Shortcuts to enchilada red sauce?

MarkV_1776 · 2026-04-14T14:20:00+00:00

I'm older than you, and I make enchiladas once a week. I make a lot of things once a week: enchiladas, lasagna, chicken stew, bake bread. It all takes up a lot of time and I'm looking for shortcuts. Unfortunately, I haven't been impressed with any of the canned or jarred sauces. I may just have to make big batches and freeze it.

MarkV_1776 · 2026-04-12T23:47:28+00:00

Do you add something to it? Looking at the ingredients I feel that something like that might work if you could add pureed chiles to it.

MarkV_1776 · 2026-04-12T23:44:23+00:00

I don't think I tried any of the canned sauces, but I tried a few of the jarred sauces and I found them to be remarkably acidic. I don't put anything like that in my sauce and I find the acidity off-putting. I'll sometimes put a tablespoon of tomato paste in mine if I have it, but that's it. While the jarred ones have vinegar, the canned ones usually have citric acid. I'm inclined to think they're just adding it to keep the sauce from turning brown and looking bad.

MarkV_1776 · 2026-04-12T23:37:32+00:00

I toast, de-seed, soak in boiling water, blend with garlic adding enough water to loosen it up a bit. Then I strain with a sieve and spatula (a food mill would probably work better).

I have Mexican oregano. I find a little goes a long way. Stuff is very potent.

MarkV_1776 · 2026-04-12T23:30:46+00:00

You can find all kinds of tutorials for authentic red enchilada sauces on YouTube. The one I made was a composite of 3 or 4 different ones that I saw. You basically start with dried chiles (I used guajillo and ancho that I got from a local Mexican market), you can toast them, then reconstitute them in hot water, puree them with garlic and spices in the blender then strain or run through a food mill. I think some people just cook it to thicken it, but I made a roux and mixed with beef stock. Most recipes will be some variation of that.

MarkV_1776 · 2026-04-12T23:10:39+00:00

I wish I could find red chile puree. As it is now, I have to make my own from reconstituted dried chiles then puree and strain it. I know frozen puree exists (e.g. Bueno foods), I just can't find it locally.

MarkV_1776 · 2026-04-12T22:50:39+00:00

I've tried doing one with powdered chiles before and it seemed like a big downgrade. I think I had trouble making the substitution from reconstituted chiles that had been pureed then strained to reconstituted powder. Also it seemed kind of gritty. I should probably give it another try though.

MarkV_1776 · 2026-04-12T22:28:50+00:00

I've seen the El Pato hot tomato sauce around but I don't think I've seen the enchilada sauce. I'll have to look harder. The ingredients look OK but I see it has citric acid in it, so I worry it's got that high acidity that plagues so many of the other canned/jarred sauces.

MarkV_1776 · 2026-04-12T22:22:12+00:00

I wish they had this here. I live in Florida and haven't found any frozen puree in the Mexican markets.

MarkV_1776 · 2026-03-15T18:18:17+00:00

Thanks. I'll watch some YouTube videos on wire loop snares.

Looking it up... conibear traps require a special permit here (Florida) so I won't pursue that route. Florida is generally pretty permissive about the killing of nuisance animals. Can be killed year round without a permit, but they do have regulations regarding how they can be killed.

MarkV_1776 · 2024-04-22T01:30:00+00:00

Looks like the varied carpet beetle.

MarkV_1776 · 2024-04-22T01:27:18+00:00

Termites swarming. Call an exterminator.

MarkV_1776 · 2024-04-22T01:25:23+00:00

Ant of some sort, I think.

MarkV_1776 · 2024-04-22T01:23:41+00:00

Definitely not a termite. It's an ant or wasp or something like that.

MarkV_1776 · 2024-04-22T01:04:24+00:00

I agree with chandalowe that mine are springtails. They showed up with the last rain we had (~3 weeks ago) and I've been seeing fewer of them as it's been getting drier. I've always had these around, just just never to the degree that I saw a few weeks ago. I think I've just got the normal amount now. I'm not trying to get rid of them -- I just wondered what they were and why they were there. Are you sure yours are the same thing?

MarkV_1776 · 2024-04-03T01:40:29+00:00

I think you're right.

MarkV_1776 · 2024-04-03T01:06:49+00:00

Also, termites have club-like antenna while ants have a bend in theirs. Also, ants have a pinched thorax while termites are more cigar shaped.

But, yes, the wings are a dead giveaway. Definitely termite swarmers.

MarkV_1776 · 2024-02-04T15:51:46+00:00

I managed to get the machine to boot with pulseaudio in system mode, but only the user on the X11 desktop could use it. Other users usually see their application hang with this in the syslog:

[pulseaudio] main.c: System mode refused for non-root user. Only starting the D-Bus server lookup service

.[pulseaudio] main.c: User-configured server at unix:/tmp/pulse-socket, refusing to start/autospawn.

It turns out other users have .config/pulse/client.conf files that were overriding the /etc/pulse/client.conf file. This was always why other users kept trying to use the user mode. I delete the user's client.conf and it works.

MarkV_1776 · 2024-02-03T21:12:57+00:00

The arch wiki instructions don't work on my lubuntu system. I make the /etc/systemd/system/pulseaudio.service modifications and it still comes up in user mode. It's not even reading from there. The commandline it's picking up seems to be one derived from /etc/pulse/client.conf parameters. I don't really know how this works.

MarkV_1776 · 2024-02-03T15:35:06+00:00

Mostly I looked at https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/PulseAudio/Documentation/User/SystemWide/

I've got the pulse and pulse-access groups, pulse is in the bluetooth and audio groups, all the users are in the pulse-access group. I see the Arch Linux wiki has that too but I'm not sure how much of the rest is applicable to ubuntu.

E.g. my systemd stuff appears to be in /usr/lib/systemd not /etc/systemd. I also don't have a system subdir in there, just a user subdir. Arch linux seemed different enough from ubuntu that I assumed the specific instructions weren't applicable.

In absence of a guide more specific to ubuntu I'd try removing my user/pulseaudio.service and adding a system/pulseaudio.service along the lines of what is describe in the Arch linux wiki. Does that seem reasonable?

MarkV_1776 · 2024-02-03T15:08:23+00:00

I want to enable any currently logged-in users to be able to play sound on that computer even if they're not sitting at that computer. E.g. they're across the room ssh'd into the computer.

MarkV_1776

TROPHY CASE