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Hola! I'm a HUGE Rick Bayless fan.
Love his "Mexico One Plate at a Time" series, although not so much his Baja season where he does less cooking and more traveling. I dunno...I think it's the slow flamenco guitar background music that lulls me so. We only get the show once a week here on PBS (cooking Saturdays!), but I understand it's on nightly on the Living Well channel. Hated the one episode where they did the nuevo cooking at his restaurant and did a foam essence enchilada....I'm sorry, but if I order an enchilada I do not want what looks like a plateful of spit. No matter how much effort and creativity went into it, I would be screamin' mad.
I got hooked on Southwest cooking on my trips to Santa Fe and NM. Working with real chiles and making sauces, etc, is just yards superior to anything in most chain restaurants or from a can. LOVE tamales, but they are SO labor intensive if you make your own masa and do it all from scratch...can it be done in under half a day? We have fun making tortillas....my husband's Achilles heel is corn chips. I'm a nut for chile rellenos with a good guajillo sauce and a tuna rojas punch (prickly pear syrup, lime juice, alcohol of choice...could be a margarita or daquiri). IMHO, you can always tell the quality of a Mexican restaurant by its rellenos. My favorite time of the week is when I go to our local Hispanic market....even though I can't speak a lick of Spanish and I stick out like the chica gringa that I am. The produce is really fresh and inexpensive.
I came across a great Puerto Rican recipe (in an AARP magazine of all places) that works well with Mexican food...I use it regularly for tacos and sopes.
PERNIL (Puerto Rican pork roast)
5 or more cloves of garlic, peeled
1 onion, quartered
2 T dried oregano
1 T ground cumin
1 t chili powder
1 T salt
2 t black pepper
1 T olive oil
1 T wine vinegar
1 lime, juiced
1/4 C orange juice (although I just use lime juice here)
1 pork shoulder (3 to 4 lbs)
tortillas
1) Combine the first 11 ingredients in a food processor and blend
2) Score the meat with a cross-hatched pattern and marinate in the mixture overnight in the fridge
3) Bring the meat to room temperature, place on a rack in a pan with a little water and roast for 3 hours at 300 degrees until tender.
4) Let meat rest 10 minutes before shredding.
(The recipe calls for open roasting, but I do mine in a covered pot...makes it really juicy)