Sunday-night dinner

After making those bánh mì, I had plenty of leftover chili peppers and cilantro, so I decided that my Christmas Eve meal would be ¡nachos! Alas, I didn't have the proper cheese (i.e., anything from a Costco "Mexican mix" to Jack to cheddar to harder-to-find cheeses like Oaxaca, Cotija, Asadero, and Manchego), so my Christmas Eve meal would be... ¡cheeseless nachos! Below are some pics for your delectation.

When I went out Sunday evening to grab my tub of sour cream from the office (I'd forgotten to grab it when going home this past Friday), I decided to swing by the building's grocery store—a Hanaro Mart that, unlike the grocery store in my building, doesn't follow the silly, anticapitalistic "close every 2nd and 4th Sunday to give the little guys a chance" rule. I got some ground beef and sugar (needed a resupply) but didn't find olives. I also forgot to grab nacho chips while there, so when I got to my building, I went to the 7-Eleven on our first floor... and discovered that it's the only convenience store in the known universe not to have any nacho-style corn chips. So I went outside and down the street a bit to a larger convenience store to get the chips and, if possible, some cheese. No dice on the cheese. I'd looked for cheese at the grocery store, but all they had was "pizza cheese," i.e., bagged and shredded mozzarella. So I stuck to my decision to go cheeseless, and that worked out fine.

Ground beef, seasoned and spiced (with some salsa added):

I made the nachos with some tomatoes I'd bought; I had bought two packages of slightly different tomatoes. One package was surprisingly sweet—the sweetest tomatoes I'd ever had in Korea, in fact. As my buddy Charles has noted before, it's hard to find decent tomatoes in Korea: Korean tomatoes tend to be bland and watery; you can't apply adjectives like "meaty" to them the way you can to American and European tomatoes. 

Elated with my find and curious to see how they'd work out in a salsa roja, I chucked my tomatoes into the food processor along with some leftover chilis, a healthy tablespoon of garlic, some salt and pepper, and some other components to help round out the flavor—sriracha, dried chili flakes, chipotle powder, chili powder, lemon and lime juice, etc. I blitzed everything in the food processor and gave the salsa a taste. Initially, it seemed like the best damn salsa I have ever made. Amazingly fresh and punchy.

Then two things happened: (1) I finally got around to reading the tomato-container label, and (2) I realized I'd forgotten to add in the cilantro during the blitzing process. The container label, which I hadn't bothered to read when buying the tomatoes, explained the tomatoes' sweetness: the tomatoes had been dipped(?) in a Stevia solution! 

Now, Stevia is one of my least favorite artificial sweeteners, and I'm normally pretty good at catching it as an ingredient when it's used. Sometimes, though, it gets past me, e.g., with certain sugar-free chocolate chips. But Stevia taken directly has a godawful nasty aftertaste that is impossible to forget, and when I've tried adding Stevia to things like tea, the result is thoroughly unpalatable. So I was surprised and ashamed not to have caught the Stevia on the tomatoes. I had successfully picked up on their unwonted sweetness, but not on the Stevia itself being the cause of that sweetness. 

As for the cilantro, I added that in after having blitzed the salsa in my food processor: the cilantro leaves had been chopped down to fairly small bits, so I saw no need to blitz anything further. I added the cilantro directly into the blitzed salsa and admired the resultant rustic look. But how did the final product taste?

Now that I knew about the Stevia, my attitude toward the salsa changed somewhat. It was still edible to me, but the Stevia-ness of it was disturbing on a barely conscious level. Once I added the cilantro, though, that seemed to round out the flavor a bit more, and the salsa proved to be perfect for the final dish.

Unlike with parsley, cilantro stems have as much flavor as the leaves. Use the stems.

For a cheeseless bowl of nachos, the above still looks pretty good. I have yet more leftover chilis, but I'll be using those in a completely different udong-themed dish.