Scallop Ceviche

It's hot. And humid. There's no way I'm turning on the stove or oven. Hence, scallop ceviche.

I can't give you exact amounts of the ingredients, but here's what you do: Chop up your scallops into ~1/2 inch pieces. Mince some red onion, chop tomatoes, cucumber, avocado and cilantro, and mince up as much chile as you like - I have some Peruvian aji chiles in the fridge, so I used those (the little orange bits in the picture). Mix everything together, and squeeze in a bunch of lime juice - you want the liquid to pool at the bottom of the bowl. Cover and chill for a few hours, until the scallops are "cooked". Salt to taste, and serve with chips.

Refreshing, crisp, light and delicious. I've also made ceviche with shrimp and red snapper, which is also delicious.

Stay cool out there, folks!

Stuff my Mother-in-Law Cooks

My mother-in-law is a great cook. When she lived with us for a time a few years back, she was always cooking up a storm. We've never eaten so well.

Here's a random sampling of the things we've been fortunate enough to eat over the years:

Roast ham, slathered in mustard and studded with cloves.

Posole made with various pig parts, including feet.

Chile verde, made with pork ribs.

Chicken mole.

Chicken Enchiladas

Who doesn't like enchiladas? Cheesy, spicy, and all-around delicious.

This is how I make enchiladas, as taught by my husband, as taught by his Mexican grandmother.

Chicken Enchiladas
Bone-in skin-on chicken breasts
1 onion
2 cloves garlic
1 can Las Palmas enchilada sauce
Corn tortillas
Shredded cheddar
Shredded jack cheese
Minced black olives
Minced red onion
Chopped green onion

Gently poach the chicken with the onion and a clove of garlic until cooked through. Let cool, then shred the meat. (Save the chicken water, as it's pretty much chicken broth!)

Warm the enchilada sauce in a pot with a smashed clove of garlic and salt to taste. Add enough sauce to the shredded chicken to make it moist but not soupy.

Spread some sauce on the bottom of a baking dish.

For each enchilada, warm a tortilla in a skillet with a bit of PAM, and drag it through the enchilada sauce (again, moistened but not dripping). Fill with chicken, cheese, minced onion and minced olives, and roll up. Place in the baking dish seam-side down. Repeat with the remaining ingredients.

Drizzle sauce over the enchiladas, sprinkle with cheese, more black olives and red onion, and green onion. Bake in a 350 degree oven until the cheese is bubbly and the enchiladas are heated through.

Lamb Tongue Tacos

If you've been reading my blog for any length of time, you know I have this, um, problem, with buying random "off cuts" of meat, and then figuring out how to cook it. This time it was lambs' tongues.

I braised them with bay leaf, garlic, onion and peppercorns until tender. Then I peeled them. This was definitely on my top ten list of weird things I've done in the kitchen that I don't want to do again. Then chop, mix with chile sauce, and make a taco.

My favorite? No. But I'm glad I tried it.

Simple Tostadas

Tostadas are one of my favorite "healthy" meals. Sometimes I get complicated and make my own beans and tostada shells, but this time I opted for purchased shells, and beans from Compadre's (house-made, no lard).

You could also add any meat you want - pulled pork, shredded chicken, ground beef. Or skip the beans and top with ceviche. Endless possibilities. These particular tostadas were vegetarian out of laziness and lack of thawed protein.

There's no recipe, just spread some beans on the tostada shell, and top with whatever you want. This one had tomatoes, lettuce, avocado, cilantro, red onion, green olives, yellow chile, green chile sauce, Tapatio, and a squeeze of lime juice. (Yes, I have a tendency to over-chile.) No cheese, because I typically only use cheese when meat is a topping. But go ahead and use cheese if you want.

Visually appealing (look at all the colors!), always delicious. Great for when you don't feel like turning on the oven/stove. Lots of chopping, but worth it.

Simple Tomato Salsa

Everybody likes salsa, right? It's so versatile - you can put it on top of eggs, fish, chicken, tacos, whatever. Or just eat it with tortilla chips (the typical mode of consumption in this household).

Here's my basic salsa recipe. (Yes, it's a lot of chopping. Make sure you have a sharp knife, and hide the tips of your fingers. Bobby Flay has a good video showing basic knife skills.)

Salsa

3 large tomatoes
¼ - ½ red onion
1 serrano chile
1 jalapeño chile
1 yellow chile
a handful of chopped cilantro
the juice of ½ - 1 lime
salt
1-2 garlic cloves (optional)

Quarter the tomatoes and remove the stem, core and seeds. (I freaking hate tomato seeds.) Do the same for the chiles. Dice up everything. I personally like ¼" pieces for the tomatoes and onions, and smaller for the chiles and garlic. Mix together, adding lime juice and salt. Let it sit for a while so the salt can work its magic on the tomatoes, i.e. it'll pull the water out so you have a salsa, not just a bowl of diced vegetables.

Serve. With everything.

Pulled Pork Chilquiles

OK, I've done tacos and BBQ sandwiches, and I still have pulled pork left. Now what?

Chilaquiles.

I fried up some corn tortillas into chips, then sauced the pork with the same chile sauce from the tacos, but added a little water. Heated a skillet on high with a slick of oil, dumped in the pork, stirred, then added the chips. Continued stirring and flipping until the chips softened (but not too soft, that's gross) and the sauce thickened, then threw in some cotija cheese. Dish out, top with cilantro.

You could also do this with a green chile sauce, either one works. What doesn't work is reheating the leftovers. Floppy chips are not cool.

And with that, I think I need to go vegetarian for a while.

Chile Sauced Pulled Pork Tacos

For my birthday, one of my awesome friends gave me a slow cooker. I had never used one before. Honestly, the whole concept seems like cheating to me. Then there's the part of me that wants to constantly be able to poke, flip, re-season, etc. Putting something in a pot and not touching it for 8 hours just seemed wrong. Plus, I'm supposed to leave something plugged in and HOT while I'm not home? It still scares me.

But I'm determined to overcome my aversions and fears. What better way to start? Pork roast. I trimmed an 8lb pork shoulder of most of its fat, and marinated it overnight with chile powder, cumin, salt, pepper, paprika, and lemon and lime juice. The next morning, I put a couple of thick slices of onion on the bottom of the cooker, plopped in the pork, filled the gaps with chunks of carrots and potatoes, and dumped in the marinade. Then I walked away.

Really. I actually left the house. But after 3 hours I was way too paranoid and came home. Of course, everything was fine. The pork continued to cook for another 5 hours. The result? The tenderest pork roast I've ever had. It broke into three pieces when I took it out of the slow cooker. And shredding? Just threaten it with a fork and it falls apart. OK, slow cookers are cool.

So now I have a huge amount of "roasted" pork. What to do? Tacos!

I made a quick chile sauce (toast dried chiles, de-seed and tear into pieces, toss in a blender with skillet-seared onion and garlic, add the liquid left from the pork shoulder, and blend), and mixed it with the pork. Warm a couple corn tortillas, spoon in the pork, and top with whatever you like. I like avocado, grilled green onions, cilantro and a squeeze of lime juice.

I still have a ton of pork left...more to come...

Pork Posole

After I made pied de cochon for the second time, I had a ton of leftover porky broth. I can't even really call it broth, because it was almost solid at room temperature from all the foot collagen. Delicious foot collagen.

So, what to make? I consulted my Twitter friends, and on Heather's suggestion, made posole, using this recipe from On My Plate. I replaced the called-for chicken broth and half of the water with my porky broth. And I'm not sure my chiles were New Mexico, they might have been guajillo. Once it was done cooking, I asked Hubby if he wanted the pork in chunks or shredded. He said chunks, so that's what I did.

Here's the finished product:

Oh! Wait! I forgot the avocado. Here:

This was absolutely delicious.

Mexican Snack

Sorry, I really don't know what else to call it. Maybe "really big nacho"? Mexican thin-crust pizza?

I made a chile sauce today from some aji mirasol chiles. Guajillos, pasillas, or cascabels would work too. Sear 4 chiles in a hot pan, then plunge in water to soften. Cook 2 cloves of garlic in their skins over a medium-hot skillet. Drain the chiles, and remove most of the seeds. Chop and mash the chiles until you get a very fine paste (or use a blender), add the de-skinned garlic, some oregano, salt, tomato paste (or sauce), and water. If it's too spicy, add more tomato/water.

Spread a corn tortilla with a thin layer of the sauce. Place in the oven to crisp up. When the bottom is crispy, throw on some shredded cheese (I used cheddar) and a little more chile sauce, and put back in the oven to melt the cheese.

When the cheese is melted, remove from the oven, let cool a little, then fold in half, and eat.

Yucatán Pork Stew with Ancho Chiles and Lime Juice

February's issue of Food & Wine had this recipe for Yucatán Pork Stew with Ancho Chiles and Lime Juice, and I happened to have a few pounds of random pork in my freezer. Coincidence?

The recipe calls for pork shoulder. I had some boneless ribs, and something called "boneless pork steak". I chopped it all up into 2" pieces and left it in the fridge overnight to thaw. I was in for a little surprise in the morning when I saw that the boneless pork steak wasn't one large hunk of pig like I thought, but rather four 1/4" thick slices all frozen together. But it was thawed and cut, so I went with it.

Other than the swap of piggy parts, I used the ingredients called for, except for using 2 ancho chiles and 1 mulatto chile, because that's what was in the cupboard. Additionally, I skimmed off a ton of fat - my ribs were much fattier than shoulder would've been. And I reduced the liquid (meat and veggies removed), because the broth was thinner than I wanted.

















After cooking for 3 hours on low heat, the pork was falling apart, but amazingly enough, the carrots weren't. Which is good, because I hate mushy carrots. All the dried chile slices had plumped up nicely, the tomatoes had dissolved into the broth, and the lime juice added a nice zing to cut the fatty richness of the pork.

This was perfect for the crappy rainy day we had. A keeper.

Quick and Tasty Carnitas

I know, I know, carnitas aren't quick. You need to roast the pork forever.

But not if you've got a Northgate Market near you. And if you live in southern CA, you probably do!

MIL came home with two large chunks of roasted pork, tub of "salsa mexicana", and a pack of guaraches (thick slipper-shaped corn tortillas). I shredded the pork and skillet-fried it without adding any fat, until it got crispy. At the same time, I placed the guaraches directly over a low gas flame to heat them through and get a little crispiness. Then pile some carnitas on a guarache, add some lettuce (or green onion or cilantro if you have it), a squeeze of lime, and a dollop of salsa.
















Alternatively, spread some salsa on your guarache, and distribute the carnitas on top, then bake until slightly dried out and a little crispy. Hubby says that guaraches are normally spread with a chile paste (much thicker than the salsa we had) and baked until the chile dries out, then topped with some sort of protein, some avocado, cilantro and lime. Sounds amazing, but I didn't feel like making chile paste, and didn't have any cilantro or lime. So you get what you get, and you don't make a fuss.
















Quick, easy, not too terribly bad for you, and totally delicious.

New Year's Menudo

Happy New Year, everybody!

MIL made menudo for New Year's - a day of prepping and chopping, followed by a day of cooking. It's a hell of a lot of work, but so good.















She started by washing tripe and pig's feet (which she had the butcher cut into manageable pieces), then boiled each one twice to remove the yuckiness. Dried chiles had to be rehydrated and seeded, then blended with garlic and onion.

Because I didn't get to see any of it, and MIL's always rather vague when it comes to sharing recipes, I'm not sure what happened next. I know the tripe got chopped into bite-size pieces. I know 3 large cans of hominy were used. And I'm guessing the blended chile sauce was diluted with water to create the soup. Maybe she added stock cube or 2, maybe some MSG. (Yes, there's a bag of MSG in my pantry.)

Toppings were chopped and sliced - radishes, cilantro, green onion, white onion, lemon wedges. Plus oregano and chile flakes for sprinkling.

End result was a huge pot of tasty deliciousness. I even ate a pig's foot, which I had previously sworn I'd never do, because of the texture. But this was good. Damn good.

Taco Night!

Yes, folks, tonight was taco night.

See?






























No pic of final assemblage, 'cause...come on...take stuff from picture 2, put it on picture 1. Eat. Repeat.

Quesadilla from Leftovers

or, How Hunger and Blogging Don't Mix

I was absolutely starving when I got home from work today. The quickest way to eat something tasty was to make a quesadilla out of the leftovers from taco night.

Oh, taco night...let's back up a minute:

Sunday night we had friends over. MIL made tacos, rice and beans. Sounds boring, right? Not so! She seasoned & cooked ground beef, adding a shredded potato to keep it thick (who knew?). Then she fried corn tortillas in oil about halfway, drained them, stuffed with a little meat, then fried the rest of the way. I thought frying the 2nd time with the meat would result in greasy-nasty beef, but it didn't. Trays of tacos were served with green onion, tomato, cilantro & onion, and shredded cheese (and homemade chili, of course). Spanish rice and pinto beans for sides. It made for a pleasant Sunday evening with friends, slightly dampened by the fact that we all got tired early 'cause we ate too much.

Now, back to the present:

Of course, there were leftovers, 'cause MIL cooks for an army, even if there's no army present. So tonight's quesadilla went as follows:

1. Spread beans, ground beef, and cheese on one half of a flour tortilla.
2. Toast in a skillet until crunchy on the outside and melty-gooey on the inside. (Geez, I sound like a Taco Bell commercial, sorry.)
3. Remove from skillet, open quesadilla, add tomatoes, green onions, and chili sauce, close quesadilla.
4. Eat.
5. Remember to take a picture only after the plate is empty.

But it's ok, I'm sure there'll be a "next time", hopefully one in which I remember to take a picture.

Tostadas

MIL made tostadas last night. We make these all the time, but for some reason, hers are better.















Brown some ground beef and onions, seasoned with garlic powder and salt.

Open a can of refried beans, add some butter, milk and chili powder, and heat up.

Shred lettuce and cheese, chop tomatoes and green onions. I usually also have chopped black olives and cilantro.

Fry some corn tortillas in oil.

Assemble your tostada - spread on some beans, then some meat, some cheese, and veggies of your choice. Top with your favorite hot sauce. Eat. Repeat.

Chili Verde con Puerco

My MIL's chili verde con puerco, pinto beans, with tortillas. No, you can't have the recipe, I'm afraid of what she'd do to me.

Chicken & Rice

For dinner last night, I made Chicken Legs in Achiote Sauce (Ben's recipe), accompanied by Green Rice, from Trini Gourmet.

The marinade for the chicken reminded me of the cochinita pibil I make (recipe courtesy of Roberto Rodriquez, director of Once Upon a Time in Mexico). The main difference is lots of ancho powder in the chicken, compared to habañero in the puerco.

My kitchen smelled amazing while this was cooking! The chicken was tender, flavorful...everything chicken wants to be but so rarely is.

The rice...was ok. I undersalted (a problem of mine, although easily fixed), and I think my long grain rice is old, because the center of the grains stayed hard for way too long, and by the time they were soft, the rice was breaking apart. The flavor, however, was very good. Cilantro, parsley, jalapeño, onion, garlic...of course the flavor's good!

Family dug on the chicken, the rice not so much. However, all three of them could live on plain white rice with soy sauce, with a pork chop thrown in once a month. So their opinion on "different" rice dishes doesn't really count in my eyes.

Will I make this again? The chicken, yes. The rice, I'll probably search for another recipe, or tweak this one til it's memorable.

Asado de Puerco

I bought some country-style pork ribs a little while ago, but had no idea what to do with them. Through the wonders of the Internet, I found this recipe from The Spice Must Flow, and decided to give it a go.

I halved the recipe since I had 2 lbs of ribs instead of 4. Because of that, 2 hours was a little too long of a cooking time, and the sauce got slightly dried out and burnt around the edges, and way too bitter. I salvaged the sauce by scooping up the non-burnt parts, adding a little water, then mushing through a sieve. Still bitter, so I added a little sugar - success!

I also had to rinse the bitter sauce off the ribs (yes, I rinsed off my pork).

After all that, this was hands-down the best hunk-o-pork I've ever cooked (except for Robert Rodriguez's cochinita pibil). I roughly shredded the meat, and we made mini-burritos with some of the salvaged sauce and some guacamole on flour tortillas.

I highly recommend this recipe, but make sure you don't burn your sauce!

Post #76 - Caldo de Res

We had caldo de res at Pacific Taco #1 in Escondido the other day. Pacific Taco #1 is my favorite local Mexican restaurant. But you have to order "real" Mexican food, not just a carne asada burrito or a chicken taco, which, in my mind, is geared towards Americans that think they're eating Mexican food.

Their shrimp cocktail is a mix of (I think) Clamato, shrimp, cilantro, chilies, cilantro, red onion, and cucumber - to die for. Their red snapper in garlic sauce is absolutely delicious, although really bad on the arteries. The siete mares is a seafood feast - pieces of fish, a crab leg, a few shrimp, baby calamari (affectionately known as monsters in my household). All of their soups have beautifully seasoned broths and perfectly cooked vegetables.

But this isn't meant to be a restaurant review.

Caldo de res is Mexican beef soup, typically made with oxtails, sometimes beef shanks (think osso buso). I've had it with any or all of the following vegetables: potato, zucchini, carrot, corn, chayote, cabbage.

After lunch at Pacific Taco, I decided that I, too, could make caldo de res. And so I did. While buying the requisite vegetables, I was trying to figure out what the mystery vegetable was in the caldo I just ate. It looked and felt like a potato, but tasted a little "greener" and had fibrous striations. Parsnip, I said, and bought one. Then when I got home and Google'd, I realized it was chayote. Final flavor was not affected by the mistaken substitution (hubby actually preferred parsnip over chayote).

I'm extremely fussy about my soups, the meat-scum and the fat that floats to the top that must be skimmed off, the consistency of the boiled parts, the degree of puree-ification, the amount of meat on and off the bone. I'm probably more OCD than most, so I've revised my directions for more normal people.

And as a last note before the recipe, caldo de res fits into my theory that Mexican cooking consists of overcooking meat to the point to where it re-tenderizes. I've learned from hubby to simmer my chicken breast absolutely forever when making enchiladas. Chili verde involves lean pork cooked so long that you'd think it would be leather, but after a certain point, it gets soft again. And you know how squid should only be cooked for a minute, and after that it's rubbery and chewy and, quite frankly, gross? If you stew it for an hour, it's delicious.


Caldo de Res

2-3 lb oxtails
1 onion, cut in wedges
3 cloves garlic, peeled
2 tomatoes, cut in wedges, seeded
1 bay leaf
2 white rose potatoes, cut into 1.5" chunks
1.5 carrots, cut into 1.5" long pieces, thick ends halved lengthwise
1 parsnip, cut like carrots
1 zucchini, cut in 3 pieces crosswise, then vertically thru the middle
1/2 small cabbage, cut into 3 wedges, then crosswise 3 times
1 ear corn, cut into 4 pieces
chopped cilantro
chopped parsley
salt

Put the oxtails in a big soup pot, and cover with water by about 2 inches. Chuck in the tomato and onion wedges and the garlic and bay leaf. Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat and simmer for at least 2 hours. Skim the scum off the top at the beginning of cooking, then the fat later on.

When the meat is almost-but-not-quite falling off the bones, remove it from the pot, and mash up the remaining veggies in the pot (removing the bay leaf first). Return the meat to the pot, and add the carrot, potato, corn and parsnip. Simmer about 15 minutes. Add zucchini, and simmer 10 minutes more. Finally add the cabbage, and simmer 5-10 minutes, or until everything is almost over-done.

If you're like me, when you mashed your veggies (see above), you cut off some of the meat from the oxtails, removed the gelatinous-cartilage-fat-skin-lining-stuff, and tossed the resulting meat back in the pot. The abused oxtails were also somewhat cleaned of cartilage-y stuff, and also returned to the pot. (To me, eating is about 50% textural, and I can't stand slimy cartilaginous tissue, even though it tastes really good.)

Stir in the cilantro and parsley, and salt to taste. Garnish with chopped red onion, cilantro, chiles de arbol, and lime juice. Traditionally, serve with tortillas, although as a white girl, I still can't figure out what to do with tortillas and soup. Give me a nice chunk of crusty bread instead, please.