Mexican-Style Zucchini Tacos

So many thoughts running through my head! I am having a really, REALLY hard time focusing on any one thing so this post might be desultory and/or spastic. Desultory...now THAT'S a good SAT word.

This is the final installment in the taco trilogy. Hot weather provides tacit encouragement for the consumption of vegetables and I thought that this recipe would be appropriate...however, I failed to take into account the richness and lush texture that 2/3-cup of whipping cream would add. FAIL. This recipe is from Bayless' Mexico One Plate At A Time. As before, I consider this an excellent introductory book to the art of Mexican cuisine. If you happen to go looking for it, don't be perturbed by the gringo on the book's front cover. You might be obsessed with finding a Mexican cookbook by a Mexican but I assure you that Bayless and, by extension, this book are legit. The real deal.

INGREDIENTS

1.5 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 medium white onion, chopped
18 ounces of canned, whole tomatoes in juice, drained
2 garlic cloves, peeled and minced
2 large fresh poblano chiles (I used three because I really like the flavor of poblano chiles...Poblanos are large, fresh, green chiles with a vegetal flavor and mild spice...If you've ever had a chile relleno, you already had a poblano without knowing it!)
1 large ear corn, husked and kernels cut off (Canned corn would be fine, I suppose...use1 cup)
4 medium (1.5 pounds total) of zucchini (I used Mexican zucchini) cut into 1/2-inch cubes
3 tablespoons chopped fresh cilantro (or, if you can find it, leaves from 1 sprig fresh epazote)
2/3 cup crema, creme fraiche or heavy whipping cream
salt
Crumbled queso fresco or other crumbly fresh cheese

Pour oil into a large (12-inch) skillet and set over medium-high heat. Add the onion and cook until well browned...recipe says 8 minutes. While the onion is cooking, puree the tomatoes in a blender. Add the garlic to the browned onion and cook for a minute, stirring, then add the tomatoes. Reduce heat to medium-low, cover the skillet and cook for 5 minutes. Remove from heat.

Roast the poblanos over a gas flame or on a baking sheet 4 inches under a hot broiler, turning regularly until the skin is charred and blistered. Cover the peppers with a kitchen towel (or place into a bowl and cover with saran wrap) and wait 5 minutes. Rub off the blackened skin and pull out the stems and seed pods. Rinse BRIEFLY to remove any stray seeds and bits of skin. Slice into 1/4 inch strips.

Set the skillet with the tomato mixture over medium-high heat. Stir in the poblanos, corn, zucchini, cilantro, and the crema (or the substitution). Cook, stirring frequently until the zucchini is cooked through and the liquid is thick enough to coat the vegetables. This took me about 10 minutes. Season with salt.

Serve with warmed tortillas and the crumbled queso fresco. Done!

Time-Roughly 40 minutes, some of it unsupervised.

Food Cost-I'm not going to break this one down because I don't have the receipts in front of me but it's around 6 bucks total. Should make enough filling for ~20 tacos. About 30 cents per taco, 3 or 4 per person so $.90-$1.20 per serving

LOLCat This one is kind of a toughie...Click here for an explanation:

Potato-Chorizo Tacos with Simple Avocado Salsa

This is one of the easiest recipes that I've ever blogged. Very few ingredients, easy technique and the only specialized piece of equipment is a food processor. Mexican for noobs. From Mexico One Plate at a Time...which, by the way, is one of my favorite Mexican cookbooks. I'm gonna say it. I "heart" Rick Bayless. Ugh. I've defiled my moral core.

INGREDIENTS

12 Ounces of Yukon Gold or red-skin potatoes cut into 1/2 inch cubes
Salt
12 ounces of Mexican chorizo sausage, casing removed (my local Mexican grocer had both pork and beef chorizo...I went with pork...However, in the future, I will be making my own...the first ingredient is "pork salivary glands"...subsequent ingredients were equally unsavory)
1 small white onion, finely chopped...(yes, I usually let shoddy knife-work rule the day but I decided to actually do some fine chopping for this recipe...I just kept repeating to myself "take some pride in your damn work!")
4 ounces of tomatillos (you should be able to find these in any well stocked grocer...they are related to tomatoes, in the nightshade family, but are NOT unripe, green tomatoes...whenever you go to a Mexican restaurant and see the ubiquitous green salsa, tomatillos are involved...they have a bright, citrusy flavor)
1 clove of garlic, peeled
1 jalapeno pepper, stemmed
1 large ripe avocado
corn (NOT FLOUR, please God not pasty, flavorless, flour tortillas...actually, I read earlier today that flour tortillas are consumed in Northern Mexico...) tortillas

Bring a large pot of well-salted water to a boil. Add the cubed 'taters and simmer until they are tender...took me about 13 minutes. Drain.

Heat a large (12-inch) skillet and add the chorizo and onion. The chorizo will be sorta pasty so you'll have to break it up with the back of a spatula. Stir regularly. I cooked mine for about 10 minutes. You're looking for soft onions and for the sausage to be cooked through. When you've achieved this, look in the pan...if it looks hella greasy, pour out some of the oil. Just leave a light coating.

Add the pre-boiled potatoes and continue to cook. Stir regularly and mash the potatoes into the chorizo/onion mixture. Scrape the bottom of the pan to ensure that nothing burns. Cook for 8-10 minutes. The recipe says that the mixture will look like hash (not that kind, you druggie) and it really does. At this point, you can refrigerate the mixture if you're not immediately eating it or continue on and make the salsa.

The salsa is pathetically easy. Take the tomatillos, and remove the husks. Rinse them and rough chop them. Toss them into the bowl of your food processor. Rough chop the garlic and jalapeno and add to the food processor. Blend it all up.

Add the flesh of the avocado to the food processor and blend. (I should've made a video to show you how to process an avocado but here's a good link). You'll end up with something close to green, light mayonnaise. Season with salt.

Serve the filling in warmed tortillas with some of the avocado salsa on top. Done!

Time- ~35 Minutes from start to finish.
Food cost-
Chorizo- $1.99
Potatoes- $1.00
Tomatillos- $1.00
Avocado- $1.50
Incidentals- $0.50
Total- $6.00...So far, we've had 8 tacos....maybe another 4 left. So, fiddy cents per taco. 4 tacos per person for a decently sized meal.

LOLCat...

"Drunken" Pintos with Cilantro and Bacon

Mexican food with no beans? Difficult to imagine. My blog without beans? Difficult to imagine. I love beans. Not only are they cheap and delicious, they will be a staple of my month-long Mexi-centric cooking. This recipe is a variation of the slightly soupy Mexican pot beans but with extra flavoring. This recipe (crudely adapted) is from Rick Bayless's Mexican Kitche.

INGREDIENTS

1.25 cups of dry pinto beans (yes, you can use other beans)
6 slices of bacon
1 small white onion, diced
1 jalapaneno, stemmed, seeded and sliced
salt
2 tablespoons of tequila
1/4 cup roughly chopped cilantro (or more to taste)

Pick through the beans and remove any stones or sticks. Rinse the beans and remove any which float. Add the beans to a large pot, throw in 4 slices of bacon and add enough water to cover the beans by an inch. Bring to a simmer and cook until the beans are soft. This will take a few hours so be patient. Make sure that the water is a good .5-1 inch above the beans at all times.

When the beans are done, set aside, cooking liquid and all. Throw out the boiled bacon unless that's what you're into.

Chop up the remaining two slices of bacon into bite sized bits and fry up in a hot pan. When brown and crispy, remove the bacon but leave the drippings in the pan. Toss in the onion and sliced jalapeno. Get a nice deep, dark brown on the vegetables. This will take some time. Be patient and don't turn up the heat to accelerate the process. Don't want to burn the onions/jalapeno, ya know.

When the veggies are well browned, add the beans back into the pan and simmer for 20 minutes. The beans shouldn't be soupy but rather thick and stew-like. If the beans are soupy, continue to simmer until the your ideal consistency is achieved. Alternatively, you can just mash up some of the bean with the back of a fork. Season with salt and pepper.

Toss in the tequila and cilantro. Garnish with the reserved crispy bacon. Done!

Time: 2 hours of initial simmering, 25 minutes after that.
Food cost- Pathetically inexpensive. Not worth talking about.

LOLCat:

Shredded Beef Tacos with Chipotle-Tomato Sauce

I've been kinda bummed out with cooking...Just couldn't get inspired or excited, ya know? To fix the problem, I spent some quality time with my cookbook collection and found inspiration in the words and pictures of Rick Bayless and Diana Kennedy. For those of you who don't know, Bayless and Kennedy are the world's foremost Caucasian experts on Mexican cuisine. They've done it all, seen it all and, thankfully, have written it all down in a series of excellent cookbooks. In addition, finding quality purveyors of Mexican ingredients is quite easy in San Francisco so Mexican food is pretty easy to recreate. I am going to cook Mexican food until I am sick of it and long to taste the flavors of a different cuisine.

To begin, I decided on a series of tacos. The first is this shredded beef taco. I've taken a general recipe from Rick Bayless's Mexican Kitchen (it's a classic) and modified it to suit my tastes and what was available at the local upscale butcher. The recipe calls for pork shoulder but I found some terrific looking beef chuck so that's what I bought. And oh, this is my ghetto version. If you want to get fancy, you can roast the tomatoes and all that. But I wasn't feeling it and the ghetto version is still really tasty. Lastly, I'm terrible at re-warming corn (wait, you were gonna use flour? don't EVER return to my blog) tortillas...I guess they should be steamed but I don't have the patience. I wrap them in a damp paper towel and microwave them.



INGREDIENTS

1/2 of a white onion, diced
6 cloves of peeled garlic
2 pounds of boneless beef chuck, cubed
salt
3 chipotles in adobo (pretty easy to find...any well-stocked grocery store should have them)
10 ounces of diced, canned tomatoes
1/4 teapoon of freshly ground cloves
Olive Oil


Put 5 cloves of garlic, the meat, and the onion into a pot and cover with well-salted water. Bring to a simmer and skim off the nasty meat foam. You'll probably need to skim 3-4 times. Simmer until the meat is tender...It took me 1.75 hours. Allow the meat to cool (in the broth) and then shred with your fingers. Pour off the broth and set the shredded meat to the side. It's okay of there are a few onion/garlic bits mixed in with the meat.

For the sauce:
Blend the chipotles, the tomatoes, the remaining clove of garlic and the ground cloves. Just get it nice and smooth. Heat up a pan and add a few tablespoons of olive oil. You need to sear the sauce. Get the oil good and hot (add a drop of the tomato/chili sauce to see if it vigorously sizzles) and add the tomato/chili sauce. Here is a video:


After 5 minutes, the sauce will be thicker and darker in color. Don't let it burn. Add salt to taste. This step cooks the sauce and gets rid of the raw flavor.

Set the sauce aside. Heat up another pan and add a few tablespoons of oil. When the pan is hot, add the shredded meat. Allow it to brown a bit and then add in the sauce. Cook for a minute...just enough to let the flavors mingle. Meat is done!

Make tacos...garnishes might include pickled onions, fresh onion, fresh chopped cilantro, queso fresco, lime juice, any number of salsas...really, it's up to you. Have fun with it!

Time- Not much at all...2 hours to simmer meat, 10 minutes to make the sauce, 5 minutes to brown meat.

Food Cost-
Beef- 10 bucks...$5 per pound, two pounds total.
Chipotles- about a third of a can, 2 bucks per can, 66 cents.
Can of tomatoes- $1.25
Incidentals-50 cents.
Total- About 12 bucks. Not sure how many tacos I am going to get out of this one batch of meat.

LOLCat (they bring so much joy to my life...the "bukkit" is sort of a LOLCat insid):

Guajillo Braised Pork with Potatoes

My roommate bought a few appliances for the kitchen. The first is this:

Ahhh, music. It makes SUCH a difference.

And the second item is this:

A blender! hmmmm, what can I do with a blender that I couldn't do before? I know! Mexican chile sauces! Yes!

Soooooo.....the next three posts will feature Mexican food. No, I'm not going to cover a burrito with cheddar cheese or make enchiladas. My food will be, dare I say, a little more authentic. So what will I be cooking? Well, as most of you have probably figured out, I'm a rice fiend so I will definitely be making Mexican rice. In addition, I can't think about Mexican food without thinking about beans so I will have to make a pot of beans. And animal protein...must have flesh of some sort. Let's start there...

This recipe is adapted from Rick Bayless's Mexican Kitchen.

Here's what we're working with today...the neat-o ingredient of the day is guajillo chile. Here's the ingredient lineup:

Dried chiles have a really unique flavor and aroma...totally different from the vegetal flavor of fresh green chiles. I encourage you to check them out if you have a chance. This recipe isn't a bad place to start...it's really easy and teaches you the basic technique for dealing with nearly all dried chiles.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Grab 2 ounces of guajillo chiles

and place them on a cookie sheet. Put the chiles into the oven for 5-7 minutes. You just want to see the chiles puff up a bit and slightly darken.

Be sure to get a whiff of the chiles as they're toasting. Scrumptious, if I do say so myself.

Allow the chiles to cool until manageable and then destem and shake out all the seeds. Place the seeded, stemmed chiles into a bowl and cover with hot tap water.

Weigh the chiles down with a bowl so they stay submerged. Allow the chiles to soak for a half hour.

While the chiles are soaking, chop up 1.5 lbs of pork shoulder. Just cube it up into 1/2 inch chunks.

Roughly chop 3 garlic cloves. Peel and cube 4 medium potatoes. I am keeping mine submerged in water so they don't oxidize and brown.


When the chiles are soaked, drain and place in a blender along with 2 cups of canned, diced tomatoes and the chopped garlic. Blend well.

Strain through a medium mesh strainer. Discard what remains in the strainer.

You will be left with what looks like loose tomato sauce.


Heat up an oven proof pot and add oil. Add the pork to brown.

Don't overcrowd the pan. You want to be able to see the bottom of the pan in between the pieces of pork. If you have to, brown the pork in batches. Turn down the heat if the pork is browning too quickly or if you start detecting burned bits at the bottom of the pan.

When the pork is browned, you will be left with yummy brown bits at the bottom of the pan.

Add the chile/tomato mixture, a few heavy pinches of salt and stir to dissolve the tasty brown bits. Add the pork and bring to a boil.

Pop a lid on the pot and drop in the oven for 30 minutes.

After 30 minutes, add the potatoes, stir, and place back in the oven. Cook for another 30 minutes. The potatoes should be cooked through and the pork should be about cooked. Cook the pork for a little longer if it's still chewy. After that, adjust the seasoning and you're good to go!

So here's my dinner from tonight:
Beans with queso fresco, poblano rice and guajillo-braised pork with cilantro. Keep reading for the rice and beans recipes. Not shown, warm corn tortillas. For dessert:
Yogurt with blueberry syrup. And a frozen, Halloween-sized Kit-Kat bar. I LOVE frozen candy bars...

Time- 1 hour and 45 minutes, an hour is unsupervised.
Food Cost-
Pork- $3.50
Incidentals- $1.50
Total-$5.00 or about a dollar a serving.
Feeds 4-6, generously.

Basic Mexican Beans

Beans are cheap and incredibly healthy. Unfortunately, beans seem to have acquired a bad rap as being low-brow, peasant food. I'm not here to argue that point because beans HAVE formed the basis (along with maize) of the Mexican diet since pre-Columbian (you know, Christopher) times. I just think that obese Americans (read: Fatty McFatties) can do their bodies (and their pocketbooks!) a great service by eating more beans. Here's one way to chef up a pot of beans. It's ridiculously easy. And I DO mean ridiculously.

Take one pound of dried beans and sort through. Beans are an agricultural product so you might find some pebbles and stuff like that. Much better to find these BEFORE rather than during consumption, right? What kind of dried bean? I used mayocoba beans but you can also use pintos or black beans. There's a whole world of beans out there so feel free to experiment. Once your beans are picked over, rinse, drain and set aside.



Medium chop a large onion. Set aside. Take three thick pieces of bacon and saute in a pan. You want to render out the fat so you can saute the onions in the bacon fat. When the bottom of the pan is slick with pork grease, toss in the onion

and saute until golden. Say, 10 minutes. Please don't burn the onion.


When the onions are golden, toss in the beans and 2 quarts of water. Keep in mind that the pictures represent a quantity larger than what I'm giving instructions for...I made a triple batch so I could freeze some of the beans.

Add a few heavy pinches of salt. Bring to a boil and then lower heat to a bare simmer until the beans are smooth and creamy.

This will take a few hours. I tasted every half an hour until I thought the beans were finished. Add more salt to taste.

This was my afternoon snack:
Freshly cooked beans with crumbled queso fresco and hot sauce. Yummy! One of my favorites...

Since I made a HUGE batch, I also prepared a few baggies for the freezer:
Time-Approximately 2-3 hours, nearly all of it unsupervised.
Food Cost-
Beans- $1.00
Incidentals- $0.50
Total-$1.50/dirt cheap per serving.
Feeds lots of folks. Maybe 6-8 as a side dish.

Green Poblano Rice

Most of you guys and gals have had Mexican red rice, yes? Did you know that Mexican rice comes in other colors? I'll show you how to make an equally delicious Mexican green rice flavored with poblano peppers, cilantro and green onion tops. You'll need a blender but I'd imagine that most of you already have one...just be sure to throughly clean out the margarita mix before you try to make this. ;-)

This recipe is adapted from Rick Bayless's Mexican Kitchen.

Here's what we're working with:

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Take three small poblano peppers

and slice in half. Carefully remove the stem and seeds. Chop into rough chunks.

Place chunks into a sauce pan and add 2 cups of chicken broth. Simmer for ten minutes.

The peppers might release some spice and you might cough a bit but this is normal. Don't worry. Watch out when you're deseeding the peppers...you might want to wear latex gloves because my hands are BURNING right now...quite painful.

While the peppers/chicken broth are simmering, assemble the rest of the ingredients. Finely chop a small onion.

Finely mince 5 or so cloves of garlic. Grab 15 stems of cilantro...you're not looking for just the leaves, you also want the stems. Cut off the green tops from 3 green onions. Stuff the cilantro and green onion tops into a blender.

When the broth/peppers are done simmering, allow to cool for a few minutes. Then pour the contents into the blender (already pre-loaded with the cilantro/green onions) and blend until smooth. Then take this mixture and strain through a medium mesh strainer. You will be left with a verdant, emerald concoction.

Go ahead and have a taste, it won't kill you. Season generously with salt...I say generously because this mixture is going to be the seasoning for the rice. If the green mixture is underseasoned, so too will the rice.

Heat up an ovenproof, small saucepan and add oil. Add the onion and garlic and saute until fragrant and softened.

Add one cup of medium-grain rice. Saute until the rice looks chalky...it's all right if the rice browns a bit. If you're feeling lazy, don't saute the rice but be warned that your finished rice will be kinda clumpy. Add the green mixture and bring to a boil.

Cover the saucepan and place in the oven for 25 minutes.

Oven-baking rice can be tough. It took me a while to figure out exactly what combination of pan,liquid:rice ratio, oven temperature and time yielded the best finished product. Thus, I'm just telling you what I do...it might not work for you at all but at least you have a starting point.

After 25 minutes, remove the pan. Check the rice to see if it's cooked. If not, cook for another 5 minutes. If it's done, leave covered on top of the stove for five minutes. After the five minutes are up, fork it to loosen the grains and adjust the seasoning.


Done!
Time- 45 minutes, much of it unsupervised.
Food Costs-
Rice- $0.50
Peppers$1.00
Broth- $0.69
Incidentals-$0.50
Total- $2.69 or 68 cents per serving.
Feeds 4 as a side dish.