Sunday, May 04, 2003
Whew!
Glad I didn't go big-food-shopping on Friday. I don' t think I'll go big-shopping tomorrow. I've got gobs of food made up in the fridge and not much room in it. I didn't even make up some more hummus and middle eastern chopped salad to use the tomatoes and cucumbers (maybe tomorrow). I can eat almost through to next Friday, especially if I get bold and make my own salsa. Although I can't eat pasta, I noticed the bag of parmesan growing blue spots and pitched it out :-/.
Before I went off to church this morning, I cooked up the (soaked) black beans with chipotles. Later, I made minestrone, which took longer than usual since I used dried (and soaked) cannellini beans. I baked the remainder of the cooky batter (and only ate about four - hee). And I made asparagus enchiladas, a la Christopher's Nothing Fancy Cafe.
I'd been trying to get nicely-chipotle-flavored beans in the manner of another local cafe (the Homemade Cafe, walking distance from the house) which has had increasingly less of my patronage as I have had the time and energy to figure out how to make the stuff I like there. (Although their home fries still rock the house.) This time I think I succeeded: three dried chipotles for about half a pound of beans, remove afterwards. I also think I remembered to salt them enough.
The minestrone (minus pasta, I eat enough starch as it is) has mushrooms, fresh basil, and green beans (frozen at this time of year). Those make it very tasty.
The enchiladas. They are asparagus and jack, contained in corn tortillas, covered in salsa verde. Sounds weird but works amazingly well. The most recent issue of Cook's Illustrated had a feature on chicken enchiladas. I borrowed the technique for making the tortillas Just Right. Traditional practice is to fry the tortillas then coat them in some sort of chile sauce. Messy. CI says to spray the tortillas with oil and put them in a 350 oven on a baking sheet for 4 minutes. It worked perfectly (even with me rubbing the things with oil - must locate sprayer and load). Most of the effort on the CI recipe was making the red sauce. I bought green taco sauce from the store.
So the plan was:
chop the asparagus small and saute briefly with onion (I think the onion part can be eliminated)
grate a lot of Jack
fix the tortillas in the oven a la CI
turn up oven to 400
pour green sauce in the bottom of my lasagna pan to coat
put some veggie and cheese in each tortilla and roll carefully
put them in dish (seam side down)
drizzle more green sauce over and use back of spoon to distribute
cover with jack
cover dish with foil and bake about 25 minutes
Muy sabrosa!
Serve with black beans and Spanish rice. I didn't make the rice, my fridge was full enough.
Christopher's makes these with spinach when asparagus gets expensive. "Cook and drain the spinach first" would be my big advice with these.
I had a beer with my enchilada dinner. Felt good. I think I'll crash and burn now.
Glad I didn't go big-food-shopping on Friday. I don' t think I'll go big-shopping tomorrow. I've got gobs of food made up in the fridge and not much room in it. I didn't even make up some more hummus and middle eastern chopped salad to use the tomatoes and cucumbers (maybe tomorrow). I can eat almost through to next Friday, especially if I get bold and make my own salsa. Although I can't eat pasta, I noticed the bag of parmesan growing blue spots and pitched it out :-/.
Before I went off to church this morning, I cooked up the (soaked) black beans with chipotles. Later, I made minestrone, which took longer than usual since I used dried (and soaked) cannellini beans. I baked the remainder of the cooky batter (and only ate about four - hee). And I made asparagus enchiladas, a la Christopher's Nothing Fancy Cafe.
I'd been trying to get nicely-chipotle-flavored beans in the manner of another local cafe (the Homemade Cafe, walking distance from the house) which has had increasingly less of my patronage as I have had the time and energy to figure out how to make the stuff I like there. (Although their home fries still rock the house.) This time I think I succeeded: three dried chipotles for about half a pound of beans, remove afterwards. I also think I remembered to salt them enough.
The minestrone (minus pasta, I eat enough starch as it is) has mushrooms, fresh basil, and green beans (frozen at this time of year). Those make it very tasty.
The enchiladas. They are asparagus and jack, contained in corn tortillas, covered in salsa verde. Sounds weird but works amazingly well. The most recent issue of Cook's Illustrated had a feature on chicken enchiladas. I borrowed the technique for making the tortillas Just Right. Traditional practice is to fry the tortillas then coat them in some sort of chile sauce. Messy. CI says to spray the tortillas with oil and put them in a 350 oven on a baking sheet for 4 minutes. It worked perfectly (even with me rubbing the things with oil - must locate sprayer and load). Most of the effort on the CI recipe was making the red sauce. I bought green taco sauce from the store.
So the plan was:
chop the asparagus small and saute briefly with onion (I think the onion part can be eliminated)
grate a lot of Jack
fix the tortillas in the oven a la CI
turn up oven to 400
pour green sauce in the bottom of my lasagna pan to coat
put some veggie and cheese in each tortilla and roll carefully
put them in dish (seam side down)
drizzle more green sauce over and use back of spoon to distribute
cover with jack
cover dish with foil and bake about 25 minutes
Muy sabrosa!
Serve with black beans and Spanish rice. I didn't make the rice, my fridge was full enough.
Christopher's makes these with spinach when asparagus gets expensive. "Cook and drain the spinach first" would be my big advice with these.
I had a beer with my enchilada dinner. Felt good. I think I'll crash and burn now.
// whipped up by Charlotte @ 9:29 PM 
