Shrimp and Tomatillos - 84

Last Spring I made a recipe for pork, tomatoes, and tomatillos and we really liked it. On a recent trip to Portland we went to the abundant Saturday Farmers Market that they have at the PSU campus, and bought all kinds of chiles, tomatillos, and cilantro for some of our Mexican cooking. I thought I'd be making the pork recipe again soon - after all, it's attached to the front of our refrigerator with a magnet!

The other day, this recipe for Shrimp and Tomatillos came up on my i-google screen where I receive a new recipe every day. I had just made a huge batch of green tomatillo salsa, but still had a few left, and decided to try this recipe rather than repeating the pork dish. We had just the right amount of everything after our trip to the Farmers Market except for the queso cotija which we had to run out and purchase. Cotija is a much drier cheese than queso fresco or panela, and some compare it to feta cheese. It goes very nicely on top of enchiladas, casseroles, and in soups.

The whole recipe only has a couple of ingredients: camarones, cebollas, ajo, chiles y tomatillos. It calls for a minimal amount of water to simmer these ingredients in, but you can also use clam juice. I had some vegetable broth on hand and used that. First you cook the onions and garlic for a few moments, and then you add the chiles (serranos, but jalapeños would work, too), and finally the liquid and the tomatillos. When these cook into a nice sauce - and not too mushy - you pour them over the raw shrimp, which have been cleaned, and are waiting for their sauce in a casserole dish. You then break up the queso cotija over the shrimp and tomatillos in the casserole dish and bake it for 20 minutes while the shrimp turn pink. Before serving, you can garnish it with a little chopped cilantro and a mighty squeeze of lime.

We enjoyed this new shrimp dish out on the back patio. Temperatures here in Oregon are getting cooler and we may not be able to eat outdoors much longer. We ate it with some warm corn tortillas and a bowl of guacamole. It was very good and we enjoyed eating something different - something that used some fresh ingredients from the Farmer's Market!

Comida mexicana at the campsite - 86 & 85

Last week we went camping for 3 nights. I decided to challenge myself to cooking a Mexican meal over a campfire. Now, I don't mean to say that I was going to drag my whole kitchen along with me and whip up some semi-complicated meal. All I actually did was rummage through the refrigerator and freezer, gather up most of our leftovers and easy things to pull together, and pack them in a cooler.

We have a rule about cooking when we camp: meals have to be cooked in one skillet, in a foil pouch, or a combination of the two. We can pull things like raw vegetables, salads, fruit, etc, out of the cooler to accompany a meal, but we do not spend time with knives, cutting boards, and other kitchen tools "creating" meals at the campground.

Our first night there, we had brought along some Trader Joe's Bean and Cheese Taquitos. Before leaving home Javier had made some guacamole and stored it in the cooler with the other cold foods. Dinner was so simple - muy sencilla. All we had to do was heat the taquitos in a foil pouch over the campfire, and then serve them on paper plates with a side of guacamole. Yum!

Our second night we reheated some steaks that we'd cooked only to medium rare along with some frijoles pintos, chile verde de hongos (see the last post), papas, y un chile rojo - or as it's often called in Spain and Argentina - un morrón. This was a big one, so we were able to share it between the two of us. And, even though we'd brought some whole wheat tortillas along with us, we didn't need them as the dinner was filling enough without them, and we were already using our one skillet / one foil pouch limit.

On our last day of camping, we used the flour tortillas and finished up the beans, chile verde and a few potatoes in some breakfast burritos. It was all good!

Chile verde con hongos (champiñones) - 87

We're having company over for dinner tonight who are vegetarians. There are a number of traditional Mexican dishes we could have fixed - cheese enchiladas, quesadillas, bean burritos, bean and cheese tostadas, etc etc etc - but we wanted to try something new with the Baby Portobello mushrooms we had in the refrigerator. I think Javier came up with a winner...

As I've written about before, he usually makes chile verde with pork. One time he tried it with chicken breast, and it just wasn't that great. So this time he's cautiously optimistic. He says he's going to treat the cut-up mushrooms as if they were cubed pork, and is going to make the recipe exactly as he makes the meat version.

I hope the cut-up mushrooms show up in the pictures, because they are definitely there. It tastes great, and we plan to serve it to our friends over brown rice and/or pinto beans. We also have some guacamole and warm corn and whole wheat tortillas to serve with the meal. They're bringing the dessert.

What's not to love about this meal ???

Eating Out in Bend - 88

The next day - after the tuna salad day - was equally as hot, so Javier and I decided to go out for some Mexican food and tell about our experience.

I'm not sure what the legalities are when mentioning the names of places where we eat, so let's just say that we ate at one of the least pretentious but most popular Mexican food places here in town. They only serve lunch, and they only serve lunch Mondays through Fridays.

We decided to order some pretty routine items because 1) we have already created some of them for our blog, and 2) we wanted to see how routine is handled at a popular eatery. Our three items, which we shared were a chicken enchilada, a taco de carnitas, and a green chile burrito.

Our experience started out with me cutting off a bite of the chicken enchilada and burning the roof of my mouth on over-heated sauce and melted cheese. This has never happened to me before! So, I labeled the enchilada "off limits" for a few moments while I turned to the taco de carnitas, which is roasted pork served in a warm corn tortilla with pico de gallo salsa. For amount of meat served in the taco, it deserves a 10, but for flavor and the practicality of eating so much meat on a taco (the corn tortilla ripped open), it deserves a 7.

Javier started in on the burrito de chile verde and said that one side of the burrito was cool but the other half was warm. (Big difference from the enchilada I tried a few moments earlier). He said it was delicious, although not very picante, and deserved an 8.

When we were finally able to eat the enchilada, we discovered that it was all sauce and very little enchilada, especially in the chicken department. I would not order another one, and feel it deserved a 5.

Will we eat there again? Of course. We go once every year, and some meals are better than others. And, you can't be the prices which are excellent.

Ensalada de atún - 89

A few days ago we had a tremendous hot spell here in Central Oregon, and there was NO WAY I was going to cook Mexican food.

We had recently purchased serrano peppers, tomatillos, tortillas de maíz, salsas, frijoles, aguacates, cebollas, cilantro, and several kinds of meat to get our cooking project going again, but cooking with any of these ingredients was not at the top of my list of "things to do" during record high temperatures.

As lunchtime came closer, I decided to take things out of the refrigerator - cold things - and combine them in a cold, Mexican-style tuna salad. The results were amazing!

I grew up in a household where "tuna salad" meant tuna mixed with Miracle Whip and sweet pickle relish - period. For my salad the only ingredient out of all of the above would be the tuna, and a white albacore tuna packed in water. After draining it and tossing it into a glass bowl, I diced tomatoes, onions, peppers, avocado, and cilantro on top. I squeezed a lime onto these ingredients, and had I mixed them at this point, I would have made a tuna ceviche. But I kept going and added 1 TB of mayonnaise and 2 TB of plain nonfat yogurt, and then some salt and pepper. Once it was mixed, I served it on lettuce leaves with some blue corn tortilla chips on the side. The picture might look like tuna and mayonnaise, but it was so much more!

Mexican Menu back at work!

I've been gone for a while. Let me explain.

I teach at a community college here in Oregon. Every Spring as the academic school year comes to an end, I find myself buried in work. It is all I can do to drag myself into my classes each day and do a good job of teaching. There are meetings, tons of paperwork to complete, grades to record, and letters of recommendation to write.

This year I had the added responsibility of planning the college's first community trip to Buenos Aires, Argentina. I had help with the planning, but was also going to accompany the first group of 11 students to the program we'd come up with that included Spanish classes and homestays. So, the end of this school year was a bit more chaotic than others. Mexican Menu 240 ground to a halt in late May while I put all of my efforts into tamping down the end of the school year and revving up the study abroad program.

Silly me...I thought that once I was in Argentina I'd be able to find Mexican-like ingredients and would be able to fix some interesting dishes for the natives. I thought I'd be able to write an interesting addition to my blog about cooking Mexican while in Argentina, a country that generally does not like spicy food. And, it's a country where tortillas are almost impossible to find.

Well, I made mole and rice for some friends of mine out in the suburbs (Adrogué) of Buenos Aires. It was a challenge with only one kind of dried peppers and highly sophisticated kitchen equipment that I didn't know how to use. (My friend, Teresita, is a professional cook) It was also the day of an important soccer match during the World Cup, so everyone had Maradona on their minds rather than Mexican food.

The mole turned out well, and I was able to serve it with a little guacamole beforehand. My very gracious hosts (and now friends), Teresita and Raul, raved about how much they love spicy food, and both ate generous portions.

The next and final attempt I made at cooking Mexican was fixing guacamole over and over for my friend, Alicia, in Buenos Aires. We have a routine: she buys a bag of Doritos and some wine for both of us, and I make the guacamole. We eat the whole bag (and it's really not that big in Argentina) of Doritos and the guacamole and call it our dinner. Argentines eat dinner very late in the evening (between 9-10:30) so the bowl of guacamole and the tortilla chips never seem like they're going to be enough for Alicia and me when we finally get around to eating it after several glasses of wine. It's been a fun routine of ours for the past two years.

There is nothing else that I could remotely stretch into something called Mexican that I ate while in Argentina. I ate the usual diet of meat, chicken, fish, pasta and pizza over and over. I had occasional salads, some grilled vegetables, and 2-4 Asian meals while I was there, but Mexican is not to be found, or at least not easily. Sad because I think they might like some of the varied dishes from Mexico if they had a chance to try them.

So, now we're home and I'm ready to resume the cooking, photographing, and writing about Mexican food. Summer presents some interesting challenges as many well-known and popular Mexican dishes are cooked. Others, like ceviche and certain salads, have already been featured. It looks like we'll be doing other salads, some grilled meats, and simple taco and/or tostada dishes until the temperatures drop here in Oregon.

I look forward to doing the final 90 recipes to complete the 240 that I originally proposed, although the whole plan has been altered. My original intent was to eat Mexican food 6 nights a week for a period of approximately 9 months and see if it was possible to live on foods that are generally spicy, feature tortillas, and are usually accompanied by rice, beans and / or bread (bolillos). By the way, last year I never did get sick of eating Mexican night after night, and rather enjoyed some of the doors that were opening as we tried new things, bought new cookbooks, and found new recipes from family and friends. So, here we go again!

The picture at the top is of me, Javier and Alicia in her living room.

Albóndigas con vegetales - 90

Ninety seems like a nice round number. I thought about stopping here at this very good dish, but then realized that before leaving on my trip there are many more Mexican meals that we'll be sharing before my departure.

Albóndigas - meatballs - are a popular way to consume ground meat in Spain and other Latin American countries. One of my biggest surprises on my first trip to Mexico was a meal of Sopa de Albóndigas. I had always considered them to be something you ate with pasta smothered in a red sauce, or something my parents took to a potluck under the name of "Swedish Meatballs." Those were served in a chafing dish (before crock pots became more popular) and were usually smaller than the variety found sitting atop your spaghetti. They were smothered in some kind of pasty looking gravy, and most of them (or at least the ones I tried) were rather flavorless. Swedish meatballs were to the 1950s and 1960s what chicken wings became in the 1990s.

But I digress. All of the meatballs I've had in Spain and in Mexico have been very tasty, and are always served in some kind of rich soup full of vegetables, or in some kind of thick, flavorful sauce. One of the things about the meatballs in Mexico that I have always liked was the addition of rice rather than bread or breadcrumbs and, in some homes, a tiny bit of fresh mint. Since our mint is just starting to pop out all over in the garden, I decided to snip some from the garden and add it to our albóndigas last night.

While the meatballs were cooking, I made a sauce of tomatoes, peppers, diced jalapeños, onions, mushrooms, and garlic. Once the sauce was prepared and had simmered for a while, I added the cooked meatballs and allowed the two parts of this dish to cook together for several hours. The meatballs were made from a very lean ground beef, so there was no problem with grease settling onto the surface of the sauce.

I also prepared brown rice, guacamole, and fresh corn tortillas to go with dinner last night. Javier ate a lot of everything I'd prepared, and I only ate a few albóndigas con vegetales, tortillas y un poquito del guacamole.