Chicken Enchiladas

 

This recipe came from our Best Simple Suppers for Two cookbook. The original intention was to make it for Valentine's Day, but we decided to roast a whole chicken instead for our romantic February 14 dinner. Since this recipe called for shredding a prepared rotisserie chicken it made more sense to use the leftover chicken for this one. The recipe says this has a prep time of 10 minutes, which I found wildly inaccurate. It took about twice that long to shred the chicken, chop the onion and garlic, cook it all with the other ingredients, then divide, and assemble. 

Full ingredient list includes:

4 six-inch corn tortillas (next time I will use six tortillas)

2 T olive oil

1 garlic clove (minced)

1 small onion (chopped)

2 cups shredded cooked chicken

1 can black beans (rinsed and drained)

1 can diced tomatoes

juice of one lime

1 cup corn kernals

1 t. cumin

1 c. enchilada sauce

2 cups shredded pepper jack cheese

While sautéing the onion and garlic in our indispensable cast-iron skillet I charred the tortillas in a dry cast iron pan on the stovetop. I added the chicken and beans to the skillet and seasoned with some salt and pepper. Once the chicken and beans were warmed through I removed half the mixture to a separate bowl and mixed half the corn, half the tomatoes, half the cumin, half the lime juice, and half the enchilada sauce into what was left in the skillet and sprinkled a third of the cheese on top. Two tortillas were placed on top of this, and then the rest of everything (except the cheese) was mixed together in the bowl with the remaining chicken and bean mix, and then put over the tortillas. A third of the cheese was added, and then the other two tortillas followed by the last of the cheese. This was all baked in the skillet (with its lid) at 350 for 14 minutes. We topped our enchiladas with sour cream.

A spicy, flavorful meal with a lot of texture. We both liked this, although it wasn't especially simple. It had a lot of ingredients, a lot of steps, and created a lot of dishes. We will likely have this again, but I will save it for a weekend meal next time.

Vieja Black Bean Quesadilla Receta

I mentioned these quesadillas in two recent blog posts -- first when I posted about shrimp I made instead of these and next when I posted about the wine I prepared to serve with them. In the process, I realized that because we have been making this since before we started the blog, we never got around to post it. So herewith, a Vieja Receta we enjoy several times a year. (The recipe is old, not the beans or the quesadilla!)

The recipe came from a booklet -- long ago discarded except for this page -- of recipes from a honey company.

To prepare these, I heat a can of black beans in our indispensable cast-iron skillet. The original recipe calls for rinsing and draining the beans; I prefer to cook them a bit longer and reduce the liquid that way. We add a cup or so of commercial salsa, though home-made would be even better. I add a dollop of honey and mix thoroughly. Because salsa adds water, it is important to cook long enough for some reduction.

While it is cooking, I shred cheese -- usually a mix of cheddar for bite and Monterey jack for smoothness; queso fresco would also be terrific. I either put the cheese on one half of each large tortilla or covering a small tortilla. Recent supply-chain issues pushed me to the latter this time. 

I then forget to include the called-for jalapeños and cilantro, because I have not looked at recipe in a long time. I heat the indispensable cast-iron griddle (on the other side of the stove) and put a bit of oil on it. I then spoon the bean mixture onto the cheese and either fold over the tortilla or place a second tortilla on top, as appropriate. I carefully place each quesadilla onto the griddle when it has reached medium-high heat. I almost immediately reduce the heat and when one side is done, very carefully turn each quesadilla.

Getting the heat right takes some practice. The idea is to gently brown the tortilla without burning it, while giving the cheese enough time over heat to melt thoroughly. 

The result is Casa Hayes-Boh comfort food. I can prepare this in about the time it took to write these few paragraphs. This simple, vegetarian dish is always enjoyable and went very well with the Glüwein we had for our solstice dinner.

Sad Irony

Although I always picture the honeybee from the cover of the original booklet when I make this recipe, I forgot the honey this time -- remembering it only after eating a couple bites. It was still delicious, but differently so.

National Lobster Quesadilla Day

What is today all about?

Part of librarian Pam's daily routine is to check the National Day web site to see what is being recognized each day. She was always a fan of these things, but has certainly followed them more closely during the pandemic. 

Careful readers might have noticed some resulting recipes; careful readers would have noticed even more if I had not fallen down on the blogging job. 

We both continue to innovate in our cooking, but the queue of unblogged recipes is indeed growing. This was so good and so easy, though, that I had no excuse to put off writing about it.

Key ingredients

Early this morning, as we sipped home-roasted coffee from Rwanda, Pam mentioned the happy coincidence of National Quesadilla Day and National Lobster Day. This seemed almost like a command from the Fates to the Hayes-Bohanans.

I simply googled the combination and found this simple recipe at Chop Happy (a site I had not previously known). Simplicity was called for because this was to be a weeknight dinner at the end of another tiring Covid-19 week. More importantly as I have gradually gained confidence in cooking seafood, I have followed an unwritten rule: the more expensive the ingredient, the simpler the recipe should be.

So the simple recipe was very appealing. I got some excellent lobster tails from our favorite fishmonger -- Kyler's Catch in New Bedford (yes, the seafood capital of North America), and chopped them into chunks of about 3/4 inch. I then chopped some scallions (in the recipe) and cilantro (in our fridge, so why not?) and tossed them gently in a bowl. 

Notice my use of the quantity "some" -- I must admit I did not even look at the recipe after my morning coffee. 

I melted butter over low heat (I have never used butter or low heat for quesadillas before) while shredding an entire package of Cabot's pepper-jack cheese (from the farmer-owned cooperative in Vermont). I then assembled the quesadillas and put them in the pan side-by-side, turning the heat to medium-high. I treated them much more gingerly than usual -- in part to make sure lobster did not fall out in the process.

The result? We both pronounce these the best quesadillas we have ever had, and we have had a few. (Like a few thousand, probably). This paired beautifully with our complex, fruity, and bold home-vinted Malbec.

We are also aware that these were by far the most expensive quesadillas we have ever made. But they are not the most expensive we have bought. Cooking at home saves money, but for a special occasion, it can mean that "splurging" for the best ingredients brings the price of an extraordinary meal up to the cost of a mediocre meal at a mid-range restaurant. We know we are lucky to be able to do this from time to time.

Lagniappe

We usually have lobster dinner with friends on Christmas Eve. In 2020, in the depths of the pandemic and before any of us could be vaccinated, we could not do it. So our gift to these friends was lobster quesadilla kits so we could feast together by zoom. 

Green Chicken

Regular readers will know that The Well-Filled Tortilla is a well-worn cookbook in Casa Hayes-Boh.  This volume by Victoria Wise and Susanna Hoffman is one of the first cookbooks we purchased, at a wonderful independent book store in Tucson over 20 years ago.

The contents are as varied as the taco genre itself. Some recipes -- such as one featuring squid and olives -- are never likely to emerge from our kitchen, but this book remains one that allows us to carry out the original mission of this blog: using the many unused pages of cookbooks that were already on our shelves.

Noticing that I had both a bit of spare time and a few tortillas available, I thumbed through this familiar volume and found a title I had not read carefully before: Red or Green Chicken.

¿Qué?

It turns out, the colors do not refer to the chicken, nor to nautical channel markings. Rather, the authors refer to salsa options within the recipe. I chose green, in the form of a commercial tomatillo salsa, because a decent homemade salsa verde is way out of season around here.

This was a fairly simple, if messy, recipe. I opted for working with boneless, skinless chicken, which I simply boiled until cooked through and then shredded. (To shred chicken Mexican-restaurant style, simpy place it in a bowl and tear at it with two ordinary forks until it is course or fine strands.) Meanwhile, I chopped a couple of onions and cooked them -- in our indispensable cast-iron skillet -- in olive oil with plenty of oregano and a little salt until soft and translucent. I then mixed in the shredded chicken thoroughly over low heat.

I then rolled about 1/3 cup of this mix into each tortilla. I followed the recipe's instruction to soften teach tortilla with a little oil on the griddle first. This made rolling them up rather more messy than need be, and a little painful. In future I'll revert to one of two other methods we use for softening tortillas: microwaving for 30 seconds while loosely wrapped in a paper towel or heating for a few seconds on a hot but dry griddle.

In any case, I placed the rolled-up tortillas (now known as enchiladas) into a baking pan. Six of them fit nicely. I then covered with a cup of the aforementioned salsa verde, followed by a generous cup (maybe close to two) of shredded cheese. I used (Monterrey) pepper jack with a little sharp cheddar, both from our favorite farmer-owned cheese company.  I baked at 350F for 12 minutes.

The result: mildly piquant, slightly complex, creamy, filling, and delicious. Not photogenic, but delicious. We will definitely be making this again!

Sweet Potato & Refried Bean Tacos

I made this dish a few weeks ago, and as I was getting ready to blog about the divine pie I made for Thanksgiving, I remembered that I never posted about this fabulous meal. The recipe has two parts - one for the filling, and the other for the poblano salsa. I dutifully asked James to procure the poblano, tomatoes, and lime but unfortunately assumed onion and garlic were already on hand, only to discover I was wrong. Further complicating the problem was the less than stellar set up I had for roasting the pepper. We usually roast them directly on the flame of our gas stove, but we were at our beach house which has the inferior electric stove top. I attempted to roast the pepper by placing it in an indispensable cast-iron skillet on top of one of the burners and turning it several times, but it didn't work very well. I ultimately decided to simply add the diced tomatoes and diced (semi) roasted pepper to a jar of prepared lime salsa - not an ideal solution, but a solution nonetheless.

The sweet potatoes were roasted in the oven at 425 for half and hour after drizzling with olive oil, chili powder, salt, and pepper. The roasted sweet potatoes were simply served on warmed tortilla shells with a helping of refried beans and topped with salsa and cilantro. We also added some sour cream. A very delicious and hearty vegetarian meal despite the problems with making the salsa.

Quesadillas de Rajas

I'm leaving the photo for this dinner to the professionals, in this case Fred Thompson, who took most of the photos in this lushly illustrated cookbook.
Our quesadillas tasted great, but did not look quite like this.

I was about to start this post with a few street-food memories, but discovered that I have already told most of those tales when we first purchased Latin American Street Food, in a post I titled Calle to Mesa.

Wanting a quick dinner and knowing that we had plenty of tortillas on hand, I picked two books from the shelf -- the old standby Well-filled Tortilla and this newer volume. We have already mined the Well-filled volume for most of its easy dishes, so I opened Street Food first. Its index listings for "tortilla" pointed mostly to detailed articles on the tortilla itself; it was the "quesadilla" listing that took me to Poblano and Cheese Quesadillas, a title that seems a bit redundant, but that had my attention because I love Pueblo and its namesake chile.

This was simple to prepare. I did some kitchen math to modify the ingredient list, which is indicated for serving 8:

4 roasted poblano peppers, peeled, seeded, deveined, and sliced into strips
8 (8-inch) flour tortillas
12 ounces Muenster cheese, thinly sliced (ours was thick; still worked great)
8 ounces soft goat cheese, crumbled
1/4 cup thinly sliced green onions
vegetable oil
Mexican crema (optional)

Gutierrez begins with a nice description of quesadillas in general and the role of poblanos in particular. She writes that the poblano is "not too spice, although some can be hotter than others." One of the most memorable things I read in preparing for our 1989 visit to Puebla is that the poblano can vary tremendously from mild to hot. When visiting a local student's home for dinner, his mother reminded us of this, and I assured her I would be fine, as I really liked hot food. Of course, I drew the extremely hot one, and could only eat the filling! Modern agriculture has rendered the poblano much more uniform and less interesting.

From a previous post: I've done this exact thing before,
and I have essentially stopped buying roasted peppers.

Alas, I knew that our local grocery was only about 25-percent likely to have poblanos on any given day, so I compromised by buying a red bell pepper and a jalepeño, promising myself I'll go to another store before I retry this dish. I brought them home and roasted both directly on the front burner of our stove, turning frequently with our indispensable kitchen tongs. Once thoroughly charred, I placed them in a tightly-covered bowl; a plastic bag also works. After ten minutes, the peppers were ready to be peeled (most of the charry outer bits removed), cored,  and sliced.

While the peppers were sweating (in the covered bowl), I started assembling the quesadillas -- on one half of each large tortilla (we had the 12-inch kind, so only needed one each), I placed several slices of Muenster, then liberally covered them with peppers, and topped with goat cheese and scallions. I then folded them, brushed on olive oil, and placed on the cast-iron griddle. I had the heat a bit too high -- medium heat would have allowed for more even browning, rather than charring!

Still, our results were quite good, and we topped with sour cream instead of Mexican crema for two reasons: we had the sour cream on hand (from our regional dairy cooperative) and I knew our local grocery would not have it.

It was only on reading the recipe page more carefully that I learned Gutierrez makes several salsa recommendations, including a tomatillo salsa that I could have made with ingredients on hand. Something to remember the next time I make these scrumptious quesadillas!

Lagniappe

In 2016, taco trucks became a political buzzword, as a presidential candidate invoked them in a tirade against immigration. His "nightmare" vision of a taco truck on every corner seemed like a dream to me!

Enjoying fish tacos at a family geography night program.

¡Ay, Patrón!

The title of this post refers to one of its least prevalent ingredients in this evening's preparation of champandongo, which I have also called Aztec Lasagna. See that post from earlier in the year for the geographic and literary background of this dish, along with a link to the basic recipe.

Since we have now made it several times, this post will focus only on the small departures from previous efforts. The first change was in the roasting of the peppers. We are fortunate enough to have two kitchens -- one in a place we find most weekends. The smaller "galley" at Whaling House has the essentials but not the frills, and it is where we are re-learning how to cook with an electric stove, just a few years after I had gotten comfortable roasting peppers directly on the burner of our gas stove.

Not a great photo, but at least I managed not to melt my phone!

Our alternative approach has been to buy roasted pepperrs (imagine!) or to roast peppers in the Cloverfield kitchen (yes, it is named for our former dog) before coming to Fairhaven. Friends recently told me of another way -- oven roasting. I did so this evening, and got the peppers both charred and gooey at the same time. I used one dark-red, long bell pepper and one jalapeño. The result was especially good for use in a sauce, as they were quite soft after I sweated them in a covered bowl. The only difficulty relative to roasting over fire was that the outer, charred skin was difficult to separate.

The other departure from our April endeavor was quite tiny -- when I was nearly done with the mole (mol-AY) sauce, I added just a splash of coffee-infused Patrón tequila. Thus this dish from a story in Coahuila (northern Mexico) used an ancient sauce from Puebla (central Mexico) and two ingredients from Oaxaca (southern Mexico). The other ingredient was the chocolate, brought recently from a friend who had visited Oaxaca last summer with our daughter.

How much coffee-infused tequila? Just a splash or three.

Cooking with Wine

This post is a two-fer. This week I found two recipes from two different recipe books that called for wine, and prepared them over two days. One was from a cookbook called Cooking Seafood and Poultry with Wine, so I was certainly not surprised by the use of the ingredient. 

The recipe actually calls for Vermouth. I knew we had a bottle of such at our beach house, and since that is where we generally prepare any kind of seafood, this recipe for Salmon Steaks seemed like a good one to try. We bought a pound of fresh, wild-caught salmon from our favorite fish-monger Kyler's Catch in New Bedford, Massachusetts  and assembled the rest of the ingredients. Then I read the instructions, which said to marinade for four hours. It was already six o'clock p.m. and we were not going to wait until after ten to eat, so I made an adjustment and put all the ingredients into a pan making the following variations - I used scallions instead of chives, and also added lime juice, and a few red pepper flakes. Once the liquid was simmering I added the salmon, turned down the heat and covered the pan for about 12 minutes (turning once about half-way through). The fish was perfectly cooked, and the flavors were all evident. I've learned a lot about cooking since I started this blog. The most important thing I've learned is that just about any recipe can be adapted to just about any situation.

The other wine recipe came from an old favorite cookbook - The Well-Filled Tortilla. This may very well be my favorite cookbook. We prepare many of our favorite recipes from it, and still find new ones to try even after two decades of use. I don't know how we never noticed the "Good and Plenty Wine-Simmered Vegetables" before. This was easy, and relatively quick and made for perhaps the best veggie wrap I've ever had. The recipe calls for a dry white wine, so I used a Sauvignon Blanc. I used about 1/2 cup to start and added 2 chopped potatoes, a small chopped yellow squash, one chopped tomato, one sliced jalapeno, and a half of a chopped onion. The recipe also called for frozen lima beans, in lieu of which I put in a small amount of mystery beans from a CSA that I found in the freezer labeled simply "Beans 8/14" in my own handwriting. They were fine and I was glad to finally use them. I also added a bit of dry oregano and some garlic salt. Once everything was in the pan, I splashed a bit more wine in and simmered for about 20 minutes. When the potatoes were soft I declared it done and warmed two tortillas on the stove top. We filled the tortillas with the vegetables and added some fresh cilantro and sour cream. Quite delicious and easily made vegan by skipping the sour cream.

Salsa Two-Fer

Perhaps it was because we are soon to be taking our first trip to Puerto Rico, which we have hoped to do for many years. More likely, it is simply because I was craving one of my favorites from our recipe shelf -- Puerto Rican Chicken Fajita. I have no idea how common this actually is in Puerto Rico, but we love it in our house -- chicken breasts hammered thin and charred hot with chopped walnuts (or pine nuts), along with unripe banana slices is wrapped in a big flour tortilla with onion-orange salsa, and sour cream. This recipe allows The Well-Filled Tortilla to earn its title, as well as a prominent spot on our recipe shelves.

One of the major Testaments in our kitchen

I'll digress for a moment to share one recent finding in the "cooking for two" department. When serving flour tortillas, I have had a habit of rolling them up in wax paper and briefly softening them in the microwave. I recently discovered that if I am using our indispensable cast-iron skillet, I can just toss the tortillas into the pan -- as if they were a soft lid -- a half minute before the meal is ready to serve. If I'm serving two tortillas, I put them both in, and then flip them together after a half-minute. This puts the damp sides out, so I invert them for serving. Just try it -- it is easier than it sounds.

For the "Puerto Rican" fajitas, I was careful with proportions, which meant I wasted no chicken, but I had a significant amount of salsa (onion/orange/jalapeno) left over.

Librarian to the rescue! When it came time to use the rest of the salsa, Pam put her information-literacy skills to effective use, searching for the salsa in the cookbook's index to see if the publisher linked it to any other recipes. Oddly, the index item for this salsa does not include the dish from which we first learned of it. The index does list two options: a squid-olive concoction or a fajita with turkey and bacon. Pam has a famously strong aversion to olives and we are both indifferent (at best) to squid. Plus we had chicken left over from the previous effort, which could do for turkey in a pinch. That only left the question of bacon. Let's see.... Yes, bacon!

This recipe required cutting the bacon into small pieces and cooking it slowly, essentially making high-end baco-bits. I prepared these and set them aside. I then cut the chicken breasts into about four "cutlets" each and marinated them in a mixture of diced jalapeno (left over from salsa preparation), tequila, and lime juice. I then seared these on high heat in a bit of olive oil, and we wrapped them in tortillas (warmed as above) with the salsa and sour cream.

The verdict: so delicious it is not even fair to other tacos. We will definitely be making this "leftover" dish again!

Aztec Lasagna

Lovers Iztaccíhuatl and Popocatepetl in front of the mountains that bear their names. These mountains divide the Valley of Mexico (City) from the Valley of Puebla. Read the romantic legend at Inside Mexico. My first encounter with mole was on the flanks of Popo in 1989.

We recently revisited a favorite recipe for friends we had not yet cooked for. We could tell they were a bit trepidatious about champandongo -- a dish that has meat, hot peppers, and cocoa, among other ingredients. But they were brave, so we took the opportunity to prepare one of my favorite weekend (i.e., long prep time) dishes.

Champandongo  is one of the lesser-known menu items in Like Water for Chocolate, in part perhaps because its preparation is not detailed in the movie version, nor is it associated with any magic realism, as are so many of Tita's other creations throughout the story.

As we've reported on this blog, mole (pronounced MOH-lay, not like the rodent) can be prepared in quite a variety of ways. I used the champandongo recipe found and followed by Pam's students in 2011 as a starting point, modifying only the way the sauce itself is prepared. I used ordinary tomato sauce in place of the tomato soup, and of course roasted my own poblano peppers, rather than using canned green chiles. I used poblanos because both this recipe and the peppers originate in Puebla, where Pam and I spent a memorable summer in 1989, and it is where we discovered mole -- a taste I enjoyed right away, and that Pam acquired over time.

Champandongo kit: meat filling, tortillas, mole. 

In place of the cocoa powder called for in the recipe, I used a package (2 disks) of dark chocolate from Taza. I would have used one of the other varieties with chili, but the regular dark was fine. I simply powdered it with a cheese grater. I then used ALL of the mole I prepared. I am not quite sure why the recipe calls for making a lot of mole and using only a small amount. The more, the better!

Don't skimp on the Manchego cheese!

The result was quite good, especially served with a bordeaux, which I had read as a recommendation with another mole recipe, and with Negra Modelo, a brown beer that I first encountered during that Puebla summer. Our friends enjoyed their first mole encounter, though their reaction to its spiciness suggests that I could have skipped the cayenne or the jalapeno that I had slipped into the sauce.

After preparing this and bragging about its Aztec roots -- the first people who prepared this for me, after all, did not even speak Spanish, only Nahuatl -- it occurs to me that flour tortillas are quite a departure. True Aztec lasagna probably needs corn tortillas. Perhaps next time I'll try them, at least in one side of the dish.

Lagniappe

Since we were serving this at our seaside Whaling House, our friends brought us a whale cake to share. It was delicious! (And no whales were harmed.)

Fried Sweet Potato, Chili, and Cream Cheese Melt

It has actually been over two weeks since I made this dish, a variation on a favorite potato cheese melt from the Well-Filled Tortilla. Generally busy-ness, as well a trip to Nicaragua prevented me from posting earlier. A quick and easy dish I started by peeling and dicing a large sweet potato and used my indispensable cast-iron skillet to fry them. The recipe called for frying in peanut oil, but I used chipotle-infused olive oil instead. I heated the potatoes until they were soft, then I chopped and added a jalapeño pepper. Four ounces of cream cheese was dolloped on top and melted. We filled two warm tortilla shells with the potato/cream cheese mix and topped them with salsa and cilantro leaves.

Sizzlin' Sesame

Among the most important things Pam and I still have from our four years in Arizona (1990-1994) are an ability to wrap tortillas and a copy of The Well-Filled Tortilla by Victoria Wise and Susanna Hoffman. Frequent readers of this blog will know that we continue to find new treasures in its pages; the latest is a simple recipe we finally got to just last night.

Spicy Sesame Chicken Fajitas begins with flattening chicken breasts with a mallet (or other implement) between layers of waxed paper or plastic wrap, until it is one-half inch thick. This is what makes  allows for rapid, even cooking, and is what makes this a fajita dish. Strictly speaking, fajita is a particular, thin cut of beef, but it has evolved to refer to other meats prepared in a similar way.

I then sprinkled both sides with sesame seeds, cayenne pepper, and salt. Actually, I only put salt on one side of each, as we all have enough salt in our lives. And the little shaker lid was missing from our cayenne, so it was more of a rub than a sprinkle. Fortunately, a love of heat is something else we retain from Arizona days!

I heated a bit of oil in our indispensable cast-iron skillet and added the chicken once the oil was hot and almost smoking. This allowed them to cook pretty quickly, though I noticed one area that I had not hammered quite thin enough was still a bit pink. So rather than waiting to transfer them to a cutting board, I cut them into strips right in the pan so they finished up quickly. (Do not try this with ordinary cookware!)

I heated some tortillas (we wrap in wax paper in the microwave for 30 seconds) and then we assembled the chicken strips with some avocado slices, plain Greek yogurt (the recipe calls for sour cream, but this is just as good), and Newman's Own mango salsa. This Well-Filled Tortilla includes many excellent salsa recipes, but we knew that this shortcut would be good, and was reasonably close to the mango-jalapeño salsa recommended for this dish. The book also suggests lettuce for this and similar dishes, and as we often do, we skipped that part.

This is a simple dish with many sweet and hot notes, and the fats in the yogurt and avocado provide cooling to offset the cayenne. A variety of wines would pair well with this; we chose the mildly sweet Riesling (not cloyingly sweet like most of this variety) from our friends Westport Rivers, and it seemed to love the mango salsa in particular!

Pam's one-word review came at the beginning of the meal: ¡yummmmmm! And our common question about this page in the book - ¿Where have you been all our lives? (Or at least the 20 years we've had this book on our shelves.)

We'll Call This The Acushnet

As we mentioned in an eponymous post in 2012, Sweet Potato Quesadillas are among our favorite dishes -- nutritious, delicious, easy, and cheap -- and something we prepare frequently. This recipe alone has been worth the modest cost of the  "Mini Moosewood"  we purchased two decades ago.

The point of the book is simplicity, so we have always followed its recommendation to use commercial salsa, though we are careful to choose a really good one.

Last week, noticing that we still had a surfeit of fruit in the house, I decided to improvise a salsa that would use some of the fruit. I finely chopped one each apple, peach, jalapeno; two medium tomatoes, and the remnant of a large onion. These I mixed with just a little white vinegar (not having any apple-cider vinegar on hand). I chilled it we spooned it generously onto the quesadillas, along with some sour cream.

This indeed made one of our favorite dishes even better than usual.

Those following along at home will realize that this is quite a lot of salsa for two quesadillas, even if smothered in salsa. Good observation! We made good use of the rest, though, mixing into one of James' famous day-long chili concoctions. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle!

Lagniappe: But What About the Name?

Over the past few months, we have begun making regular drives through the town of Acushnet, Massachusetts, which is between Bridgewater and Fairhaven. A few weeks ago we were surprised to see this usually quiet town buzzing with activity as it celebrated its annual Apple Peach Festival..We later learned that this is a major point of pride in the town, so this dish is named in its honor. We assume that the festival will afford us an opportunity to enter -- and perhaps win -- an apple-peach recipe contest at some future date.

Just Peachy Quesadillas

For Sunday's dinner, James played the role of Pam, concocting a new meal from ingredients we had on hand. On my way to Harvard Forest with students on Saturday, I had of course stopped at the "farm stand" of Bolton Orchards.

The stand is more of an emporium of all things apple -- including apples, applesauce, apple butter, apple candy, apple cider, apple donuts -- as well as all things local. It is such an excellent place to include in a land-protection field trip that we stopped twice -- on the way to the forest and on the way back. I was careful to restrain myself, but still managed to come home with quite a few peaches, apples, cider, and, yes, some cider donuts that the whole family enjoyed.

My dinner idea did not include the apples or the donuts, but it did make use of the peaches and the cider, as well as several other items in the house. I began by slicing two chicken breasts into thin stripps and browning then in olive oil in our indispensable cast-iron skillet. As the chicken was browning, I sliced two of the peaches (ripe but quite firm) and put them in the pan. That is when I realized that this dish had potential, at least to be photogenic.

I added a few vigorous squirts from the Tabasco bottle and a few spoonfuls of some blackberry preserves we had on hand. I stirred over high heat until the chicken was cooked through and the peaches slightly caramelized. I then added a glug of apple cider and allowed the mix to continue cooking until reduced.

To assemble, I used a slotted spoon to fold the mixture into tortillas with some sliced provolone and shredded Monterrey Jack, though other soft cheeses would serve just as well.

We topped these with standard salsa from Newman's Own, though one of his fruit salsas would have been even better. Similarly, we had it with our weekend house wine, a pedestrian Sauvignon Blanc that was refreshing but not quite a perfect pairing. We are open to suggestions on the wine front! 

Coming Out of the Cold

As mentioned in the "Cada Mes" post last week, our summer has been blessed with everything but at-home leisure, putting us well behind our usual pace of a new recipe each week. Well behind. As we get back on track, today's post is not only a specific recipe, but some of what we have learned about how to plan meals.

It began with Pam making a list of today's goals that included a freezer inventory. After a morning row and some extreme yard work, we got together at the freezer door and used a cooler so that we could take everything out and put it on a list. We threw out one or two items that were of miniscule quantity or unknown provenance, but otherwise made a detailed list of everything in the freezer before returning it there. (I did generously volunteer to save space by finishing off a small quantity of vanilla ice cream.)

With the inventory in hand, we each grabbed a cookbook to look for something that would be new to us, interesting, and most importantly that would use something from the inventory. Pam found a chicken salad that we will prepare at the end of the week for our weekly vineyard outing -- details to follow.

Because I knew we had a fresh package of tortillas in the fridge, I turned to our bible, a.k.a. The Well-Filled Tortilla. I have to admit I was doubtful. After all, we have used this book many times over the past 20 years, and much of what remains is either grandiose (even for us) or uses ingredients on the no-go list (olives, tripe). But we had a half-bag of lentils ("half" being the most common word on our freezer inventory), so I checked the index for that word.

On page 221 is a recipe entitled "Indian-style lentils." We were prepared to use the second half of our Sunday for something more complicated, but this worked out very well indeed. We went to our local farm stand at Hanson Farms after deciding the recipe, so that we could get the needed tomatoes there. We planned a grocery-store run for after the farm stand, for any items that would not be there. This is always a good order to shop -- home inventory then farm stand, then grocery.

The rest came from our shelf, fridge, or modest garden. (Actually, mint is not a "garden" item. It is something that the previous owner of our house planted, and which we can now retrieve from random spots all over our property.)

Preparation was incredibly simple, halving the recipe as printed. I put 3 cups of chicken stock (could have been any stock) in a stock pot, along with 1/2 pound of lentils and three medium potatoes, diced to 1/2-inch.  I then added plenty of turmeric, cilantro (in place of coriander), ground clove, chili powder, cumin, and cayenne. I heated to a boil and then simmered for 20 minutes.

I then added a generous splash of lime juice (from a bottle in this case). We then diced tomatoes, tore up some mint, and spooned up a little sour cream that was in the fridge. The only thing missing was something the recipe calls "pickled carrots, optional."

The result; Delicious! I had been skeptical of a dish calling for both lentil and potato, but they worked well together in this case. These tacos paired beautifully with a 2013 Wild Oats Pinot Noir from from San Luis Obispo, California. This is a complex wine with dark fruit flavors and just a bit of spice.

Blueberry-Vanilla Goat Cheese Quesadillas

We have been rather remiss in 2015 with following through with the weekly recipes. I don't feel bad about it. The New Year started with a death in the family, and one snow storm after another, so getting out  cookbooks and finding something to blog about has fallen to a low priority after mourning, traveling, and cleaning up snow.

The dish I made for breakfast this morning didn't come from a recipe book. I was simply inspired to make it when I happened to notice the two main ingredients next to each other in the refrigerator. We bought the blueberry vanilla cheese from Trader Joe's last week. It is something we usually pick up there and I enjoy it on English muffins or crackers, but yesterday I realized it would make a jim-dandy breakfast quesadilla. The cheese is crumbly and hard to spread, so getting it onto a tortilla shell was more a matter or pressing down on the crumbles with the flat part of a knife rather than spreading. I covered one half of a round tortilla shell with the cheese, folded and then grilled it on the stove-top for a few minutes in each side. As a side dish I sauteed some banana slices.

We topped the quesadillas with some flavored vinegars from Lebherz Oil and Vinegar Emporium. I took a selection of likely pairings from the cabinet and tried them all. I found the Dark Chocolate to be especially tasty. The Wild Blueberry, and Ripe Peach were also good. James tried Wild Blueberry and called it "delicious". 

These were super easy, and super yummy.

Feast of St. Valentine

A quick glance at the blog shows that we've hardly kept the "cada semana" pace of late -- we have gone from one holiday to another without pausing. Fortunately, the convergence of a snow day, a Saturday, and a holiday brought us back into the kitchen ... all day. This was especially the case since Valentine's Day is definitely a day we avoid restaurants. Why struggle to get a table for food that is probably not as good as what we can make ourselves?

We started the day, of course, with some good coffee. Coffee with heart, no less: some hand-ground El Corazón from Just Coffee in Madison was the perfect start to the day. We usually eschew blends, but this blend does include Nicaraguan coffee, along with ethically-sourced coffees from Colombia and Ecuador. The blend of medium and dark roasts make this both sweet and smokey -- the perfect romantic coffee.

Coffee was served in our matching cicada-wedding mugs. It might seem peculiar to have big insects involved in our romantic day, but our wedding took place in the midst of an epic swarm, so we have a soft spot for these hard bugs.

Brunch was bacon and French toast -- made even more French by the inclusion of a bit of Courvoisier VSOP in the batter.

Soon after brunch, we began preparing dessert, since it would need time to chill. We used a mousse recipe from Boston Globe Magazine. It is in one of those articles that describes a recipe in detail, with variations following. Despite our best efforts, we missed a step this way -- using water where we should have used rum -- but it worked out OK. We discovered we did not have rum anyway -- HOW DID THIS HAPPEN AT CASA HAYES-BOH? -- but substituted bourbon, adding it where there should have been water. It worked out very well in the end. (See below.)

It being a romantic holiday, for the main course and beverage we turned to two favorites that will be familiar to regular readers oft this blog -- Intercourses and Booty Food, respectively. Both of these books are full of fun and interesting foods, as well as fun and interesting essays on love and romance.

For the main course, we selected enchiladas with asparagus, beans, and chicken. We've not made enchiladas much before. We found these to be absolutely scrumptious!

A lot of good food is not easy to photograph, and this is no exception. It looked best at this intermediate stage, before final assembly and baking.

The finished dish photographs best at a distance.

For the beverage, we worked for the first time with fresh pomegranate to make margaritas. With four feet of snow on the ground, a frozen beverage might have seemed an odd choice, but the fresh summery fruits were very welcome, and we were fortunate to be in a very warm and cozy home for the occasion.

The dessert was AMAZING and we will certainly be making this again. We were glad to be using local eggs we could trust, and we paired it with Farmer's Fizz from our favorite vineyard. We learned recently that sparkling Pinot Noir is a thing, and a thing that pairs perfectly for chocolate. So despite our loyalty to local white sparklers, we will be spending some time in the coming year looking for that wine!

Champan-Hayes-Boh

For a small honors seminar this semester, I decided to hold the final exam as a discussion over food at Casa Hayes-Boh. I decided to make champandongo the main course, as I have been thinking about this mole-based (MOH-lay) dish ever since we had it here with a group of Pam's students here three years ago.

In that case, Pam had made the food of Coma Agua Para Chocolate a major theme of her Spanish course, and had secured an undergraduate research grant to facilitate having the class make most of the dishes from Laura Esquivel's book (see my posts on its revolutionary context and on Latin American films).

We have cooked several of the dishes from Esquivel's work before -- most notably chicken based on her quail-and-rose-petal recipe, but Pam's class project was far more ambitious, especially since it involved students, many of whom had little if any cooking experience. Working in pairs, students created both a fabulous meal and a permanent record of their culinary efforts. Each post on the CAPCR blog explains how a dish was prepared and how it is connected to the story. All of the dishes were shared at our house during this 8:00 a.m. class. Most were then served again -- either remade or thawed from leftovers -- at an undergraduate research colloquium open to the entire campus.

I must admit that I know the movie far better than the book, and so was unaware of champandongo prior to this adventure with the students. I have been a huge fan of mole -- a complex chocolate-chile sauce usually associated with poultry -- since Pam and I spent the summer of 1989 in Puebla, Mexico. The sauce is properly known as mole poblano, meaning "sauce of Puebla" and represents one of the several ways cacao was used for centuries before people thought of it as a candy. Its use in this lasagna-style dish was simply amazing, and it is hard to believe I have not yet attempted it myself.

In planning my own version, I of course began with the description by Sullivan and Laura. (Incidentally, Sullivan is the only student in this class who I knew previously, both as a student and a long-time family friend.) As complex as the dish was, however, I knew that authentic mole is much more complicated: Campbell's soup, for instance, was rarely available to the ancient Aztecs. I turned to the Hispanic Kitchen blog for more authentic versions, and quickly found an impressive recipe for chicken mole.

Uncooked Tomato and Mint Sauce with Poached Eggs

Photo from New York Times

A winner recipe from the New York Times. This is a simple summer dish with a good texture and flavor.

We made this one together - James grated 5 plum tomatoes while I chopped the garlic cloves. All of this went into our blender along with some olive oil, mint leaves (from our garden), and a bit of black pepper. We set the blender to puree until it was well mixed. I then followed the recipe instructions for egg poaching, which involved boiling the water for four minutes before adding some vinegar (we used red wine vinegar) and then adding the eggs and boiling another four minutes. I must admit they turned out better than any other poached eggs I've ever made before. James charred two tortilla shells over the flames of our gas stove and two eggs and some sauce we placed on top of each. This was quite good. The mint gave it an unexpected sweetness.

Simple Summer Supper

A friend posted a recipe on Facebook for avocado chicken salad. Since we already had all of the ingredients it seemed like a good day to try it. I grilled one boneless, skinless chicken breast in lime flavored olive oil, shredded it and added it to a mix of one mashed avocado, 1/2 a chopped medium onion, 2 T.  lime juice, 2 T. fresh chopped cilantro and a bit of salt and pepper. We warmed some soft tortilla shells and made burritos out of it. Yummy.