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.

Poached Egg on a Tortilla

Yes, I'm addicted to poached eggs. I blame my husband.

This was a lightly toasted tortilla, some cheddar cheese, green onions, tomatoes, poached egg. Surrounded by green chile salsa.

Not glamorous, but tasty.

Thai Papaya Salad

Do you ever crave something you've never had before? No? Just me?

A while back, I was craving som tam (ส้มตำ), Thai green papaya salad, even though I had never had it before. Just looking at the list of ingredients, I knew I wanted it, knew I would love it. Shredded unripe papaya, tomatoes, green beans, dried shrimp, peanuts, hot chiles, lime juice, sugar, fish sauce. I finally had it for the first time at Sab E Lee, and, seriously, I could do shots of the dressing, it's that good. Then recently I decided I needed to make it myself.

So I consulted with Leela from She Simmers, using her recipe, and asking her a couple questions along the way. I have a mortar and pestle, but it's the Mexican kind with the rough granite. My instinct told me I needed a smooth-sided mortar to make som tam, so I used a large cutting board and a metal bowl, and alternated between the granite pestle and my meat tenderizer. Don't laugh. It worked.

Aside from an altercation with the vegetable peeler, in which I removed a fair-sized chunk from my thumb, everything came together nicely. Lots of pounding, crushing, mixing, more pounding. It's a fair amount of work for a salad, but any time I get to pound on things, it's worth it.

Will I make it again? Hell, yes. But I think I'll ask my husband to peel the papaya.

Dried Ghost Chiles

So after making the hot sauce with the ghost chiles from Marx Foods, I still had a few chiles left over. Having absolutely no idea what to do with them, I figured I could dry them in the oven. (I saved the seeds, sending some to friends, and keeping the rest for myself to plant in a few months.)

My oven only goes down to 170, but I wanted to dry them at a lower temperature, about 150, so I stuck a wooden spoon in the oven door. Once again, I feel I must warn all of you about the fumes. My entire kitchen was filled with eye-tearing, throat-choking evilosity. (Yes, evilosity is a word, because I said so.)

So now these pretty chiles are safely stored in a baggie in my pantry until the next time I feel like spicing up dinner.

Aside: My Youngest told me: "You are not allowed to snort that line of seeds."

Ghost Chile Hot Sauce

Remember the ghost chiles I got from Marx Foods? After using 1 tiny one in my Japanese curry, I needed to come up with a way to use up the rest. I settled on a hot sauce, and used Rick Bayless's recipe for habañero hot sauce, posted by Michelle at Thursday Night Smackdown.

Looks innocent, doesn't it? All orange and pretty from the carrots.

As it turns out, looks can be incredibly deceiving. I almost passed out when I was making the sauce. Twice. The first time was when the carrots, onions and chiles were simmering in cider vinegar. Look out for those fumes! Boiling vinegar combined with hot chiles is not a fun thing to inhale.

The second narrowly averted pass-out was after I blenderized all the ingredients, took the top off the blender, and (like the fearless/stupid chemist that I am) leaned my face directly over the blender to see what it smelled like. Immediately, my eyes were stinging and tearing, I felt like sneezing, and the breath that I was in the process of inhaling got stuck in my throat.

That being said -- this is one of my favorite homemade hot sauces. Sweet from the carrots, definitely spicy, tangy from the vinegar, and, um...oniony from the onions. Very good. Just be careful.

Japanese Curry with Ghost Chiles

Have you heard of ghost chiles? I've also seen them called bhut jolokia and naga jolokia. They're hot. Really hot. Hottest pepper in the world. They come in at about 1,000,000 on the Scoville scale, or 3-10 times hotter than a habañero.

I was lucky enough to get a sample package of fresh ones (only dried have been available until now) from Marx Foods*. I opened the package, and was immediately assaulted by their fragrance - they even smelled hot. I was a little apprehensive - what could I possibly do with a chile that's so strong? Well, first off, I gave a few away to coworkers. (None of the Americans wanted any, so they went to Mexicans, a Laotian, and a Korean.)

I realized I hadn't made Japanese curry in a while, and that sounded like a good (and easy) place to start. Armed with my package of S&B Golden Curry (mild), I chose the smallest pepper in the package.

Aw, how cute. What wasn't so cute was that I could find only one glove. So my knife hand went gloveless. While mincing, a piece of chile touched a cut on my hand. Ow. Burn. Ow. Yikes! Experiencing firsthand what this little monster chile could do, I decided to only use half of it in the curry. I used about 1.3 pounds of pork, and an equal amount of veggies (carrot, celery, green pepper, onion). So 2.5 pounds of stuff, with a piece of chile the size of my fingernail.

And you know what? It was good. Really good. Ghost chiles have an awesome flavor. I could've even added the other half of the chile, and it wouldn't have been too hot. (Husband called this a "3" on the hotness scale.) Maybe it's because it was simmered for a while, maybe because it sat overnight, but the heat definitely mellowed out.

So, experiment #1 with ghost chiles complete and successful. I wonder what's next...

*The chiles were provided free of charge from Marx Foods. I didn't promise to blog about them, and they didn't ask me to.

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.

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...

Il Primo Giardiniera

Best. Giardiniera. Ever.




















That is all.

Mezze

I bought some hummus, made some tzatziki, chopped some olives, peperoncini and cheese, and grabbed a few crackers. Dinner is served.

















The tzatziki was Greek style yogurt, with chopped salted & drained cucumber, and salted & mashed garlic.

The cheese was double Gloucester with green onions.

















The hummus was nothing spectacular. I still can't find a good store-bought one.

And some closeups of the peperoncini and olives, because I finally have my camera back (even though it now makes a funny noise when the lens retracts).

































Simple, delicious, perfect no-cook dinner for a hot day.

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.

Cheese and Crackers, Grown-Up Style

Go out and buy yourself some of these Trader Joe's pita crackers.





















And some of this Spanish cheese.

















And some Peppadews. Don't know about Peppadews? Here's the wiki, and here's the US website. Normally I'd laugh at the idea of brand name produce, but these are really really good.

















And finally some smoked salt.






















Fill pepper with cheese, sprinkle with crushed smoked salt, place on cracker. Crunchy cracker, creamy tangy cheese, sweet and lightly spicy pepper, smoky salt. Truly amazing.

If you can't find Peppadews, I'm sure roasted red bells would work. Or just nix the pepper altogether. And the cracker's pretty much just a vehicle, you don't really need that either. I keep finding myself walking through the kitchen, scooping a knife-point of cheese (it's that soft), sprinkling with salt, and popping it in my mouth.

The only downside is how expensive the salt is, $12 for 7 oz at my market, but honestly, it's worth every penny. I've been drooling over the SaltWorks website for the last 10 minutes. Check out their amazing salts here.

Note: Even Hubby liked the smoked salt, and he's normally strictly a table salt kind of guy.

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.

Shisito Peppers

I picked up an absolutely gorgeous bunch of shisito peppers at Marukai a few days back. I had read that they're like pimientos de padrón, so I decided to cook them that way - very small amount of oil, cook over high-ish heat until the skins start blistering, blot on paper, sprinkle with salt. I had also heard that, like pimientos de padrón, 1 in 10 is spicy. So I cooked 10 of them.















Spicy? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, yes! Not very, but my lips were tingling for a few minutes. Other than that, how to describe the taste? Like a pepper. More specific? Like a pasilla, but very thin flesh and skin. I typically detest pepper skin, but I had no problem with these, the whole thing was very light and delicate.

Would I make them again? Yup, but probably as a part of a tapas party, antipasto platter, etc.

Peruvian Cilantro Stew

A while back, I bought some frozen aji amarillo chiles from a local market. I didn't know what I was going to do with them - heck, I had never seen them before. But I bought them because they were a beautiful orange, and chiles are always good.

What do you do when you have an unknown ingredient? Check out the internet, specifically other food blogs, of course! So that's what I did, and found Peruvian Cilantro Stew from Gretchen Noelle of Canela y Comino. Her blog is one of my favorites, and I figured that since she lives in Peru, I could trust her judgment when it came to these brightly colored chiles.

















My only hitch with the recipe was when it came to pureeing the cilantro. A cup of cilantro puree is quite a lot, so I figured my blender would be helpful. I figured wrong. The stupid leaves just spun up and stuck to the sides of the blender. I tried pushing them back down, but they spun right back up again. So, cutting board and big knife. I chopped and chopped and chopped, until the sound of the knife cutting through the cilantro was less of a crunch, and more of a mush. (What I wouldn't give for a mezzaluna.)

This isn't a quick recipe, and there's a lot of hands-on, but it is so worth it. Beef marinated and then browned. Onion is sauteed, then cooked down with a puree of aji amarillo chiles, onion and garlic. Then beer and the cilantro "puree" are added, and it's cooked down further. Then you add the beef back, cook for about an hour, then add in carrots and peas, and cook until the veggies are done.

The sauce is so amazingly good, I couldn't stop myself from dipping pieces of bread into it as it was cooking. Think pesto, but cilantro. And beefy flavored. Mmm...

The meat ended up perfectly tender, due to its braise in beer, and the chiles added just the right amount of heat. I had originally planned to serve this with rice, but MIL came home with a bunch of sourdough loaves, so we had it with bread. I loved sopping up every last bit of the sauce with the crusty bread. However, I'm dying to know what the sauce tastes like over rice, so I guess I'll just have to make it again to find out.

Thanks, Gretchen Noelle, for a great recipe!

Peppers Stuffed with Jambalaya

So I was the lucky recipient of a whole boxload of stuff from Zatarain's, courtesy of a tip from The Passionate Eater.

I was also lucky enough to have 2 Italian frying peppers from the farmers market. So I deseeded the peppers, stuffed them with the jambalaya mix and some colby-jack cheese, toothpicked them closed, and simmered in tomato sauce until tender.

No pictures, sorry. Only 2 peppers, and we ate them before I thought of the camera...

Hainanese Chicken Rice

I had come across numerous recipes for Hainanese Chicken Rice, touted by Wikipedia as a national dish of Singapore, also very popular in Malaysia, and originally from the Hainan province of China.

Having absolutely no clue what I was doing, I followed Chubby Hubby's recipe, except for the rice. The chicken, poached in water but never allowed to boil, turned out moist and tender. The chillie and ginger sambal was a winner, made with serranos from my garden.

The rice, however, I wasn't too impressed with. I used a shortcut, Hangchong Hainanese Chicken Rice Mix, that I got from AsianSupermarket365. I used my jasmine rice, which is supposedly the same thing as the Thai fragrant rice called for on the jar, and it cooked up okay, but I just didn't dig too much on the texture. The rice had an almost slimy-mushy coating of what tasted and felt like chicken fat (the ingredients of the mix include soybean oil and chicken powder). Maybe I should have followed Chubby Hubby's recipe for the rice, but I don't know what a pandanus leaf looks like, let alone where to find one.




















That being said...here's how I served it: Put a mound of rice in a bowl, pour some broth (from poaching the chicken) around the rice, sprinkle with sliced green onion, and top with some poached chicken slices. Serve with dishes of soy sauce and chilli ginger sambal on the side, along with diced cucumbers.

I would have loved to have a picture of the finished dish - but there's no way in hell I could get a decent picture of white rice and white chicken in a red bowl to turn out.

When the rice was mixed into the broth, it lost some of the texture that I found unpleasant. The soy sauce and sambal livened up the deliberately mild-flavored chicken. All in all, I was pleased with the dish, but I wouldn't go through all the work again. Chubby Hubby's recipe uses a 1kg (2.2lb) chicken - I couldn't find a chicken under 4 lbs to save my life! Granted, it was a sustainably raised, antibiotic free chicken on sale for 77 cents a pound, but that sucker weighed 4.64 pounds! So instead of poaching for a hour, it was more like 2 hours, having to reheat more than once. I'm sure if there were such a thing as a decent-sized chicken around here, I could've done it in a hour.

Then there was the whole carving-the-chicken thing, something which, to be blunt, I suck at.

So I guess what it comes down to is: try this dish if you make the rice from scratch, have a small chicken, and don't suck at carving.

Two Product Alerts

First, an Awesome Product Alert:

Trader Joe's Hatch Chili Bread. Chewy crust, good crumb, a little spice. Perfect for topping with, well, anything.

Second, a Not-So-Awesome Product Alert:

The San Diego Soap Company Honey and Blackberry Hand Soap. It's a good soap with a good fragrance, but given the name, I was expecting something locally produced. Upon further inspection, I see it's distributed by Universal Products in Clinton Township MI, and made in China. Local fail.

Short Ribs with Coffee and Chiles

Tonight's dinner was Short Ribs with Coffee and Chiles, shredded and turned into small burritos. Since the short ribs came from my freezer, it's perfect as an entry to Mele Cotte's Deep Freeze Summer Challenge 2.















I followed the NY Times recipe, using one mulato chile and one pasilla oaxaca chile, and baking at 300 degrees for 2.5 hours. The meat and the sauce were separated and refrigerated overnight. Today I removed massive amounts of fat from the sauce, shredded the meat, then mixed meat with sauce and reheated.

I also quick-pickled some sliced red onion in red wine vinegar, quartered a few baby limes, and chopped some cilantro.

Mini-burrito assembly: Heat a tortilla over a gas flame, spread some meat in the center, top with red onions and cilantro, sprinkle with lime juice, and roll. Served with lemon & chile powder cucumber salad.















If you are thinking of making this, be forewarned - it's not health food. Even after removing the fat from the sauce, there's still plenty left, because short ribs aren't exactly lean. But the pickled onion and lime juice help cut through the richness somewhat, so you don't feel gross after eating.

I'm not sure how much of the coffee or red wine flavor came through in the meat - everything kind of blended together to make a rich, earthy, slightly bitter sauce.

Hubby said it was too bitter, even though he has previously claimed he loves bitter (hmm...maybe that's why he married me). MIL loved it, couldn't stop telling me how good it was. I'm somewhere in the middle - I'll make something like this again, but probably without the coffee to reduce the bitterness, and maybe with a pot roast-type cut for a less fatty final product. I guess that would make it a completely different dish, but for me, it's all about the chiles (and cleaning out the freezer!).