Category Archives: Mexican food

August 15, 2012

Chicken Tortilla Soup

You guys, I don’t know if you know, but chicken tortilla soup is amazing. It’s one of those things I’d only read about on other people’s blogs, maybe heard mentioned in passing, but I’d never paid it too much attention. Now, I am paying it a lot of attention. A LOT. You know when you’re eating fajitas/burritos/enchiladas and there are the really good bits of tortilla that have gone a bit soggy and chewy, and you’re really enjoying those but then you’ve got chicken and beans and salsa and cheese and sour cream all up your arm and even though it’s delicious you kind of wish it didn’t have to be up your arm? Well, now it doesn’t!

I decided this week I wanted to try this chicken tortilla soup of which people spoke, and I chose this recipe from The Pioneer Woman to base my own soup on. I made a few changes along the way, and here is my own version, which makes six to eight servings depending how big your bowls are. We’ll take this in stages, and you begin by roasting up some full of flavour chicken.

2 chicken legs, jointed into thighs and drumsticks, then skinned
1 tbsp rapeseed oil
1 1/2 tsp ground cumin
1 tsp homemade chili powder
1 tsp homemade smoked garlic powder
1/2 tsp sea salt

Heat the oven to 200C, and lay the chicken pieces on a wide sheet of tinfoil. Drizzle with the olive oil, then mix all the spices together in a bowl. Sprinkle two teaspoons of the spice mix over the chicken – reserve the rest for later. Rub the oil and spices into the chicken evenly, then wrap the tinfoil sheet up round it to form a little parcel. Roast for 20 to 30 minutes, depending on the size of the pieces – when you pierce the thickest part of the meat, right through to the bone, you shouldn’t see any pink running out of the chicken.

Tip the tinfoil parcel into a very shallow bowl, juices and all, then remove the meat from the bones and shred, using two forks. Mix well with the roasting juices and taste – add more seasoning if you need it. Phase one is complete.

Now we will begin the soup. Ingredients as follows:

1 tsp rapeseed oil
one small white onion
5 ears of baby sweetcorn (are they still called ears?)
1/2 red pepper
1/2 orange pepper
3 cloves of garlic
remaining spice mix from Phase One
shredded chicken from Phase One
400g tin chopped tomatoes
10 jalapeno slices
chicken stock cube
800ml boiling water
2 tbsp tomato puree
3 blocks frozen spinach
400g tin kidney beans
salt, to taste

First, prepare all your ingredients so they look all nice, like this:

Then crush the garlic on top of the onion, to make it easy to scrape into your soup pot.

Heat the oil over a medium high heat, then add the onion, garlic, baby sweetcorn and peppers. Stir continually until the onion begins to look transparent, then add the spice mix and stir to coat.

Now add the shredded chicken and mix well. Add the jalapenos, tomatoes, stock cube and hot water – I refilled the tomato can twice to measure the water. Be careful if you’re going to do this, boiling water + tin can = potential for fairly serious burns and then possibly scalds as you drop the can of boiling water on your foot.
Bring the soup to the boil, reduce the heat to a simmer and leave for twenty minutes.

Add the spinach, tomato puree and kidney beans, then simmer for a further ten minutes. After this time, turn off the heat and cover the soup while you prepare the toppings. Your soup is ready, subject to a further drop of salt if you think it needs it.

The toppings for your soup, as demonstrated in that middle photo, will be known as Phase Three. You can choose from (or use all of) the following:

flour or corn tortillas (I had flour tortillas in the freezer, but corn have more flavour)
very thinly sliced red onion
chopped coriander
grated cheese
sour cream (actually I used half fat creme fraiche, shh)
salsa (um… red pepper relish…)
lime wedges

Roll the tortillas (allow one per person) into a cylinder and then slice through it to give strips. Half the longest strips, too. Now, you can choose to fry a few of these strips up for a crunchy treat to go with the soup, which I did for reasons of research and development only.

Heat a layer of oil in a frying pan until shimmering and almost smoking. Drop some tortilla strips in there and let them sizzle until browned, flipping them carefully when you start to see the edges change colour. You don’t need them to be very browned, just kind of golden and crispy. Remove (also carefully) and drain on kitchen towel before serving.

Now, ladle the soup into bowls and drop in several tortilla strips. Stir them through the soup so they can absorb all the flavours, then add a squeeze of lime juice and your chosen toppings. If there is a group of you, you could leave the toppings on the board and let people choose their own – it’ll save you some work, too.

This soup was really off the chain, I couldn’t believe how much I enjoyed it and that I had never made it before. It’s like all the good things about Mexican food in one big bowl with less mess. Of course, if you think the mess is the fun part, you might not appreciate this quite so much… Also, the next time you’re making chili and can’t be bothered waiting for it to thicken, serve it as tortilla soup. Done.

9 comments | tags: cooking, soup, tortilla soup | posted in Dairy free, Mexican food, Original recipes, Other people's recipes, Spicy food

May 18, 2012

Home Made Chili Powder: The Conclusion

By Rock Salt

Well, Wednesday’s post showed the process of smoking and/or drying chilis at home, for eventual use in a special home made chili powder. Today I’ll show the other six ingredients that went into the final product, and give the recipe in case you want to try it yourself.

Another shout out to Jillian at Whisky Drinkin’ Chimney Sweep for putting the idea in my head in the first place.

When we finished up on Wednesday, we had three different varieties of chili powder, waiting to be mixed together. I like the photo of them so much that I’m going to post it again here:

The final products; clockwise from top right: chipotles, bird eye chilis, long red chilis

You may remember that I also smoked a clove of garlic, while I had the smoker on the go. Here that is, too:

It’s not as full-on in terms of colour as the last time I smoked garlic, but it was a lot easier to handle since I just left the head whole and put a slit in the edge of each clove, instead of peeling them all and trying to balance them on the smoker rack. The garlic is cooked through as well as smoked, and I used a very sharp knife to cut two cloves into thin slices, which I put on a tray lined with tinfoil and sprayed with oil. I dried these in an oven heated only to 50C, for about an hour and a half, until well dehydrated.

At the same time, I dried out some lime zest. You probably ge the idea of how – I finely grated it onto the same tinfoil lined sheet, and baked at 50C. It only took half an hour to go from your standard lime zest to a really vibrantly coloured and crumbly version of itself.

Those pictures aren’t really the best, but I think you can see the difference in colour, if not texture.

This was the end of the dehydrating – for now, at least. It’s oddly satisfying, I’ll definitely be looking out for an opportunity to do it again. We are up to five ingredients out of nine now – but what are the last four? Well, the first one is another kind of chili – I think they are cascabel chilis, though the packaging gives no indication and I’m basing that on some quick Googling. They are small, round chilis, and they rattle when you shake them because they’re absolutely crammed full of seeds – check this out:

All those seeds came from six of the chilis!

I de-seeded and ground these up to a powder, too. The next thing to go in the spice grinder was all the thyme that I’d put in the bottom of my roasting tin as I dried out my chipotles on the first day. The thyme was extremely dry and infused with Guinness, which I’d been spraying over the chilis to add flavour, and hopefully with some of the smoke and spice from the chilis themselves. I stripped all the leaves from the stems and powdered them. Finally, I used two ingredients straight from the jar – some ground sumac berries, for a fruity, slightly tobacco-ey flavour, and ground cumin, because I’ve often heard it said that a good chili must have cumin in it.

So, let’s recap those ingredients!

As you can see, I ground all the ingredients to a fine powder, except the sumac and cumin which already were ground. Then I scooped it all into a wee jar and shook it like a Polaroid picture until everything was mixed. I had a sniff – it was fragrant, but not in a floral way, in a much more powerful POW kind of way. I had a wee taste. As I remarked on my Facebook, it is hard to properly taste chili powder, but I felt like I could taste the garlic, lime and some kind of cumin-thyme herby combo alongside the smokiness, before the inevitable heat really took hold and I had to reach for a spoonful of yoghurt to calm the situation down.

I’m glad that I de-seeded most of the chilis. While I enjoy spicy food, the point of making my own chili powder was flavour over pure heat. I didn’t want to drown out the more subtle tastes, and I hope I’ve managed to maintain a good balance. I sent half of my chili powder to my Foodie Penpal – you can see what she thinks of it later in the month. For now, I’m trying to think of the perfect way to debut my home-made chili powder.

Any suggestions?

20 comments | tags: chili powder, cooking, dehydrating, home made chili powder | posted in Condiments, Dairy free, Healthy, Mexican food, Original recipes, Spicy food, Vegan, Vegetarian

May 16, 2012

Home Smoked, Home Dried Chilis

By Rock Salt

So, you can buy chili powder at any supermarket and probably even a lot of corner shops. There are many such shops very near my flat. On the other hand, you can spend two days smoking, drying and powdering chilis in your own kitchen, then adding other smoked/dried/powdered ingredients until you have something a lot more interesting. It’s up to you…

I first got the idea for this project from Jillian at Whisky Drinkin’ Chimney Sweep, whose every blog post is frankly an inspiration to me. I made a much, much smaller batch than she did, but I did have my own take on proceedings – namely, starting with some fresh ingredients as well as ready dried ones. It’s hard to know where to begin telling the story of all the ingredients and the individual processes for each one, because there’s a lot to it. It’s kind of an epic tale, which requires being split into two parts.

I’ll begin with the chilis, given that they are the ingredients with the most work and they’re the star of the show. Don’t tell the rest of the ingredients, especially the ones that came out of a jar – they already have a bit of an inferiority complex. The fresh chilis that I started with were three each of long red chilis and short, fat green chilis – these might have been jalapenos, they were just labelled as ‘green chilis’. I’ll use jalapeno to describe them, unless anyone has any objections, and furthermore I’ll call them chipotles after smoking. A chipotle (if you’re not sure, you say it chi-pote-lay) is nothing more than a smoked jalapeno, after all.

I read up a bit on the best way to smoke your own chilis, and I found that hot smoking is tricky because if you apply too much heat to the peppers, the flesh will cook and get soft and mushy. The home smoker that I have sits on the stove top, and having an electric hob makes it really tricky to regulate the heat properly, so I was concerned about softening and ruining them. To try to compensate, I started by partly drying the chilis in a low, low oven. I sliced them open, removed the seeds from the green ones, and baked at just 50C for an hour and a half. The skins started to toughen and curl a little round the cut edges, while the flesh stayed firm. A good beginning.

I then fired up the smoker. For a bit more information about the smoker I have, see this post about smoked pheasant, this post about smoked garlic, this post about smoked chicken and ham terrine or this post about hot smoked salmon. I filled the tray with broken down pine cones, dried thyme and some chives which were so far past their best that they had forgotten what it was like, and could only remember the dark dankness of the salad drawer. I thought the soggy chives would help produce more smoke. I’m not really sure if I was right. I sprayed all this dry fodder with some Guinness, hoping to add more flavour to the smoke and, therefore, the chilis. The first photo shows the smoker box, and the second the result of half an hour of smoking time. Notice the change in colour of the green chilis.

When I checked them at half an hour, I was concerned about how soft the chilis were getting. I decided to take them out and fully dry them at this stage, sacrificing smokey flavour for the right texture. With the oven still at 50C, I dried all the chilis on a bed of thyme leaves, with occasional sprays of Guinness for added flavour, for about an hour and a half.

After this time I took out the red chilis, which were almost dry. While the smoker was on, I’d thrown in a clove of garlic to smoke – I thought I may as well make the most of it, if my flat was going to smell of barbecue for a week anyway… At the ninety minute mark, I removed the garlic and turned off the heat, then put the red chilis back in the smoker and closed the lid. They sat inside the smoker overnight, with no heat, to absorb what flavour they could.

As for the thicker jalapenos, I left them in the oven overnight, with the door propped open to allow more air to circulate. Yes, this meant leaving the oven on overnight. I would never recommend that anyone leave an oven unattended. I don’t always practise what I preach.

In the morning, this is what I found:

The one on the bottom left is dried. You cannot argue with that. It is dah-ried-ah. The other two were still a little too soft, so I took the decision to put them back in. I had a clever plan; I heated the oven to 200C, put the two not quite ready chipotles, plus the red chilis AND four bird eye chilis that were partly dried from hanging out in the fridge for a couple of weeks, inside on the thyme bed, sprayed with Guinness and left them for ten minutes before turning the oven off and wedging the door with the wooden spoon again. You will notice that while I was willing to have the oven on while I was asleep, I drew the line at leaving it on while I was out of the house.

When I came home, I found these:

Again, those green ones look absolutely cremated, but the truth is that they’ve just been blackened by the higher heat, they are still usable. Alright, a little over-dried, granted, but usable. I used my brand new electric spice grinder to turn all the chilis into powder, doing just one variety at a time so I could compare the colour, flavour and smell of the different chilis.

The red chilis were thoroughly dried without the same loss of colour the green chilis experienced

The chipotles broken up into the spice grinder…

…and after – that dust is potent stuff, do NOT inhale.

The final products; clockwise from top right: chipotles, bird eye chilis, long red chilis

As I mentioned, I took the seeds out of the jalapenos before smoking and drying, but I left the long red chilis as they were (there were hardly any seeds in them anyway) and also retained the seeds in the bird eye chilis. Therefore, the bird eye chili powder was the hottest, with a sharp, searing flavour. The red chilis really benefitted from their overnight stay in the smoker, and the powder had a full, rich, smoky flavour with a little sweetness and a pleasant warmth more than a heat. The chipotle powder was the fruitiest, with a medium tingling heat and more aromatic flavour.

I will pause to allow you to scoff at my highfalutin’ descriptions of those flavours.

Now that we’ve done that, I think this is a good time to take a break from this tale of two-day chili powder. On Friday we will have the second installment, which will show the other six ingredients and give the recipe for the finished chili powder. It’s a doozy.

20 comments | tags: chili powder, chilis, cooking, dehydrating, drying, smoking | posted in Condiments, Dairy free, Gluten free, Healthy, Mexican food, Original recipes, Other people's recipes, Spicy food, Vegan, Vegetarian

July 23, 2011

YotB Part Twenty-Five: Remember When I Made Bento?

By Rock Salt

It seems a long time since I posted any bento, and I do feel quite ashamed that the project I was so devoted to initially fell so hard by the wayside. I still love my bento box and accessories, but I’ve changed my lunchtime habits and somehow that changed how I saw bento making and eating. This may be a temporary state of affairs, or it may not; I’m not going to give myself a hard time over a packed lunch, that’s for sure.

Before my bento adventures tailed off, I made this one, with the rather striking component of Yucatan-style slow roasted pork. Here is the bento in its entirety:

I kept the other ingredients in the bento simple, because the pork is so strongly flavoured, and had mini pulled pork pittas with a side of asparagus and a fruit salad (which was just banana and kiwi fruit) for afterwards. Here is a closer shot of the pork so you can begin to really appreciate its colour, though sadly I can’t share the gorgeous (and yes, garlicky) aroma.

This pork recipe involves a bit of effort up front, but once it’s in the oven it’s low maintenance so you can get on with whatever it is you want to get on with while it cooks and fills your house with a spicy, savoury fragrance. The effort begins with finding annatto seeds, which I picked up easily at my shop of choice for all things Mexican and many things from other places round the world, Lupe Pintos. There are branches in Glasgow and Edinburgh and I’d recommend taking a look, though make sure there’s plenty in your wallet because there will be oh so many things you want to buy. They also have an online store – very dangerous. I was very focussed on this occasion and bought only the annatto seeds… and some mate tea bags… but that was all! It so happened that I’d bought ancho chilis and pimenton, two of the other ingredients in the recipe, on previous trips to Lupe Pintos, so I was all set to get started.

The spice paste is truly vibrant, with a bright red-orange colour from the annatto seeds. I’m not saying it looks pretty, particularly not when piled up on top of a hunk of raw meat, which is how I seem to have chosen to display it, but the colour is remarkable. Get your nose too close to it and you’re in for a surprise, too; the unwary sniffer may go away with fewer nose hairs than previously. The coriander, pimenton (smoked Spanish paprika), orange, beer and chilis fight it out in a battle for smell supremacy, though after five hours in the oven together they seemed to have resolved their differences and be living in blissful spicy harmony.

I’ve never cooked anything like this pork before, it has masses of flavour and the slow roasting means its moist and tender; it took mere minutes to shred the whole shoulder of pork with a fork, just a little pressure on the meat and it fell apart most enthusiastically. You can then add as much or as little of the cooking juices as you like back into the shredded meat, to intensify the flavour.You end up with a LOT of pork, so make this for a group or if you have the BFG coming for dinner.

Leave a comment | tags: bento, cooking, packed lunch, roast pork | posted in Dairy free, Mexican food, Other people's recipes

September 13, 2010

Marinated Pork and Black Pudding Stew

By Rock Salt

This dish is based on a traditional Spanish stew, fabada. ‘Based on’ is once again the key phrase, but it’s a nice stew in its own right – I just don’t know what to call it that’s a bit snappy and exciting. Suggestions welcome!

It was also the product of having some black pudding in the fridge that had to be used up, but having little by way of funds to buy additional ingredients. I bought a pack of two pork loin steaks, which worked out at about 60p each, and had one last night (as you will have seen if you’re up to date) and combined the other with the black pudding and some flageolet beans, herbs, water and a bit of veg to make this rich stew. Tonight I had a couple of brainwaves about how to add other ingredients that I had round the house to make the stew even more interesting. Sometimes I have to trick myself into looking forward to eating something. I’m kind of fickle, and can go off the idea of a meal that I’ve made the day before. I think that part of it is about putting in time to preparing the food; quite often, if I just have to heat something in a pot or the microwave then I feel like I haven’t really cooked, and I’m not satisfied by the meal. So, to sidestep that problem, I decided to serve the stew in two ways, even though it was just me for dinner.

The first thing I decided to do was serve it up with the makings of fajitas; corn tortillas, refried beans, lettuce, tomato, cheese and yogurt instead of sour cream. I debated with myself about the cheese for a while, given that I’m avoiding eating it (unfortunate that I have some in the fridge, really). I allowed myself a little, and I’m hoping it won’t have too many ill-effects… The part that was going to take the time for this part of dinner was making the refried beans. I didn’t do them ‘properly’, because I used the wrong kind of beans and, even worse, got them out of a tin, as well as not adding fresh garlic or onion. Still though, they turned out pretty good, and I’ll be making them again to a more authentic recipe another time. The second half of dinner was stew baked in a corn tortilla and topped with an egg. I thought the creamy, richness of the egg yolk would really set off the black pudding in the stew – black pudding and egg is such a killer combo. This baked dish was sadly better in thought that in practise. I had the oven up too high, I think, because the egg yolk cooked through while the white was still a bit raw. I think a lower heat might have let the egg white set before the yolk was hard. It was nice enough but definitely far from perfect. Doesn’t look great, for that matter; at the high temperature the edges of the tortilla were really crisp and dark. It tasted good and not burnt, you can take my word for it. Still, a nice idea, though another time maybe I’d leave the tortilla out altogether and just bake up the stew with an egg on top. I also wonder if salting the egg before cooking was the wrong thing to do, I did notice that the yolk cooked unevenly…

So, to the recipes. First the stew. It’s not so much a recipe as a suggestion of things to put in a pot together. I started off with the pork, which I marinated in a rub of tomato paste, crushed sumac berries, chipotle Tabasco, lemon juice, paprika and plenty of garlic. A great big clove of garlic. Not as big as the cloves I got the time I opened a bulb of garlic to find that it was only split into about four cloves, that was mammoth garlic and wouldn’t have looked out of place in a vintage horror film, towering over black and white footage of women screaming and holding their hand to their mouths while the rest of the city more sensibly runs away from the garlic. Vampires look out for that one, that’s all Im saying. The pork was marinated for about seven hours before I cut it into bite-sized pieces, ready for the pot. Before I added te pork, though, I sauteed some thinly sliced onion in garlic oil and added several stems worth of thyme leaves. Then I added the pork and two thick slices of black pudding, cut into quarters. This black pudding would break up as the stew cooked to make a lovely thick base. I cooked the pork until browned all over, then added enough water to cover the meat and reduced the heat to a simmer. I added some lemon juice, sugar, saffron and a stem of rosemary, then left to cook gently for half an hour. After this time I added a diced yellow pepper and a can of flageolet beans. Flageolet beans were what I had in the cupboard, a more authentic addition would have been butter beans. I also added more black pudding, four thick slices cut into sixths, and stirred through. I let this simmer for ten minutes, which left the pepper soft but the black pudding still in chunks, if softened round the edges. I should really have waited and added the pepper at the last minute to maintain its crunch, but never mind. I fished out the rosemary stem, though the leaves were distributed through the stew so I couldn’t do much about that; I did find myself picking them out as I went along, though they wouldn’t have done me any harm if I’d just stopeed being so fussy and eaten them. I found that the black pudding meant that I didn’t have to season the stew much at all, though I just kept an eye on the water levels to keep it a good thickness. Again, it’s not an especially attractive dish, but they can’t all be works of art.

I made the refried beans thuswise: I heated two tablespoons of garlic oil in a wok until it was shiny and loose enough to coat the bottom of the wok. I drained a can of kidney beans – I bought value beans, because you often find that they’re already a bit mushy or bashed up. Well, that and the fact that I’m on a ‘week before pay day’ budget, so it worked out pretty well. I tipped the beans into the oil, stirred through and mashed with a potato masher. I then added four tablespoons of water to the beans and stirred through. This left a very watery mixture, unsurprisingly I suppose. I wasn’t too concerned about the consistency at this early stage, because I was going to leave them over the heat while I seasoned them, so I knew they’d thicken. To the beans, I added two teaspoons of lemon juice, about three quarters of a teaspoon of smoked sea salt, six dashes of chipotle Tabasco and eight dashes of jalapeno Tabasco. I’m trying to think of something I could have added that could be describe as a dot, and then I could make a morse code joke. I’m struggling, so let’s consider the joke made. It was hilarious, you really loved it. I’ve been watching Derren Brown, it’s working out really well for me…