Spicy Spicy Sauce

Cooking on the boat requires oodles of creativity. You're really lucky if you have a lot of fresh ingredients and even the canned goods are sometimes precious little gems of food that end up being hoarded. A lot of my cooking so far is looking through cookbooks for recipes that look tasty while hoping I have enough ingredients to make it taste somewhat similar. I rely on cookbooks quite a bit compared to cooking at home since the pantry contents are so different.

Luckily at least half of the time my experiments turn out tasty, and they always turn out edible...well except for that one rice pudding fiasco between the Tuamotus and Tahiti. This latest blunder with mushroom chipotle sauce turned out edible and delicious enough to be funny.

Using the recipe for Mushroom Chipotle sauce from the Cruising Cuisine cookbook as a loose guide I sauteed some onions and garlic, set that aside and started chopping chipotle peppers. They're a smoked jalepeno pepper that can be super spicy. I didn't realize that Ben usually uses one to spice up an entire pot of beans. I also didn't realize that a "can of chipotle peppers" is usually around 4 ounces. I found a can in the dry storage and just started chopping and putting them all in the sauce (at this point it was just chicken bouillon, a can of green chiles and a can of mushrooms. The recipe called for a whole can and to simmer it down to about 1/3 of a cup.

At this Ben looks up and his eyes bug out--I had just used a 10 ounce can of chipotles. When you tried a bite it burned an actual hole into your tongue.

I really really didn't want to waste all those primo ingredients so I dug in the fridge and found leftover beans and corned beef and added that. Still too spicy. So I served it over rice and just ate it as fast as I could and tried to ignore the burning sensation in my stomach. Ben managed to eat a bite or two. You know it's spicy when he can only handle two bites: his curry usually makes me cry it's so spicy.
That night I just kept thinking about that mushroom sauce and how wasteful it was. When I woke up I dug through the pantry and found a can of tomato paste and rechecked the recipe. That was supposed to be in there. Oops.

So I served about a tablespoon of that over some potato frittata and it was almost palatable. Still scratching my head about what to do with it all I decided to add more beans. So after soaking a couple cups of black beans and bummed some cans of tomato paste and diced tomatoes from Dragonsbane I had a sort of chipotle chili that they helped us eat. But there were still leftovers.

The day after chili, Dragonsbane cooked up some burritos and I used the chipotle chili as a topping and there were STILL leftovers. On day four I added macaroni noodles--Ben and I finally polished off that sauce with some chili mac. By this time we were sailing to Raiatea.

Looking back at it, it wasn't such a bad thing on a boat to have this never ending tasty thing that could be tweaked meal to meal. I'm brainstorming something like that for the passage to Tonga. Maybe something a little less spicy, with fewer beans.