Vegetarian Posole {cinco de mayo}

I know, it is the ... quatro ... de mayo.  Or something.  But!  We need to plan for tomorrow.  

I'm a serious Mexican foodie, and we make Mexican rice bowls or some kind of tacos at least once a week, usually twice or more.  They're easy and can be different every time, which is a huge selling point for us.  Also, Mexican flavors are just delicious.  

So, we had friends in town this weekend that eat pretty healthfully and thankfully aren't picky, and one only eats a few kinds of meat and Jay doesn't eat much meat at all, so a veg dish for this glorious holiday we're celebrating tomorrow just seemed to fit the bill.  My neighbor across the street is Mexican, and when her mother was here a few months ago they made a massive batch of chili paste that they used to feed our entire street for a few weeks, and I was the lucky recipient of a jar of it!  I put it in lots of Mexican dishes, but chili paste is the crux of posole, which usually has slow cooked pork in it.  

So.  Veg posole it was, with lots of hominy.  Have you had hominy?  It's corn but not like corn at all...kind of like gnocchi almost, with a really mild flavor that takes on the taste of whatever you put it with, in this case ridiculously great chili flavor.  You need this.  

You need a bell pepper (I think green has too strong of a flavor for this dish, but any other kind would be great), onion, garlic, olive oil, salt, tomato paste, chili paste, flour, hominy, and broth.  I used chicken which I KNOW doesn't make this vegetarian, so get some veg stock and get off my back.  Also used:  Valentina or any other hot sauce for spice, and chips, avocado, cilantro, and lime for serving/topping.  

On the chili paste:  If you don't have a Mexican neighbor and can't find any of this stuff in stores (sometimes called a chili base), see the recipe below for a how-to make your own.  

First, add some olive oil to the bottom of a soup pot and turn the heat to medium.  Then, chop the onion.  

For the bell pepper, I cut off the top and the bottom, remove the stem and seeds, and leave the center section intact.  

Then, I chop the top and bottom and cut the center section into strips then a dice.  I HATE it when TV chefs cut off the top and bottom of a pepper and THROW IT AWAY.  What the hell.  It's half the pepper.  Use the whole thing, people.  

Then, mince the garlic.  

Now, to the hot oil, add the pepper and onion and stir them together for 3-5 minutes until they start to soften.  

Then, add the chili paste, garlic, and tomato paste.  Stir everything together for 2 minutes. 

Then, sprinkle over the flour and stir THAT into the mixture for 2 minutes.  

Then add the hominy!  

At this point we have kind of a thick veg mixture, so pour in the chicken stock and stir to create a soup.  

Now, what you do next is up to you.  I let this come to a boil and prepped some toppings (listed above), then tasted the soup and it wasn't spicy.  So, I grabbed my fav Mexican hot sauce and added a bunch to the soup.  If you have a different chili paste you might not need to do that!  I also wanted a stronger chili flavor so I added another spoonful of the chili mixture.  

When the posole tastes how you'd like it to, let it simmer for a few more minutes and then EAT.  I didn't use very much stock compared to some recipes because I wanted a thicker product, but some posole is much thinner and the consistency of a brothy soup, so you could add more stock if you wanted it that way.  If your flour thickened the soup a LOT, add some more stock to thin it to a consistency that you like.  

Then, we top and go, kids.  

I can't tell you how satisfying and HEALTHY this is.  If you don't use chicken stock the dish is vegan, but the texture of the hominy gives a really good toothy quality to the dish, which is something that's really important to me in veggie dishes - it's kind of hard to replicate the texture of meat sometimes, but this does the job.  

Add margs and Corona, and you're ready to CELEBRATE.  

I have no clue what we're celebrating on Cinco de Mayo.  Guacamole?  Sorry.  

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