Super Bowl Dip

After many years of cord cutting, we're finally able to watch the Super Bowl at home for the first time in ages. When we realized this, of course, we had to have some food to go along with the game. Pretty much immediately, I thought of the quasi-traditional 7-layer dip that so many people serve. And I asked myself, "How can it make it tastier and more fun?"

Ready to Watch the Super Bowl

I spent a little time thinking about what might comprise the layers in the dip and started making a list of things that individually would be really good with nacho chips.

You can see what I came up with from bottom to top in the photo above:

• Chipotle-Garlic-Bacon Frijoles Refritos. I debated the longest time about what kind of beans to use for the refritos, finally settling on pintos rather than either black beans or mayocobas. Traditionally, beans are refried in lard which I don't have on hand. Rather, I fried up a few slices of bacon and put the cooked pintos, a couple finely chopped chipotles, and rather a large amount of minced garlic into the bacon grease. After I mashed the beans to smooth and cooked them until they separated from the edge of the pan, I chopped the bacon and added it to the beans before seasoning them.

• Salsa Fresca. My fresh salsa is easy to make and delicious, consisting of finely chopped grape tomatoes (in lieu of large tomatoes in the late summer), white onion, cilantro, a finely minced jalapeño, with lime juice and salt to taste.

• Tinga de Pollo. I haven't made this delightful taco filling in a few months and I don't know why as it couldn't be simpler. To prepare it, I place slabs of onion in the bottom of a roasting pan, then layer on a bunch of chicken thighs lightly dusted with a spice mix of New Mexican ground chile, cumin, granulated garlic, salt, and Mexican oregano. The thighs roast until they are done and ready to come off the bone. After they cool, I pick the meat off the bones and add it to half the onion slabs that I have roughly chopped. The other half of the onions goes into the blender with a couple of chipotles en adobo and a small can of tomatoes. After I blitz the sauce, I pour it over the chicken and onion mixture and cook it down until most of the liquid is evaporated to make a delicious taco filling.

• Queso Fundido. Who doesn't like a gooey queso with chips? There are all kinds of ways to make queso fundido (melted cheese) but honestly, the easiest is just to throw some Velveeta and a little milk into the microwave. I added pickled jalapenos and chopped pickled nopalitos to the queso to give it a bit of zing.

• Chorizo. Mexican chorizo may be my favorite taco filling, especially when mixed with eggs. No eggs in this batch of chorizo, however, that I made from pork shoulder, ground Chimayo chile, cumin, garlic, salt, Mexican oregano, and a touch of red wine vinegar for acidity.

• Guacamole. It wouldn't be a Super Bowl dip at all without guacamole. The avocados are tiny now and hard as bricks, so I bought a bunch of them and kept them on the counter for a week to ripen. I made the simplest guacamole ever from avocados, salt, and lime juice, just looking for a nice citrus flavor to lift the rest of the heavy ingredients.

• Cotija Cheese. Grated cotija serves the same role in Mexican cuisine as pecorino does in Italian. I wanted it not only for its white color to serve as a backdrop for the top garnishes, but also to add a bit of saltiness to the dip.

• Top Garnish. The point of gilding this particular lily was to bring to freshness to the rest of the ingredients. On the top, I spooned on the remainder of the salsa fresca and scattered over some sliced green onions. Before topping the whole with a little bouquet of whole cilantro leaves, I used a squeeze bottle to drizzle on a crisscross of thinned chipotle sour cream.

Israeli Couscous in the Style of Risotto

A lot of chefs, myself included, stretch their culinary vocabulary by learning classic techniques and then extending those techniques to non-traditional ingredients. For me, having learned to make risotto in my teens (more than 40 years ago now!), I have always loved the risotto technique and have extended it to many other ingredients. I once taught a series of cooking classes examining the classic technique for risotto and extending it to barley, farro, quinoa, and orzo.

Israeli Couscous in the Style of Risotto
Poached Eggs and Salsa Verde for Garnish

Recently, Ann ordered some Israeli couscous (because it's a favorite pasta and is not readily available in our markets) and that has seen me making couscous just like I would risotto, mainly for the simplicity of a one-pan meal, truth be told. Post-restaurant, I have to wash the dishes myself!

First Liquid Addition

Cooking Off the Final Liquid Addition

The classic technique is three-fold: sauté the onion and rice in fat, add the liquid in small additions until the rice is done (a bit of wine followed by stock), and finally mantecare, adding butter and Parmesan to finish the dish.

I extended this technique to my clean-out-the-refrigerator couscous. First, I sautéed my soffrito of onion, garlic, red pepper flakes, dried basil, sweet peppers, and asparagus slivers to evaporate some of the moisture in the vegetables. Then I added and toasted the couscous. Next, in went the liquid, water in this case because I already had a lot of flavor in the soffrito. To gild the lily, I could have used an aromatic saffron stock.

Once the pasta was just cooked after a few small additions of water, I then finished it à la true risotto with both fat and cheese. For fat, I made a quick pimentón aїoli and for cheese, I used grated cotija from Mexico.

To add protein to the dish, I poached eggs and put them on top, along with some salsa verde and cilantro for garnish. What is better than stirring egg yolk into a dish?

Spring Grilling: Carne Asada

Here in beautiful Bend, Oregon, spring is starting slowly with the appearance of the first buds on trees and the advent of milder, though still cool, temperatures. The nicer weather has inspired me to get my grill cleaned up and reassembled after the move from McMinnville in February. My goal: to grill the  package of skirt steaks, labelled also in Spanish, arracheras, that I came across at the grocery store.

Tacos de Carne Asada

Skirt steak is not all that common at grocery stores here in the PNW, which is a shame, because it is the perfect cut for carne asada, thin and flavorful. No lie, it is one of my most favorite grilling cuts.

Carne asada, literally grilled meat, with beef being implied, isn't typically a meal in itself, though it can be. The grilled skirt steak is generally chopped and used in other dishes, such as tacos. In norteño culture, carne asada can also mean the event at which the meat is grilled, a barbeque in American terms.

To celebrate the coming of spring and the first barbeque in our new home, I decided to make carne asada tacos with a quick salsa roja, cilantro, raw onion, and a sprinkle of cotija cheese, pictured above.

Arracheras on the Grill

For carne asada, skirt steaks are generally marinated before grilling and a lot of people use a wet marinade. I prefer something simpler, rubbing the steaks with oil, a generous amount of salt, a bit of freshly ground cumin, minced garlic, and finely chopped cilantro stems. I left the steaks in the fridge for 3-4 days to absorb the rub, though this is certainly not necessary. I've never been a big fan of wet marinades on steaks, because I feel that the liquid inhibits the really great grill sear and char that you see in the photo below.

Grilled Skirt Steaks: Carne Asada

I also go against conventional wisdom in grilling my carne asada to medium going on medium well. Convention says that skirt steak is tough and so you want to cook it rather less than more. Having grilled thousands of skirt steaks, I have to disagree. I have found that a tough, stringy steak like a skirt steak is very hard to chew when rare to medium rare. And so I opt for medium to a bit beyond, say medium well.

Recipe: Salsa Roja (Guajillo-Chipotle)

I make all manner of salsas and keep them in the fridge to have on hand whenever I want some. In general, I don't use tomato in my red sauce, but this time, I decided to stretch my supply of dried chiles with a can of tomatoes.

Toasting Stemmed and Seeded Guajillos

Chiles After Toasting and Soaking

Finished Salsa Roja

Following is the recipe I used for this batch of mildly spicy red salsa. You can alter it as you see fit.

4 guajillo chiles, stemmed, toasted, and soaked

4 chipotles en adobo

6 cloves garlic

2 tablespoons red wine vinegar (or lime juice)

1-28 ounce can tomatoes in juice

salt to taste

Remove the stems and seeds from the dried chiles. If you are not certain how spicy the chiles are, you might want to wear gloves while doing this.

Toast the chiles in a dry pan until they start to smell good, but stop before they char. Move them around while toasting so that they do not burn.

Off heat, cover the chiles with water and let them soften. This will take an hour or so.

Drain the chiles and place them along with all the other ingredients in the blender. Blend until smooth. If the salsa is too thick, thin with water. Season to taste with salt.

Bonus Dish: "Steak and Eggs"

When grilling carne asada, it always makes sense to me to make more than I need because the leftovers are really useful for a quick meal. In this case, I made steak and eggs with the largest skirt steak. First, I cooked the leftover onions from the tacos from the night before, then added the diced skirt steak and the leftover cilantro. I just warmed the meat through, trying not to cook it any further.

Reheated Carne Asada with Onion and Cilantro

"Steak and Eggs"

The "steak and eggs" is a bowl of scrambled eggs topped with the reheated carne asada, fresh tomato, salsa verde, pimentón sauce, more cilantro, and a sprinkle of cotija cheese. Recipes for salsa verde and pimentón sauce are here.

Super Bowl: Chicken and Green Chile Tostadas

I have been a lifelong Washington Redskins fan and remember trips to RFK Stadium and later to FedEx Field vividly, especially when playing the big NFC East rivals, the Cowboys, the Giants, and especially the Eagles with their riotous fans. Then came the restaurant with its 80- to 90-hour workweeks and football all but disappeared from my radar. Post restaurant, we became cord cutters with no access to cable TV. And so, for the last 20-plus years, football has not played a significant role in our lives, especially because Ann has no desire to watch.

But year in and year out, we seem to find a way to watch the Super Bowl, if for no other reason than to keep at least some grip on cultural literacy. This year, we happened to have access to CBS for the broadcast and that got us thinking that we should do something a little special, a little bad food-wise to eat during the game.

We kicked around a bunch of ideas when Ann struck on chicken enchiladas. I suggested that perhaps instead we do tostadas because I could bake the tortillas without any oil for tostadas versus frying the tortillas in oil to seal them against the enchilada sauce.

Chicken and Green Chile Tostadas

When I think about chicken in Mexican cuisine, my mind immediately leaps to the juxtaposition of mild white chicken with mild green chiles. It is a food combination that really works for my palate and I just love the way that each ingredient plays off of and dances with the other. So when I was at the store buying the chicken for the tostadas, I also bought a small sack of mild Anaheim chiles to roast. Yes, you can buy them roasted and canned, but the flavor is not there and they are wicked expensive compared to roasting your own.

Torching the Chiles

Char Each Chile and Place it in a Plastic Bag to Steam

Peeled and Diced Green Chiles

I took the chiles outside and fired up my propane torch to char the skin on each. As I finished with each chile, I placed it into a plastic bag so that it could steam. After sitting for a half an hour or so, the chiles were ready to peel. The easiest way to peel them is to rub the skins off under running water.

Charring the chiles with a torch does not cook them in the way that charring them over a gas burner or under the broiler in the oven does. As you can see in the photo above, they are nearly raw and bright green. To cook them further, I steamed them in the microwave, covered in film, for about four minutes on high.

Enchilada Sauce

I decided to keep with Ann's enchilada theme by making enchilada sauce to drizzle on the tostadas. This sauce is nothing more than a little roux with a lot of mild New Mexican ground chile and a bit of garlic powder, ground cumin, and rubbed Mexican oregano, all thinned with a ladle of chicken stock from the chicken that I poached for this meal.

Chicken, Green Chiles, and Chipotle Adobo

I picked the chicken that I had poached the day before and put and ounce and a half of shredded chicken per tostada in a bowl, then mixed in enough of the diced Anaheim chiles to make me happy, about two parts chicken to one part chile, or maybe three to one. Really, who cares?

I seasoned the chicken with salt and gave Ann a taste. She requested some heat to the mix, so I added about three tablespoons of chipotle adobo to the mix, turning it slightly reddish. The tostada mix ended up with just the slightest kick in the back of the throat.

Baked Tortillas

I baked eight tortillas, one sheet tray full, and left them on the counter to cool and finish drying out. (Click here for tostada procedure.) Then when we got hungry, around the end of the first quarter or so, I put some chicken-chile mix on each tostada, drizzled on some enchilada sauce, and topped each with a sprinkle of cotija and a few cilantro leaves. They were really good, giving us the sensation of eating something bad, while really being quite waistline friendly.

The tostadas were the highlight of our day, being much better than the game in which the Chiefs rolled over and played dead, the lousy half-time show, and the lame commercials. This sparsely attended COVID Super Bowl will probably be memorable for being unmemorable, except that Tom Brady, no matter what you think of him, continues to demonstrate why he is the best quarterback that I have ever seen. Unreal that he can continue to perform at his age, just unreal to defy time the way he has.

Vegetable Tacos

Vegetable tacos are something that I started making seriously this summer during grilling season and because they are so delicious, have become a regular quick dinner chez nous. Since I first posted about them back in October, I have formulated a strategy for making them that I will outline below, using vegetables that I prepared stovetop.

Vegetable Tacos

As I have been experimenting with dozens of veggie tacos, I have fallen into a procedure which involves mixing cooked ingredients with raw ingredients just before serving. This yields a warm, but super fresh taco.

Preparing the Raw Ingredients

In a large bowl, I mix the raw ingredients: green onion, cilantro, tomatoes, cotija, and finely minced chipotle. In season, I would likely include raw corn in this mix.

Searing the Cooked Ingredients

For the cooked ingredients, which I grill in good weather, the mix varies depending on what I have on hand. This pan contains onions, poblanos, yellow squash, and asparagus. Almost anything goes in veggie tacos and I have used eggplant, zucchini, and green beans this past summer. To mimic the intense cooking on the grill, sear the veggies hard if you are using a pan.

When the veggies are done, mix them immediately with the raw ingredients and season to taste with salt and spice. Serve with slices of lime on warm corn tortillas.

Although veggie tacos don't sound all that great, I assure you that they are delicious and addictive.

Grilled Vegetable Tacos

From late summer to early fall when the garden vegetables are rolling in is a great time to take advantage of your grill to make vegetable tacos.

Grilled Vegetable Tacos

Not only are grilled vegetable tacos pretty healthy for you, they take on a meaty flavor from the grill smoke, especially if you dress them with a bit of smoky, spicy chipotle adobo. I don't know of anyone who would turn down one of these delicious tacos simply because they contain no meat. I could nosh them all day long.

Taco Vegetables

I've used a bunch of different vegetables this summer for tacos including yellow and green summer squash, eggplant, peppers, and onions. This batch was yellow straightneck squash, gray zucchini, a corno di toro-style pepper, and onion. The batch prior to this was yellow crookneck squash, onions, kousa (Lebanese) squash, and graffiti eggplants. Use whatever vegetables you happen to have.

Grilling Vegetables

For my tacos, while the vegetables are grilling, I cut up a tomato or two and add it to a bowl with a good amount of cilantro leaves. Once the vegetables are nicely charred, I chop them and add them to the tomatoes and cilantro, along with a couple tablespoons of spicy chipotle adobo. I give them a good season with salt and pepper and serve them on warmed tortillas with a sprinkle of cotija cheese.

Do Your Onions Fall Apart on the Grill?

Perfectly Grilled Onion

If you're bothered by the onions on your grill falling apart and falling through the grill bars or just making a mess on the grill, you can short-circuit this by running a skewer through the onion slabs as you see above. It really helps if you use flat skewers rather than round ones; the onions won't spin on flat skewers.

Fully Loaded Eggs

Every now and again, I like to serve a nice brunch without working too hard at it. As I get older and more accustomed to retirement, I find myself more often than not eating only two meals a day, brunch and dinner. Along with retirement goes the sentiment of not wanting to slave over a meal quite as often as in the past, so I'm always thinking of ways to put great food on the table with little effort.

Fully Loaded Eggs

A case in point are these fully-loaded eggs that we had for brunch, plain-Jane scrambled eggs in a bowl, topped like tacos.

Taco Toppings

Just before scrambling the eggs, I pulled a container of roasted garlic-chipotle salsa, some cotija cheese, and some jalapeños en escabeche out of the fridge. Then I sliced an avocado and diced up a tomato with a bit of cilantro. Alternatively, these eggs would have made great breakfast tacos.

This was a really tasty brunch that took under ten minutes to assemble.

Roasted Garlic-Chipotle Salsa

I've made a lot of salsas in my life, with nary a recipe. Most of my salsas are chunky and tend to follow the basic formula of a fruit (yes, tomatoes are fruits), an onion, cilantro, salt, a source of heat, and lime juice. It's a bit more unusual for me to make a smooth salsa such as this one with roasted garlic and chipotle. It's extremely versatile, as you will see below, and worth keeping in the refrigerator.

Roasted Garlic-Chipotle Salsa

This salsa that I recently made is so easy and so delicious that I decided to record it here. I will forget it otherwise.

1 28-ounce can of diced tomatoes
1 chipotle, or to taste (I also added a tablespoon of the adobo for more spice)
1 head of garlic, roasted
salt to taste

Put all the ingredients in the blender and blend until smooth. Adjust seasoning to your taste. 

Ready for Avocado Tacos

Avocado Tacos

We decided to have vegetarian tacos last week to take advantage of the inexpensive and ripe avocados on the counter. When serving tacos, I like to put out all the ingredients and let each person assemble tacos to his or her (call me a dinosaur: I cannot bear to use "their" as a singular pronoun) liking. For these tacos, I put out all the ingredients that I would use for guacamole (avocado, tomato and cilantro mixed, jalapeños en escabeche) plus roasted garlic-chipotle salsa and cotija cheese.

Scrambled Eggs with Padrón Peppers and Tortilla Strips

And for brunch one day last week, I made us some scrambled eggs with Padrón peppers, avocado, tomato, cilantro, roasted garlic-chipotle salsa, cotija, and fried strips of tortillas left from dinner the night before.

As you can see, this salsa is extraordinarily easy to make, delicious, and versatile.

Enfrijoladas

I'm a hopeless student of languages. Hopeless in the sense of interminably curious and hopeless in the sense that I know bits and pieces of so many of them that they are trampling each other in my brain to the point where I will never be able to master any of them. In fact, as I've added more languages to the mix, my spelling in English, the one language that I have mastered, has become suspect because of the melange of words in my brain.

One aspect that fascinates me is how speakers of languages create new words to describe novel things. English, for example, inherited from its German-based ancestor the tendency to jam existing words together to describe a new thing. An example: the German Bahnhof  is the marriage of the words for train and house, meaning train station.

I've noticed a tendency in the Spanish-speaking food lexicon to create adjectives (and then nouns from those adjectives) using the prefix en or em, meaning in, and a noun, the resulting adjective meaning something contained in or smothered in or by the noun. Let's take one that we pretty much all know: enchilada. Enchilado means smothered in a sauce of chile and by extension an enchilada is a tortilla rolled around a filling and smothered in a wonderful chile sauce.

Off the top of my head, I can think of several others: enmolado, smothered in mole; encebollado, smothered in onion sauce; entomatado, smothered in tomato sauce; empanada, wrapped in pan (bread); and less commonly emparedado, a sandwich (torta/bolillo) between walls (paredes), that is, walled between two slices of bread.

Enfrijoladas de Pollo

Which leads me in a roundabout fashion to enfrijoladas. Now that you know the key, you can figure out for yourself that this means smothered in a sauce of frijoles, beans, seasoned with chipotle. This is a wonderful dish that deserves the acclaim given to its cousin enchiladas. Enfrijoladas are rarely found here north of the border, but they are such good comforting peasant food that I wonder why people aren't clamoring for them.

Roasted Chicken, Onion, Cilantro, and Cotija Filling

If you've ever made enchiladas, you pretty much already know how to make enfrijoladas. Decide on what you want for a filling and prep that. For this batch, I had some chicken thighs that I roasted on a bed of onion slices leftover from another meal. I mixed the shredded chicken with the chopped roasted onions, cilantro, and a bit of cotija cheese. You can put anything, or nothing at all, in your enfrijoladas.

I have seen enfrijoladas in which the tortillas were dredged in bean sauce, folded in quarters like crepes, topped with a bit more sauce and a sprinkle of cheese, and run under the broiler to melt the cheese. That sounds like pretty good stoner food to me!

To make the bean sauce, cook a batch of frijoles de la olla, pot beans. Put some cooked beans, a whole chipotle, and several ladles of bean broth in the blender and blend briefly to get a loose bean sauce, slightly thicker than chile sauce. Season to taste.

Fry tortillas briefly in oil to soften them and to seal them against the bean sauce, just a few seconds on each side. Remove from the oil before they become crisp or take on any color.

Assembling Enfrijoladas

To assemble the enfrijoladas, put some of the bean sauce in a plate. Dip both sides of the tortilla in the sauce and lay on some filling. Roll the tortilla around the filling and transfer to an oiled casserole dish. When all the enfrijoladas are assembled, pour a little more sauce over the top of the dish and bake in a moderate (350F) oven until the dish is heated through, perhaps 20 minutes.

As you can see in the top photo, I cooked the leftover bean sauce down into refried beans and put some of those on a plate. Then I put a couple enfrijoladas on top of that. I garnished the dish with a bit of crema, a touch of cotija, and a sprig of cilantro.

"Stupid good!" said Ann.

Recycling

Let's face it. Cooking can be strenuous especially at the end of the day when you're tired and don't have the enthusiasm to spend a lot of time in the kitchen. Even I, a retired professional chef, have days when I don't want to do something complicated or think a lot about dinner. For me, the most strenuous part is deciding what to eat. Executing it is pretty easy after that.

Something that really helps me is planning for leftovers from the major meals that I cook. When you've got leftovers, it really limits the scope of deciding what's for dinner, rephrasing the question as "How can I recycle these leftovers into a new meal?" For me, it's much easier to come up with ideas when I have constraints, such as using up leftovers, versus trying to come with a plan given a blank slate.

Cannellini-Piquillo Ersatz "Rouille"

Cannellini-Piquillo Ersatz "Rouille"

Here's an example from last week, shot over a four-day period. It starts with a lower-fat and lower-calorie ersatz rouille, a type of aïoli from Provence made with red peppers. Rouille is the classic garnish to bouillabaise. We're watching what we eat, now about three months into quarantine with rampant boredom and scant exercise. We don't want to give up flavor, but we do want to give up fat and calories where possible.

Enter this rouille. Rather than start from a base of egg yolk and olive oil, I substituted white beans. I put two pounds (1 kg) of cannellini and half a pound (250g) of piquillo peppers into the food processor along with 8 cloves of minced red hard neck garlic. When all was smoothed out, I drizzled in 2 tablespoons (30 ml) of extra virgin olive oil and then seasoned to taste. Not rouille, but not bad either, especially with that spicy red skin garlic!

While the sauce was destined to be eaten with a massive head of roasted cauliflower for dinner, I made 2-1/2 pounds, a processor bowl full, because I wanted to have the sauce on hand to use in other ways. After dinner, the remaining sauce went into the fridge to be incorporated into other dishes during the course of the week.

Arroz con Pollo Italiano

Likewise, when I make chicken or basically any other protein, I make enough for at least two meals. Having leftover meat in the refrigerator guarantees at least one follow-on quick taco meal. Last week, I was in the mood for something similar to chicken cacciatore, but I wanted to incorporate rice. It struck me that I could make arroz con pollo with Italian flavors to satisfy my craving.

Arroz con pollo was a frequent and favorite staff meal at the restaurant. We'd prep a hotel pan in the afternoon and leave it in the walk-in until about an hour before close, about 90 minutes before we would sit down to eat. Then it would go into the slow oven and would be ready, piping hot, once customers left the building.

Arroz con Pollo Ready for the Oven

Outside, I heated a cast-iron frying pan in my grill and browned six chicken thighs in olive oil until they were crisply brown on both sides, about 20 minutes. In decent weather, I do it outside to avoid setting off the f*cking smoke detector in the kitchen. It keeps the kitchen cooler as well.

Meanwhile, I prepped the vegetables: onion, carrot, celery, and lots of garlic. I then assembled spices (red pepper flakes, saffron, salt, and pepper) and a bouquet garni of oregano, sage, and lots of rosemary.  Out of the refrigerator came about a cup of olives and a half a cup of pickled capers. I drained a 28-ounce can of chopped tomatoes into a large measure and added chicken stock to the tomato juice up to the one quart line. Finally, I measured out 2 cups of long grain rice.

When the chicken was browned, I removed it to a plate and sautéed the vegetables in the cast iron pan on the grill, adding the spices and the bouquet towards the end. When the vegetables were translucent, I mixed them with the tomatoes, olives, capers, and rice and added the mix to the bottom of the roasting pan with the chicken on top. I poured the broth over, covered the roasting pan with foil, and put it in a slow oven (350F) for 90 minutes.

Out of the Oven, Ready to Eat

This recipe scales fairly nicely: just make sure that you use about two cups of broth to every one cup of rice.

Arroz con Pollo Italiano

Poached Eggs over Rice 

One of the dishes that Ann liked the best for brunch on our Sundays together back in the restaurant days was a poached egg over a loose risotto-like pile of Israeli couscous, inflected with piquillo peppers and topped with a pimentón (smoked paprika) aïoli.

Poached Eggs over Rice

I aimed to recreate the feel of that dish using some of the leftover rice and the cannellini-piquillo "rouille." In the span of ten minutes, I rewarmed the rice with a bit of chicken stock, mixed some of the "rouille" half and half with mayo and a little water to thin it, and poached some eggs. I added mayo and water to the white bean-red pepper sauce because I wanted the texture to approximate a true aïoli more closely.

Brunch just doesn't get any easier than that.

Tacos de Pollo

As I mentioned above, I like to have leftover proteins in the refrigerator to facilitate putting a taco dinner on the table in next to no time.

I first made a quick salsa fresca from tomatoes, onions, cilantro, chile peppers, lime juice, and salt. Then I took the leftover 50-50 rouille-aïoli from the day before and mashed it with a super ripe avocado and lime juice for some quick guacamole.

I picked the chicken off a couple of thighs leftover from the arroz con pollo and seared it quickly in a pan. After that, I gave a little more of the leftover rice a quick sauté to crisp it slightly.

Taco Fixings: Guacamole, Salsa Fresca, Rice, Pulled Chicken, Cotija

This is about a simple as dinner gets. The most strenuous thing was picking the meat off a couple of chicken thighs, mere child's play.

Tacos de Pollo

Recycling

In the course of a single week, I made a fake "rouille" from white beans and piquillo peppers and a big pan of arroz con pollo, both in quantities guaranteeing leftovers. From the remains of these two dishes, we had a very easy egg dish for brunch and a simple taco dish for dinner. Recycling leftovers is a great way to minimize the effort of putting food on the table and a great way to help answer the age-old question, "What's for dinner?"

Tacos and Tomatoes

Back in the spring, I got an email out of the blue from Martha, an old friend of the family. She and her first husband were great friends of my parents and I saw a lot of her during my days in Charlottesville. But the last time I saw her was 31 years ago. I went my way to Texas and she went her way to Missouri. She and her husband Bob have recently moved back to Virginia and she reached out to me, wanting to catch up. So she and Bob drove up on Sunday and we caught up and had lunch together, standing around the kitchen counter.

Pulled Pork Taco with Salsa Verde, Cotija, and Spicy Curtido

On my day off, especially for lunch, I really am not into cooking all that much. Whatever I make for lunch needs to be something that can be prepared in advance and/or doesn't take more than about 15-20 minutes of active work, so I decided to roast some pork shoulder and serve it as tacos. That way, the oven could do all the work while I had coffee with Ann.

The pork I rubbed down the night before and put in a slow oven when I awoke on Sunday morning to deal with the dogs. The slaw I made at work a couple days before: cabbage, all manner of peppers, carrots, red onions, habaneros, garlic, spices, sugar, vinegar, and oil. I also brought home some salsa verde made from roasted tomatillos, poblanos, cilantro, and roasted garlic all slowly cooked down in pork stock and then blended to make a smooth sauce, whose acidity I adjusted with a touch of lime juice.



Tomatoes with Cotija and Cilantro

And I decided that we needed to have a very quick tomato salad to go with our tacos, mainly to take advantage of the most amazing tomatoes of the year. I sliced the tomatoes and laid them on a platter, sprinkled them with salt, cotija cheese, and cilantro. Less than two minutes from start to finish.

An Improv Sunday

Sunday was a bit of a strange day. It was too hot to go outside, Ann still wasn't feeling great from her bout with this cold that I had last weekend into the early part of this week, and no wine in preparation for my 14-hour fast for bloodwork on Monday morning. Our usual Sunday routine of coffee on the patio in the morning and wine on the patio in the afternoon was shot to hell. But I guess that was OK because neither of us was feeling up for much, with Ann still reeling from her cold and me feeling like I got punched in the face after a brutal, brutal Saturday night at the restaurant.

But it got to be noon and we needed something to eat. In what would become the theme for the day, I scrounged the cooler and pantry for stuff for breakfast and came up with this delightful mess for breakfast. This is the kind of thing I would serve for brunch, if I ever did brunch at a restaurant, which I have vowed never, ever to do.

Black Bean, Potato, and Egg Mess

This particular mess is fried redskin potatoes cooked with onion, black beans, jalapeño, garlic, and cilantro stems and bound with a few fresh chicken eggs, garnished with grape tomatoes, cotija cheese, and more cilantro.

Continuing the improvisational theme for an early Sunday dinner before starting my fast, Ann had some zucchini in the fridge, which I made into traditional latkes. I guess I can add that to my list of vegetables from which I have made latkes. They were really good, tasting like a combination of latke and fried zucchini.

Zucchini Latkes

In the afternoon, I also made Ann some eggplant "meatballs" to eat during the week (eggplant, onion, garlic, rosemary, basil, egg, panko, and cotija). I cooked the onion until it was browning around the edges, then added the rosemary and garlic and let that cook for a minute, and then added finely diced eggplant. I added bits of water as necessary to steam the eggplant and to let me scrape up the fond from the bottom of the pan. Once the eggplant was soft, about 12-15 minutes, I folded in the basil and seasoned the eggplant. After cooling for a minute, I put it in a bowl with some panko, a bit of Cotija cheese, and an egg. Mixed, the eggplant sat on the counter for five minutes to cool at which point I made it into meatball shapes and put them on a greased sheet tray in a 350F oven for 30 minutes to set.

Taco Party!

Black Bean Taco, Cotija, Cilantro, Chipotle Salsa

Sunday afternoon Ann got a text from Kelley asking if we could meet at a winery on Monday afternoon, that they were in Virginia for the day. Because of renovations at the restaurant, I couldn't meet but suggested that we have dinner at our place early Monday evening. On Monday morning, Ann and I talked about what to make for dinner and we got precisely nowhere. Some time later, she texted me saying that she felt like Mexican. I suggested do-your-own tacos and she suggested cheese dip and chips. Deal done.

Pregame Margaritas

After a long day at work, I finally got home with groceries and set to prepping dinner. I asked Ann to throw some music on, a little banda to prep to, to liven things up. While I was getting things ready, she found a can of margarita mix in the freezer and put together a batch of margaritas for us. The margaritas were a great pick-me-up after a long, hard slog at work and running all over town doing errands for the restaurant.

Happy Trio

Mark and Kelley arrived about 90 minutes after I did and I had just managed to finish prepping dinner maybe 10 minutes before they arrived. As Ann requested, I made some nasty cheese? dip for chips: Velveeta, cilantro stems, chorizo, chipotle salsa, and a little Sherry vinegar to help cut some of the fat.

Queso Fundido and Chips

I got both corn and wheat tortillas. I'm a fan of corn, Ann of wheat. For fillings, I cooked some fresh chorizo, some black beans with onions and poblanos, and some shrimp with mango and chipotle. For toppings, we had pico de gallo, cilantro, chipotle salsa, nopalitos, and queso cotija. And we all sat around the island in the kitchen, made tacos, and caught up. It was a great evening!



Taco Spread: Chorizo, Black Beans, Shrimp and Mango