It's often said that truly great cuisine comes from the desperate need to make otherwise unpalatable food edible. As a modern, American, sort of middle class guy, the closest I will probably ever come to this is the process by which I came to make Ethiopian chicken drumsticks.

See, I had these drumsticks.

So, sometimes I have ideas. This was an idea for a coleslaw dressing that combined three of my favorite things: charred stuff, tomatillos, and Mexican crema.

This recipe came about as a result of a few things. First was the Moroccan Fried Chicken at World Street Kitchen, which reminded me of a desire, long on the back burner, to get a grounding in some basic Moroccan flavors.

The second was the pork carnitas from Barrio, which are laden with cinnamon.

The third was two pounds of lamb leg meat in my freezer, waiting for experimentation. So I started with a basic rub:

• 2 tablespoons ras al hanout
• 1 teaspoon kosher salt
• 2 teaspoons ancho chile powder
• 2 teaspoons ground cumin

Hey, remember when I said in a farm box post I was gonna do something special with banana peppers? You don't? Because nobody reads the farm box posts or gives a shit? Well, I got banana peppers in the farm box and decided to try something special with them.

Right! CSA starts Thursday, so I'd better get off my ass and post the two or three things I've been meaning to post before that happens.

And so, my obsession with smoking things begins.

As I believe I mentioned, the ongoing attempts to clean out the chest freezer pre-porksplosion led to me to discover a few pounds of pork shoulder and a chuck roast in the freezer. Last Friday, these became the test cases for the first use of the side fire box for barbecue.

One of the things I like to do is pull inspiration from much better cooks than I am. If I have a fabulous dish at a restaurant, I'm tempted to try to rework it, and if I can get at least 60% of the way to a mindblowing dish, then the result is still going to be damn good.

So after an entire day of cooking, pureeing, and otherwise fucking with tomatoes, this is how many tomatoes I had left.

I actually don't have a picture of this, because it's just red sauce.

You can make a good cooked tomato sauce out of any tomatoes, because the cooking process levels the playing field. Oh, there are advantages to using good, organic tomatoes for your cooked sauces, but where they really shine is in a raw pasta sauce.

This is how madness starts, in case you were wondering.

As of Thursday evening, when I picked up the 20 pound box of Romas, plus the CSA box with two bags of mixed tomatoes, this is how many tomatoes I had on hand. It's a lot of tomatoes. So Saturday became Dia De Los Tomuertos, in which I attempted to process as many tomatoes as I could. Starting with the yellows.