too haute.

Right. So if you're one of the people who is eating at our place this week and you want to be utterly surprised when your food shows up in front of you, you may want to stop reading now. I leave the decision in your hands.

+++

Above: tamale dough for shrimp and basil tamales. Below: those homemade chipotles en adobo I was talking about a few posts back for a top secret duck adventure.

I'm also working on integrating a Dutch coldcut into my southwestern cooking. It's basically very thinly sliced (what I believe is) cold-smoked beef, and it matches up especially well with this prune thing I've been making. Here's the question: is it too fusion-y to make a smoked beef quesadilla with prune, shallot, and pine nut preserve? And if not, what cheese/salsa combination are we talking about? I'm thinking goat cheese and pico de gallo. Let me "run some tests".

THE ANSWER: Smoked beef, goat cheese, prune/shallot/pine nut stuff makes for an excellent quesadilla. It's very rich, so you need to cut into small slivers. And you probably need to saute the smoked beef first before putting it in a tortilla, because it seems to give up a good bit of fat when heated. And I'm using flour tortillas for this one b/c corn is just a little distracting.