Chipotle Chicken, Cuban-Style Black Beans... and Champagne!

It was Mother's Day Eve. At 5PM, we were hosting our moms for a mother's day dinner and a surprise visit to the Vintage Theatre in Denver to see their hilarious production, Leading Ladies. At 4:49, the house was silent.

Why, you might ask? Well, because we weren't home! We were at a graduation party, slurping down one last martini before having to high-tail it home and host our moms. What kind of kids are we, anyway?

We get to the house at 4:55, slip in the driveway just as they park out front. What timing! Lucky for me, I had the foresight to plan a fun and easy menu prior to departing for our martini-filled afternoon party and we were ready to go.

First things first: Pop that champagne! Nothing makes a mom feel more special (or is better after a prickly pear martini) than a nice sparkling wine. Glasses filled, the mothers retire to the living room and Brian and I roll up our drunken sleeves and get to work!

Grill warming: check. Bacon rendering: check. Veggies chopping: check! Chicken marinating? CHECK! Awesome, we were off to a great start!

Rewind 8 hours earlier: I am sober, in my kitchen, and recklessly tossing ingredients in my Cuisinart mini chop to make a smoky, citrusy marinade for grilled chicken to accompany one of my favorite sides, Cuban-style black beans. I toss in a few chipotle chiles with a serious dollop of the adobado sauce, the juice of two limes, some garlic, salt, pepper, cumin, oregano, and a little extra lemon juice just to round it out. Taking three chicken breasts, I slice them in half lengthwise, resulting in 6 thin chicken cutlets. Toss it all in a ziploc bag, massage heartily, roll that puppy up and stick it in the fridge.

Fast forward to 5:00, and rather unsteadily sipping my champagne I'm chopping up bacon (really, is this such a good idea???), cooking it down into lardons, and reserving the grease to saute a chopped sweet onion, bell pepper, and some spices. Once the veggies are soft and ready, you add some drained and rinsed black beans and re-introduce the bacon (well he-lllo!), and start supplying it with ladle-fulls of chicken broth and alternately letting it cook down, ala risotto.

Husband is on grill duty, the chicken looking delightfully marinaded and tender. Shred up some Cotija cheese (a dry Mexican cheese, kind of like a mix of feta and parmesan, we fondly call it feta-san), spoon some sour cream into a bowl, slice up an avocado, and... ole, mamacita! A feast for the two best moms in the world!

Delightfully tender and spicy chicken, sliced thin and spread across the top of the plate, surrounding a healthy spoonful of black beans, sprinkles with cotija, and fanned with avocado.

Who would have thought we could have pulled it off?

Grillin' for Dinner

It's officially summer. The thunderstorms have started to roll in over the rocky mountains in the afternoon, we hit 70 one day and have snow the next, and every where you go you get that lovely wafting of meat on an outdoor grill. Yeah!

I've invited my brother to come over tonight, and I'm so excited to experiment a new dish with him. The thing I love about my brother (well, one of the many, I suppose!) is that he'll eat whatever I put in front of him. And he'll 99.999% of the time really like it. At the very least, he appreciates it. And he has kind feedback for the .001% of the time when something doesn't hit his palate right. Don't get me wrong, I'm not that good of a cook. He's just an exceptional eater... and, thus, taster for new things!

Thus... grilled shrimp with lemon-parsley-butter and grilled vegetables. I know, it's not that exciting. But for somebody who loves food as much as I do, I have to admit that I've only recently entered into the world of cooking seafood. I love a nice poached salmon, and pan seared sole, and I've never met a crabcake I didn't like... but I haven't had a lot of experience actually cooking all of these things.

So... I have four pounds of U-15 shrimp (I still maintain that it sounds like some sort of WWII submarine) in my freezer and I'm going to thaw a healthy portion, skewer those puppies and hope for the best. They won't stick if marinated in olive oil, a splash of lemon juice, oregano, and some cayenne (nice!).

The lemon-parsley-butter concoction is inspired by a meal I had several times when in Tahiti in May of '09. I ordered the grilled shrimp almost every evening because it was so good and because the butter was even better! Yes. I ate a meal night after night based solely on the accompanying butter. What can I say, it was really good???

So I've got my butter out on the counter, am going to put Scott (big brother) to work on reaming me half a lemon and mixing it up while I get the stuff on the grill.

For my darling husband, who doesn't do seafood, I'm cooking a delicious green chile burger with asadero cheese. I could do a whole post on that!

Lemony Chicken

A delicious recipe for perfect pan-seared chicken turned out to be a really luxurious looking and tasting meal with very little of the effort usually associated with something so rich and delightful.

Cooks Illustrated recently featured a technique for perfect pan seared chicken. It involved a process of roasting, covered, at a very low temperature and then searing afterwards. What made this luxurious, however, especially for a random weeknight dinner was the lemon pan sauce that accompanied it.

After you get the chicken roasted, seared on all sides, and resting, you scrape up those bits with a quick white wine deglazing, add some lemon juice (NOTE: buy lemons at costco. Always use freshly squeezed lemon juice. I'll probably devote a post to this at a later date!) and a nice roux, and voila... you have a rich, tangy, silky sauce.

I recommend carving the breasts into thin slices so you get a touch of that nice seared edge with every juicy morsel, and spoon your pan sauce over it.

On this particular night, we made a quick roast out of whatever veggies I had still hanging out in the fridge:  a bell pepper, a sweet onion, a few handfuls of broccoli and a couple of roma tomatoes. The broccoli ended up with a delightful charred roasti-ness about them, and I think the other vegetables were just meant to be served that way.

Delish!

Ratatouille!

No, this isn't a blog dedicated to Julia Child-- there's another one for that!-- but I do want to give homage where appropriate and I happily dedicate this post not only to the legendary and heroic Julia Child, but to the young and heroic Ms. Julie Powell, whose book I happily devoured after receiving my own copy of Mastering from my mother in law a few Christmases ago. Trust me, the leek and potato soup IS the best!

Ratatouille
If I can come clean, it really wasn't either Julie or Julia that inspired me to create a traditional ratatouille a few weeks ago... it was our little rat friend Remy, from the Pixar movie Ratatouille. The scene where the first little bite of the rat's ratatouille draws the embittered food critic through time, back directly to his mother's kitchen in provencial France, was something I can relate to on so many levels. My passion for cooking is not only the process, but the tradition. To make my grandmother's corn soup, or my mom's meatballs and rice, is as much our geneology and history as our family tree.

So I went straight to the source, consulting with Julia to figure out how much of the various vegetables I would need, and went shopping. There's something so gratifying about a big bowl of vegetables, a veritable Ratatouille-in-the-Raw, sitting on the counter just awaiting transformation.

What a way to cook! The quick blanching of the tomatoes, the peeling and slicing of the eggplant (love the strange and foreign texture of the eggplant, the beautiful dark purple the most stunning background) the exquisite aroma as the vegetables share in their "communal simmer", as Julia would say. The process is a delight, from the slicing of the vegetables, the layering in the dutch oven, the careful turn and saute of each one individually as you prepare to bring the symphony together in the final creation.

France is one of my favorite places to visit. Especially southern France, in September, when the lavendar fields drift in the afternoon sun and it feels as though time could almost comfortably stop and nobody would mind.

I've only been to France once, and to be completely fair, I'd never tasted ratatouille before that afternoon in my kitchen. But the blend of the artisnal flavors, the hearty eggplant, the tangy tomato, the gentle sweetness of the summer squash... I might as well have been back in Aix-in-Provence, or on the side of the farmer's market in Nice, with their endless rows of briny olives.

It's a transformation for the soul and armchair travel for the French in all of us! Voila!

Bacon and Green Chile: a match made in heaven

Two ingredients that I feel are almost practically impossible to make a decent breakfast without: bacon and green chile. The combinations and applications are almost endless, from making a spicy, kicky scramble or a unique and flavorful quiche.

Kicky Scramble

Chop half an onion, saute in butter, sprinkle gently with some dried oregano, salt and pepper. (A note on oregano: it's typically lumped in the Italian side of cooking, but it really is a true staple in Mexican and Spanish cooking. Give it a try, you won't be disappointed!)

While the onion is sauteing (just until soft, sweet and golden, you don't want it black, brown or crispy) cook up about four pieces of bacon. If you want, chop up one potato, microwave in water until soft, and saute in a separate pan. This can and should get the oregano treatment, too. This is a nice bed for your scramble, but if you want to avoid the carbs and starch, you really won't miss it. It's a real treat especially when you use a nice yukon gold or fingerling potato.

If you have canned green chiles, go ahead and open them up and drain them. If you live in the American southwest and are lucky enough to have access to green chiles in the fall, go ahead and peel, chop and seed them now. (I'll dedicate a separate blog post to green chiles, so if you have no idea what I'm talking about, stay tuned).

Chop up your bacon and green chile. Add the chile to your onions, cook until they brown just slightly in spots and start to dry up; you want to just heat them here to activate some of that capsaicin that makes them spicy and chase away any additional moisture they bring from the can or the freezer.

Add about four eggs, whisked, your bacon, and any type of cheese (I heartily recommend a mexican Asadero, if you can find it). Cook up until your eggs are your desired consistency, and serve! I recommend a hearty dollop of sour cream on top-- deliciously cooling!