If you haven’t already, please make sure you check out the Red Cross of Central Texas Raffle that I’m holding. You could win amazing prizes from Keurig, KerryGold, Chicago Metallics, Scharffen Berger Chocolate, and Miss in the Kitchen!

 
Who doesn’t love a good taco salad? I don’t know if they’re very authentic, but you can certainly find them on the menu of most Tex-Mex restaurants I’ve been to back home.

Usually, the tortilla bowl is deep fried to crispy perfection. I remember when I was younger, my mom had one of those specific tortilla fryers.

It looked a little something like this, and the tortilla bowls that came out of it were tasty, but terribly unhealthy and the house smelled like frying oil for *days* afterwards.
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Post tags: Chicago Metallics, dinner, Ground Turkey, Taco Salad, tacos, Tex-Mex

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Tacos de camaron (kam-ah-rohne) are a standard on most Mexican restaurants where I come from. Some people think of them as Shrimp fajitas, others simply shrimp tacos. Any way you look at it, you’re looking at a delicious dinner in a very short amount of time.

Grilling season starts this weekend, and we’ll all be looking towards our burgers, steaks, and chicken. Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t always immediately think of shrimp when I think of grilling. This is something that’s got to change, because they’re a fantastic, and a lot of times, a healthier choice.

I’ve given these giant prawns a Tex-Mex treatment, marinating them in Goya Sazon Liquida, garlic, Camino (or Cumin, as you non-Texans might call it), chili powder, and cilantro.
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Post tags: cilantro, garlic, onion, red pepper, shrimp, tacos, tortillas

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There is nothing more divine to me than a warm and fresh tortilla. When I am in San Antonio, it is one of the things I look forward to most – stepping foot in a Las Palapas or Casa Rio and being served with a tortilla warmer full of steamy, perfectly pillowy flat breads to go with my carne guisada, migas, or fajitas.

That I spent years buying in-store tortillas for home use kind of depresses me, now that I know how easy they are to make. You don’t need much: flour, lard, salt, water, and a food processor or your own two hands.

You might think I’m crazy to cook with lard, and before I’d read Robb Walsh’s Tex-Mex cookbook, I might have agreed with you.

Cooking with lard is actually much better for you than say, margarine. It has absolutely no trans fats, and stacks up gram for gram equally on total fat to vegetable oil. And Crisco? It’s got genetically modified soy bean oil in it. No thank you!

Besides all that, I am putting my hand on the Good Book here and telling you: You will only make a superior tortilla if you make it with lard.

I’m not asking you to cook with lard every day, and I’m certainly not asking you to make fresh tortillas every day of your life (though hey, if you want to join that party with me, it’s kinda fun) – but for the good of your tortillas, I am asking you to pick up that box near the butter that says LARD on it.

I promise, if I see you in the grocery store, I’ll give you a thumbs up. I will not judge. And if someone else starts giving you those judgy eyes? You send ‘em my way. I’ll set ‘em straight.

Robb Walsh tells me in his book that San Antonio has superior tortillas because of the hardness of the water there. San Antonio water comes from the Edwards Aquifer, and I’m here to tell you, it’s some of the best tasting water in the world. The Edwards Aquifer is an underground cavern made of limestone, filled with water. The limestone imparts minerals into the water that give it such a fresh perfect taste, and oh man.. I miss it now.

So if you ever make to San Antonio, you’ll have to taste the water and the tortillas, and tell me what you think. In the meantime, make some tortillas of your own, and throw some carne guisada or breakfast taco fixins in it. It’ll make your day, I promise.

If you’re feeling especially adventurous, instead of just griddling your tortillas for use in tacos, visit Bake at 350 – a blog started by my fellow Texan and dear friend, Bridget – where she teaches you how to french toast tortillas and FILL THEM WITH NUTELLA. Did I mention she’s a freakin’ genius?

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Post tags: flatbread, flour tortillas, Mexican food, tacos, Tex-Mex, tortillas

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I can’t tell you a lie. James and I are really horrible at eating leftovers. Whether it’s from a restaurant or delicious food made right here at home, both of us are horrible at facing that same flavor combination the next day.

I’ve found a way to combat that though, when it comes to chicken. The secret to using a chicken (or two, depending on the size of your family) is to prepare it first at the least common denominator recipe, which in most cases means soup.

What led me to this epiphany is a recipe in the New Braunfels Smokehouse Cookbook, whose famous chicken and dumplings I’ve waxed on poetically about before. The recipe calls for you to cook the chicken in a pot with dehydrated onion and cumin, salt, and pepper, effectively making your own stock – which the recipe goes on to turn into a gravy for the chicken and dumplings. Where it separates from most soup recipes though, is that it calls for you to shred the chicken and add it back in, after the dumplings have had a chance to cook up.

When we’d eaten our NBS (New Braunfels Smokehouse) delights, I had a plate full of shredded chicken left over – that because of their method, was not committing us to a week’s worth of chicken and dumplings. (Come on, we all love chicken and dumplings, but 2 meals in a week is more than enough!)

So I froze most of the leftover gravy and dumplings for a future date, kept a little back for one day of leftovers, and then started to figure out what I was going to do with all that delicious chicken.

Do you know how easy it is to make dinner when the protein portion is already figured out?!

First up on the agenda, shredded chicken tacos. I lightly fried the corn tortillas like we do back in San Antonio while enough of the chicken reconstituted in a can of V8 juice, cumin, salt, pepper, and can of green chiles.

When the chicken was hot and deliciously moist, and the tortillas had just the right amount of give and crunch, I brought them together with cheese, sour cream, tomatoes, lettuce, cilantro, and a little lime. We made a side dish of brown rice cooked in pollo y tomate bouillon and refried beans.

The next night, we had leftover chicken and dumplings. The third night, we had chicken enchiladas.

A few weeks later, I did the same thing again. Only instead of making chicken and dumplings, I made chicken noodle soup. I didn’t add the chicken back until we had our individual bowls ready to serve, leaving us with more than enough chicken to enjoy more tacos, and chicken sandwiches with fresh tomato, lettuce, mayo, and crispy fried bacon. Another night we had barbecue chicken sandwiches, heating up the shredded chicken with barbecue sauce and then tossing it on hamburger buns.

The next time you want chicken soup, stew, or dumplings, pull that chicken yourself, and reserve the majority of it. We ate the entire week off a $4.50 chicken, and fresh vegetables and bread we got at the farmer’s market.

The moral of the story: Leftovers don’t have to be a drag.

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Post tags: chicken, chicken and dumplings, dinner, enchiladas, mains, soup, tacos

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You know by now that I love me some tortillas. With butter. With beans and cheese. With eggs and bacon. With.. carnitas!

What are carnitas, you ask? Well, traditionally, it’s roasted or sauted pork. A lot of times, I’ve had it as ‘pulled’ pork. In fact, Qdoba, a popular burrito chain, does their carnitas burrito this way.

My version of carnitas is Carne G inspired with a desperate need to use up a bunch of pork loin to make room in the freezer. But don’t let that deter you. OMG was it tasty.

I made this last night for some friends, and it went down really well. Unfortunately, I have no photos because the camera is dead. One of the hazards of moving and not entirely unpacking – I’ve got no clue where the darn charger is. Luckily, the method is pretty much the same as Carne G, so you could happily follow those step by step photos.

Let me know how you like it!

This meal was a complete experiment, so the recipe is approximate. Feel free to adjust to fit your family. I fed 5 adults, with enough left over for approximately 2 more meals for 2 people at 2 tacos each.

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Post tags: carnitas, pork, stew, tacos

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Breakfast tacos. On every worth-their-salt Mexican restaurant menu in Texas. The great thing about these is that it doesn’t matter if you’re vegetarian, carnivore, or somewhere in between, you can fill your taco with whatever tickles your fancy, and have a delicious breakfast in just a few minutes.

I’m pretty sure the first time I made these for my husband, he wept a little.

The Players: Eggs, Bacon, Hash browns (shredded potatoes), chopped onions, flour tortillas, salt and pepper. You will also need 2 tablespoons of vegetable oil, but I forgot to drag that into the photo.

Optional, but tasty: sharp cheddar cheese, salsa, sour cream etc. to top.

This recipe is for 2 people, but feel free to double, triple, quadruple it, etc. to feed your family.

Start with 4 slices of thick bacon.

Using sharp kitchen shears, because it’s easier than using a knife, slice the bacon into small pieces, like so:

Now layer the bacon pieces in a hot frying pan (set to high) to cook.

And let it brown up nicely, but not get too done. You’re going to be adding that back into the frying pan at some point, so don’t let it get crispy.

When it’s brown, but not crispy, remove it to a plate with paper towel to drain some of the grease off. Do not drain the pan.

Add two tablespoons of vegetable oil to your bacon grease in the pan, and make sure it heats up thoroughly. I suggest keeping it on medium-high heat.
Add approximately 1 cup of hash browns to the pan. Be careful to add gently so as not to splatter yourself with hot oil. Ouch!

When the potatoes start to brown up nicely, add about 3 tablespoons of chopped onion, and stir.

Now add back in that yummy bacon.

In a bowl, crack 5 eggs, and stir them well, so that all the yolks are broken. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Go ahead and pour those eggs right on top of the rest of the ingredients in the frying pan, and stir with your spatula. Set the temperature to low.

Now leave those eggs to cook, stirring occasionally so that they don’t brown.

This next step is VERY important for authenticity!

Take a smaller, ‘omelet’ sized frying pan, and place it on high heat. When you can feel heat coming up from the face of the pan, lay a flour tortilla in it. No need for any kind of grease, flour tortillas are initially made with lard, and so retain some natural cooking oil.

After about 20 seconds, use tongs to flip and cook the other side.

This, my friends, is how you properly reheat a tortilla. It makes it taste like it has just come off the griddle in your abuela’s kitchen.

At this time, your breakfast taco mixture should look like this:

Take your just reheated tortilla, place it on a warmed plate, add two tablespoons of this loveliness, and you’re good to go.
Add any toppings you want. I like mine with sharp cheddar cheese. James likes his with HP Sauce (gross!). Other people like ketchup, salsa, sour cream, or nothing at all.

You can put anything you want into breakfast tacos. Popular menu items back home are:

Potato and Egg
Bacon and Egg
Sausage and Egg
Bean (refried) and cheese
Carne Guisada (see recipe!)
Chorizo and Egg

Go forth and make Breakfast Tacos! You will not regret it.

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Post tags: bacon, Breakfast, eggs, homesick, tacos

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Carne Guisada (car-ney gee-sada) is a thick Mexican beef stew, typically served in flour tortillas, which, by definition, makes a taco. For future reference – food inside tortilla = taco, regardless of the variable fillings.

You can have it on its own, or topped with cheddar cheese and sour cream. Where I come from, it’s a perfectly acceptable breakfast, lunch, or dinner food. Many a San Antonian will tell you its an excellent hangover cure. So will my British husband!

I’ve had Carne Guisada from many a Mexican or Barbecue restaurant in Texas, but this particular recipe comes to you from the SAFD, the honorable San Antonio Fire Department. J.J., my brother-in-law, is a fireman down there in Texas, and this is a recipe that frequents the firehouse table.

I stayed at my sister and brother-in-law’s house when I was recovering from surgery, and secret sweetheart that he is, J.J. made this recipe for me. He says we’re not allowed to call it Carne Guisada, because it is such a bastardized recipe that most Mexican citizens would go blech! when they see the recipe. So instead, we call it Carne G.

But I promise you, it tastes the same. And it looks the same.

And it’s downright sinfully delicious.

It’s also one of these recipes that is very loosey-goosey. It’s going to be difficult for me to give you absolutes on the spice measurements, because honestly, it’s all to taste. When you make it, you can make it as spicy as you want, or as smokey as you want with the cumin, or, you can do incredibly strange things like my friend Maggy that came to dinner, and request POLLO G – yes, that’s right, this recipe made with chicken. It was a first for me, but definitely pretty tasty. I still maintain Maggy is a weird-o. Good thing I love her anyway.
Ready?

The Players: Beef, Golden Mushroom Soup, Rotel Diced Tomatoes with Green Chile, Red Pepper, Onion, Cumin, and Garlic Salt

A few words about the ingredients before we go any further:

1) It doesn’t matter what cut of beef you use, other than don’t use hamburger. Sirloin to stew meat, the world is your beef oyster.

2) If you live somewhere that you can’t find Golden Mushroom Soup, that’s okay. Guess what makes it “golden”? Beef Broth. So just get regular cream of mushroom soup, and mix in about a cup of beef broth.

3) If you live somewhere where you can’t find Rotel, get a can of Diced Petite Tomatoes and one single jalapeno. Cut open, de-seed, and chop the jalapeno.

4) I used chopped frozen onion, only because I forgot to get a whole one. Use 1 whole onion for this recipe.

5) Spices – Cumin and Garlic Salt are important, but if you want to kick things up, feel free to add chili powder, black pepper, etc.

Now, back to what we were doing..

First, chop your beef into bite size (about 1×1 inch) pieces. And if you’re a weirdo called Maggy, do the same for your chicken.

Now, on a different cutting board (cross contamination is bad, mmmkay?), slice your pepper into strips, and chop your onion (or you know, pour them from the bag).

(Upon reflection, cutting red pepper on a red cutting board doesn’t transfer well to photo. Whoops.)

Here, a better shot where you can see them.

Before we get started cooking this, a quick note on procedure. If you’re in a hurry, brown the meat as I’m going to show you and throw into a stew pot on medium heat. If you’re not, and you have a slow cooker, just throw it all in and leave it for a few hours. If you’re in between, like I was, you’ll brown the meat, AND use a slow cooker.

Pour about a tablespoon of oil in a heated frying pan. I used Olive Oil, but you can use vegetable oil, it doesn’t matter. When the oil is nice and hot, add in your beef to brown.

Now take that garlic salt..

And give the meat a liberal sprinkling. This is entirely to taste. But if I had to take a guess, I’d say it was about a teaspoon, maybe two.

Now add in your chopped onion.

And stir occasionally to ensure even browning.

Now add in your red pepper strips and repeat the process of stirring so that they too can cook through.

(Ignore that rogue pepper under the pan. Slippery little sucker!)

In either your separate stew pot, or your slow cooker, start adding in your cans of soup. For 4 lbs of beef, I used 3 cans of Cream of Golden Mushroom soup. If you can’t find this soup, like I said earlier, add about a cup of beef broth at the same time.

Then add to your soup your can of Rotel, or your can of petite diced tomatoes and jalapeno.

And then stir it all together.

Next, we’re going to add the KEY ingredient to Carne G’s flavor: Cumin. Cumin is also known as Camino. It has a smoky flavor, and can be added to lots of different dishes to give them a unique flavor.

I added about a palmful, which, according to Rachel Ray, is roughly a tablespoon. Again, this is to taste, so if you loooove Cumin, add more. Entirely up to you.

At the same time, add more garlic salt, directly to this mixture. Again to taste, but I’d say roughly 2-3 teaspoons.

At this time, you can also add chili pepper, dried red pepper, black pepper, or any other seasoning you might fancy.

Stir.

Now add in your meat, onion, and red pepper mix, and stir.

Whoa baby.

Now, you want to let this baby simmer. We left it in the slow cooker for about 2 hours on high. If you added the meat, onion, and peppers directly to the mixture without browning first, you probably want to let it cook for at least 4 hours. On the stovetop, you’re probably looking at half an hour. It’s all about how quickly you want your food done. If you want to start this first thing in the morning on low, by dinner time, you’re going to have melt in your mouth Carne G. It’s just all in your patience level.

If at any point you feel the stew is a little thin, feel free to add flour to thicken.

It should be said that these tacos are a messy affair, but you don’t want thin gravy here.

When it’s ready, heat up some tortillas in the microwave, or my preferred method, wrapped in foil and in the oven. Add a spoonful of Carne G to the tortilla, and fold.

We paired our tacos with refried beans, and you could also side them with a salad. They’re also good just on their own.

And do like Maggy does, adding some sour cream, alongside an ice cold beer.

Oh yeah, it was good food, people.

Let me know your results!

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Post tags: beef, Jeremy, mexican, Rotel, stew, tacos

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