Easy

Guacamole means “sauce made with avocado” and comes from Nahuatl, the pre-Columbian language still spoken in some parts of Mexico: guac—avocado—and mole—a sauce made of more than one chile or ingredient. The best guacamoles are prepared in a stone mortar or molcajete. The chiles and cilantro are ground with lime and salt, and the avocados and tomatoes are mashed in, layering the flavors and creating a coarser, more interesting texture.

Perhaps expecting the red-tinged, tasteless, so-called Mexican or Spanish rice you see in most restaurants, guests at Coyote Cafe are pleasantly surprised as soon as they take a forkful of this rice. This is a real trailblazer of a side dish, with plenty of personality. For best results, use a good, fresh, pure chile powder. The rice will keep for 2 to 3 days in the refrigerator.

“Red or green?” means what color chile sauce do you prefer? It’s the usual question posed to anyone ordering a main course in traditional New Mexican restaurants. This is my version of the favorite cooked green chile sauce served with just about everything in New Mexico and other parts of the Southwest. It pairs well with all kinds of dishes, from eggs to roast beef. Make it hot or hotter by the type of chile you use—up to you. I prefer the fall chiles, roasted when they are turning red from green and a little sweeter.

This sauce is offered at most taco stands throughout Mexico and is probably the one most widely served with tacos. Chile de árbol—literally “treelike”—is searingly hot, with a smoky, grassy flavor, but its heat is tamed slightly in this recipe by the tomatoes. A variation using serranos follows.

This green rice is the side dish that we have used at the Coyote Cantina for over twenty years. Its bright balance of herbs and chiles works well with almost every dish because it is not the usual “red-chile Mexican rice.” It tastes of pureed vegetables and chiles, but doesn’t overpower some of the milder tacos. And as most tacos contain smoky grilled flavors, this rice provides a fresh accent, rather than duplication of what’s already there.

When you want a chile with distinctive flavor and a blast of heat for a salsa with Caribbean roots, the habanero is an obvious choice. It is native to the Caribbean basin, which includes the Yucatán region of Mexico. The flavor of habaneros has tropical overtones that perfectly complement fruit like mangoes and bananas. A little goes a long way—despite its diminutive size, it is the hottest of all chiles available in the United States and Mexico. This salsa makes a great condiment for pork, chicken, or fish.

Here is the recipe used at the Coyote Café. Along with chopped onions, fresh cilantro, salsa tomatillo, and red chile sauce, it’s always offered as a basic condiment with tacos, regardless of whatever special salsa is paired with a particular taco filling. Salsa fresca is used in Mexico like we use ketchup—to wake up plain foods. But salsa fresca is better than ketchup because it is made fresh—ripe tomatoes, a bit of onion for crunch, the heat of green chile, the tang of fresh lime juice, and the refreshing lift of aromatic cilantro.

This recipe highlights the wonderful flavor of the fresh green chiles widely abundant at roadside stands throughout New Mexico during the late summer and all through the fall. Often the chiles are roasted on the spot in hand-turned, butane-fired drums. You can smell the roasting chiles long before you can see them. Just follow your nose to find a vendor, as the air is thick with fiery oils that can clear your head. I look forward to fall in Santa Fe every year mainly because of that nostalgic, pungent and spicy aroma I have come to love.

Why make this versatile sauce yourself instead of buying it already prepared? You’ll get a smokier, more interesting result that’s free of additives and excess amounts of salt and vinegar of the commercial versions. It’s also a great base for other ingredients—tomatillos would be a flavorful addition. Use it in marinades, soups, as part of other sauces, or as a spicy table condiment at a taco party.

The green tomatillo has a bright sharp flavor akin to that of green plums or rhubarbs. In the winter months, when it’s sometimes hard to get fresh red tomatoes, I use tomatillos, which are available all year. This sauce makes the ideal cool counterpart to spicy salsas. The unusual addition of ice keeps the cilantro green when pureed with the other ingredients.

Bacon, red chile, and honey are a heavenly combination that I first tried in Santa Fe. I had found a really delectable red chile honey made in the Taos area of northern New Mexico. The combination of sweet, aromatic honey and earthy piquant red chile is a wonderful marriage that enhances both. You can make your own version: add a good fresh red chile powder or puree of fresh red chiles to a wild honey that isn’t too sweet. For these tacos, buy the best quality bacon you can find—it will make a huge difference in taste. For a more authentic Mexican flavor, you can substitute guava jam for the honey.

Spicy breakfast foods are the norm in Latin America or Asia, but not in the United States. I have always liked a spicy breakfast, finding that bland, starchy choices like bagels, toast, or pastries with sugar tend to make me sort of sleepy in the morning. This taco filling is another simple version of spicy scrambled eggs and would also make a great omelet when you don’t want tacos. Dry-roasting the jalapeños gives the dish a heady, smoky quality and cuts the richness of the eggs. A natural cream cheese would be another tasty accompaniment, with smoked salmon slices for garnish.

Chorizo was one of the first dishes that I learned to cook at home, prompted by a longing for it after visiting Mexico as a youth, where it was usually served for breakfast with eggs. No more dried, tough, salty bacon for me. I was a chorizo convert, and I was determined to have it for breakfast. While there were good local Mexican markets at the time, I found a simple recipe for chorizo in a Mexican cookbook of my mother’s (which I still have almost fifty years later). That homemade chorizo became our Sunday morning ritual. I measured out all the spices—the chile powders, the canela, the cumin, and other seasonings—and added them to the pan along with fresh ground pork. I stirred the mixture slowly, keeping it moist, until it was ready. Breakfast had become exciting again! For this filling, I prefer chorizo that has not been ground too fine and with plenty of fat. You can add additional spices and seasonings like red chile powder or roasted fresh green jalapeños to it while cooking to enhance or alter flavors.

If you are in a rush and don’t want to make the Ranchero Sauce, buy a jar of roasted red chile salsa, drain off the liquid, and use what remains. Scramble the eggs over low heat, turning them gently with a wooden spatula or spoon. If the eggs turn white while cooking, the pan is too hot. The chopped cilantro adds bursts of fresh green, herbaceous flavors. For a more robust and traditional finish, squeeze fresh lime juice on the eggs when they are almost finished cooking.

This is a very simple taco, common throughout Mexico, that I ate at whatever local market was nearby on almost all of my mornings there. It was always accompanied by copious amounts of orange juice freshly squeezed with a portable juicer at a neighboring street cart. They are a great way to start a day and one of my longtime favorites. Consider this recipe a tasty base for ingredients—whatever sounds good to you. Green chile powder is a nice addition, as is chipotle powder.

Buffalo was (and still is) the primary game meat of the American Indians of the Southwest pueblos. They either hunted buffalo or, if they were an agrarian society like most pueblo tribes, they traded corn and other supplies for buffalo jerky and buffalo skins. Originally, there were over 60 million buffalo or bison roaming the continental United States from the Northwest all the way to Virginia. But by the 1920s, they were almost extinct from overhunting, with only 1,200 left. Fortunately, they have been brought back through effort and careful husbandry, and there are many suppliers of buffalo meat today. When planning my fall menus, I always include buffalo and pair it with local New Mexican fruits like our excellent apples from the Velarde Valley. Any high-quality buffalo sausage will work for this recipe, or substitute a game or lamb sausage.

A great game meat, elk is more flavorful than deer and not as dry as ostrich. At Coyote Café, elk is a signature dish of chef and partner Eric Destefano, who I say makes the best elk dish in the United States—very juicy and not at all gamy. The trick is to marinate the meat, cook it rare, and let it sit for awhile before slicing. When purchasing elk tenderloin, be sure to have your butcher trim off all the silver skin. If you cannot find elk, axis deer can be substituted (see Sources, page 167). Sautéed wild mushrooms, such as morels, are a nice accompaniment.

The meat from the shank is the tastiest part of the lamb. As lamb is a grazing animal and stands probably 90 percent of the time, the leg muscles get more developed and flavorful. Braised meats take a little more time to cook, but not much time to prepare. They’re really very simple and almost foolproof, and the end result is really luscious, flavorful meat. It takes a little longer, but you get the best results if you cook them at as low an oven temperature as possible—around 200°F. Serve these tacos with this richly flavored filling during the colder months, when appetites yearn for something earthy and substantial. Shredding the meat along the grain produces pieces that better retain both moisture and flavor. The meat is best eaten the day it is cooked. Place the meat back in the sauce to reheat.

The “aha!” moment when I thought to combine porcini and grilled beef with chiles came to me in Argentina, home of the world’s best grilled beef. Specifically, I was in Mendoza, the capital of Argentina’s wine country and settled by Italian immigrants in the nineteenth century—probably why beef with porcinis is such a common pairing there. This dish is delicious prepared outdoors over a wood-fired grill, but you can also cook it stovetop on a cast-iron griddle or ridged grill pan. Look for porcini powder at specialty food stores or buy dried porcinis and grind them yourself in a spice grinder.

I lived in Morocco for a time in the mid-1970s studying textiles as part of my anthropology training. While there, I learned to cook with the full array of the expressive, aromatic spices of the Moroccan kitchen. Cumin is one of the most important and widely used of these spices, and I find that its pungent, woodsy aroma gives most meat dishes a “meatier” or “gamier” flavor that I like. Cumin is also widely used in Tex-Mex cooking for the same effect. This brine will work for up to double the amount of meat called for here. When making a brine, use a five-to-one ratio of sugar to salt, which works well for twenty-four-hour brines such as this one. For a North African accent, garnish the tacos with grated carrots, chopped fresh mint leaves, and quartered cherry tomatoes. Look for cinnamon oil in the baking and candy-making sections of well-stocked specialty food stores or online.