SUBMISSION Thread for Mexican Food Challenge Tuesday, Sept 26, 2023

Hell yea well done y’all I was supposed to tag along with No8 but had to make a bunch of liquor baskets for tinsel n treasure before heading out of town….next time

I kept it simple with one of my fams favs. Taco soup.

Pretty simple dish, cheap, and all in one pot. Only thing missing in the picture was a can of tomatoes. All you have to do is cook down the vegetables, browned the meat, add the canned ingredients, draining them except for the diced tomatoes. Let it simmer for an hour. Topped with shredded cheese, sour cream, and tortilla strips.

Sopa de Fideo is a dish that is common in Mexican homes, fairly rare in restaurants, but easily found in Mexican cookbooks.


I’m working from a recipe found in the Dona Tomas book, authored by the owners of the namesake restaurant in SF Bay Area.
Fideo is called a sopa de seca, or dry soup, because the angel hair pasta soaks up the soup base as the pasta cooks, leaving a thick coating on the pasta.
First, make a simple sauce of pureed fresh tomatoes, onion and oregano (Mexican oregano if available).

Keep the sauce thin and acidic. Don’t cook it down too much. 20 mins tops. You need to cook the pasta in this sauce, so you want to make sure it has enough water to do the job. Add a bit of water if needed. Puree the sauce once again so that it is very smooth.

In a dutch oven or wok, add enough oil to reach half the height of the angel hair nests. Then fry angel hair nests on each side in neutral oil until they are light brown (~30 seconds).


Remove pasta, and most of the oil, leaving behind a few tablespoons. In this oil, saute a mix of carrots, onion, celery, and jalapeño. Finally add pasta and tomato sauce and cook until the pasta nests begin to break apart (about 5 minutes).

Serve and garnish with cilantro and cotija cheese.


The toasted pasta and cilantro give the dish a different (and Mexican) flavor profile than Italian style pastas. Rick Bayless variation removes carrots and celery and adds chorizo, zucchini, stock, dried chipotle and cream. Diana Kennedy also removes the carrots and adds Swiss chard and eggs.

Chicken Enchilada Stuffed Poblano Peppers

I like poblano peppers and I like chicken enchiladas, so I thought I would include a mixture of both dishes in my submission. Everyone here knows I like bacon and I am confused how often, if ever, it is used in Mexican dishes. If wrapping my stuffed poblanos with bacon makes my dish a Mexican/MD fusion submission, then I guess that is what it is. All I know is it was tasty.



My Mexican spice blend – I have been making this for close to a year now. Try it - goes great on Mexican chicken or beef dishes.

Ingredients for Mexican Seasoning:

1 Tablespoon Mexican oregano
1 Tablespoon Paprika
1 Tablespoon Lawry’s garlic salt
2 teaspoons Black pepper
1 1/2 Tablespoons Cumin
1 Tablespoon Adobo Seasoning
2 teaspoons Powdered onion
2 teaspoons Cilantro





Ingredients for the dish:

2 cups Chicken breast meat shredded – I used rotisserie breasts. You can cook yours if you like.
3 Tablespoons Red Bell Pepper, diced
3 Tablespoons Green Bell Pepper, diced
3 Tablespoons Onion, diced
2 Tablespoons Jalapeño pepper, diced
2 Poblano peppers
Oaxaca cheese
12 ounces Bacon
1 Tablespoon oil (for roasting poblano)
1 Tablespoon chicken broth, or water



Ingredients for Guacamole:


1 Ripe Avocado
2 Tablespoons onion, fine diced
2 Tablespoons Tomato, diced
2 teaspoons Lawry’s Garlic Salt – I love what this does for guacamole
juice for half of a lime



Directions for dish:


While the oven is heating to 450 degrees F, dice the green bell pepper, red bell pepper, onion and Jalapeño and set aside.



If chicken is not cooked, boil it with a little onion and celery until fall apart tender. Shred chicken and set aside.





Rub the poblanos lightly with oil and roast on a rack in a 450 degree oven for 25 minutes



As soon as the poblano peppers come out of the oven, place them into a plastic bag, or covered dish and allow to cool. The bag or dish helps you pull the skin away from the pepper. Remove the skin and deseed the peppers. Set aside.









Add chicken, peppers, onion, jalapeño and spices to a mixing bowl and mix to a uniform mixture







Add 2 cups of Oaxaca cheese to chicken mixture and mix.





Precook bacon slightly (450 degrees F for 5-8 minutes), on an oven pan to help shorten the oven time required to crisp the bacon.





Stuff the peppers as full as you like, with the amount of enchilada stuffing used dependant on the size poblano you have. I like mine pretty full, especially when I plan to wrap the stuffed pepper in bacon to cook it.



Place the peppers across the strips of bacon as shown here.



Wrap the peppers in bacon, securing the bacon ends with tooth pics and place on a roasting rack. I like using one that allows the heat to circulate below the wrapped pepper. They can also be cooked directly on the roasting pan.



The stuffed peppers are cooked at 350 degrees F for 40 minutes, then finished at 450 degrees until the bacon has crisped.







I had lots of stuffing left over, enough for 5 or 6 peppers total. I decided to make 10 small chicken enchiladas with my remaining stuffing. I froze them for later meals.







Guacamole:

The avocado must be ripe. A good ripe avocado is not always easy to find at the grocer. We put ours in a paper sack with an apple for several days to ripen.
Cut avocado into pieces and scrape as much of the dark green flesh that always sticks to the tough skin as possible into the bowl.



Dice and add the onion, tomato, Lawry’s garlic salt, and lime juice into the bowl with the avocado. I think the lime juice helps keep the avocado from turning brown as quickly, so I always add it first, right after scooping out the avocado.



Mix well, cover with plastic wrap to keep the air away, and chill in the refrigerator





Serve the stuffed poblano peppers with a simple lettuce and tomato salad, guacamole and sour cream.







At our house, we don’t eat as much as we did when we were younger. The photos here show two peppers cooked but we halved the larger one and shared it. The other one was placed in the refrigerator and for tasty leftovers the next day. The enchiladas were frozen and will become two excellent meals we will eat sometime in the near future.











Leftovers, eaten the next day. Like so many dishes, this one seemed better the next day, after the enchiladas have had a chance to meld in flavor.







Thanks for looking at my post.

The following photo is for Darla:

Enchiladas Montadas con Chorizo

Found an interesting dish known as enchiladas montadas, aka stacked enchiladas.  Fried corn tortillas covered in a homemade enchilada sauce layered with cheese and topped with a fried egg.  Your choice of meat or vegetables can be used.  I used a homemade chorizo and onions.  
 


For the chorizo, I ground some pork. Then I took dried chiles and ground them in a food processor to make a freshly ground chili powder.

Mixed the pork with the chili powder, paprika, salt, granulated garlic, oregano, black pepper, cumin, and vinegar. Once mixed, I let the fresh chorizo sit in the fridge for 2 days.
 

The ingredients 




For the sauce, I took dried chiles, removed the stem and seeds, then soaked them in water for 10 minutes. 
In a cast iron pot, I lightly charred the  tomato, garlic, and scallions. This was added to a blender with the softened chiles, and about 3 cups of the chile water.  Everything was blended. I added a couple of chicken bouillon cubes, salt, and oregano. Then the sauce was cooked in a saucepan for about 15 minutes. 





Cooked the chorizo. 





Lightly browned/sautéed the onions so they were not raw. 





While the sauce was cooking, I fried corn tortillas in vegetable oil. 




Time to assemble. Add sauce to the plate. Dip the tortilla into the hot sauce. Top with cheese. Then add chorizo and onion. Then repeat the process 1-2 more times. 




Once the layers are done, too it with a tortilla covered in sauce. Add more sauce to the top. Garnish with cojito cheese, cilantro, and crema Mexicana (Mexican sour cream).  





Add the egg

I want to point out that I like to get my ingredients from a place like this:

Not necessary, but it gets me in the right frame of mind...

quote:

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The esteemed guest list included several F&DB contributors, including a few multi-time winners of this challenge

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This teamwork “Mexican Buffet” is my entry. If not allowed, I’ll just gracefully accept my disqualification.

There is another such gathering coming up soon. I'll have to ask and see if we can squeeze you on the guest list.

The committee has decided there is no reason to care.