Every year we spend a few weeks with my sister in LA. Her house is cut into a hillside to the east of the city and sits at the top of steps brightly painted with hearts. Nearby, there’s a billboard that reads “I like you very much” by a taco stand that announces itself with rainbow parasols. It might be too much for some, but the optimism of California has had me hooked since I was a little girl.
Every Saturday morning we walk down the heart-covered steps and cross Sunset Boulevard to the tiny farmers’ market. January brings fat scarlet pomegranates, winter citrus in every shade from lemon chiffon to saffron: mandarins, tangerines, tangelos, Moro blood oranges, kumquats, tiny key limes. There’s pink radicchio, perfect avocados and fluoro-pink watermelon radishes.
There are deep bins of dried white peaches, mission figs, nectarines, pluots, yellow inca berries preserved in the sun during the late southern Californian summer. My bag fills up with a rainbow to rival the steps.
The walk home leads us past the taco stand, the coffee shops and the lady selling palo santo (which, like dried sage, people burn to cleanse their homes). Mexican food is the heartbeat here. Every type of it can be found within LA – not just tacos but whole menus dedicated to mole, quesadillas, enchiladas, burritos … and also upmarket vegan renditions. It’s almost too good to be true.
In the hands of Mexican cooks, the bursting produce of the Sunshine State has made for some of the best meals I can recall. Tacos piled high with avocado, the crisp crumbed outside resisting for a moment before giving way to a grassy green butteriness, a salsa layered with char and chilli, sweet and tart, all atop a perfect hand-size soft corn taco. Mole made with mission figs, spooned on to tortillas, beans gently spiced and refried, all the better for the second cooking. These are the things I cook when I get back home: a riot of colour and unabashed flavour that reminds me of the west coast’s vibrancy, all the more welcome on a January day in London.
Roast avocado tacos with charred tomato salsa
I encourage you to seek out corn tortillas made from 100% corn masa (dough). They have a totally different texture and flavour to the softer corn and wheat tortillas we are used to in the UK, and are easily available online. Here I break my no-tomatoes-in-winter rule: the charring brings out a sweetness in even the most lacklustre winter specimen. If you’re able to cook this in the summer, when tomatillos are in season, do use them.
Serves 4
For the roast avocado
4 just-ripe avocados, stoned, quartered
Zest and juice of 1 lime
1 green chilli
A pinch of dried chipotle or red chilli
A handful of wholemeal breadcrumbs or oats
Olive oil
For the slaw
½ white or green cabbage
A small bunch of coriander
1 green chilli
Juice of 1 lime
Salt
For the charred salsa
4 ripe vine tomatoes or tomatillos (unripe green tomatoes)
4 spring onions
2 red chillies
2 garlic cloves
A swig of red wine vinegar
Salt
Lime juice (optional)
Agave syrup or honey (optional)
To assemble
100g of manchego or feta cheese, crumbled
12 small corn tortillas
Limes and chilli, to serve
1 Cut the avocados in half and take out the stone. Cut them in half again (ie, into quarters), remove the skins, put them into a bowl and finally sprinkle with the lime zest and juice. Toss well to coat. Roughly chop the green chilli, add to the bowl with a pinch of chilli powder/chipotle and toss gently.
2 Put the breadcrumbs on a plate and roll the avocados in them. Put on a baking tray, drizzle with olive oil and bake at 180C/350F/gas mark 4 for 25 minutes. Alternatively, shallow-fry them in a good bit of olive oil.
3 Put a griddle on a high heat. While it heats, thinly shred the cabbage and roughly chop the coriander, then combine in a bowl. Chop the chilli and add to the bowl with the lime and a good pinch of salt, then mix until well combined. Pile into a serving bowl.
4 Char the tomatoes, spring onions and chillies on the griddle until soft and blackened all over, turning with tongs every 30 seconds or so. Once the whole lot looks good, put it all (apart from the chilli stalks) into a blender with the garlic, a good swig of red wine vinegar and a generous pinch of salt and blitz until you have a punchy salsa. Taste and check it is nicely balanced: add more vinegar, lime or a little agave syrup or honey if it needs sweetness (depending on the sweetness and ripeness of your tomatoes). Put this into a big bowl.
5 Warm the tortillas in a dry frying pan on a medium heat or over an open flame, turning with tongs. Once they are warm and a little charred around the edges, pile them on to a plate. Put them in the middle of the table with the avocado, salsa, slaw, cheese, and some extra chilli and limes for squeezing over, and let everyone make their own tacos.
Fig and pinto bean tlayudas
A tlayuda is a bit like a Mexican pizza that uses a crisped flour tortilla as its base. It’s originally from Oaxaca, but I’ve eaten them in California topped with local mission-fig mole. I haven’t made a full-blown mole here as it’s a very long process; instead I’ve done a quick fig relish with some mole spices I ate one sunny afternoon in California. To my delight, I managed to get my hands on some meyer lemons recently, a less acidic citrus, with a sherbet tangerine kick. They are one of my all-time favourite ingredients and their bright freshness is so Californian, cutting through the deep Oaxacan spices perfectly. If you can’t get your hands on meyer lemons, then a mix of lemon and clementine will stand in.
Serves 4
For the fig relish
150g dried figs
Olive oil
1 tsp cumin seeds
50ml red wine vinegar
1 tbsp maple syrup
1 red chilli, roughly chopped
Salt and black pepper
For the meyer lemon cabbage
½ small red cabbage
Juice of 1 meyer lemon (or ½ a lemon and ½ a clementine)
Salt
1 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
For the refried beans
Olive oil
2 x 400g tin pinto beans, drained
2 tbsp chipotle paste
A pinch of allspice
¼ tsp cinnamon
Salt
A small bunch of coriander
To assemble
Olive oil
4 flour or corn tortillas
100g feta cheese
1 Make the jam by putting the figs into a frying pan with a splash of olive oil and cumin seeds, then cook on a medium heat for a couple of minutes until they begin to look sticky. Remove from the heat, add the vinegar, maple syrup and chilli, then cook for a further 5 minutes until you have a sticky jam. Season well with salt and pepper, transfer to a bowl and put aside. Don’t wash the pan: you’ll use it again.
2 Shred the cabbage finely and put it into a bowl with the citrus juice, a good pinch of salt and the extra virgin olive oil, then mix well together.
3 To make the beans, put the fig pan back on the heat, add a splash of oil and allow to heat a little before adding the beans, chipotle paste, spices and a good pinch of salt. Mix well, scraping the fig stickiness from the pan. Cook for a few minutes, then stir through the chopped coriander. Keep warm.
4 Heat a splash of oil in a frying pan and add one tortilla. Cook for 1-2 minutes each side, until crisp. Keep warm in an oven while you cook the rest.
5 Top the tortillas as you might a pizza, with the beans, then the figs, the cabbage and a final crumble of feta.
- Anna Jones is a chef, writer and author of A Modern Way to Eat and A Modern Way to Cook.(Fourth Estate); annajones.co.uk; @we_are_food
- This article was corrected on 1 February 2017: it forgot to mention that, ideally, one is supposed to relieve the avocados of their skins once chopped and stoned.
