Main Dish
We have been very silent since the middle of last week as we had lots of meetings in town last Thursday and Friday and we had a very successful wine course on Saturday. Sunday we totally collapsed from the back and forth driving between here and the center of Mexico City we had business. With a drive of between 2-3 hours each way we were exhausted from the ordeal. Sunday we totally collapsed and I prepared some hamburgers with some nice ground beef we had bought on the way back from the course Saturday night. It was as complicated as I could manage in the condition I was.
I like my hamburgers nice and juicy and well flavored. Depending of my mood I used different ingredients and on Sunday it was a combination of ground beef, rum, soy sauce, Worcestershire sauce, dried onions, some chipotle-based seasoning, and some sesame oil. The recipe is easy you first put the meat in a bowl, put the ingredients on top, and then with your hand you make a big mess like my Chinese cooking teacher used to say.
The ingredients for my hamburgers
The hamburger ingredients ready to mix
The Mess - The Mess
Once the mess is made I like to hand-form thick patties and it made a lot more than Normita and I could eat in one sitting. I individually wrapped the patties and froze them so that we can enjoy some nice burgers in the coming weeks with even less effort than I did Sunday.
Individually wrapping the hamburger patties we did not use
The patties we ate and the ones we froze
I went outside to cook the hamburgers on the barbecue, and of course the barbecue was barely hot when it started raining. When I finished cooking them I ran inside and we had a great meal, but with all the excitement I only remember to take a picture of the final product when only crumbs remained. Too bad… It will be for next time…
Lucito
Today when I went to prepare the meal I found some unexpected ingredients for the marinade in the back of the refrigerator. A while back Normita had bought a bottle of Torito and we only had a few little sips and it has sat unused in there. Torito is an alcoholic drink typical of Veracruz, a state in the east of the country on the Golf of Mexico coast. It is a cream of peanuts, and I quickly thought of doing something like a cross between Thai and Mexican food. Torito is very sweet so I needed to cut that to make it palatable with the fish. I also found some tamarind pulp and some fresh limes so I made a mixture of Torito with tamarind pulp and lime juice. It lacked salt and chile to balance the flavor so I added some soy sauce and some chile paste until I got a satisfactory mixture. I then put my 2 pieces of fish filet in the marinade and refrigerated for 15-20 minutes while I finished preparing the rest of the meal.
Two nice pieces of dorado filet (mahi-mahi)
The main ingredients of the marinade
I had found some large potatoes while searching for ingredients for the marinade and decided to grill them with the fish. I sliced them, and then sprinkled some salt, pepper, oregano, and olive oil on them. I like to grill them on high heat until slightly burned. They get a great flavor like that.
The potaoes ready to be grilled
We had some frozen vegetables as a second side dish, simply heated in the microwave with a bit of butter, salt, pepper, and herbes de provence on top. I grilled the fish directly on the barbecue with the potatoes and the meal turned out surprisingly tasty. I served a little bit of the reserved marinade on the fish as a light tangy sauce.
The plated dorado
Lucito
The heat has yet to letup here in Mexico City and the entire region is plagued by high heat and high levels of pollution. We had planned to go out today, but neither Normita nor I have the energy to face up with the heat down the hill. I guess that it will be for another day. I thawed a nice piece of dorado or mahi-mahi today. It is sitting in the refrigerator waiting for me to decide what to do with it. Since the is minimal wind today I might do something on the barbecue. I will definitely marinate it first, in what I still have no idea as I have looked into what we have left yet. I think we have some nice large potatoes, so I guess I will grill some nice slices of potato first, and since I do not think we have anything fresh in the refrigerator I will have to used some frozen vegetables as a side dish.
I will decide the details of the meal in a short while, but first I have to go take a shower. Bacchus just passed by my office’s window and from the long smell he took and the excited way he looked at me I guess that I smell like one of the pack and he wants me to go bark at the squirrels in the trees with him. I think I will pass on the occasion and go wash off the strange smell, so that I can be taken for a human again…
Later I’ll post the details on how I prepared the dorado.
Lucito
I have not been in the kitchen since last Friday… Actually I am lying there as we were invited by some neighbors to an outdoor Mother’s Day bash on Saturday. The men were preparing various fish dishes for the Mothers and after sitting around for a while sipping wine I decided to help with the prep-work as I did not want to interfere with the cooks. The did a huge salad with octopus, battered deep fried fish filets and shrimps, deep fried fish, grilled fish, grilled stuffed fish in aluminum, dried shrimp soup and all kind of other fishy things. It was an afternoon meal and we returned home past midnight well fed and well drunk. Luckily we live walking distance from there.
Sunday was spent visiting my mother in law for Mother’s Day, which is actually on the 10th here, thus yesterday, but the family got together on Sunday instead. We had a light meal of ham and cheese sandwiches and salmon sandwiches, followed by gelatin and cake. We returned home early and yesterday was spent trying to resolve some emergencies so we really did not have much time to cook. Normita prepared a nice chicken noodle soup with chipotle this time, and with the cooked chicken breast she made the soup we had some nice chicken tostadas. For those who do not know tostadas are corn tortillas that are fried or oven baked until crisp. For the sake of healthy living we have been buying the oven baked ones for years now.
They can be used as a side dish, or as we did as the main fare. They are normally topped with a variety of things and what we did is butter them with cream, followed by a sprinkling of salt, then a layer of shredded chicken, some avocado, a bit of grated Parmesan and some Valentina hot salsa. Very nice and tasty and we had the same again today as we both had soup and chicken left. We will see what we do tomorrow depending on if we have time to go food shopping or not. Since things have been hectic for the past few weeks and we have not had time to go shopping, we may need to improvise again…
Lucito
After I wrote the previous post about inspiration I hit the kitchen directly to prepare the tomato salad as I wanted it to cool down a bit once prepared and it could do so while I took my shower. I looked into the larder and found 4 small tomatoes that were good, a small bag of olives and I collected other assorted ingredients including some fresh basil from the plant growing wildly in Normita’s office. Starting with these ingredients I assembled the salad.
The tomato salad main ingredients. Tomatos, basil, apple, and olives.
I have been doing those kinds of salads for over 25 years and I love the basic combination of tomatoes, basil, and olives. I normally prefer something like a Kalamata olives, but the only thing I found was a small bag of Spanish olive filled with peppers. They are overly salty so I rinsed them a few times in water to tame the saltiness. Assembling a salad like that is very easy, as you just make layers of ingredients starting with the thinly sliced tomatoes. Thus went it the tomatoes followed by cubed apples, sun-dried tomatoes in olive oil, shredded Oaxaca cheese, grated Parmesan cheese, the fresh basil, ground coarse salt, a fresh grind of black pepper, some balsamic vinegar, and extra virgin olive oil.
The first layer of the salad
You the build the salad layer by layer until you have no more tomatoes. The process is simple. The salad that it yields is very tasty and I like to return it to the refrigerator for a while so the flavors gets well blended and that it gets very cold. I like fresh tomatoes to be very cold. I remember in another life when I was young and handsome, that often during the hottest part of summer when I was working on afternoon shifts from 2pm to 7pm. Before I left for work I would prepare a similar salad to that one with Kalamata olives and feta cheese to keep with the Greek olives, and I would put it in the refrigerator and eat it when I returned home after work. By that time it was ice cold like I like it and the flavors were blended to perfection.
The assembled tomato salad before I put it in the refrigerator
Once the salad was ready I put it in the refrigerator, did the dishes, and I then hit the showers. We sat down and relaxed a bit in front of an electric fan as it is still like a furnace in here. We had this cold refreshing and tasty salad and all of the problems of this stressful weeks we just went through just disappeared.
The plated tomato salad ready to eat
When we sat down to eat Normita reminded me that I had forgotten to put some walnuts in the salad, so I added a handful of them in each of our plates over the salad. It made a nice addition to the salad.
Lucito
It is now past 9pm here and it is still over 90F in the office. Outside it is around 70F, but even with wind no fresh air is entering. The chicken salad we hate earlier was just what was needed on such a hot day. It is a bit cooler in front of the house, but not by much. We enjoyed the nice light salad and even have a bit left for tomorrow. We will see what we will recycle then…
The plated chicken salad perfect fare for a hot day
Lucito
It is over 90F in the office today and we are just melting on the floor. We still have half of the roasted chicken we bought yesterday and in our traditional way of not letting anything go to waste we are going to prepare it as a nice chicken salad. It is about the only way I would get it down in this heat. We will dress the chicken with a bit of mayonnaise and cream, herbs and spices, some frozen peas and carrots, and some little cubes of celery. Normita disinfected a head of romaine lettuce and we will serve the chicken salad over a bed of fresh lettuce. With a tall glass of ice-cold water it should just hit the spot…
Lucito
In our new found quest for everything leftovers I thought that we would have a leftover free day today as we bought a roasted chicken, but of course when we started to prepare the sandwiches we ended up as usual using a lot of odds and ends we found around the kitchen. First the bread, then Normita found some leftovers pickled chiles in the refrigerator and I found some pickled ergh… pickle slices… We also found an avocado and some cheese slices. so we had some nice sandwiches on small French rolls with cheese, roasted chicken, a touch of mayo, avocado, pickles for me, and chiles for Normita. They turned out great.
When we arrived home I noticed that the roasted chicken was “Ranchero” flavored. Since Ranchero roughly means farmer or ranch owner, I was hoping the the flavor was not sweat and dust, or worse sweat and manure… Luckily it was neither and it tasted to me like any supermarket roasted chicken I ever ate.
Our Ranchero-flavored chicken. Just a plain roasted chicken.
The opened plastic tub makes the chicken a tad more appetizing
Half of the chicken cut in small pieces
My mini-sandwiches ready to eat
Lucito
I guess that by now most of you who are following us daily are starting to see a trend evolving over the last week or so. It seems that we never have time to do much cooking as we are rushing all over the place trying to put together some big projects on many front. Today is the same as we needed to go out this morning for some business meeting, and we were delayed as the neighbors on one side who are building a house came to visit with their little kids and 3 puppies. Of course a bunch of screaming kids and yapping puppies did not go well with our dogs who joined the fun, the the kids humans and animals on the other side of the fence were just running back an forth raising a huge cloud of dust. Since we cleaned the hose yesterday, that made us both very happy as there is now a huge amount of accumulated dirt everywhere.
I then had to go talk to the owners to convince them that it would be a good idea to finish building the huge wall they started to build and abandoned with the section still open being the center of a huge pile of dirt that the workers are sending to us daily. We have been living in a dust storm for over 2 months now and hopefully they will soon finish they wall so we can breath a bit of clean air once in a while. While we were driving to our meetings we both realized that once again we had forgotten to plan something for lunch. We finally stopped by on the way back to a supermarket and bought a cooked rotisserie chicken and some bread, so I guess we will now go make some chicken sandwiches. I will report later on how they turned out…
Lucito
As mentioned multiple times we finally manage to have our nice steak as we both had the energy and the weather cooperated for a change and I could cook on the barbecue outside as the wind was only moderate. I quickly marinated some zucchinis cut in medium thick slices.
The marinating zucchinis waiting to be grilled.
Prior to that I had prepared some nice baked potatoes and maintained them hot in a low oven while I prepare the rest. About 15 minutes before cooking, I took the steaks out and simply salted them and put some Montreal-style steak seasoning on them. Strangely enough I was raised in Montreal and when I was young you never saw that stuff in the supermarkets. Now I live in Mexico and you can see that stuff all over the place. Go figure… I prefer a simple dry seasoning to my steaks and never use things like oil either on the meat or on the grill. I cook the steaks at very high temperature with the barbecue lid closed, and that has worked for me for over 30 years, so I stick with what works.
The nice New York steaks with a sprinkling of Montreal-style steak seasoning pressed into them.
I grilled the steak to around medium-cooked for Normita as she likes her meat dead, and to blue for me as I like my meat with a nice crust outside and with the inside at body temperature. If it does not go moo when I stick my fork in, it is perfect for me. We enjoyed the meat as it was extremely juicy and very tasty. Next time we go to town to do some shopping we will definitely buy another side of New York.
Normita's plate ready for her to eat.
Lucito