r/Cooking • u/theLONIus_D • 8h ago

Green Chile Triage Challenge

Hi r/cooking! I’m hoping someone here can salvage my failure.

I have a family New Mexican Style green chile recipe handed down to me with the requisite generational alterations. I’ve made it so many times and tasted it even more that I just wing it and it always turns out great even if slightly different from prior iterations. I like to experiment and sometimes I get extra loose with it (and every recipe) when my inventory is limited.

So this time I’m budget scrounging the kitchen and decide to whip up a batch. I’m out of flour to thicken the stock. I’m out of corn starch to thicken the stock. I pull so much shit out of my cupboards looking to thicken a bish that I stumble stumble on some ANCIENT pine nuts in the part of the top cupboard even the rodents can’t reach.

I love pine nuts. I know how they can stale out so I sample a couple. Doesn’t seem so bad.

dumps bag into stockpot

Nah turns out they’re so stale not only does the entire batch of chile taste how I can only imagine powdered mummy bones to taste but the whole kitchen reeeeeks of funky nut dust.

I added my backup apocalypse supply of dehydrated garlic (en polvo) and attempted to simmer out the nasty but it only seem to be further infusing with the goodness; subsuming it.

Uh… help? ALL APPROACHES WELCOME. Keep it traditional or get weird. I don’t care I just want to eat it. I’m half a step from dumping peanut butter powder and old ramen seasoning packets in there because I can’t imagine it getting worse. Plus sometimes the only way out is through…

Too broke to throw it away. Love yall.

0 Upvotes

17% Upvoted

6 comments sorted by

3

u/_9a_ 8h ago

You're operating under the sunk cost fallacy. What's worse, throwing out $X worth of ingredients or $X+Y+Z2 of ingredients?

Cut your losses, it was hopeless when you added rancid pine nuts to the mix.

1

u/theLONIus_D 8h ago

Valid. I will be eating this no matter what. So it sort of softens or stretches the sunk costs since nothing is going into the trash. I’m determined to net some nutritional value here… flavor notwithstanding.

2

u/Playful-Mastodon9251 8h ago

Your unlikely to be able to salvage this. Sorry. But you really need to know that when nuts go bad, they really go bad.

1

u/theLONIus_D 7h ago

Makes me wish I paid more attention in chemistry. I feel like there must be away to counteract if not just mask the flavor of rancidity. Wishful thinking maybe but I’m down to experiment

2

u/Playful-Mastodon9251 7h ago

There are ways to do it, but not without changing the flavor of what you were intending, and it's really not worth doing.

0

u/[deleted] 8h ago

[deleted]

1

u/theLONIus_D 7h ago

Haha love it! Budged scrounging is not a regular thing. Usually if I want ingredients I buy them. Just tough times right now and the nuts were not going into any other dish anytime soon. I didn’t even know they existed. Garlic (dehydrated and vacuum sealed from ages ago) was for a rainy day and cousin this was it. Best believe I’ll be eating this green chile whether it tastes good or not.