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.

Tacos de hongos - 91

¿Dónde he estado? Where have I been? En una palabra - ocupadísima. In a word - very busy. It's the full time job, folks. The end of the term at the end of the school year in addition to several committee assignments have all kept me from doing my blog, and I apologize. Me disculpo...

Pero más importante, ¿qué he estado cocinando y comiendo? But more importantly, what have I been cooking and eating? I have not given up on this challenge, and continue to eat Mexican food almost daily. The reason that I haven't blogged about any of the recent meals hasn't been just the job, but the repetition of all of our favorite meals. So, while I've been missing, we've eaten things like chile rellenos, tacos de pollo, bistec con salsa ranchera, fajitas, y huevos. It's all been good, but hurried. Again, me disculpo...

So, the other night we've got these beautiful baby portobello mushrooms, and I want to make something Mexican. I nixed the idea of making quesadillas con hongos because I didn't want to buy or eat flour tortillas and cheese. We'd already had meat several times during the week, and half of the mushrooms had been added to a lovely vegetarian spaghetti sauce the previous week. I decided I'd make a taco filling using the baby portobellos with tomatoes, onions, peppers, olive oil and lots of seasoning - mucha sazón - and fresh corn tortillas with a good, crumbly Mexican cheese.

Dinner was light, but dinner was unique and delicious! Es posible que repitamos esta comida muy pronto.

Camarones y Aguacate - 92

Excuse the picture. We made this quickly the other evening and then photographed it very quickly, too, as we were hungry and ready to eat!

This is an excellent recipe that was given to me by a friend in Houston. I'm not sure where she got it from, but Javier and I make it several times a year since we love the two main ingredients - shrimp (camarones) and avocado (aguacate)

First you cook the shrimp and then you marinate it for an hour. The salad is started by chopping avocado, chives, cilantro, and a chile serrano if you like. The marinade is drained off the shrimp before adding it to the salad ingredients, and before adding the dressing, you squeeze a lime over everything. he whole mixture is tossed in a dressing of mayonnaise, hot sauce and a few drops of Tabasco. To keep the calories down, we used very little mayonnaise and some plain nonfat yogurt.

Enfrijoladas - 93

¿Qué es esto? ¿Enfrijoladas?

Look back on the blog to enchiladas, and you'll find that they are corn tortillas with a filling - pollo, queso, vegetales - and the sauce consists of something with chile.

Look back on the blog to entomatadas, and you'll find that they are corn tortillas with a filling (same as above) - and the base of the sauce is mainly tomato.

Look at the picture of the ENFRIJOLADAS and you'll see that the sauce is made from - frijoles! I had these for the first time in Morelia while staying in the home of Señora Betty (her real name was Elsa), and she enjoyed cooking all kind of vegetarian meals in between an occasional dish that featured meat. When she fixed ENFRIJOLADAS for us, I had never heard of them before, so she explained that they were similar to an enchilada but had a sauce made from frijoles. The sauce is, of course, thinner than frijoles that you'd eat on a plate, and can be thinned down with chicken stock or cream. The ones she made for us in Morelia were so simple with a cheese filling, and she served them with a mixed vegetable (maiz, calabaza y cebolla) on the side.

We had some leftover chicken from the grill the other day, so we shredded it for the inside of our ENFRIJOLADAS. Javier had never had these before, and had been acting like he just wasn't sure what I was doing or why I was doing it. I kept telling him - calmado - let me do my work! It paid off because he ended up eating 5 of them. ¡Salieron deliciosas!

Huevos con Carne y Migas - 94

OK, so we've already featured HUEVOS CON MIGAS on this blog, but this time we took some of the CARNE DE RES ADOBADA left over from a few nights before, sliced it thin, and then sauteed it with the migas before scrambling the eggs into the whole mixture. The result? Excellent breakfast tacos!

After warming a stack of fresh corn tortillas from our favorite tortillería, we served this platter of the eggs, meat and migas in the center of the table along with a nice salsa ranchera and some queso fresco. Javier and I have given up on large breakfasts, except on Sundays, and today was the day for our experiment with leftovers.

Breakfast was served with jugo de naranja y café - and it was perfecto!

Bacalao con Morrones - 95

What in the world is BACALAO CON MORRONES? The translation is Codfish with Red Peppers, and as you can see from the pictures, those peppers are really red.

While this might look complicated, it was actually a fairly easy recipe. First I gently sauteed some onions and garlic in olive oil, and then added the cod to the pan to brown it, too. Once the fish was cooked through and flaky, I added some pickled red peppers that I'd bought at Whole Foods. They come whole in a small jar, so I cut them into strips before adding them to the fish. Before serving the fish, I added a small amount of white wine to the pan to "unstick" the fish, onions and garlic.

We ate the BACALAO CON MORRONES with a small avocado salad on the side. It was really good, except that the peppers weren't very spicy. Next time I might go another route with dark red chile ancho strips, or something like that.

Carne de Res Adobada - 96

Javier fixes the most flavorful flank steaks in a marinade that he learned to make in a Mexican restaurant years ago. Because they're so good, we tend to eat flank steaks this way and don't experiment with other recipes very often. So, the other day we decided to step out of our comfort zone and try something new and a little bit different.

The recipe for the CARNE DE RES ADOBADA came out of one of my cookbooks that I've had forever. I don't use it very often because it's big and heavy, and I'm always worried about spilling something hideous onto the beautiful pages. However, whenever I do venture into this cookbook and fix something for the family or for my classes at school, the recipes always turn out very well.

This particular recipe utilizes a combination of techniques and ingredients. First the flank steak gets a rub-down with a combination of Dijon mustard, salt and freshly ground black pepper. While it sits in its rub, you can make the marinade out of a combination of ingredients - chile guajillo, garlic, onion, tomato, black peppercorns, marjoram and oregano. Once the marinade is done (and it has to simmer for a while before using it as a marinade on the steak) you can pour it over the meat and let it sit for the next half hour while you prepare the grill. (We always grill some dark green chile poblanos while we wait for the grill to get hot enough for the meat).

As you can see from the picture, we grilled the meat and served the chiles poblanos on the side. Our dinner consisted of the grilled CARNE DE RES ADOBADA and a FIESTA SALAD, a recipe of my own. Basically it's made from salad greens, tomatoes, colorful bell peppers, and queso cotija. We served it with a low-cal cilantro salad dressing that we bought from Trader Joe's. The salad was great, as was the CARNE!