Wednesday, July 27, 2011

A chicken in every (crock) pot.

Crock pot chicken tinga tacos. © Ryan Schierling
Most nights, Julie and I cook dinner. Even if we're both exhausted from work and don't get home until almost 7 p.m., we still try to throw something interesting together. But, there are those days (and weeks), where we just don't have time to plan and prepare a picture-perfect meal in the quickly-waning evening hours.

It's summer in Austin, which means 100-degree-plus days. Even with the air conditioning set to muy frio, our tiny kitchen becomes a nearly unbearable place when there are three or more gas burners going. So, we've been pulling out our oft-forgotten crock pot, loading it up in the morning and heading out the door. At night, we return home to a still-cool house that smells incredible.

Rick Bayless' Authentic Mexican recipe for pork tinga is one of my favorite taco fillings, but since J rolls sin puerco, I adapted this using chicken thighs and turkey chorizo. It is every bit as rich and delicious as its porky counterpart, and since everything goes into the crockpot, there's not much to clean up after dinner.


Chicken tinga

3 medium white, waxy potatoes, 1/2" dice
2 pounds boneless, skinless chicken thighs, brined overnight
1 medium onion, 1/2" dice
2 cloves garlic, minced
8 ounces turkey chorizo*
1 28 ounce can diced tomatoes (fire-roasted, if you can find them)
1 small can chipotles in adobo
1 tablespoon worcestershire sauce
1 tablespoon Mexican oregano
1 tablespoon sugar
salt to taste

*Not all chorizo is created equal. If it's meat-based, it's mechanically-separated something. The brand Cacique makes a soy chorizo that, as a meat eater, I find to be a perfectly-fine substitute for turkey chorizo in this recipe. We don't really ever endorse product on the blog, but this is the only fake chorizo I will let into the house. 

The night before you're going to make this, take your two pounds of chicken thighs and rinse them, then submerge them in a brine made 1/4 cup kosher salt, 1/4 cup sugar and 2 quarts of water. Cover and refrigerate until you're ready to start the next morning.

It takes me about 10 minutes to prep everything and get it into the crock pot, so set your coffee maker just a hair earlier than normal and enjoy a cup of the black blood of the gods before you start chopping things up all bleary-eyed and sleepy. Missing work because you lopped off the end of a finger is not acceptable.

Wash 3 medium white, waxy potatoes and cut into 1/2" dice. I like them chopped fairly small if they're going into tacos, and 1/2" dice is just the right size for me. Put the potatoes into the bottom of the crock pot. Remove your chicken thighs from the brining mixture, pat dry and layer them on top of the potatoes. Chop 1 medium onion (again, 1/2" dice) and put it into a medium-sized mixing bowl. Mince two cloves of garlic and toss it into the bowl with the onion. Add the can of tomatoes (undrained), the worcestershire, oregano, sugar and a pinch of salt. Open the can of chipotles in adobo, seed and chop four of the peppers fine. Add to the bowl with 2 tbs. of the adobo sauce from the can. Mix well, then pour over the chicken in the crock pot. Put the lid on, set the crock pot to low heat and cook for 6-8 hours – depending on how long your workday is, I suppose. The brining of the chicken keeps it from drying out if it's overcooked, which is still possible to do even though it's being slow-cooked in liquid.

When you get home, grab a skillet and fry up that turkey chorizo until it's done, nice and crispy. Mix it into the crock pot with everything else, and you'll see your chicken start to pull apart as you stir it all up. Give the tinga a taste and add salt if necessary, but you probably won't need too if you're putting cotija on top, which is nicely salty anyway.

Make yourself a margarita and serve with warm corn tortillas, crumbled cotija cheese, a squeeze of lime and fresh cilantro sprigs.

Sunday, July 24, 2011

Be still my heart, literally.

Sweet potato fries w/ gravy and over-easy egg. © Julie Munroe
It is a breakfast order in the finest Ghetto Melrose tradition.

A supremely-overslept Sunday morning, a toss through the freezer and refrigerator, a perversely-inspired ensemble of baked sweet potato fries, leftover chicken gravy, an over-easy yard egg on top and a hot sauce drift...

It's like Texas poutine with black coffee. 

Sunday, July 17, 2011

Give the man three and a half dozen gold stars!

Gold Stars for a job well done. © Ryan Schierling
We've had a limp-along oven for a while now. That might be generous, even. It was a 20-year-old base model that showed every decade of abuse when we moved in to our Wee Suburban Cabin. It was still operational and the least of our priorities after traveling 3,000 miles seeking adventure in Austin. But, it was no easy mistress – baking required temperature monitoring, pan placement was tricky because the heat distribution was terribly uneven and, horror-of-horrors, it couldn't even clean itself! The last straw was when the oven knob cracked a few weeks back and we had to start using pliers to turn it on and off. It wasn't even worth the $25 to replace the knob.

So, we've been shopping for a replacement. Everything seemed like a fully-loaded Cadillac after the one we'd been living with, so we weren't even looking for something new, just something decidedly better. Surely some lovely people in the area must be remodeling their kitchen – discarding stalwart appliances and replacing with something spanky-new. We did our level best to be patient until the right one came along, but having the limitation of not being able bake, well, absence makes… Julie want to bake!

This weekend Ryan outdid himself and wildly exceed my expectations when he found a great deal on a well-cared for and relatively new range to replace our old one. It is light years better than its predecessor – glass digital touch-screen control, convection oven, three racks, "Cake" mode, a warming drawer with "Proof Bread" mode and a great big window to see all the action!

I was like a kid at Christmas, giddy with excitement. Ryan's only question... "What are you going to bake first?"

For my man who just made my little baking heart so very happy? He got gold stars!!

See, I found these star-shaped peanut butter coated cookies in our local HEB store's bulk department the other day. Ryan really isn't one to eat a lot of sweets, but he does happen to have a soft spot for the classic chocolate and peanut butter combination. So, to inaugurate the new oven and to thank Ryan… double chocolate cookies with crispy peanut butter stars!

The chocolate cookie part is an adaptation of a recipe for Double Chocolate Oatmeal Cookies that I have had in my recipe box since I was in grade school – I've been making them that long, and almost every time I change it up in some way or other. This time I was going for really dark chocolate cookies and wanted to minimize the texture of the oatmeal, so this is where most of the modifications were geared.

The oven? It worked like a dream. Ryan deserves every single one of these chocolate and peanut butter rewards.


Gold Star Cookies

1 cup butter, softened
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup dark brown sugar
1 large egg
1 teaspoons vanilla
1/4 cup water
1/2 cup cocoa powder
1-3/4 cup all-purpose flour
2-1/2 cups rolled oats (or quick oats), whizzed up in food processor
8-10 ounces dark chocolate chips (or semi-sweet)
Peanut butter coated star cookies, cooled in freezer (not frozen).

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

In mixing bowl, cream together butter and sugar. Add the egg, water and vanilla and mix well. Mix in cocoa powder, then the flour, then the oats, and finally the dark chocolate chips.

Drop by rounded teaspoonfuls onto an ungreased cookie sheet. Bake until almost no indentation remains when touched, 10-12 minutes. (Take care not to over bake.) Remove from oven and quickly press a star cookie into the top of each chocolate cookie. Move at once from the baking sheet to a cooling rack.

Makes about 3-1/2 dozen cookies.

Sunday, July 10, 2011

Adventure day.

Thai Fresh. © Ryan Schierling
Sundays are days off. Typically, historically, it is the only day Julie and I both share as a day together, a day of rest – so we try to create as much unrest as possible. We set out, we adventure. We cross things, locations, off our list.

We were southie Thai in our jaunty beginning today, craving something spicy, fresh and close to home. Just so you know, we bring a wealth of Pacific Northwest experience with "one-to-five" stars when ordering Thai food. So, we were a little surprised that both the green curry and the coconut vermicelli salad we ordered at Thai Fresh were extremely mild. This is Texas, and historically, stereotypically, Texans like things hot. Homemade green curry in this household is a fearsome, fiery beast, that will politely knock on your front door with a coconut milk, Thai basil, fish sauce and palm sugar smile, and then burn the house down and dance in the cinders. While solid fare, I imagine the Thai Fresh cuisine reflects the location and neighborhood, which is, training-wheels-on, exotic take-out experience that one can heat up in the microwave of one's expensive, relatively unused stainless steel kitchen after a long day at work. It is Thai, and it is local and very fresh, but you won't see too many Thai families making a trip to south Austin to eat there. It's certainly a valuable resource for south residents who want very quick Thai food in an convenient coffee shop/deli setting.

Curiosity satisfied, we moved north to MT Market with our A-level shopping list.

(L) Dragonfruit. (R) Goo Fish. © Ryan Schierling
I have friends that would walk through the automatic front doors at MT Market and balk immediately at the smell. It is… a foreign scent, an aroma that you don't associate with American grocery stores. Mostly (mostly) fresh fish, a big smack of fresh pork, beef and assorted offal, and some weird-ass pickled vegetables in tubs that I just can't stay away from. We are there for Vietnamese young green rice (com dep), Julie's strawberry cream biscuits, daikon radish and fat carrots, bird chiles and whatever else looks promising.

Julie gravitates toward fresh-cut-in-half durian fruit, picking it up, smelling it, making me smell it. She relates it to fine, sweet, stinky cheese. I am taken aback, recalling the Andrew Zimmern 'Bizarre Foods' episode where he visibly gags, choking on durian. Rotten onion fruit!?!? Anthony Bourdain apparently digs it, describes it as…"indescribable, something you will either love or despise. ...Your breath will smell as if you'd been French-kissing your dead grandmother." I don't want anything to do with that (just yet), so we move on, selecting some beautiful dragonfruit, sweet potato vermicelli and Maggi seasoning. Proper baguettes for banh mi are down the way at Baguette House.

After a bit of a layover at Goodwill in the housewares section, we drive back through downtown Austin proper and then point east on a single digit street with the intention of visiting Bits & Druthers for some English fish and chips and a bit of poutine. Frustratingly enough, the whole fickle food trailer park is closed, again. We tried last Monday, with no luck. Sunday, apparently, is no better, so we wind back downtown. And then as we are driving, after months without, the rains come. Brilliantly, dark blue clouds pull up, pull in, and surprise pedestrians, cyclists and motorists alike. The temperature drops 20 degrees, the humidity spikes, and a warm, wet blanket is plunked down on downtown Austin.

Owl bldg. © Julie Munroe

Wipers on, we decide on drinks, and perhaps a sandwich, at the Tiniest Bar in Texas, and Lucky's Puccias. The bar-side trailer, offering Italian wood-fired handfuls, is an unassuming respite with simple, well-thought ingredients. My sandwich is proscuitto-salty, mozzarella-creamy, tomato-acidic and arugula-spicy, all tucked in a smoky, fire-kissed envelope. Julie's vegetarian Rustica is a mild, delicate sandwich with simple flavors allowed to shine without heavy-handed embellishment. 

Lucky's Puccia, w/ Lone Star. © Ryan Schierling
Our garden is being watered for us, we have an open tab at a teeny, tiny bar (perhaps the teeniest, tiniest bar), and the puccias are warm and delicious.

It has been another good, good adventure Sunday, but now it is time to get home to the cats, and the laundry, and to make preparations for the week ahead. 

Sunday, July 3, 2011

Patriotism is patronage.

(L) American Idol Pop-Tart. (R) Passport w/ tinfoil hat. © Ryan Schierling
We are a nation of immigrants and descendants of immigrants, each celebrating life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness through the most sensual of daily pleasures... food.

An amazing array of cuisine from all over the globe lies waiting outside our doors and we just plain take it for granted sometimes – that Thai restaurant down the street where we get the occasional pad pug take-out, that little Greek cafe around the corner with the amazing avgolemono. We are the proverbial melting pot, fusion perpetual in this equation, and we're also a lucky bunch to enjoy such incredible diversity in food and flavor influences.

Sometimes we're also a bunch of awfully unadventurous bores compared to the rest of the world. We're squeamish about eating insects, we have generally bland expectations of flavor and seasonings and we have a deplorable propensity toward eating over-processed pre-packaged foods – well, maybe in some circles that is considered being adventurous....

Regional, sub-regional, generational, individual, traditional, international deliciousness is so close for most of us. We don't even have to buy a plane ticket or remove our RFID-chipped passports from their tinfoil wrappings to get there.

There are people in our neighborhood, down the street, in our town who have so much to share about the world outside of Hamburger Helper. There are little specialty grocery stores tucked into strip malls carrying foods we'll never see at the big supermarket chain stores. There are grains, spices and condiments that will invite a world of new sensations into our kitchens and possibilities to our palates.

New techniques enhance our cooking skills and challenge our ways of thinking about what a meal is or can be – and getting started is easily accessible. It's all at our finger tips with a world-wide web full of recipes and helpful tips and tricks.

So, while we may be standing over the grill contemplating the massive quantities of hotdogs and hamburgers being cooked up for Independence Day, we should also consider what else constitutes All-American cuisine. Let's actively celebrate the independence of millions who are free to make our lives and country richer because they have brought with them the history and flavors of their families and food.

Let's go out and try tasting something new; read some reviews, experience a new kind of cuisine, and then another. Then let's seek out the appropriate resources and try making our favorite dishes at home. Perhaps one will find a place of honor in the family dinner rotation – an indulgent tribute to the wealth of diversity the good ol' USA has to offer.

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