Here in Texas, you can buy fresh jalapenos at the supermarket all year long in the produce section, right there next to the carrots and celery. Fresh jalapenos are about 100,000 times hotter than the kind that you find in a jar back on the East Coast, and I’d never even seen one until I moved here. Now, they’re a staple in our diets and I can’t get enough! Oh, and they’re really good for you too!!
A friend of mine asked me for a good Mexican soup recipe, so I replied with my “safe” chicken tortilla recipe, not knowing the level of spice she wanted or her access to fresh jalapenos … can you get fresh jalapenos back East?
- 2 chicken breasts, baked and broken into pieces (I season them with a little chili powder or taco seasoning before baking), you can also get the Tyson already-cooked fajita chicken
- 5-6 cans or 3 boxes chicken broth (I usually buy 3 boxes and use about 2 ½, depends on how watered-down you want the spice)
- 1 large jar medium salsa
- 1 can diced tomatoes w/ green chilies (do not get the ro-tel brand, it is nasty)
- 1 can black beans, rinsed and drained
- 1 can mexi-corn (green giant makes this, it’s multi-colored corn), rinsed and drained
**side note – if you’re watching your sodium, make sure you rinse the canned beans/corn very, very well, the more you rinse off the liquid they were canned in, the less sodium you’ll get in your final soup**
- Chili powder
- Red pepper flakes
- Salt & pepper
- shredded cheddar or Monterrey jack cheese, sour cream
- Tortillas for tortilla strips, 1tbsp or so of canola oil
With the chicken, I find if you cut it up in perfect cubes with a knife, it doesn’t soak up the flavor as well as if you just break it into bite-sized bits with your hands so I typically just pull the breasts apart and some is in chunks, some a little shredded.
Just put it all in a big stock pot and let it simmer for at least an hour, the longer it simmers, the more the spices mingle and the spicier the soup gets, I love eating it the next day bc it’s so much better than the day I make it; I use a lot of chili powder and a good 2-3 shakes of red pepper flakes in mine bc I like it spicy but you can use however much to tailor to how spicy you want it. I’ll start everything else in the pot so it’s already hot when the chicken is ready to go in rather than wait on the chicken to start the soup. I like to give it a good stir every 20-30minutes or so to make sure all the little bits at the bottom make it through the broth for an even flavor.
You can buy flour or corn tortillas, I prefer corn, and I’ve found the easiest way to cut them into strips is with a pizza cutter: slice each tortilla into long thin strips then slice across cutting the tortilla in half (or quarters, depending on what size you buy); just warm a little canola oil in a skillet, very little oil, then fry up the tortilla strips until crispy and drain on paper towels. I like to throw a handful or two into the soup so they soak up the flavor, then use a few on top to garnish with the sour cream and cheese. The sour cream and cheese will also cut down some of the spiciness, so if you like spicy and others don’t, make the soup as spicy as you want and just put more sour cream in their bowls than in yours.
Well, she let me know that there was this fabulous place she used to go in Baltimore with Mexican soup so hot, it’d make her nose run, so I explained it was probably the type of chilies they put in their soup. You can certainly spice this soup up to the extreme simply by using a hot/spicy salsa and a super hot chili powder. But the absolute best way to spice this soup up while being flavorful is to use fresh jalapenos. (if you use fresh jalapenos, use a can of plain diced tomatoes without the green chilies)
If you can, buy two fresh jalapenos, the brighter/darker the green, the better the flavor; remove the seeds and dice them very, very finely. You do not want to be the person with a big chunk of jalapeno on your spoon, which is one spicy bite! You’ll want to be very careful not to touch your eyes or nose after dicing them until you’ve washed your hands a good dozen times (thanks Dan for teaching me this lesson). The easiest way to remove the seeds is to slice off the stem, slice in half length-wise and use a spoon to scrape out the guts, that way you’re limiting direct contact with your hands.
The last time I used fresh jalapeños, I had the teenie tiniest little papercut on my finger and it burned for a solid 4-5 hours even after I was done and had washed my hands a bunch of times!!! So be very careful if you use them.
After explaining all of this to my East Coast friend, I think my description of working with jalapenos scared her a little bit. In her response, she said she was going to try it based on my original recipe rather than go all out and make it super hot. Her direct quote was: I can see the headline... "Novice pregnant chef rushed to hospital for jalapeno mistake"
Showing posts with label cooking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cooking. Show all posts
Friday, February 19, 2010
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
My history of life (and food)
I have loved food and have been cooking for as long as I can remember. For as far back as I can recall, Sundays were the highlight of my week. My father and I would make breakfast for the entire family (6 kids + 2 parents = 8 mouths and sometimes more if one of us had a sleepover!). He taught me how to make pancakes in the shape of Mickey Mouse, dinosaurs, E.T. and various other things which were awesome at the time, but I now realize they were actually pretty simple. As I grew into my pre-teens, I became obsessed with PBS and watching cooking shows. Mom didn't really let me cook much because she was scared I'd light the house on fire, as I was always a bit of a klutz, and still am today. I used to love fondue night growing up because I absolutely loved being able to cook my own dinner. Mom mostly cooked out of necessity, she made quick and easy (and bland) meals because she really didn't have much time to slave over the stove when she had 6 kids all in different sports and never all at the same school at the same time due to the vast range in ages between the oldest and the youngest.
My parents always tried to instill in us the value of giving things a chance, and trying new things. We often went out to dinner and occasionally tried new cuisines. I remember my favorite was going to Benihana's! Watching the chef was mesmerizing, the quickness of the knives, the steam from the grill, I was sold ... I was going to be a chef. As I went through high school, I was put on the path towards a 4-year college. My parents encouraged me to study math and the sciences and cooking was literally put on the back burner and not considered (by them) to be a future career, they wanted me to be a doctor. My senior year of high school, I had fulfilled all of the requirements for graduation so I took Gourmet Cooking I as an elective. It was truly the only thing that kept me from skipping school, as it was the last period of the day. I was pretty terrible (ok VERY terrible) to start, but by the end of the year I could bake and decorate a cake, make a mean chicken stir fry, and even flip a pancake without dropping it on the floor. However, my fate was sealed as I had already been accepted to Franklin & Marshall College where I would spend the next 4 years of my life studying Government & Public Policy.
I wrapped up my years at good ol' F&M with a B.A., some fairly good writing skills, and a full understanding of the political spectrum but unfortunately, I didn't improve my cooking skills much at all due mostly to the very limited budget of a college student and the uncanny ability to consume ramin and Easy Mac on a daily basis without complaint. I had been accepted to Rutgers for graduate school so I was heading home to live with Ma and Pa for awhile, due to the limited budget of now a graduate student.
For that first month that I lived at home after college graduation, I couldn't find a job and was bored out of my mind. So I did what any bored person would do, I kept myself busy. I typically rolled out of bed around 10am, flipped on PBS or whatever channel was airing a cooking show (mom only had basic cable) and watched the world's best chefs create masterpieces while scarfing down my Captain Crunch. Then, I'd leaf through a few of my mother's cookbooks (Betty Crocker circa 1973), head over to the grocery store and spend the entire afternoon cooking these fabulous 4-5 course meals while mom looked on, thankful she wasn't boiling yet another pot of spaghetti for dinner.
Monday night might be Mexican night, I'd make tortilla soup and a salad topped with tortilla strips and a southwestern ranch to start, followed by cheesy quesadillas. For the main course, I'd make a pan of chicken enchiladas and a pan of beef enchiladas (dad doesn't eat chicken), with black beans, Mexican rice and corn on the side. When all that was done and the pants' buttons undone, we'd have sopapillas for dessert. Tuesday would come and maybe I'd make Tuesday night Asian night and stir fry some steak with peppers, onions, carrots and the like all drenched in a honey teriyaki crafted from scratched and served alongside the fried rice I'd seen demonstrated that morning, closing the meal with bananas tempura (fried in mom's Fry Daddy) with vanilla ice cream and a honey drizzle. Perhaps on Wednesday, I'd recreate the Italian feast showcased on epicurious.com with a tiramisu for dessert. I'd truly found my passion and loved every day of it, even more than my mother loved not having to cook. However, as was the theme throughout this time in my life, I was broke and I had to get a job.
I went to work for what would be the first of many years working in the mortgage industry and spent my summer working my butt off trying to get as much overtime as possible to save and get out of my parents' house. Summer ended, fall semester started, and I was taking a double course load plus an internship. The closest I came to cooking might've been heating some soup at 2am when pulling an all-night study session. Spring semester ended and I went back to the mortgage company, but in a much better position than I'd been before. When fall finally arrived, I only had a few more courses to take so I was able to schedule those in the evenings so I could still work full-time and finally move out of my parents' house.
I left one mortgage company for another, moved from NJ to Philadelphia, and was grateful to be out on my own. For the first time, I was really fending for myself. I had some roommates, but they were guys, they didn't cook or grocery shop or anything. Over the winter break from school, I started really cooking again. I'd come home from work, call my sister (who lived just a few blocks away) and start fixing dinner. She'd run to the store to pick up whatever wine I told her to get and we'd have dinner together, talk about our day and watch whatever reality tv show that happened to b eon. **side note: this is also where I fell in love with reality tv** When the spring semester started, I only had one class left to graduate so I cooked 4 nights per week, watched a lot of reality tv and cooking shows, and really enjoyed myself. I was also a serial dater during this "single-gal in the city" phase of my life and oh man did I love going on dates to new restaurants! Almost every Saturday was a new restaurant and a new cuisine. My absolute favorite restaurant, to this day, is on a scary little dimly lit side street in Philadelphia. It is called Marrakesh and they serve the most amazing Moroccan dishes I have ever had in my life! I took my husband there the very first time he visited the East Coast and while he wasn't such a fan of eating with his hands, he very much agreed with me on taste.
I wrapped up graduate school, received my Masters degree, and was now bored yet again. I spent the summer wasting my time working at the mortgage company and spending my weekends down at the Jersey Shore in Avalon. I cooked occasionally, here and there, but summertime on the East Coast for a 24 year old girl is more about partying and having fun than staying home and cooking dinner. Winter came and it was a cold one, lots of snow. For those of you unfamiliar with the Manayunk section of Philadelphia, where I was living, I would liken the hills to those of San Francisco ... imagine San Fran being buried in 2 feet of snow overnight. I awoke one freezing cold February morning to yet another foot of snow that had fallen overnight. I walked straight into my company's HR department and stated "we have offices in Georgia, Texas, Florida and two in California. Please pick one and send me." And so began my journey to Dallas, TX. I threw my clothes in the back of my car, drove to Texas and started my life all over again.
Once in Texas, living by myself, I started cooking again. I only lived here a short while when I met Dan, my husband. From the day we met, we haven't spent a day apart unless I was traveling. Cooking for him became my passion and the joy in my day, finally I found someone as obsessed with food as me!! He took me to new restaurants to learn all about Texan and Southwestern styles of spice and cooking which I would then carefully recreate at home. I stayed with my mortgage company for about a year when I saw it on the horizon, the mortgage industry was flailing and I knew I had to get out ... but mortgage was all that I knew! Well that and anything you ever wanted to know about our political system. I threw together my resume and decided to finally put my graduate school education to good use. I began working at a new company, in a new industry, and spent a lot of time studying and working long hours getting myself acclimated in my new world, but not a lot of time cooking. Time passed, I got the hang of things, Dan and I got engaged, bought a house, moved to the suburbs, got married and then I finally started cooking again.
Dan and I have been together nearly 5 years now, married almost 3, and every day is still an adventure. He knows me better than anyone and is my favorite critic. He is always there, willing to try a new recipe I created and pushing me to try new spices and wrap more things in bacon. He doesn't blink when I purchase the Betty Crocker 200-piece cake decorating kit "just because" or when I come home with bags of ingredients, none of which he'd ever heard of before. I told him the other day that I wanted to be a tv chef and he said "ok" like he already knew it before I said it. Hopefully, this spurs another adventure for us to enjoy together.
Must run, big girl glass is full and it's not going to drink itself!
My parents always tried to instill in us the value of giving things a chance, and trying new things. We often went out to dinner and occasionally tried new cuisines. I remember my favorite was going to Benihana's! Watching the chef was mesmerizing, the quickness of the knives, the steam from the grill, I was sold ... I was going to be a chef. As I went through high school, I was put on the path towards a 4-year college. My parents encouraged me to study math and the sciences and cooking was literally put on the back burner and not considered (by them) to be a future career, they wanted me to be a doctor. My senior year of high school, I had fulfilled all of the requirements for graduation so I took Gourmet Cooking I as an elective. It was truly the only thing that kept me from skipping school, as it was the last period of the day. I was pretty terrible (ok VERY terrible) to start, but by the end of the year I could bake and decorate a cake, make a mean chicken stir fry, and even flip a pancake without dropping it on the floor. However, my fate was sealed as I had already been accepted to Franklin & Marshall College where I would spend the next 4 years of my life studying Government & Public Policy.
I wrapped up my years at good ol' F&M with a B.A., some fairly good writing skills, and a full understanding of the political spectrum but unfortunately, I didn't improve my cooking skills much at all due mostly to the very limited budget of a college student and the uncanny ability to consume ramin and Easy Mac on a daily basis without complaint. I had been accepted to Rutgers for graduate school so I was heading home to live with Ma and Pa for awhile, due to the limited budget of now a graduate student.
For that first month that I lived at home after college graduation, I couldn't find a job and was bored out of my mind. So I did what any bored person would do, I kept myself busy. I typically rolled out of bed around 10am, flipped on PBS or whatever channel was airing a cooking show (mom only had basic cable) and watched the world's best chefs create masterpieces while scarfing down my Captain Crunch. Then, I'd leaf through a few of my mother's cookbooks (Betty Crocker circa 1973), head over to the grocery store and spend the entire afternoon cooking these fabulous 4-5 course meals while mom looked on, thankful she wasn't boiling yet another pot of spaghetti for dinner.
Monday night might be Mexican night, I'd make tortilla soup and a salad topped with tortilla strips and a southwestern ranch to start, followed by cheesy quesadillas. For the main course, I'd make a pan of chicken enchiladas and a pan of beef enchiladas (dad doesn't eat chicken), with black beans, Mexican rice and corn on the side. When all that was done and the pants' buttons undone, we'd have sopapillas for dessert. Tuesday would come and maybe I'd make Tuesday night Asian night and stir fry some steak with peppers, onions, carrots and the like all drenched in a honey teriyaki crafted from scratched and served alongside the fried rice I'd seen demonstrated that morning, closing the meal with bananas tempura (fried in mom's Fry Daddy) with vanilla ice cream and a honey drizzle. Perhaps on Wednesday, I'd recreate the Italian feast showcased on epicurious.com with a tiramisu for dessert. I'd truly found my passion and loved every day of it, even more than my mother loved not having to cook. However, as was the theme throughout this time in my life, I was broke and I had to get a job.
I went to work for what would be the first of many years working in the mortgage industry and spent my summer working my butt off trying to get as much overtime as possible to save and get out of my parents' house. Summer ended, fall semester started, and I was taking a double course load plus an internship. The closest I came to cooking might've been heating some soup at 2am when pulling an all-night study session. Spring semester ended and I went back to the mortgage company, but in a much better position than I'd been before. When fall finally arrived, I only had a few more courses to take so I was able to schedule those in the evenings so I could still work full-time and finally move out of my parents' house.
I left one mortgage company for another, moved from NJ to Philadelphia, and was grateful to be out on my own. For the first time, I was really fending for myself. I had some roommates, but they were guys, they didn't cook or grocery shop or anything. Over the winter break from school, I started really cooking again. I'd come home from work, call my sister (who lived just a few blocks away) and start fixing dinner. She'd run to the store to pick up whatever wine I told her to get and we'd have dinner together, talk about our day and watch whatever reality tv show that happened to b eon. **side note: this is also where I fell in love with reality tv** When the spring semester started, I only had one class left to graduate so I cooked 4 nights per week, watched a lot of reality tv and cooking shows, and really enjoyed myself. I was also a serial dater during this "single-gal in the city" phase of my life and oh man did I love going on dates to new restaurants! Almost every Saturday was a new restaurant and a new cuisine. My absolute favorite restaurant, to this day, is on a scary little dimly lit side street in Philadelphia. It is called Marrakesh and they serve the most amazing Moroccan dishes I have ever had in my life! I took my husband there the very first time he visited the East Coast and while he wasn't such a fan of eating with his hands, he very much agreed with me on taste.
I wrapped up graduate school, received my Masters degree, and was now bored yet again. I spent the summer wasting my time working at the mortgage company and spending my weekends down at the Jersey Shore in Avalon. I cooked occasionally, here and there, but summertime on the East Coast for a 24 year old girl is more about partying and having fun than staying home and cooking dinner. Winter came and it was a cold one, lots of snow. For those of you unfamiliar with the Manayunk section of Philadelphia, where I was living, I would liken the hills to those of San Francisco ... imagine San Fran being buried in 2 feet of snow overnight. I awoke one freezing cold February morning to yet another foot of snow that had fallen overnight. I walked straight into my company's HR department and stated "we have offices in Georgia, Texas, Florida and two in California. Please pick one and send me." And so began my journey to Dallas, TX. I threw my clothes in the back of my car, drove to Texas and started my life all over again.
Once in Texas, living by myself, I started cooking again. I only lived here a short while when I met Dan, my husband. From the day we met, we haven't spent a day apart unless I was traveling. Cooking for him became my passion and the joy in my day, finally I found someone as obsessed with food as me!! He took me to new restaurants to learn all about Texan and Southwestern styles of spice and cooking which I would then carefully recreate at home. I stayed with my mortgage company for about a year when I saw it on the horizon, the mortgage industry was flailing and I knew I had to get out ... but mortgage was all that I knew! Well that and anything you ever wanted to know about our political system. I threw together my resume and decided to finally put my graduate school education to good use. I began working at a new company, in a new industry, and spent a lot of time studying and working long hours getting myself acclimated in my new world, but not a lot of time cooking. Time passed, I got the hang of things, Dan and I got engaged, bought a house, moved to the suburbs, got married and then I finally started cooking again.
Dan and I have been together nearly 5 years now, married almost 3, and every day is still an adventure. He knows me better than anyone and is my favorite critic. He is always there, willing to try a new recipe I created and pushing me to try new spices and wrap more things in bacon. He doesn't blink when I purchase the Betty Crocker 200-piece cake decorating kit "just because" or when I come home with bags of ingredients, none of which he'd ever heard of before. I told him the other day that I wanted to be a tv chef and he said "ok" like he already knew it before I said it. Hopefully, this spurs another adventure for us to enjoy together.
Must run, big girl glass is full and it's not going to drink itself!
Welcome to my life ...
I want to be a tv chef. I've never wanted anything more in my entire life. But the funny part is, I didn't even know that this is what I wanted to be until about a month ago. It makes sense, I've always loved food, cooking, and helping others. I just never put it all together in my head until I recently tried out for (and didn't get) a reality show to become a real chef.
Not that I really thought I'd get picked, but now I know what I want to be when I grow up; and as I near my 30th birthday, I just don't know what to do. Friends have been urging me to blog for years to tell the stories of what I consider to be a pretty regular existence that they for some reason find hilarious and entertaining. So now I sit here on my couch, having my big girl glass and typing my thoughts so that maybe someone important will see this and give me my very own show.
I hope anyone reading this at least enjoys the recipes that I plan to include in my postings. I have three main strengths in the kitchen: turning grandmom's comfort foods into healthy meals with little recipe substitution, cooking gourmet meals on weeknights, and creating sunday feasts that take an entire day of preparation and cooking that could wow even the pickiest of critics. I hope to showcase those talents while thrilling you with little stories about my life, mostly about my husband Dan, my blog's namesake and quite possibly the funniest person I know. You'll also get to know entirely too much about my dogs, Fredo and Gus, that we swear have human personalities and whose thoughts we enjoy providing to one another.
Not that I really thought I'd get picked, but now I know what I want to be when I grow up; and as I near my 30th birthday, I just don't know what to do. Friends have been urging me to blog for years to tell the stories of what I consider to be a pretty regular existence that they for some reason find hilarious and entertaining. So now I sit here on my couch, having my big girl glass and typing my thoughts so that maybe someone important will see this and give me my very own show.
I hope anyone reading this at least enjoys the recipes that I plan to include in my postings. I have three main strengths in the kitchen: turning grandmom's comfort foods into healthy meals with little recipe substitution, cooking gourmet meals on weeknights, and creating sunday feasts that take an entire day of preparation and cooking that could wow even the pickiest of critics. I hope to showcase those talents while thrilling you with little stories about my life, mostly about my husband Dan, my blog's namesake and quite possibly the funniest person I know. You'll also get to know entirely too much about my dogs, Fredo and Gus, that we swear have human personalities and whose thoughts we enjoy providing to one another.
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