Catching up!

Hey guys, we haven't posted in a while, but we've got plenty of new recipes to share with you! We also forgot to e-mail our last post around, so if you didn't see that one, be sure to check it out!

Chicken, Spinach, and Cheese Enchiladas with Chile Verde Salsa

Gina has got this great green chili enchilada recipe stored in that amazing brain of hers. My mom, sister, and niece (Grace!) came out for a visit not too long ago. We thought it would be a good idea to pre-prepare an oven baked dish that we could just throw in the oven. The enchiladas were a great idea! We wanted to give them a taste of all the great Mexican flavors that we've been exploring.

Raw ingredients

We grilled up a few chicken breasts on the George Foreman grill and shredded them. Assembling the enchiladas was very easy. We coated the bottom of an casserole dish with some salsa then rolled up some spinach, shredded chicken, and a Mexican cheese blend, in corn tortillas. We placed them into the pan, covered them lots of green chili and cheese then stored in the fridge until we were ready to cook it.

The assembled enchiladas

We also, per Cati's suggestion, made Grace's favorite: Mexican rice. Grace really enjoyed the meal, as did the rest of us.

White Chili

Making a crockpot dish is the way to go when life gets too busy to cook. This took no time to prepare.

What went into the crock pot: great northern white beans, cannellini beans, pinto beans, yellow pepper, onion, jalapenos, cumin, garlic, oregano, and vegetable broth.

We forgot to capture a picture of the cooked chili because we were so hungry, but it was so delicious!

Grilled Pork Adobado with Smoky Roasted Sweet Potatoes and Guajillo Salsa p 183

So Rick Bayless' recipe (Mexican Everyday) has quite a few good grilling recipes. Now, we don't actually own a grill, but we do own a George Foreman grill, so that's what we decided to use.

First, we'll talk about the yummy tomatillo salsa that we made. We started with some fresh tomatillos (husked and washed).

We pan roasted the tomatillos (cut in half) with some garlic cloves.

We also fried a couple dried guajillo chilis in oil (only for like 60 seconds). We pureed the roasted tomatillos, garlic, and peppers in a food processor and came out with a nice salsa that we used with chips and on top of our yummy pork.

We made a marinade for the pork, it was pretty straightforward. Oil, garlic, red chili powder (we subbed New Mexico for Rick's recommendation of Ancho because that's what we had on hand), apple cider vinegar,  Mexican oregano, and sugar. We boiled it down a little bit, then slapped it on the meat.

Rick Bayless has some really great tips for grilling to keep the meat very moist, but these aren't applicable here since we used the George Foreman grill. He recommends grilling over a hot flame for just a few minutes, then moving to the cool side for ~20 mins, but since we have an electric grill, the meat finishes in 7 minutes regardless. So we just slathered the meat in marinade and put it on the grill (put it on again about half way through cooking). The finished product is shown below.

We plated it up w/ some of the guajillo tomatillo salsa and some sweet potatoes that we baked in oil and salt. Rick also recommended grilling the sweet potatoes, but the baked ones were also very good. Overall, the meal was very good. The marinade on the pork gave it a nice spicy flavor, but it was a little dry (the salsa definitely helped though). We would like to get a real grill to use in the future!

Here is a picture of some yummy wine that we had with the meal. 

Red Chile Chicken and Rice with Black Beans (pg 266)

Since Gina's been working in the evenings, I wanted a recipe that wasn't too difficult, but gave a lot of food to eat through the week. I came across this recipe in the book, and I thought  that it looked perfect! Rice and beans is always good.
So, I roasted some onions and rice in olive oil until translucent then covered with chicken broth, water, New Mexico Chili powder, and . Once the rice had cooked for a while (~15 mins), I added the uncooked chicken to cook while the rice was finishing (~10 mins more).

Once everything was pretty well cooked, I added a can of drained/rinsed black beans and added a ton of fresh cilantro.

While the dish was cooking, I roasted up some tomatillos and made some roasted tomatillo and chipotle chili salsa (so easy, and sooooo good!). Below is the resulting yumminess. We ate the dish for several days, it was really easy to make in a large batch.

Guacamole - poach the eggs with vinegar potato pancake

So, recently I've been informed by my lab mates that there's a really good Pasadena farmers market on Saturdays! We decided to go by and pick up some fresh vegetables. The prices were reasonable, and the quality was VERY good. We also had a great experience with the Tamales there, and would recommend them to anyone who goes there. Anyways, some of the fruits/veggies/fresh garlic are shown below for our latest concoction.

So I'm sure that you all are tired about hearing about Rick Bayless, but his book is full of fabulous recipes. This one was actually tacked on as a side point in the last paragraph of his guacamole recipe. It's super simple, but very good. We shredded some red potato and pressed them into small pancakes. We then cooked them in a lightly oiled pan and sprinkled them with salt. In the meantime, we poached an egg. We put it on top of the potato pancake and topped with some guacamole (which we made from the above ingredients). I'm a big fan of the simplicity in many of Rick's recipes, but this one's the easiest one I've come across yet! Very few ingredients, but loads of flavor. Highly recommended.