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Archive for meals
August 8, 2010 at 11:14 pm · Filed under food, meals, pasta
See, this isn’t called “Cheesy Chicken Pasta,” it’s Queso Chicken Pasta. That means it’s Mexican food that had a baby with a baked pasta dish. And a delicious baby it is.
It’s from Evil Shenanigans, which are the best kind of shenanigans. I’m pretty sure the only thing I changed was that I used a chipotle pepper instead of a jalapeno (because that’s what I had on hand, and also anything smoky is more delicious than not-smoky) – that and halving it so it was suitable for two people and a bit of leftovers, rather than two people and enough leftovers for a small army.
Queso Chicken Pasta
Ingredients
enough pasta for 2 people
1 tsp vegetable oil
1 small onion, diced
1 clove garlic, minced
1/2 a chipotle in adobo (seeds scraped out because I’m a wuss… leave them in if you’re more B.A. than me), minced
1/4 tsp cumin
a few coriander seeds, maybe cracked under the flat of a knife blade if you can keep them from rolling long enough
1/2 tbsp flour
2/3 cup milk
1/2 tsp salt
1 1/2 tbsp cream cheese – which is, helpfully, just about the amount in one of those single-serving packets you can buy
3 oz “nacho taco” shredded cheese blend
1/4 cup Ro-Tel tomatoes (I know, this is a pain – it’s about half a small can, if I remember correctly), drained
1 cup cooked chicked, shredded
Method
Preheat the oven to 350.
Cook the pasta 2 minutes less than the package dictates.
Drain it and set it aside.
Spray a smallish casserole dish with cooking spray.
Get a pot and heat the oil in it over medium heat.
Throw in the onion, garlic, and chipotle and saute for 3 minutes.
Add in the cumin, coriander, and salt, and continue sauteeing for another 2 minutes.
Next, add the flour and cook, stirring, for another 3 minutes, making sure that all the flour is incorporated.
Pour the milk in, slowly, whisking the whole time, until smooth.
Simmer the mixture until thickened.
Turn off the heat (but I left it on the same element, so some residual heat is all well and good).
Whisk in the cream cheese and 2/3 of the shredded cheese, until anything of a cheese nature is melted.
Stir in the tomatoes.
Pour your pasta (remember your pasta? You had some, a long time ago) into the casserole dish.
Add the sauce and the chicken, and mix everything so that it’s all nicely coated.
Top with the remaining shredded cheese.
Bake for 20 – 30 minutes, or until bubbly and melty and glorious.
July 11, 2010 at 11:28 pm · Filed under food, meals
I don’t really have much to say about this one, partly because it was a while ago, and partly because I got 4 hours of sleep last night thanks to the worst drive home ever – an hour and a half drive turned into a 4-hour ordeal involving both getting pulled over AND a major-league flat tire, compounded by the tow truck that AAA called for us not showing up, so they had to send their own… an hour and a half later. Matt dealt with the tire situation today, and I did all our regular weekend stuff like grocery and laundry. So I don’t really have month-old chicken (not like that, though) on the brain. P.S. it’s also hot here. So all I’m going to do is post the recipe and call it a night, if that’s ok with everyone.
It’s from… errr, crap. It appears I mislabeled it. It is not from where I thought it was from, so I have no idea. I’m sorry, original owner of this recipe! I’m not trying to plagiarize! If you read this, let me know so I can put your link up here.
Oven-Roasted Mexican Chicken
Ingredients
enough chicken for 2 people – I used these little mini chicken breast parts, don’t know what they’re really called, but that’s why they look all wee
1/3 tsp hot sauce
1/3 tsp pepper
1/3 tsp salt
2/3 tsp dried oregano
2/3 tsp mustard
2/3 tbsp chili powder
2/3 tbsp worcestershire sauce
3 tbsp olive oil
juice of half a lime
2 cloves garlic, minced
Method
Whisk all ingredients except the chicken together in a bowl.
Put the chicken in a big ziploc bag and pour the marinade in as well.
Seal it up and smoosh it around until you’ve got everything nicely coated.
Put it in the fridge for anything between 1 and 24 hours.
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees.
Create a little contraption out of a baking sheet and a wire rack (I used the rack from my roasting pan standing on a regular baking sheet lined with tinfoil for easy cleanup) and arrange your chicken on the rack.
Bake for 30 – 40 minutes or until the chicken is done.
Seriously, they’re not just all shriveled up! THEY ARE SUPPOSED TO BE THAT SIZE!
P.S., also, I just baked a tart that was a complete and utter failure. I was going to take it in to our new-office-warming party tomorrow, but I guess they’ll just have to survive without it.
July 3, 2010 at 9:14 pm · Filed under food, meals
I have a really hard time remembering to pronounce the word “pasties” correctly when referring to food. The first syllable is “past” as in, well, past. These are not stripper attire, they are hearty portable meals! When I was eating it, I was all “Look at me, I’m a Welsh miner!”
The recipe is from Taste and Tell. Not only did I halve it to make 2, I took the good advice of that recipe when considering the size to make these little numbers – they had been enormous in the original, so I made one enormous one for Matt, and two half-ones, one for me and one for leftovers (by which I mean Matt ate it later). I think I’d like to add more seasoning the next time I make this, but the crust is excellent. It’s essentially the same as the pie crust I make, which, not to brag, but it’s awesome – except instead of fruity pie juices seeping into it, it’s got savoury meat juices seeping into it. Dreamy.
Beef and Potato Pasties
Ingredients
1/2 lb ground beef (although I bet you this would be great with chopped up hunks of steak, too)
1 medium russet potato, diced
1 medium onion, diced
1/2 tsp salt
a few good cranks of pepper
2 cups all-purpose flour
10 tbsp (1 1/4 sticks) butter, cubed – this looks like a lot but you are essentially making 2 pie crusts, and 5 tbsp per crust isn’t that much, and if you’re only eating a small pasty, you’re having half that. So relax, cowpoke.
Method
Preheat oven to 350.
Mix beef, potato, onion, salt, and pepper together in a bowl.
In another bowl, combine the flour, salt, and butter with a pastry cutter, until it’s more or less at the coveted “coarse meal” stage. Bonus: one really buff arm.
Pour in 1/3 cup ice water (or at least really cold water, ok, it’s not like I’m going to come to your house and check) and combine until you get a doughball.
Separate the doughball into however many pasties you’re going to make; I made one large and two small, but your mileage may vary.
Flatten each separated piece of dough into a disk, and throw them in the fridge for 10 minutes.
On a lightly floured piece of waxed paper or whatever you like to use, roll out each disk to be… some size. For a full-sized pasty, a Welsh-miner-sized pasty, roll it out to 10″ diameter. Or do some other size depending on your wants and needs.
Plop a loaf-shaped unit of beef-and-potato mixture into the center of each disk.
Bring the two sides of the dough together around the filling, making a seam on top, and pinch shut.
Place them on a silpat- or parchment-lined baking sheet and bake for 1 hour and 15 minutes, or until golden brown.
May 29, 2010 at 5:46 pm · Filed under food, meals, soup/stew
Recently, a guy I work with became a father. So a bunch of us decided it would maybe help him and his wife out a bit if we brought them food they could freeze – or even not freeze, there’s nothing wrong with just eating it right away. This is what I made for them, although I don’t think it needs to be reserved for major life milestones like having a baby. In fact, I had to debate with myself over maybe saving a little of this for myself. I didn’t do it – what do you take me for, taking food out of the mouths of babies? Or at least their parents? COME ON – but I thought about it.
The recipe is from My Kitchen Addiction, although apparently it gets around – it went through at least 2 iterations before she got it, and here I am iterating it a bit more. Not a lot, though. I mean, I forgot that I needed an onion, so I didn’t have one, so I decided what it really needed was some garlic instead. Can’t go wrong. And I did huck a bunch of it in a blender at the end (because my birthday had not yet occurred, so Matt had not yet given me an immersion blender, whee, best husband in town!), but I don’t know if I really should have done that… I feel like it probably froze better that way rather than if it was all liquid, but, y’know, whatever. Most people who make this will probably be eating it right away, so its freezing properties are kind of moot. The picture at the top is pre-blender; at the bottom is post-blender. Oh, er, wait, maybe I am iterating more than a little. I forgot that the original called for andouille sausage, obviously, but my grocery store didn’t have them and I’m still a little too nervous to go into MEATLAND, so I went with the never-a-bad-choice chorizo. And finally, I used some of my homemade veggie stock instead of chicken stock, basically because I had it on hand.
Cajun Bean Soup
Ingredients
1 chorizo sausage, diced (about 8 oz, anyway)
olive oil if necessary
1 cup celery, diced (that was about 3 ribs, for me)
1 cup red and green peppers, diced (about half a pepper of each colour, but again, your mileage may vary)
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tbsp Tony’s or other Cajun seasoning… are there other kinds? I live in Boston, I don’t know anything
about 1 1/2 cups dry pink beans, soaked, drained, and rinsed (I really need to start writing these right away afterwards, because I can’t remember exactly how much I used… I just used up the rest of the bag I had in the cupboard), or 3 15-oz cans
~3 cups vegetable stock
Method
Over medium-high heat, cook the chorizo in your big soup pot, for about 5 minutes or until you wouldn’t die of eating it.
Scoop it out to drain on paper towels, but leave the paprika oil that rendered out of it in the pot.
If you need to add more oil to the pot, add it, otherwise just go ahead and saute the celery and bell peppers with the Tony’s in the chorizo grease.
Saute for about 4 minutes, then add the garlic and saute for another minute.
Add the veggie stock and deglaze the pot, if you hadn’t already.
Throw in the beans.
Bring to a boil, then turn it down to medium-low and let it simmer for 30 minutes.
At this point, if you’re going to puree any of it, go for it – I put about 3 ladles of it into the blender, but if I’d had my immersion blender I’d have just given it a few whirls around the pot. Blend as much or as little as you’d like, depending on what texture you’re going for.
Stir the chorizo back in, and serve!
May 23, 2010 at 7:46 pm · Filed under food, meals, pasta
This is one of those recipes that makes your house smell really good. I mean, it tastes good too, that should be obvious, but you have to roast some garlic and tomatoes, and that is something scented-candle companies should look into, because I bet they’d make a fortune. Except that having one of those candles going would kind of get everyone mad at you. Think about it. Someone would come into your house and smell that, and think you’ve got something delicious cooking up for them, and then when you pull out whatever non-roasting-garlic-and-tomatoes thing you have instead (which I’m sure is still good, but if you were cooking something that already smelled of this, you wouldn’t need a candle, now, would you?) they couldn’t help but be disappointed. So maybe I’m not a genius of the candle industry. Whatever. Moving on.
I got the recipe from Joelen’s Culinary Adventures, which, sidebar, it’s easy to get the wrong idea when you see the “joelens” username on the Foodgawker picture, or even if you’re just looking at the URL, because you might think it’s a dude who likes to take pictures: Joe Lens. It’s not. If you click on the link you can discover your error right away, because she helpfully provides her picture to set right the constantly baffled (i.e. me). I understand that this is a take on a restaurant favourite. Having never been to the restaurant in question, I really couldn’t say how it compares – I’d definitely order it in a restaurant, though! Of course, not having the original to go on, I felt pretty free to make changes and substitutions. Sadly, one of these changes was ditching the mushrooms. I can disguise peppers pretty easily, but it’s hard to hide a mushroom without making a mushy horror out of the thing. I bet it would have been mind-blowing with them in. I was also unable to get any sundried tomatoes – we were having kind of a lousy trip to the grocery store, and I didn’t want to draw attention to my expensive and possibly objectionable food tastes by making a detour over to the sundried tomato aisle (hahaha. I mean “the sundried tomato square foot of shelf space”). So instead, I bought a regular tomato, and while I didn’t have all day to dry it in the oven, or a food dehydrator to do it in seconds, I did roast it until it was moderately wrinkly and 100% delicious, so while my version is probably a bit milder-tasting than the original, it’s still very good – and I always think I like sundried tomatoes more than I actually do, anyway. I get all excited about them and then I realize that I don’t honestly love them all that much… once I’ve bitten into one.
Pasta Milano
Ingredients
3 slices bacon
about 1 person’s worth of chicken (I used 2 thin little breast cutlets), diced
4 cloves garlic
1 tomato, cut into 8ths
1 cup chicken broth
1 cup half and half
enough farfalle for 2 people
parmesan cheese – you might need 1 cup or you might need less, but have at least a cup on hand just in case
basil
Method
Preheat oven to 450.
With them still in their skins, chop the tops off the garlic cloves so a bit of the clove itself is exposed.
Arrange the garlic cloves and the tomato pieces on a baking sheet and drizzle some olive oil on them. I also cranked a little salt onto the tomatoes to draw the liquid out a little more.
Roast for 10 – 15 minutes.
Turn the things so that a different face of them is touching the pan.
Put them back in for another 10ish minutes.
Meanwhile, or whatever, cook the bacon.
When it’s done, take it out to drain on a paper towel.
Drain off most of the bacon grease from the pan, just leaving enough to cook the chicken in.
I think you’ll have guessed what comes next – cook the chicken in the bacon-greased pan.
Take the chicken out when it’s cooked – you can put it with the bacon. By the way, at some point, break the bacon up into bits.
Don’t turn the pan off when you take the chicken out, though – just toss the garlic (squeezed out of its papery husks, of course), tomatoes, and chicken stock in there and give it a nice old stir to deglaze the pan and smash up the garlic and tomatoes a bit.
Bring to a boil.
Turn it down to a simmer and let it go for 10 minutes.
Stir in the half-and-half.
Bring it back up to a boil again.
At some point in the meanwhile, cook the pasta according to package directions.
Once both the sauce and pasta are done, mix the two together in a baking dish.
Sprinkle the parmesan cheese over the top.
Garnish with basil.
Sling it into the oven for 5 – 7 minutes or until the cheese is melty and the sauce is bubbling.
May 14, 2010 at 10:59 pm · Filed under food, meals
I made a risotto! I did the whole stand-over-it-and-stir thing! The consistency was good and the rice was toothsome and tender (how’s that for a turn of phrase?), and the only drawback was that when you cook something you hear Gordon Ramsay shout about all day long on Hell’s Kitchen, you imagine him standing over your shoulder belittling you and calling you a donkey. I’m sure I made some donkey moves while making this, but who cares – I was only making it for me, and I liked it.
The recipe came from Avocado & Bravado (which I tend to want to just call “Avocado Bravado”). I halved it since it was only for me, and wound up with enough for dinner and lunch the next day. Also, I didn’t spend my time roasting my own red peppers when you can get perfectly good ones in a jar from the store. When I’m making an “only me” meal, time is at a premium!
Roasted Red Pepper Risotto
Ingredients
1/2 a roasted red pepper (oh, go on, use a jarred one… are you going to roast half a pepper?), diced
1 shallot, diced
1 clove garlic, minced
1/2 cup arborio rice
1 tbsp white wine
2 cups chicken stock (which is what I used because I forgot I still had a 2-cup tupperware of frozen homemade veggie stock in the freezer… duh)
1/4 tsp paprika
1/2 tbsp lemon juice
2 tbsp parmesan
2 tbsp flat-leaf Italian parsley
Method
Very gently warm the stock in a pot over very low heat.
In the pot where you’re actually going to make the risotto, heat a little glug of olive oil over medium heat.
Saute shallot in the heated oil for about 5 – 7 minutes.
Add the garlic and saute for about 30 seconds.
Stir in the rice, roasted red pepper, and wine.
Cook for about 3 – 5 minutes, stirring frequently, which will seem positively laid-back compared to what’s to come.
Add about 1 1/2 ladles of the heated stock (I know, right? Who’s to say how my ladle compares to yours?) and stir until it’s pretty much all absorbed.
Add another ladleful of stock and stir until absorbed.
Repeat until you’ve used up all the stock, the risotto is creamy, and the individual rice grains are tender. These things should all occur at more or less the same time, about 25 minutes later.
Sometime during the stirring of the last ladle (dramatic!), stir in the paprika, parmesan, lemon juice, and parsley. I also added a few cranks of pepper, because I live on the edge.
May 9, 2010 at 11:06 pm · Filed under food, meals, soup/stew
As you might infer from the title, this is a version of chili that contains some flavours familiar from Asian cooking – it’s got soy sauce, sesame oil (of which I love) and ginger in it, as well as bok choy – but don’t be confused by the “chicken chili” part of the name. It’s not a chicken chili as you might usually know it, but with the added Asian bonus. It’s more like a regular chili as you might usually know it, but with chicken and with the whole pan-Asian thing. Or pan-east-Asia; it annoys me when people say “Asian” and basically mean “Chinese and Japanese and maybe Thai and Korean.” It’s the world’s biggest continent! It’s diverse! But anyway, my point is that it’s not a white chili, like most chicken chilis I’ve ever heard about are. It’s got tomatoes; it’s sort of… orange.
The recipe’s from The Taste Traveller, where it is billed as being spicy; maybe it’s because I used chili sauce instead of chili paste, but mine wasn’t particularly spicy. It was delicious, though – I don’t regret having less fire. And anyway one can always add more dashes of hot sauce to your own serving. Let’s see, what else did I change? Well, I halved it, of course, and I used a chopped actual tomato instead of a big can of tomatoes because there aren’t small cans of tomatoes. Also, she used chickpeas but said to use whatever was handy, and I felt that chickpeas were too far from a traditional beany bean to really evoke “chili” in my mind or Matt’s, so I went for pinto beans instead. That… might be all? So I don’t know if this tastes anything like the original version. I can definitely vouch for this version, though. Completely yumface.
Asian Chicken Chili
Ingredients
1/2 tbsp olive oil
3 cloves garlic, minced
say about a 1-inch piece of ginger, minced
3 green onions, chopped
1 bell pepper – I used an orange one and savaged it in the food processor so Matt wouldn’t know it from carrots (and it worked, too!), but use whatever colour you want and dice it or something
2 carrots, chopped
1 stalk celery, chopped
2 heads bok choy, chopped (both stem and leaves)
1 tsp chili sauce, or more
1/2 lb chicken – I used breasts, but use what you like – cut up into bite-sized pieces
1 biggish tomato, diced
1 14-oz can pinto beans, or something else, rinsed and drained
1 tbsp soy sauce
1/2 tsp white wine vinegar
1/2 tsp rice wine vinegar
1/2 tsp sesame oil
1/2 cup flat-leaf Italian parsley
Method
Get your big soup pot out and heat the oil in it.
Saute the garlic, ginger, and green onions for about 30 seconds.
Add the bell pepper, carrot, celery, and hot sauce, continuing to saute until these are softened.
Stir in the chicken.
Cook until the chicken is white on all sides.
Add tomatoes and simmer, covered (or, y’know, not – doesn’t really matter), for about 30 minutes.
Stir in the beans, soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, white wine vinegar, and soy sauce.
Cook for another 10 minutes.
Remove from heat and stir in sesame oil and parsley.
May 2, 2010 at 8:53 pm · Filed under food, meals
These two dishes came as a twofer from Slimming Eats. Now, let’s note, I got the link to that site from seeing it on Foodgawker, and I clicked on it because the picture looked delicious. I wasn’t looking for some eats that were particularly slimming, and I didn’t keep the recipe because of that either. So don’t get the wrong idea.
The chicken and its associated veggie department was fantastic, but I wasn’t as taken with the rice. The rice was kind of bitter, and just didn’t taste the way its appearance would have led one to believe it would taste. It wasn’t terrible, but I thought it was going to be the best part of the meal, and it wasn’t. Plus, Matt thought it was going to be Mexican rice, because it was so beautifully yellow, and of course it didn’t taste anything like that. Mixing the rice with the chicken and vegetables was an improvement on eating the rice by itself, though. Interestingly enough, the word “pilau” comes from the same word as “pilaf,” so I’m not weird for thinking this would have a certain taste profile.
The word “dupiaza” means “double onion,” and it refers to the fact that onion is used twice in this recipe, half in a puree and half in a normal fashion. I halved the original recipe, so I was supposed to be using two onions. Instead, I found an onion the size of my face, so I figured that counted for two:
(please excuse the fact that it’s incredibly unflattering)
Chicken Dupiaza
Ingredients
2 chicken breasts (not the creepy steroidal ones, though – the normal-sized ones) or whatever 2 people worth of chicken is for you, diced
2/3 cup water
1 tsp minced ginger
2 cloves garlic, smashed
1 tsp turmeric
2 tsp curry powder
1/2 tsp chili powder
1 tsp garam masala
2 onions, or one BEHEMOTH onion, divided in half and chopped (I mean, keep the two halves separate… I know you normally cut an onion in half in the process of chopping it, duh)
1 rib celery, sliced
1 carrot, sliced into rounds
approx. half a container unflavoured Greek yogurt
1 tbsp tomato paste
1 tsp oil
Method
Fill a small pot with water and bring it to a boil.
Add half of the chopped onion (or, if you prefer, one chopped half of an onion).
Boil until soft.
Drain, then dump in a food processor and puree.
Heat oil in a large pan.
Add the celery, carrot, and the other half of the chopped onion (or… well, you know) and saute at a lowish heat until the onions are golden.
In a bowl or something, mix the garlic, ginger, curry powder, chili powder, turmeric, and garam masala and add a little splash of water until it forms a paste.
Stir this paste into the frying vegetables and let it cook for a minute or two.
Then, stir in the chicken until it is nicely coated.
In another bowl, or, if you’re cool, the bowl of your food processor where the onion puree already is, mix the yogurt, water, and tomato paste into the onion puree. If you decide you need to sample a little of this, I’ll look the other way, because it’s pretty delicious.
Mix this into the pan with everything else.
Bring the pan to a simmer and leave it, well, no, stir occasionally, for 15 – 20 minutes, or until the chicken is done.
Pilau Rice
Ingredients
Some of that cooking spray, or if you’re not fussy, a little oil or butter
1 cup rice
1 tsp turmeric
1 bay leaf
4 cardamom pods
4 cloves
1/2 tsp fennel
1 tsp salt
1 1/2 cups boiling water
Method
Put the rice in a pot and spray it with cooking spray; alternatively, melt some butter or heat oil in the pot and add the rice in.
Stir in the seasonings.
Pour in the boiling water.
Slap a lid on that bad larry and let it simmer on a low heat for 15 minutes, and treat it like regular rice – that is to say, leave it alone; don’t take the lid off, don’t stir it, just leave it until you see “eyes” (little holes in the rice) and they no longer have bubbles appearing in them. This might be obvious, but not everyone is an awesome cooker of rice. Anyway, once it reaches that stage, you’re donesies.
April 25, 2010 at 9:40 pm · Filed under food, meals, soup/stew
Let’s not lie. This is not soup. However, in the comments to the original blog post on which I found this, namely on Ezra Pound Cake’s site, I found out that it also goes by another name which equally fails to describe it: Frito Pie. It isn’t pie, either. What it is, essentially, is chili. It does have this one distinguishing feature – not to say that it doesn’t stand out by its taste or anything, it’s delicious, but it tastes like another variation on the theme of chili – and that is that instead of maybe garnishing it with tortilla chips, or scooping it up with them as we’re wont to do in my family, you serve it on a bed of Fritos. Or, in our case, broken-up bits of regular tortilla chips from the bottom of the bag.
Oh my wordy word. Why had no one thought of this before?!? (The South: “AHEM.”) Ok, so clearly someone has thought of it before, but to paraphrase an old VICE Do-and-Don’t entry, you know something’s good when it makes you mad at everyone else for not thinking of it sooner. It doesn’t matter that it’s been going on for donkey’s years and just nobody told me. This is going to be my preferred method of consuming chili from now on.
This particular chili? Well, it’s good. I’m not going to throw over my existing recipe for it, but I do like the addition of corn, although I can’t say I’m going to make that addition to my normal chili – I don’t think Matt prefers to have it in. I was going to cook it in our slow cooker, at first, but I made it when a friend was over, and we spent the whole day doing the BARCC Walk for Change – for which I have a (still-active!) fundraising page through the website that I work for. Which, P.S., you should all also make fundraising pages for your own favourite charities. You’re welcome, work! ANYWAY, we did that, and then we went back to my friend’s alma mater, which is here, and she gave me a tour of the place. And we also snuck into their library – thrill! And because of all this, I wasn’t able to start the chili early, so I just made it in a pot.
And I halved it and there were 3 of us and we still had leftovers. So there. In the course of doing so, though, I had to make some changes – I don’t like having to use half a can of something, so I improvised with the un-canned counterparts and whatnot. So the amounts here are the amounts I made up based loosely on halving the original recipe. And I added some water, because I didn’t think the tomatoes were going to express enough liquid, and I don’t know if I was right or not but even the small amount of water I added cooked down nearly completely. So I’d recommend it.
“Taco Soup” Chili
Ingredients
1 lb ground beef
1 onion, diced
2 tomatoes, diced
1 15-oz can black beans
1/2 cup dry pink beans, soaked overnight (or all day, in my case) and drained
1 8-oz can whole kernel corn, drained
1 4.5-oz can chopped green chilis
1/2 an envelope taco seasoning
1/2 an envelope ranch seasoning
chipotle powder (for smokiness)
1/4 cup water
Fritos or broken tortilla chips to serve over, plus more chips for garnishing (or eating with, in my family’s case)
sharp cheddar cheese, grated, to garnish
green onions, chopped, also to garnish
Method
Brown beef with onions in a large skillet over medium heat.
Transfer to a large dutch oven, using a slotted spoon to drain while you transfer (multitasking!). You’d think I’d just say to brown the meat in the dutch oven from the get-go, and it’s true that way you can get more fond in your life, but you wouldn’t get to drain it in the slotted spoon, and the whole tilting a heavy pot and trying to pour out the grease without pouring out the actual food thing is miserable. So do it this way, it’s easier.
Add everything else except the garnishes (which, to recap, are the chips, cheese, and green onions… don’t add those, add everything else).
Cover and simmer for 30 minutes, or longer, depending on what your schedule looks like, stirring every now and again.
Put some Fritos (or broken tortilla chip bits) in the bottoms of the bowls you’re going to eat from.
At any point after the 30 minute mark, if you feel like eating and can’t take the delicious smell anymore, serve the taco soup into the bowls over the wee chips.
Garnish with grated cheese, green onions, and regular-sized tortilla chips.
You may not need to add the water – the tomatoes and onions do emit moisture after all – but by the next day, the leftovers had just the perfect amount of sauciness, so I guess it depends if you’re planning on eating some the next day. I mean, it is chili, so, like all chilis and stews, it tastes even better the next day. This is an immutable law of the universe!
March 21, 2010 at 8:20 pm · Filed under food, meals, pasta
Matt and I have an ideological disagreement over ravioli. He feels that the only true filling for them is cheese; specifically, ricotta cheese (which I don’t like, because, in sufficient quantities, it makes me gag). I was used to meat ones, when I was little. He was referring to the kind you purchase in the frozen section, which wasn’t something I was familiar with. This recipe said to use frozen ravioli, but meat was the preferred filling. Ha! They do exist! Buuuut not here. All I could find was the ricotta kind. So I kind of soldiered through this recipe, and the fairly dominant flavours of the sauce masked the ricotta mostly, and the texture wasn’t as noticeable as it sometimes is. I’d still rather try it with meat, because I feel that that would fit better thematically, and where I got the recipe, Mommy I’m Hungry, recommended meat anyway. So there… or whatever. I win. Or perhaps lose.
Also, this is quick as hell, and easy, and I don’t really care that it uses mostly pre-made stuff. If you have homemade stuff hanging around, or you’ve got that kind of time, go nuts on it.
Mexican Ravioli
Ingredients
1 25-oz package frozen ravioli (meat if possible! Yeah! GO MEAT!!)
1 10-oz can enchilada sauce (which apparently comes in colours other than red… well, not around here it doesn’t!)
8 oz salsa
one of those bags of “Mexican blend” cheese – the original recipe called for the whole bag, but since I made this in a big pot instead of a skillet, there was less surface area and I didn’t wind up using the whole thing. Maybe 2/3 to 3/4 of a bag.
sliced black olives for garnish
Method
Cook the ravioli according to package directions.
Drain and set aside.
In the same pot – I mean, it’s big enough to hold all the ravioli at once, you already know that from cooking them, so obviously it’s the right size, why get another one dirty? – mix the enchilada sauce and salsa over medium heat until warmed through.
Stir in ravioli (gently!).
Cover with cheese and sprinkle with olives.
Slap a lid on that pot and lower the heat.
Let cook for 3 – 4 minutes or until the cheese is all melty.
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