Chicken Tortilla Soup

I don't think I've ever made tortilla soup from scratch before. James and I have occasionally made it from a kit, but in reviewing our shelf of recipe books while looking for a recipe for some chicken breasts I noticed our seldom used The Daily Soup Cookbook where I discovered the tortilla soup recipe. 

Before getting to the recipe, which I only used as a suggestion, it is important for me to discuss our history with tortilla soup. We usually only enjoy this when we eat at Mexican restaurants - something we have not done at all since before the pandemic. Each time we have some of this soup we remince about the first and second times we ever ate it. The first time we couldn't believe our good fortune in finding a restaurant that made such an exquisite soup. The second time we couldn't believe how the soup could have been so thoroughly ruined (too much salt and burned tortillas).

Both times were during our first trip to Mexico in 1989. Both were also at the same restaurant about two weeks apart. 

As I said, I used the recipe only as a guide for what I ultimately made. Which was way better than either the first or second tortilla soups I tried.

I started with making a vegetable broth by simmering some whole peppercorns, whole coriander seeds, chopped onion, garlic, chopped celery, and some canned diced tomatoes in water. Once the stock was made and strained I prepared the soup by frying a chopped onion and three cloves of chopped garlic in Chipotle-infused olive oil (from L.O.V.E. Emporium). I added some dried oregano, fresh cilantro leaves, and some salt, some canned diced tomatoes, six cups of stock, and some fresh lime juice and simmered for 30 minutes. Finally I added the poached and diced chicken breasts. Once everything was cooked I placed broken up commercial tortilla chips into soup bowls and added the soup on top. This was served with shredded cheddar cheese topping and fresh cilantro garnish.

We had enough for leftovers so I made a change to the second-day offering by adding some frozen corn kernels before reheating.

Of course this would have been even better had I included avocado slices when serving, but alas we had none.

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.

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.

Local Tostadas

They were not nearly from scratch, but this evening's tostadas were immensely satisfying, and I do think that the extra care taken is partly responsible, along with many local or regional ingredients. Previous tostada efforts have begun with store-bought corn tostadas, which are usually available in little bags of about a dozen, stacked in a rather fragile pile in the "international" section of the larger grocery stores. These are not bad, but they are not a great beginning.

Here is what I did this evening, drawing very loosely on the introduction to the tostada section of The Bible, also known as The Well-Filled Tortilla. Yes, it has an entire tostada section, which is yet another reason that you should go get a copy if you have been putting this off.

I started by boiling a couple of chicken breasts that were in the freezer. While they boiled -- which did take a while -- I chopped a small onion, a couple cloves of garlic, an Italian pepper, and one red-hot serrano pepper, all from this week's farm-box share at Colchester Neighborhood Farm. Once the chicken was very tender, I lifted the pieces into a medium bowl, where I used two forks to shred them. I then heated the last remnants of a bottle of Persian lime-infused olive oil from Lebherz (time to re-order!) in an indispensable cast-iron saucepan. I then browned the chicken in the oil, and added the aromatics, cooking until all of this just looked and smelled wonderful.

Meanwhile, I heated some refried beans (Trader Joe's Salsa Style) in a small, indispensable cast-iron skillet. Then I stirred a bit more EVOO and some chili powder into the chicken mixture. I turned both pans to very low heat and heated a goodly amount of EVOO (about a 1/4-inch deep; we never do this) in our large, indispensable cast-iron skillet. I then placed a store-bought, eight-inch, flour tortilla in the pan and heated it until the edges began to brown. I turned it over with tongs (our friend Rob insists this is the most important tool in the kitchen, and today he was right), cooked for another minute or so, and then placed it on a plate. I repeated with a second tortilla, being careful not to allow the oil to smoke, and to allow the tostadas (the first I've ever made!) to drain just a bit. When they got a bit puffy, the tongs proved useful in bringing them down to size.

With everything done at the same time (one of the toughest parts of cooking, in my book), we assembled by spreading the beans on each tostada and topping with a generous helping of the chicken. We then topped it with sliced, luscious tomato (also from Colchester), plain Stonyfield yogurt (healthier than sour cream), and a chipotle salsa from Green Mountain Gringo.

What could be better than all this, besides delightful company? The perfect pairing with Original Recipe Pale Ale from our friends in Westport.

UPDATE: The panic about Persian lime-infused olive oil was premature. Pam remembers an additional bottle, purchased for our Lime Jubilee in May. I know readers were worried!

Tamale-Style Beef

The decision of what to prepare on February 14 could not be taken lightly. As former Arizonans we were acutely aware that this year marked the Valentine State's centennial. The meal had to have a southwest theme, and be worthy of two souls whose love transcends any Hallmark drivel, and be easy to prepare after working all day. The solution was found in The Well-Filled Tortilla byVictoria Wise and Susanna Hoffman. The recipe? Tamale-Style Beef. As Wise and Hoffman point out "making a tamale is an arduous task" and is traditionally done only at Christmas time. The tamale-style beef tortilla is an-easy-to-prepare meal, that can turn any day into a fiesta. We began by sauteeing onions and garlic rabe in our indespensible cast-iron skillet. Then added one chopped cubano pepper, and chopped steak which had marinated in Cachaça. (The recipe actually called for ground beef, but I read it wrong, and simply put "beef chuck" on the list, which James couldn't find in any case, so he just bought a steak and cut it up, which we agreed probably made the dish way better.) Next we added one chopped tomato, 1 cup of corn kernels, a bit of fresh oregano, and a dash of red pepper flakes, and 1/2 cup red wine. This was cooked until the liquid evaporated. The filling was wrapped in a whole wheat tortilla shell along with some of the Crema Mexicana we still had left from our ajiaco recipe. This was the perfect blend of sweet, spicy, and creamy (what could be more sexy?). It was paired perfectly with a peppery Savignon Franc from Sakonnet Vineyards. See James' post on Loving Coffee to find out how our dessert went. That Intercourses cookbook does not fail!

If you really couldn't think of anything more creative than candy, flowers, and dinner in a crowded restaurant to celebrate Valentine's Day you didn't deserve to get laid. Start planning now for next year.

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!

Scallion Egg Wrap

I saw this recipe in an article from the New York Times that listed what the newspaper's food editors prepared when they didn't feel like cooking. It looked simple and fun so we put it on our dinner list for this week. I started by chopping some scallions and chopped up some mushrooms I found in the refrigerator as well. I heated our small indispensable cast-iron skillet added a bit of butter and sautéd the veggies for just a few minutes and then added two beaten eggs to the pan. The eggs cooked quickly in a thin layer. Once they were cooked (but still just a bit runny) I placed a warm tortilla on top and heated just long enough for the tortilla to stick. Now comes the scary part: the recipe says to "flip onto a plate egg side up". I found this a bit daunting, but with careful use of a spatula and a bit of patience I managed to do this successfully for both the wraps I made. I folded the wraps into quarters as indicated. Since this looked a lot like a Mexican dish, and it was National Tortilla Day, we had tortillas on the side and served with sour cream and salsa. James added some Tabasco sauce to his as well and declared it delicious - and cute!

The Good Read Tortilla

James is adding some old favorites to his Good Reads profile; this is the first cookbook to be included.


The Well-Filled Tortilla Cookbook by Victoria Wise
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

We purchased this book more than 20 years ago, when we lived in Tucson -- where these things are decided. We do not traffic in "wraps" -- just tortillas. As hard as decent tortillas are to find in New England, this book allows us to put them to good use when we do.

Many of the recipes in this book have become comfort food in our home, but we still open it to a new page fairly often. Anyone who loves to cook will find plenty to enjoy in this book. On our recipe blog, we probably cite this book more than any other -- http://nuevareceta.blogspot.com/searc...

Enjoy!

View all my reviews

Tostadas Mayoníficas

This recipe puts the mayo in Cinco de Mayo.

We are still catching up from the culinary bounty of two weeks ago, when three feasts in a row preceded a flurry of academic work. We did blog about the delicious tartlets that we made for my attainment day on Saturday the 3rd.

We did not blog separately about my birthday feast on Sunday the 4th, -- which was a re-enactment of the first meal I prepared for Pam -- because the recipe is already on my web site. I prepared the main course as described, noticing a few problems with the ingredients lists in the process; I'll update those soon. This remains a major endeavor, and one worth undertaking at least once a year. I will add that our ability to pair wines has greatly improved over the past thirty years, with Westport Rivers far outshining Paul Masson. Aside from cooking, I spent my birthday reflecting on the day itself, and ending the day by indulging in a movie starring the most famous person to share my birthday.

All of this was prelude to a very nice dinner with friends on Monday the 5th, Mexican Independence Day.

JUST KIDDING! As Latin Americanists who have spent a lot of time in or near Mexico, we know that Mexico's Independence Day is on September 16 and celebrates Miguel Hidalgo's famous Grito de Dolores in 1810. May the 5th, in fact, marks neither Mexican independence nor any other date significant to the entire country. Rather, it is a local holiday in Puebla, akin to Bunker Hill Day in Boston. The holiday celebrates the defeat of French invaders in Puebla on May 5, 1862, and because Pam and I spent the summer of 1989 in that city, we have taken an interest in the holiday, and I have included some information about the battle and about Puebla more generally on my geography blog for kids.

It was shortly after our summer in Puebla that marketing geniuses at a San Antonio beer importer decided to start promoting the holiday throughout the United States. Clearly they were on to something, as our country suspends its 364-day-a-year antipathy to celebrate Mexico, or at least the excessive consumption of Mexican beverages. Thus has May 5 has become, for us, a date to celebrate Mexico, but as far as possible from Mexican restaurants!

To make this happen, we invited over a couple of friends and turned to our old standby The Well-Filled Tortilla, in which Pam found a tostada recipe entitled "crab, watermelon, and breaded chili strips." This is another of those recipe titles that includes have the ingredients, from bottom to top, this recipe is simple:

• tostada shell (this is like a giant, round tortilla chip)
• lettuce
• watermelon cubes
• breaded chili strips
• lump crab meat
• tomatillo mayonaise
• abundant cilantro

Since I never liked watermelon much, we substituted a chilled honeydew melon, which was a perfect compliment to the crunchy, savory ingredients. A single large melon also left plenty to be used in fruit salads and smoothies for the rest of the week.

The recipe -- like several in this book -- is a sort of Russian nesting doll, in that some of the "ingredients" are actually other recipes. The first of these is the chili strips. I wondered how slices of chili would hold batter, and it turns out that the answer is "not well" so that in this instance "breaded" was more like "fried with corn meal." This was not a bad thing, though, and this layer added crunch and a lot of flavor.

The recipe calls for lump crab meat to be picked from whole crabs. This is not really possible this far from Maryland, but I hoped to find some lump meat in local fish markets. What I found was simply imported, canned crab, but since we were fairly well committed to this recipe, I bought some. And since I had no idea how much crab we would actually use, I bought two, one-pound cans, one of which turned out to be plenty for for adults to enjoy this meal.

The tomatillo mayo is an even better example of a nested recipe, as it calls for combining mayonnaise with salsa verde and a few other ingredients, and of course salsa verde is an entirely separate recipe. It was well worth the effort, though, to make a cool, tangy mayo that allowed for the weak pun at the top of this article! More importantly, it was a fabulous topping for this recipe and held up well in the fridge as a more flavorful substitute for mayo all week.

4Matic Crab

This dinner far exceeded the 20 to 40 minutes indicated for preparation time, and was messy both on the plate and in the kitchen as a whole. It was delicious and highly satisfying, however, and paired well with both Negra Modelo (one of those beers at the center of reinventing the holiday) and margaritas.

We are likely to try it again some day, but for the remaining can of crab in our fridge, we are mostly likely going to "Crispy Crab and Breaded Chili Strips" recipe -- another of the nesting-doll variety. It calls for cooking the crab with some wine and garlic, and placing it in a soft tortilla with the same chili strips as those used above.

Tortilla Heaven

For this week's recipe, I dug into one of our favorite cookbooks, The Well-Filled Tortilla. by Victoria Wise and Susanna Hoffman. We purchased this book at a great little southwest book store in Tucson, Arizona -- where these things are decided. Its mix of simple and fancy, meat and veggie, savory and sweet, was just the thing for adventurous, thrifty cooking in graduate school. (A cursory look online shows that the great feminist book store Antigone and the great used book store Bookman's are both still in business, but I cannot find this southwest-themed store, whose name escapes me. Tucson readers: please tell me if it is still around. Meanwhile, it is good to know that Singing Wind in Benson is still a Mecca for readers of all things Southwestern!) Fortunately, more than 20 years after its initial publication, this celebration of the tortilla is still in print. At $10, I can think of no better cookbook bargain.

Zipf's Law, also known as the 80/20 rule, applies to many of life's distributions: 20 percent of volunteers (or employees) doing 80 percent of the work; 20 percent of a library's holdings comprising 80 percent of the circulation; 20 percent of songs taking up 80 percent of a radio's air time, and so on. For recipe books, however, Mr. Zipf's estimate is probably too conservative. We have cooked from this book hundreds of times, but I doubt we have prepared more than 5 percent of the recipes -- a 95/5 rule would be a generous estimation for this or any of our other cookbooks.

This common reality was part of Pam's motivation for the Nueva Receta project, and I am delighted. Thumbing through this volume, I commit to revisit some old favorites -- such as Turkish turkey tacos and Puerto Rican chicken fajitas -- but I disciplined myself to choose something we've never tried before. Because we have good beef in the freezer from last week's Julia Child adventure, and because of my recent interest in home brewing, I chose beef beer stew tacos (page 96) with a roasted red pepper, chili, and pine nut salsa (page 57).

This was an excuse to -- finally -- learn how to roast my own red peppers. The book includes an incredible assortment of salsa recipes, most of which are recommended to match particular fillings. I should have made more of those salsas when we lived in the Southwest, since produce in general and peppers in particular are much more limited in New England. I had made an orange/onion salsa quite a few times, but never any of the others. I have always wanted to roast red peppers, and finally got to it this time. Our oven has been acting up lately, so I almost resorted to a stove-top approach, but at the last minute I coaxed the oven into working. I roasted at 500 degrees for 25 minutes as directed, and many charred spots were beginning to appear. I will let it go a bit further next time, though, so that the outer skin will come off more easily, and by next time I hope to have a reliable oven! (These were red bell peppers, by the way, so there was no capsaicin problem working the pepper by hand.)

Confession: I simmered the beef in Mexican dark beer rather than amber, because my favorite -- Negra Modelo -- was readily available and a classic amber -- such as Dos Equis -- was not. Negra Modelo is dark for a Mexican beer, though not nearly as heavy as a dark European beer, so it seems to be within the spirit of this recipe. Also, I did not brew the beer, though a friend has given me a recipe with which I hope to clone Negra Modelo in the near future.

I shot this in-progress photo when I realized that several interesting things were on our counter at the same time. First, the counter itself: this is an ordinary, small island we purchased from Target a few years ago. We realized that we could use it as a small snack or breakfast table, if only its top were a bit wider, so we asked our friend Frank to build a new top for it. This gave us the added benefit of perhaps two more square feet of precious counter space in a kitchen that was not really designed for active cooking.

To the left of the counter is a box that I almost cropped out of the photo, but I might as well mention that it contains beer-brewing supplies. As we may have mentioned elsewhere on a blog, Pam discovered last year that National Home Brew Day is on my birthday (at least some years, it is), which has given us an excuse to add beer to the list of beverages about which we are becoming obsessive (see my recent tea post for others). We have not yet become completely obsessive, though: we are still working from kits. Eventually we hope to grow some of the ingredients ourselves and begin experimenting, but for now kits strike the right balance.

On the counter is a recipe-book holder, a gift that Pam received from my parents -- by fortunate coincidence -- just before this project began. We've tried a variety of approaches, and this is the best design we have encountered. Also in the photo are some beautiful peppers (though I'm sure my salsa will be better in the summer with local, if less photogenic, organic peppers). Some of the peppers are a lightweight mesh bag that we now use to replace the plastic produce bags at the grocery store. To the left of the peppers is a case for reading glasses -- the case itself comes from the El Chile women's weaving cooperative in Matagalpa, Nicaragua. In it we keep an old, crooked pair of glasses that is no longer suitable for reading books but works for occasional reading emergencies in the kitchen). Finally, in the background is a French press (also known as a press pot), which has nothing to do with this meal but is evidence of the near-constant presence of coffee in our lives, and of the great care we take in its preparation.

Our friends Anna, Brendan, and Amelia joined us for this small feast, and everyone seemed to enjoy it. I was grateful that Brendan brought guacamole at my request. He was raised in California, and even though Massachusetts in January is not natural habitat for avocados, he managed to provide us with a scrumptious appetizer.  The beef was exceptionally tender and savory, and the pairing with roasted red-pepper salsa was perfect. For our veggie daughter Paloma, I prepared her favorite rice-and-bean burrito. (The Nueva Receta project has begun with much more beef than we usually eat, so check this site in the near future for more vegetarian offerings!)

I was delighted that Pam prepared the table both with festive colors and with our real silver. Because washing it is a bit of an extra chore, we do not use our silver at every meal, but neither do we save it for once-a-year, formal meals. Silver helps to make any meal festive, as do fresh flowers (even if they are dyed unnatural colors).

Incidentally, using the silver with some frequency helps to prevent tarnishing.

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.

Another Ish Turkey Dish

Earlier this week, Pam made one of our comfort foods, known as Crusty Mexican Bean Bake. It is essentially a Sloppy Joe casserole on a biscuit-like base. Sometimes we make it with just beans, but since #1 Daughter was enjoying the Big Apple without us, we splurged and used a half-pound of ground turkey along with the kidney beans in that recipe.

Which left us with the second half-pound and several options on Wednesday night. On the short list was Turkish Turkey Taco, a favorite from The Well-Filled Tortilla that is emblematic of the situation that gave rise to this Nueva Receta project in the first place: at least 50 percent of our use of the book was that one recipe. Because we had all we needed for that recipe except tortillas (we've found somewhat reasonable tortillas for sale locally) and a jalapeño, we were about to follow that tried-and-true path again, when Pam decided to open the trusty tortilla tome in search of something a little different.

She found Spanish-style Ground Beef and Pork on pages 84-85, the name similarly connoting a dish that is probably as Spanish-ish as its precursor is Turkish-ish. No matter, it seemed -- and turned out to be -- both simple and delicious.

One adjustment I made was to heat olive oil infused with Persian lime, in place of ordinary olive oil, simmering onion, bell pepper (we used a frozen medley of this), pine nuts (the real deal this time), orange zest and thyme. I then added the ground turkey and a small amount of frozen breakfast sausage to get some of the mix intended in the recipe without buying more meat. Of course this was all browned in our indispensable cast-iron skillet, after which I added a generous pour-over of our home-vinted Chardonnay.

The result: warm and delicious! The next time I try this, I would avoid pre-cooked sausage, though I managed to chop it in pretty well. I would either use just turkey or perhaps a mix of ground turkey and Italian-style turkey sausage.

Oh, Currant!

This recipe is another favorite from The Well-Filled Tortilla. It is very tolerant of variation. We have used raisins instead of currants, for example, and look forward to doing it “right” for the first time with the currants in this week’s share from our CSA at Colchester Neighborhood Farm.

The currants were beautiful during cooking; they eventually merged
with the overall grayness of the filling.

We do not know how authentically Turkish this is, but it has been a favorite recipe of ours for many years. Note that the recipe calls for 2-1/2 pounds of ground turkey; we usually use 1 pound and diminish all other ingredients accordingly. 
Turkish-Style Ground Turkey

3 T peanut or olive oil
2 large onions, finely chopped
¾ cup slivered almonds
2/3 Cup currants I separated the currants from their stems, which was somewhat tedious and perhaps not necessary, as the stems were very fine and the currants essentially disappeared into the mix.)
2-1/2 pounds ground turkey
¾ teaspoon ground cumin
¾ teaspoon salt (we usually skip)
2/3 cup dry red wine
18 corn or 12 flour tortillas, warmed just before serving (We often roll in waxed paper and heat in the microwave, and we just start with however many we need for the first round to be served.)

TOPPINGS – optional

1 cup sliced jalapeño chili peppers – preferably fresh (In recent years, commercially-available jalapeños have become larger and milder; the ones we purchased for this recipe were an exception, and I am still regretting that I did not take more precautions while slicing -- the capsaicin still stings!)
4 cups shredded lettuce (we usually skip)
2 cups sour cream (we usually use plain yogurt)
1 cup thinly shredded mint

Heat oil and add onions, almonds, and currants until onions are wilted and almonds browned; stir in turkey cumin salt, and red wine, cooking until most liquid is absorbed. Assemble with about 1/3 cup turkey in the middle of each warmed tortilla; add toppings, fold over, and serve

Good with beer or the rest of the red wine! Yesterday we used a very modest Pinot Noir, which worked well with the filling, but the piquant peppers would have gone better with a highly-hopped IPA.

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.)

Shrimp Taco

As Pam mentioned in recent posts, this has been a week of returning to the original mission of this blog: delving into our ample collection of cookbooks! As readers will notice, we sometimes simply search a few popular recipe sites (I'm loving Hispanic Kitchen, and All Recipes never fails to match available ingredients), rather than using the books. Not that there is anything wrong with it!

Still, going beyond one or two well-worn pages in our existing books is part of the project, and we've been rewarded with a couple of good meals recently, and tonight we continued that trend, dipping into one of the first cook books we purchased, The Well-Filled Tortilla.  As a search of the word tortilla on this blog reveals, we have hardly neglected this family friend, but we did find something new in its pages this week. It was about a year ago -- in my Landlubber Arrives post -- that I decided not to be intimidated by seafood.

Tonight's dish (well, last night at this point) was so easy -- despite having to make a few judgment calls -- that I really could have tried it years ago. The title on page 195 is practically an ingredient list for a dish that I prepared in less time than it has taken me to write about it -- Shrimp with Lemon-Chili Cream Sauce. I will describe it as made, which is with smaller portions and a couple of slight adjustments to the recipe. I did prepare all of the chopping of things ahead of time, because this is cooked so fast that the sauce and the filling need to be ready at about the same time.

For the sauce: Into a saucepan (aptly named), I put 1 cup of light cream (instead of heavy), a half of a finely minced Hungarian hot pepper (in place of a yellow wax chili pepper), the juice of half a lemon, a dash of salt, and a tablespoon or so of chili powder. I then had this handy to heat up and whisk with one hand as I cooked the shrimps with the other.

Preparing the tortillas: I rolled two large, store-bought tortillas in a sheet of  waxed paper and microwaved them for 30 seconds. This is our default method for softening tortillas, and it works really well. I also sliced half of a yellow bell pepper into thin strips, and then cut the strips in half. I skipped the shredded lettuce.

The shrimp: Here was the judgment call. First of all, we love shrimp but know a bit too much about the damage done in harvesting them, so I regret not finding a better source than the large bag of frozen shrimp in the freezer. We had about a pound of already cooked shrimp, and the recipe called for raw shrimp. So I was really just heating them. I thawed them first, of course, removed the tails, and drained them. Then I heated Canola oil in our indispensable cast-iron skillet, as I also started heating the sauce (above). I tossed the shrimp in with some salt, and stirred until they were hot. If I were starting from raw shrimp, I would have cooked them until they were opaque, but they started out that way. In either case, it takes no more than 3-5 minutes to cook shrimp.

I removed the shrimp from the heat and continued whisking the sauce. We noticed that it was pretty thin, so added a sprinkle of corn starch, which thickened it right up. We then divided the shrimp and sliced peppers between the two tortillas, spooned over the sauce, and folded them up in the expert fashion of former Arizonans. Still, the sauce oozed out a bit.

This was, I have to say, spectacular. The magic was in this sauce, which authors developed specifically for shrimp (so as not to overwhelm its delicate flavors), but which they recommend for other shellfish, pork, chicken, lamb, turkey, duck, and even blanched vegetables. I can certainly see this easy sauce complimenting a nice fish fillet.

We paired these tacos with the some 2006 Brut RJR from Westport Rivers, a "91" and a Gold Medal winner. Rather than wait for a special occasion for champagne-style wines, we keep them on hand, and turn good meals into special occasions when the pairing seems ideal. Beer is a natural choice for a dish like this, but sparkling wines also go quite well with Mexican or Mexican-inspired fare.

Dessert: We do not usually have dessert, but we had something handy that was well paired with the bubbly. A friend who now lives on the Left Coast brought us an assortment of excellent chocolates today (in recognition of our upcoming chocolate course), and we opened the first one this evening. The Cherry & Chili Dark Chocolate Bar from Theo and the PPC Farmland Trust was an obvious choice, and we were slaked with 1/4 each of the three-ounce bar. With the Brut, of course!

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!

Three Sweet Words

As I wrote in the Tortilla Heaven post nearly a year ago, at the beginning of this project, The Well-Filled Tortilla is among my very favorite cookbooks. Often, when scanning our collection for a new recipe, I will grab this volume, even if I also take another from the shelf. It is organized by the main filling ingredients -- veggies, chicken, beef, seafood. This weekend, I started near the end and found a few favorites we had made recently. I was also surprised by the number of seafood entries, which I had not really noticed. I was especially surprised by the illustration of how to dissect a squid, which I found somehow unsettling.

I kept thumbing toward the middle of the book, when three words jumped out at me. Three words that I cannot believe I had not noticed together: tequila, sausage, and mole. (I always feel obligated to stipulate that mole is not a rodent in this context, but a savory, sweet sauce: mol-AY. The words were especially intriguing because we had a half jar of mole sauce left over from our recent Champadongo ecstasy.

This recipe (Tequila Sausage with Chocolate Mole Sauce, p 108) actually called for me to make sausage, but not in the gruesome way one might imagine. Rather, I simply mixed a pound of ground pork with minced garlic, rubbed sage, fennel seeds, cayenne, salt, and tequila. The recipe called for 2-1/2 pounds, but for just the two of us, a pound was more than enough. I cut back a bit on each of the other ingredients, except the tequila. Rather than prepare and cook it right away, I let it meld in the fridge overnight, so that the spices and tequila were absorbed.

Dinner this evening was then quite simple -- steam a couple soft tortillas (30 seconds in the microwave, rolled up in waxed paper), heated the mole sauce in a saucepan (though I guess a molepan would do), and then cooked the sausage with a bit of oil in a hot cast-iron skillet. I cooked the sausage until crispy, meanwhile chopping a cold tomato. The result: hot, spicy, sweet, salty, and not too heavy. Hmmmmm.

Melty Tuna Melty

As Pam noted in the "Best Tuna Melt" section of her New Jersey entry on Celebrating the States, my usual open-mindedness with respect to food (and most other things, other than Dunkin' Donuts), generally fails me when it comes to tuna. I do not eat tuna salad unless I am at home, and then only if I have made it or a trusted family member has made it under my supervision. For me, incidentally, it is not really a "salad" since it only has tuna, mayo, and ground black pepper.

As Pam rightly predicted in that same entry, my willingness to eat -- and even enjoy -- a tuna melt in which the tuna was polluted with celery and onions did not mean I had turned over a new leaf in this area of gastronomy. Strict limits are still in place. (Sorry to call onion a pollutant -- in its proper place, of course, I love it! Its proper place is anywhere but tuna salad.)

The bottom line, I suppose, is that I have some issues with the preparation of tuna. I rarely prepare tuna melts, but for some reason today I had a hankering for them, and arriving home for lunch just a few minutes ahead of Pam, I decided to surprise her with one (one each, that is).

I made tuna "salad" in my conventional way -- a can of tuna in water (squeezing the water in our dog's food dish -- all of our dogs have loved that) with a minimal mix of reduced-calorie mayonnaise (Hellman's: let's not even talk about Miracle Whip, since this is a family blog) and fresh-ground black pepper. I grilled this on regular whole wheat sandwich bread with freshly shredded Cabot cheeses (Monterrey Jack and extra sharp cheddar), in the style of grilled cheeses about which we've been blogging of late.

Nothing terribly innovative so far, except that this is the first tuna melt I have made since we got grilled-cheese religion, and I stacked the shredded cheese as high as it would go, giving it plenty of time to melt down before flipping the sandwiches.

Here is the innovation, though: on my own sandwich, I added a couple tablespoons of what I call "hots" -- jarred, crushed red pepper. I often order this on deli sandwiches, but never thought to get it for home use until I recently noticed it on a grocery shelf. In this case, it is Gouveia brand, imported to New Bedford from the Azores (an Atlantic archipelago that is part of Portugal).

I would never have thought to blog about this, because it was a simple recipe, but Pam pointed out that we have not posted much lately, so to keep up a weekly pace, I should mention it. Though the meal (which included milk, tortilla chips, and canned peaches with cinnamon) was not fancy, it did meet the main criteria for lunch: nutritious, delicious, easy and cheap!

Sweet Potato Quesadillas

I thought of using a clever title that refers to this being an Old Faithful recipe on our Nueva Receta blog, but I chose a simple title in hopes that people can find this, one of our very favorite recipes. It is healthy, high-fiber, vegetarian, and easily made vegan. It comes -- as so many good things do -- from Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home: Fast and Easy Recipes for Any Day, which visitors to our home know simply as "Mini Moosewood."

I have prepared this so often that I cannot even be sure how far it may have departed from the original in its details. I can tell you that it requires an indispensable cast-iron skillet and a cast-iron griddle or large pan.

Photo added at Cloverfield during global pandemic
March 23, 2020

It works like this, in two stages.

First, peel and then shred some sweet potatoes (or yams; please tell me if you honestly know the difference) as you heat up some oil in the pan. A serious shredder such as the one I mention in my "Gratin" article will pay for itself with this dish. Quantity? Whatever makes sense, plus a bit. I usually do one fairly large one for the two of us. Add to the hot oil and then add a diced onion. Add minced garlic if you are not forgetful (as I was this evening, but accidentally compensated with a garlic salsa). Add cayenne, chili powder, and cumin in abundance (all three, that is). Mini Moosewood says to cook it in one flat layer and scrape/flip it only once to avoid absorbing too much oil, but with a good olive oil, I don't see the point.

Second, assemble this with on the best tortillas (one big one each, or a couple of small ones) as you heat a small amount of oil on a griddle or in a large skillet. Having rinsed and dried the shredder (or using another face of it), shred a generous helping of cheese. I use the sharpest cheddar at hand (usually from Cabot cooperative in Vermont) and sometimes a bit of Monterrey Jack (also usually from Cabot). This evening we used aged Lite Sharp Celtic Cheddar and Monterrey Jack, both from Trader Joe's, to very good effect. With the sweet potato mixture on one half of each tortilla and the cheese on top of that, fold each one over and put on the hot griddle, flipping when browned. Top with a good salsa (we used Green Mountain Gringo garlic this evening, but any good salsa will do) and either sour cream or plain yogurt.

As if this were not enough, tonight we added a third step, which was Pam's brilliance: sangria. I once scoffed at sangria as too sweet, but in the right circumstances, it is amazing -- and thrifty! Tonight it was Madria Sangria ("Tradicional/Fresh Citrus") with a chopped apple and a bit of Triple Sec. It was a good excuse to bring out our sangria pitcher and matching mugs (from Nantucket's best thrift shop) and the first outdoor dining of the season at Casa Hayes-Boh.

Yes, our sangria kit matches our cookie jar.