Salsa - Everything beyond Burrito.ai

This is the prompt we use in our answer detection example. The agent looks at open questions in your community and decides what to do with each one: mark a reply as the answer, nudge the asker to confirm, or just log it and leave the thread alone.The model only recommends. Your script checks its output and decides whether to act. If you haven’t read it yet, start with Before you automate: what we’ve learned building AI agents for communities. It explains why the agent is built this way.How to use itReplace everything in [brackets] with details from your own community. Keep the output format exactly as it is. Your script depends on it. Test it in Claude first. Paste the prompt, then paste one thread at a time as JSON, and compare the result with what you would have decided. Run it in dry-run mode on 30 to 50 real threads before you let it write anything.The promptYou review open questions in the [COMMUNITY NAME] community and decide whether one of the replies already answers the questio

I had a bad tomato summer three years ago. The market tomatoes were pale and tasteless by mid-August and every salsa I made that season was flat in a way I could not fix with technique. Out of frustration I put six roma tomato plants in containers on a south-facing balcony the following spring. By July I had more tomatoes than I needed and every single one tasted more of tomato than anything I had bought in years. Now: twelve plants, a tomatillo section, two types of chile, and a growing conflict with my balcony space. The salsas I make in season are the reason I keep the garden. The rest of the year I use good canned tomatoes and remember what is possible.

I spent a year systematically testing different dairy products in Mexican cooking contexts: crema, sour cream, crème fraîche, queso fresco, queso Oaxaqueño, Chihuahua cheese, cotija, requesón, and several commercial substitutes. Key findings: Mexican crema is genuinely different from sour cream — higher fat, more pourable, less sour. Not interchangeable for applications where you want a sauce-like consistency. Queso fresco and cotija are different cheeses used for different purposes: fresh vs cured, mild vs salty, crumble texture vs finer crumble. Oaxacan quesillo is the best melting cheese in Mexican cooking and most home cooks outside Mexico do not have access to it. Low-moisture mozzarella is the closest functional substitute for melting.

After cooking indoors exclusively for years, I built an outdoor station this summer and the change to my cooking is significant. Outdoor photo documentation. Setup: a large commercial propane burner on a steel-frame table, a cast iron comal mounted on the second ring, a charcoal chimney for direct flame work, and a stainless prep table alongside. What changed: I can cook at higher heat than any indoor setup because ventilation is unlimited. The comal temperature I can reach outdoors is genuinely different from indoors — hotter and more even. Charring tomatillos, chiles, and corn directly over flame without setting off the smoke alarm. For anyone who has outdoor space: even a single outdoor burner on a table changes what is possible.

I have cilantro aversion (it tastes strongly of soap to me — genetic, nothing to be done). I spent a year systematically testing substitutions in dishes that typically use cilantro and want to share the results. For tacos and burritos: flat-leaf parsley plus extra lime works best. The parsley provides green herbal freshness; the lime provides the bright finish note. Not identical but the closest functional result. For salsa verde: epazote (where available) or Mexican oregano. Both read as 'Mexican herb' without cilantro's specific soapy quality. For guacamole: just skip it entirely. Cilantro-free guacamole with good lime, salt, and fresh onion is excellent on its own terms. For pico de gallo: flat-leaf parsley is the substitute. Add it at the last second — it wilts faster than cilantro.

I see this come up and I want to put down my own position clearly. The burrito in its current most common form — large flour tortilla, rice, beans, protein, multiple toppings — is a border and northern Mexican food that evolved through the 20th century in Sonora and Chihuahua and in the US border states. It is not ancient, it is not pan-Mexican, and it is not identical to what you find in most parts of Mexico. But 'not ancient' and 'not pan-Mexican' do not mean 'not Mexican.' Food evolves. The burrito has Mexican DNA — the tortilla, the beans, the chile-based proteins — and developed in places where Mexican food culture was central. Arguing about authenticity in food is usually less interesting than understanding the history. The burrito's history is specific and interesting. The authenticity debate is not.

Not all cookbooks are technique books. Here are three that changed how I think rather than just what I cook. Diana Kennedy's The Art of Mexican Cooking: the most rigorous documentation of regional Mexican food in English. Not prescriptive — investigative. Reading it changed my understanding of what regional means. Nuevolution by Enrique Olvera: a chef's cookbook that is also a philosophy of Mexican food. The mole pages changed how I approach complexity. Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat (Samin Nosrat): not Mexican but the fat and acid chapters rewired how I think about every dish, including Mexican food. The acid chapter is the most useful 30 pages I have read about cooking. Books that teach you to think are worth more than books that teach you to follow.

I have been pairing mezcal with home-cooked Mexican food for a year and want to share what I have found works. Carnitas: a smoky mezcal is the obvious choice but I prefer a joven mezcal with light smoke — the fat in the carnitas provides enough depth that the mezcal does not need to add more. A heavily smoked mezcal competes. Chile verde: anything citrus-forward. The green chile and tomatillo base is already complex and acidic; a bright mezcal echoes rather than fights it. Mole negro: the most complex food in this category and probably the one place I reach for an añejo. The aged spirit can stand up to the depth of a proper mole negro without being lost in it.

Started a mole negro three weeks ago because I had a free Saturday. Twenty six ingredients, six hours, and a result I would describe as fine. The thing that got me is that every source disagrees about the order. Some toast the chiles first and fry after, some the reverse, one insisted on doing both in the same pan without cleaning it, which I now suspect was the actual point. So. Who here has gone properly deep on this, and did you land anywhere you would defend?

Went out Tuesday morning and the bottom third of the bed had gone. Brown lesions on the stems, leaves curling, the whole thing. Pulled eight plants and burned them. This is year three and it is the first time it has happened, which somehow makes it worse. I had started to think I was good at this. I grow in raised beds, drip irrigation, decent spacing. Wet July is the only thing I can point at.

Standing weekend thread. Not necessarily burritos, not necessarily Mexican, just what is happening in your kitchen. I have a bar shift Friday and Saturday so Sunday is the only day I cook properly. Doing carnitas, mostly because it needs four hours of nothing and I need four hours of nothing.