Jungle Jim's, Cincinnati's oddest and best exotic food store, offers shoppers plenty of obvious attractions, including posh restrooms disguised as port-a-potties, an abandoned monorail, huge tanks of live fish, and a giant animated chimp dressed as Elvis. But we often sneak into one of its less blatant features, the marked-down produce alcove. The Jungle has high standards, and things that still look perfectly good get marked down to ridiculous prices after only a couple of days. Which is how we ended up with two pounds of organically-grown tomatillos for 59 cents.We once tried a cooked tomatillo salsa, but in our opinion, it took all the zip out of them, in both flavor and texture. So Holt just made his classic New Mexican Tomatillo salsa: Into the Robot Coupe go a clove of garlic, ground first with some salt; then the tomatillos, then lots of red onion, lots of fresh coriander leaves, and the juice of a lime. Problem with tomatillos is, they give up a a great deal of watery juice (and will continue to do so on the plate). The grinded-up mix needs to be drained in a sieve. However, it can get too drained so we put a bowl under it and can add back just the right amount of wetitude and moistosity.
While this was going on, we sautéed a pair of chicken breasts, at first with wine, but once the salsa had been drained, with the extra juices from it. To serve, Barbara plated out a fresh green mound of salsa on the bottom, with the chicken resting on top; while Holt deglazed the pan and made a quick brown sauce with all the lovely scrapings.
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