilaquiles can be made with red or green sauce, but my favorite is a tangy green tomatillo sauce like the one we made the other night. We used elements of Diana Kennedy’s Chilaquiles Verdes Tampiquenos recipe from her amazing book The Essential Cuisines of Mexico, as well as elements of the also wonderful Border Cookbook‘s Coahuila Chilaquiles, but our sauce was more similar to that in The Essential Cuisines of Mexico. I didn’t really like Diana Kennedy’s topping ideas, but I didn’t want to add cream to our sauce like the Border Cookbook version called for.

This was my first time using epazote in anything! It had a strange flavor–kind of medicinal. But if you can find it, don’t leave it out. It’s weird, but it adds an authentic je ne sais quoi to the sauce that I don’t think you could get from anything else.

(for about two servings)
6 – 7 fresh tomatillos, shucked and rinsed
3 large poblanos
1 sprig’s worth epazote leaves
1/2 bunch fresh cilantro, rinsed and chopped
1/2 white onion, chopped
1 serrano pepper, chopped
3/4 cup chicken broth
salt
8 – 12 stale corn tortillas
frying oil (we used safflower)
2 eggs
1 chunk asadero cheese, sliced
1 avocado
chopped onion and cilantro for garnish

Cover the tomatillos with cold water in a pot, and bring to a simmer for about three minutes, until the tomatillos are softened. Drain and put into a large bowl.

Broil the poblanos under a high broiler, turning them so that all sides become blackened. When finished, remove from the oven and put in a covered bowl to steam. When cool, peel and seed the poblanos. Do not run them under water; this will wash away much of their flavor. Taste one for hotness; if the poblanos are hot, you may want to cut down on or eliminate the serrano pepper later.

Put all other sauce ingredients except for salt and 1/2 of the serrano into the bowl, and use an immersion blender to blend until smooth. You don’t want any chunks. Taste for seasoning, and add salt and serrano until you like the heat and savor.

Heat 1/2 to 1 inch of oil in a large heavy-bottomed pan over medium-high heat. Cut your tortillas into strips, triangles, or whatever shape you like. Fry in batches until moderately crisp; you don’t want them to be like chips, but they shouldn’t still be flapping about when you lift them with tongs. Layer on paper towels to drain.

Heat the oven to 375℉; it should already be fairly hot from broiling the poblanos. Place the fried tortilla strips in a large casserole dish, so that there are about two layers of tortilla. Pour the sauce over, turning with a wooden spoon until coated. If there is extra sauce on the bottom of the pan, that’s fine. Place sliced asadero over the top, and pop into the oven.

While the chilaquiles bake, fry your eggs for topping. Don’t overcook; you want a runny yolk. Chop some extra onion and cilantro for garnish, and slice the avocado.

When the cheese is melted, the chilaquiles are ready to eat. Turn off the oven, serve with eggs and avocado on top, and enjoy.

You can put pretty much anything on top of your chilaquiles. We did onion, cilantro, cheese, eggs, avocado, and sliced radishes. Some people like chicken on theirs, especially with a red sauce. You can do sliced tomato or guacamole or beans, but in my opinion, the eggs and cheese are not optional. That runny yolk and salty cheese go so well with the tangy sauce and interesting texture of the fried, sauced, and baked tortillas.

Did I mention that we ate this for dinner? It’s not just breakfast food!