Chiles en Nogada - 205

Last night I was having a group of friends over for dinner and I wanted to make something special. This group will eat almost anything, and one is a vegetarian. With the holiday season upon us, I decided to try out a recipe I'd never made before, one that always seemed too complicated for an average cook like me to prepare.

And, by the way, I've only ordered it off a menu once in my life - in all my years of eating Mexican food - and thought it was good, but probably not worth all of the effort to make it.

CHILES EN NOGADA is a variation on the theme of a chile relleno. You have to start with a number of roasted and peeled chile poblanos. Most cookbooks or online recipes call for a ground meat (pork, beef) filling called picadillo which is typically made with diced potatoes, carrots, onions, raisins, and seasoning. Several of my cookbooks called for the ground pork with a combination of diced potato, sweet potato, apple, pear and raisins. Keeping my vegetarian guest in mind, I made my filling from diced onions, potatoes, sweet potatoes, raisins, a bit of cinnamon, nutmeg, and a dash of brandy.

The sauce for CHILES EN NOGADA is the tricky -and high calorie - part of this dish. It's made from ground walnuts, cream, queso fresco, and pinches of seasoning. I started mine in the food processor, but couldn't get the walnuts ground fine enough, so moved the mixture into the blender where it turned into a puree. I did what I could to bring the calorie count down. Instead of fresh cream, I used half and half, and I used a lowfat variety of queso fresco.

The reason this is such a complicated dish is that you have to roast and peel the chiles, then remove the seeds and veins before filling. You have to chop and dice a number of ingredients for the picadillo filling before cooking the mixture. You have to make the sauce and watch that it doesn't burn or curdle because of the cream and cheese in it. You have to seed a pomegranate, although if you're willing to pay more, you can now buy little packages of just the red seeds. Finally you have to assemble the final dish: stuff the chiles, arrange on a platter, ladle the sauce over them, and garnish with the bright red pomegranate seeds.

The easy part is eating them! As one guest at dinner said last night, she enjoyed the burst of juice coming from the pomegranate seed as she took bites from her dinner plate. CHILE EN NOGADA is a very different and original dish.