Santa Fe Enjoys Its Time in the Spotlight

By Patricia West-Barker, The Santa Fe New Mexican

Apr. 9–Santa Feans have had their share of the food-television spotlight lately. Among the programs broadcast in the last few months are a segment of Dinner Impossible filmed at El Rancho de las Golondrinas and an episode of Diners, Drive-ins and Dives featuring the Tecolote Cafe (both on the Food Network); and at least three segments of The Learning Channel’s Take-Home Chef, filmed here during last summer’s Indian Market and aired in the past month.

On Dinner Impossible, chef Robert Irvine is challenged to produce a meal under a variety of difficult circumstances, from cooking on an airline carrier to using the kitchen at Graceland to preparing a meal in a medieval castle. On a 30-degree January day, his mission — part of an early Santa Fe 400th anniversary event — was to prepare a traditional Northern New Mexico meal for 60 guests in an 18th-century outdoor kitchen using only a pit fire, wood-fired comal (or griddle) and two hornos.

Assisted by his own staff, local chef Noe Cano of the Santa Fe School of Cooking and Leroy Romero and Virgina Vigil of las Golondrinas, Irvine produced a menu that included bizcochitos; a stew we know as menudo, called posole on the show’s menu; and buffalo tamales; pan de horno (a bread); chiles rellenos; carne adovada; refried beans; flour tortillas and atole, a corn-based drink.

Irvine’s recipe for the atole, posted on the Food Network Web site, is not the usual take on the traditional drink. Irvine uses fresh, whole corn rather than the masa or cornmeal we are more accustomed to seeing in this porridge-like beverage.

To serve four, Irvine’s recipe combines:

1 (8-ounce) package of fresh frozen white corn, defrosted 3 cups milk 1/2 cup sugar 1/2 cup brown sugar 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon 1/8 teaspoon salt

In a blender, puree all ingredients until smooth. The puree is heated in a saucepan until warm, then poured into 4 mugs, with a cinnamon stick added to each serving.

Additional recipes from the show (episode IE0307) are available on the Food Network Web site (www.foodnetwork.com). You can also check the network Web site for future re-air dates of the “Santa Fe Struggle” episode.

For more information about El Rancho de las Golondrinas, a 200-acre Spanish colonial living-history museum in La Cienega, visit www.golondrinas.org or call 473-4169.

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Guy Fieri is the flamboyant host of the Food Network’s Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives, which was conceived as a one-episode special celebrating the re-emergence of these classic American “greasy spoons,” but proved so popular that it is still filming.

On March 24, the segment featuring the red and green chile of Santa Fe’s popular Tecolote Cafe premiered, with fast-paced, lively shots of loyal local customers, longtime owner Bill Jennison and general manager Chris Valdez.

The show’s producers contacted Tecolote, Valdez said, because someone had sent them an e-mail about the restaurant. After several phone meetings with Jennison and Valdez, and viewing photos of the cafe’s signature dishes, the network told them they had been selected for the program.

“I’ve been a fan of that show from the beginning,” Valdez said. “I thought of us the first time I saw that show — so to get a call from them to say you’ve been considered, and then to be picked … to me that was an honor.”

It took two days to film what was edited down into about a 20-minute segment, Valdez said. The first day, spent cooking with Fieri in the Tecolote’s back kitchen, was great fun, Valdez said — “he’s even cooler in person”; the crew returned the second day without the host to do all the close-ups of the food.

Although a number of the cafe’s signature dishes — like carne adovada and blue corn-pinon pancakes — were featured on camera, it was the red and green chile that got the most air time. “Our chile is just so good and the colors were so bright on television,” Valdez said, that the cafe has been getting calls from all over the country since the episode aired, asking if they ship their sauces. (Tecolote doesn’t ship its chile, but does sell it to locals who want to pick it up at the cafe.)

For more information about the chile sauce or the 27-year-old restaurant’s hours, call Tecolote Cafe at 988-1362 or stop by 1203 Cerrillos Road.

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Charmaine Jackson-John, an independent film and media specialist, heard TLC’s hit series, The Take-Home Chef, hosted by Aussie Curtis Stone, was looking for couples to appear on the program and decided to “try out” for the program by sending the producers a brief video of herself in front of her Santa Fe adobe home.

The show’s concept was to have Curtis surprise a shopper in a grocery store and have him or her take the chef home to prepare an impromptu meal. Although the concept has changed enough to now include Jackson-John’s home video in the edited segment, Curtis still met her at the Santa Fe Farmers Market during Indian market weekend last August, shopped the stands for ingredients for the dinner they would prepare, and followed her home.

The real surprise, Jackson-John said, was for her husband, Jefferson John, a University of New Mexico student, part-time employee of Las Cosas Kitchen Shoppe and a budding chef himself.

It was really hard to hide all the preparations from him for the month and a half before the episode was filmed, and during the hours of shooting before John unknowingly opened the gate to their home to be greeted by Curtis and the TV crew. “But it was so worth it to do something wonderful for my husband,” Jackson-John said.

The romantic dinner Jackson-John and Curtis prepared for Jefferson included a chile relleno, bison rib-eye steaks with a chile rub, a variation of calabacitas, and lavender-infused chocolate custard.

The couple — members of the Navajo Nation originally from Shiprock — plan to prepare the meal again, Jackson-John said, to celebrate their fifth anniversary in September.

The Take-Home Chef episode titled “Charmaine” is scheduled to re-air today on TLC. Check local listings for time, or visit tlc.discovery.com/fansites/takehomechef/takehomechef.html for more information about the series.

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