Unfortunatley, I not only don’t remember how this recipe turned out — though I don’t remember it being bad — I also can’t seem to figure out where I got the recipe from! It looks like I cooked the chicken in some olive oil in one pan while grilling the tomatillos and chili in a cast iron grill skillet. From looking at the pictures, I think that red bell pepper was in there on accident.
Anyway, once the tomatillos and pepper were done being grilled it looks like they were boiled in a little bit of water. They then went into a food processor with some onion, garlic, honey and lime. That mixture was then cooked with the shredded chicken and that was the main thrust of the dish from the looks of it. I also shredded some cheddar cheese, cut some lime wedges, opened the sour cream and toasted a few tortillas on the oven. I want to say the results were good, but I really can’t remember. Luckily, I’ve made things like this enough that I think I could probably recreate it from the pictures!
I’m a big fan of Mexican food and am always looking for a new way of cooking with those flavors, especially if it means I don’t have to muck around with wrapping food in tortillas over and over and over again. So, when I saw Food Network’s Chicken Tamale Pie recipe and saw that it looked pretty easy to put together, I was all over that one.
The beauty of this recipe is, in addition to being really good, I was able to make it after buying only one or two things at the store. I had some chicken breasts in the freezer and most of the other ingredients were hanging out in my fridge and pantry. I think I just needed the black beans and was good to go from there. It was also really simple to make, so thumbs up all around.
Since I didn’t have cooked chicken on hand, the first thing I did was coat the breasts in olive oil, salt and pepper and get them in a pan. While those cooked, I did the rest of the prep measuring out the corn meal and chicken broth, draining the beans and shredding the cheese.
After you get the chicken cooked and chopped up, you’re basically working with two pans, one cooking the beans, salsa and chicken, the other mixing the corn meal and other liquid ingredients. Once the latter is done, you mix in cheese and butter, then spread over the former before tossing the whole pan — I used cast iron — into a 400 degree oven for 30 minutes. I highly recommend serving with sour cream or maybe something a little fancier like Avocado Crema (might try that this week now that I think about it) just to add some moisture to the proceedings.
It’s really a shame that I remember next to nothing about making this trio of Bobby Flay recipes I came across in Good Housekeeping: Red Curry-Marinated Skirt Steak Fajitas, Pickled Roasted Peppers and Acocado Crema. For one thing, they look pretty good — and I’m sure they were, I just can’t remember — but I do remember this meal taking a good deal of work to get made. From looking at the recipes again, I remember roasting the peppers and getting them in the pickling liquid and also getting the steak into the marinade so it could sit for a while. I want to say I did most of this the night before, but it’s more likely that I had a bit of a slow day at work and did all this around noon.
I didn’t want to let these photos go to waste because I like how colorful they are. It looks like I had a bit of trouble getting the steak to the right done-ness so I cut it into smaller pieces and cooked it in a pan separately. Not the most elegant fix, but it worked. I do remember the tangy pickled peppers being a lot of fun. While I’m bummed I don’t remember much of how this meal turned out, I’m glad I wrote this post because it reminded me of it so I can give it another try. Maybe this summer!
For all the writing I do about grinding my own meat, trying to find more local sources for produce and protein and keeping an eye on my caloric intake with the Lose It! app, I’m still the kind of guy who dreams about heading to Taco Bell, throwing down a few bucks and scarfing down a small mountain of faux Mexican food. I like to think I come by it honestly. You see, Toledo, the town that I’m from actually has three T-Bells on one of the city’s major thoroughfares with the two furthest ones only about 20 minutes from each other. As a kid and young adult, we’d head there and get food and I kept that tradition alive into my adulthood our here in New York. Heck, I even stopped there the day I heard about a rash of Bell-based food poisoning outbreaks about five years back. After hearing the news on the radio I thought, “Mmm, Taco Bell. I’m sure I won’t get food poisoning (and I didn’t, at least that time).
There was even a part of me that was ashamed that it took me so long to actually taste a Dorito-flavored taco shell at the restaurant. It’s the same part of my brain that misses seeing big-time superhero movies in the theater on opening night. It’s just something the old me would have done in a heartbeat that older me can’t without lots of scheduling and worries of health and whatnot.
Anyway, last weekend my wife and I both checked our points and decided to get some dinner at T-Bell while we were out running some errands. Of course, we both had to try the Cool Ranch version of the taco, something we were both excited about. Heck, much like the above commercial, I was one of the people who immediately said, “They should do Cool Ranch” as soon as I heard about the regular Dorito taco shell. As it happens, Cool Ranch is my favorite Dorito flavor, though much like Taco Bell, they’re not really a regular part of my life anymore because I will eat a ton of them in a single sitting and that’s not good for someone who counts going to the grocery store as exercise.
So, I should get to the main event. I tried the taco and it was pretty good, but definitely salty. My wife read some account that said the flavor of the heavily spiced meat tends to wash out the Cool Ranch flavor, so I went in making the conscious decision to put my tongue directly on the shell every time I bit. That way, I definitely got the flavor every single time. And it definitely worked. I’m still not one hundred perfect sure if this fits in with the “two great tastes that taste great together” category as one definitely seems to outdo the other, but I’d say it’s a fun experiment with pretty good results.
It seems like I just can’t recreate the success I had the first time I made Smitten Kitchen’s Homesick Texas Carnitas. It’s a super simple recipe that involves a few ingredients and a bunch of time, but the last time I did it I accidentally bought beef instead of pork and then this time I didn’t chop it up ahead of time. Both times the results were pretty good, I just want to nail the procedure again, you know?
Anyway, I’ve already talked about making that dish, so I want to write about a few of the accouterments I made to go along with it. For whatever reason I had a brain fart when planning the menu that week and didn’t plan on serving the carnitas with anything other than a tortilla. Scrambling, I used what I had at hand to make Paula Deen’s Avocado Dressing and Martha Stewart’s Asian Carrot Slaw. The latter might seem like kind of a strange choice, but the only veggies I had in the house were carrots and I thought the Asian flavorings would bring something interesting to the table.
The Avocado Dressing was alright, but it being a Paula Deen recipe, there’s a good deal of mayo in there which I thought threw the flavor off a little. Since then I’ve made an Avocado Crema that I’ll write about eventually that actually had no dairy or condiments involved and tasted a lot more avocado-y which is what I wanted. Still, it was an okay addition that worked well with everything else on the plate.
The Asian Carrot Slaw actually wound up working really well with the carnitas. I kind of figured this would be the case when I saw that lime was a main ingredient, which is also in the carnitas, of course. I liked the tang that the sesame seeds and vinegar brought to the table and think I might be onto a cool flavor combination here. Anyone want to start a food truck?
My wife really wants me to join Pintrest. I’m still not exactly sure what that means and I don’t feel like joining another social network, so, for now, you won’t read about my pinning things. But, that doesn’t mean we all can’t reap the benefits of her interest in pins. She was looking around for recipes and came across Steven’s Oven Baked Chimichangas on Tasty Kitchen, sent me the recipe and now we can all talk about it.
Before actually working on the recipe itself, I decided to whip together some homemade taco seasoning. I wasn’t a big fan of the one I tried last time, so I did some searching and came across this one I did like over on All Recipes. It was just a simple matter of getting all the spices together, measuring them out, throwing them in a jar and giving the whole thing a good shake.
With that all set, I got to work on the chimichanga recipe itself. I got everything that was eventually going to be added to the meat in one bowl and then got the ground turkey cooking. After that was browned, in went the taco seasoning and then the bowl o’ ingredient. While that cooked, I shredded the cheese I’d need, then mixed part of that in with some sour cream and had my filling.
After that it was a simple matter of buttering both sides of the wraps, filling them with some of the mixture, wrapping them up and placing them on the baking dish. I’m not always the biggest fan of recipes like this because I find them somewhat tedious, but this one was just the right balance of work for me. When they came out of the oven, we were treated to some tasty chimichangas.
I’ll be honest, aside from burritos and tacos, I have a really hard time keeping track of what food is what when it comes to Mexican. You’ve basically got a lot of combinations of tortilla and meat with various cooking techniques. If I’m not mistaken, chimichangas as basically burritos cooked in an oven. Is that right? Whether it is or isn’t, I’m cool with the results.
I’ve got a lot to be thankful for this Turkey Day. My folks have come in from Toledo to share a meal with Em, Lu and I so that’s great. But, since this is a food blog and there’s no way I’ll be able to turn around photos of our Thanksgiving prep until next week, I figured I would keep things on topic.
Regular readers will know that I love Fiddlestix. I’ve never had a bad meal there and love the variety of specials they present every week. Here you can see a collection of photos I’ve taken in the past few months. I can’t quite remember all the details. Up top is some kind of breakfast quesadilla. Then you’ve got a roast beef wrap above this paragraph followed by a double whammy of a sausage omelet and what I believe are raspberry and something pancakes. I’m not sure if I’ve ever talked about this, but even the sides at ‘Stix are something to talk about. At a lot of other places, breakfast potatoes feel like an add on, but theirs are always crisp and paprika-y. Better than that are the lunch sides which consist of homemade potato chips and what seems like a different pasta salad every time.
I hope you’ve found a great place like Fiddlestix and go there on a regular basis. It’s important to support local restaurants, especially when they’re awesome.
Since our oven’s still not working, I’ve been focusing my attention on meals that can be either cooked on the stove pot or in a crock pot. I actually made Tamale Pie from Dawn J. Ranck and Phyllis Pellman Good’s Fix-It And Forget-It Cookbook (page 128) before the oven crapped out, but I figured I’ll be making it again in the near future. Actually, I’d make it again anyway because it was so simple, filling and tasty (I’ve got to think of better words than that when writing about food).
All you need to make this dish is 3/4 cup of cornmeal, 1.5 cups of milk, an egg, a pound of cooked ground beef, some chili mix, a 16 oz can of diced tomatoes, a 16 oz can of corn (or cut off the cob if you have it, like I happened to at the time) and a cup of cheddar cheese. While the beef was cooking, I cut the kernels off the corn cob and combined the cornmeal, milk and the beaten egg. You then combine that mixture with the cooked beef, corn and tomatoes, put it in the crock pot and cook either on high for one hour or low for three. At that point, sprinkle the cheese on top, let cook another five minutes and
you’ve got dinner.
I like this recipe because it was a different enough take on Mexican food without being too much of a pain to put together. I mean, I love taco night, but that can get kind of boring. I also like enchiladas, but those are kind of a pain in the butt to make. This was super easy and, thanks to the shorter cook time than most slow cooker recipes, it doesn’t really involve that much prep or cook time. I also like that you can do some tinkering with this recipe with different kinds of ground beef, cheese and, of course, using fresh ingredients instead of the canned ones suggested in the recipe.
As I snapped a picture of my food at Ruby Tuesday’s a week ago, my wife asked why I was bothering. I thought about it for a second and said that I should give chain restaurants the same opportunities on MATK as local ones. I’m actually a big fan of Ruby Tuesday’s and have been since one opened in Toledo as a kid. I’m a sucker for a good salad bar and think they’ve got a pretty good one.
Anyway, I started our meal off with a Black and Blue, which is a combination of Guinness and Blue Moon. I don’t think I’d ever had even a black and tan, but the combination was fun. I’m a big fan of combos, so this was up my alley, especially because they gave me the can of Guinness, so it was like getting two beers.
For dinner I went with the fish tacos which were alright. I’ve definitely had better, but I’ve also had worse. They were a bit spicy, but not too bad. Overall it was a good dinner with good service and the quality salad bar, so I left happy.
I’ve been sitting on these images for a while, but I still wanted to talk about what I believe is the only food truck local to Cornwall, New York. I’ve seen the the green Lucky Cow truck at the farmer’s market I attend on a mostly regular basis, but have only gotten food from them once and it was a great experience. The truck offers completely home made vegetarian dishes as well as smoothies and shakes and has different offerings all the time. The day we got food from Lucky Cow, they had three entrees and we got them all. In the first picture you can see a mushroom quesadilla and their zucchini “crab” cakes, below is their falafel wrap which I believe they have on a regular basis. The food took a bit longer to prepare than I expected, but it wound up being worth the wait. Fresh, flavorful and reasonably price, I’d order all three again and look forward to trying out new options with future visits. To find out what they’re serving and where they’ll be, check out the Lucky Cow Facebook page.
