{recipe} Chiles En Nogada

My parents lived in Queretaro, Mexico for a couple of months 2 years ago- and ever since then my Dad has been OBSESSED with something he ate there ONE TIME. He does not stop talking about it! Using his descriptions, I did some detective work via my Diana Kennedy cookbook and figured out he probably ate Chiles En Nogada- a very interesting and admittedly somewhat challenging Mexican recipe. I’ve been promising him that I would make it, and when I finally did, it was really rather time-consuming and I wasn’t sure it would be worth it.

The main issue that I had is that the recipe calls for fresh walnuts. Here’s where I admit I don’t actually know what a fresh walnut looks like. It also said to skin the walnuts, ie remove the papery skin part… which sounded really vexing and actually totally completely WAS vexing. That is because I felt like I was in a walnut skinning sweatshop with my tiny fingers painstakingly working the skins off of walnuts for hours on end. Welcome to my sweatshop. Note the tiny pile of hard-won naked walnut pieces on the bottom left. Ugh.

In the end, it was all totally worth it. The dish was beautiful, unusual, and super delicious. It didn’t taste strictly Mexican, and in fact had shades of the Middle East in the flavor profile. It was also absolutely gorgeous. Even for a lazy slacker like me- it was totally worth the effort!  Next time I will try just NOT skinning the walnuts… or try to track down those fresh walnuts once and for all.

Luckily for me, and for you, Elise from Simply Recipes posted Diana Kennedy’s recipe in full right here! For the record, Elise doesn’t skin the walnuts. Of course, if  you’d like to open your very own walnut sweatshop… be my guest!