#9. Chiles Rellenos, for Real This Time

Last month I created a vegan version of Chiles Rellenos based on the non-vegan recipe in my 75th anniversary edition of Joy of Cooking and the meager contents of my fridge. It was good enough to eat and even enjoy just a little bit, but it gave me a hankering for the real thing, so on Groundhog Day, the day of trying things over again just a little bit differently this time, I followed the Joy of Cooking recipe to the letter to compare. Surprisingly, it was not nearly as good. In fact it was awful.

Here's what I think went wrong. First off, I bought three poblano peppers, and since the recipe called for 6, I made half as much cheese & shallots filling. This was not nearly enough to actually fill the peppers. Secondly, shallots are disgusting. I truly hate green onions and chives, and shallots, although they look like cute baby onions, have an annoyingly chivey flavor. Third, I should have used a large amount of mild salsa, rather than a dribble of the medium, because the poblanos themselves are gross-tasting and VERY spicy (Joy described them as having "a rich flavor" and "varying heat").

Here they are, oiled up and ready for roasting:

Here they are after roasting:

I probably could have roasted them longer, because it was somewhat difficult to remove the skin.

Here's the finished product:

I barely ate the whole thing. I ended up giving the other two to my dad, who likes chiles rellenos and orders them a lot in restaurants. He said that the peppers I used were a bit spicier than usual and agreed that there wasn't enough cheese filling. But he said they were otherwise okay (and he's a very honest critic).

I wanted to see what the chiles were "supposed" to taste like too, so I found some in the prepared foods section at Costco (they cost a whopping $13 for four):

I heated them up in the microwave and topped them with the same kind of cheese I'd used for the filling when I made them myself:

What I don't show is the two slices of bread I had to eat with this to keep my face from catching on fire. This version was actually pretty good, though. There was plenty of cheese filling (they used a ricotta type, which worked better than the three cheese "Mexican blend" I'd used). The sauce was thick and chunky, like spaghetti sauce with bits of hot peppers in it. I ate and enjoyed all four chiles, but I don't think I'll buy these again because they're just too spicy for me.