Hash, Hash, Baby.

I have had a lifelong love affair with the potato. Fried, mashed, baked, twice-baked, au gratin. Shredded, cubed, julienned, chipped. If there is a way to cook a potato, chances are, I will eat it. There is nothing like that starchy high, the comfort of perfectly executed spud heaven. The potato grounds a dish, gives it substance, and acts as a vehicle for other flavors. It is the great unifier in western meals, as rice and pasta are in so many other parts of the world. We love us some potatoes, but we tend to look down on hash. It is often seen as cheap and associated with poverty, but it shouldn't be! It is an amazing way to bring new flavors to your plate, and can really add variety to your dinner menu.

Hash is as fancy as you choose to make it, and there are as many ways to make hash as you can think up. It need not be relegated to being a breakfast dish only, as my face-melting curry hash can attest to. A good potato paired with fresh vegetables and meat and a little invention with the spice rack are the keys to turning a poor man's meal gourmet. I looked through my cupboard and these are the items I started with:

With these few ingredients, you can make:

Chorizo Hash with Roasted Red Peppers and Mushrooms

4 medium potatoes
4 large white mushrooms
3-4 garlic cloves
1 lime
Dried rosemary
Dried thyme
Parsley flakes
5 oz. roasted red peppers
2 Tbs. EVOO
2 large chorizo links

A word about chorizo:

Chorizo is badass tasty. It is spicy and a little greasy but not chewy and grisly. It is good in so many dishes and should be used on a regular basis. It is also usually made out of pork. We don't eat pork in this house because we are Muslim, but I converted, so I had a whole history with tasty swine for most of my life. I had found really good substitutes for bacon and pepperoni and even Italian sweet sausage. But I truly thought that chorizo was lost to me forever. Until I went to, you guessed it, the most badass spectacular gorgeous Mexican grocery store of all time! There it was, two fat, spicy links of tasty goodness labelled, "chorizo pollo". It was one of the best days of my life. I brought it home and got right to making this lovely little hash with it.

Speaking of that hash, start by cleaning, peeling, and chopping up your vegetables. Potatoes should be cubed, garlic minced, mushrooms sliced, and the peppers roughly chopped. Aren't my mushrooms pretty?  

Set your vegetables aside and start warming a large non-stick skillet to mudium-high. Thrown in your chorizo, squeeze half a lime over it, and let it sear a little bit on each side. Remember to turn it and not to leave it in too long; sausage of any kind rarely takes long to cook through. Sometimes, when you buy your sausage handmade and fresh, the tubing or intestines the meat was packed in might split. It may not look pretty, but there is nothing wrong with the sausage. Just roll with it. My chorizo split in a few places, so I took a sharp knife and continued the split down the side of both sausages. I turned the opened side of the sausage down and let it sizzle away. Once you have a little brown on each side, remove your sausage and set aside. With the grease from the sausage still in the pan, add a few dashes each of the rosemary, thyme, and parsley. Add your potatoes, squeeze the other half of your lime, and stir until they are evenly coated with the oil and spices. If the spices char to the bottom of the pan, add about 1/4 cup of water and stir it around. It will pull all of the cooked on flavor from the pan and give your potatoes a beautiful light brown color. After a few minutes of crackling and browning, add your mushrooms, peppers, and garlic. This is what mine looked like:

I just love the way the potatoes look in that picture, like they own the pan! Saute your vegetables until the mushrooms tighten up a bit, and when you are done, spoon them into a butter-lined baking dish. Nestle your chorizo into the hash and bake in a 375 degree oven for a half hour. I like to do this with the hash because I want the sausage and potato flavors to really mix together, so it becomes a more cohesive dish. When the half hour is up, your hash should look something like this:

This is what mine looked like when I plated it up:

Look at the steam rolling off that baby! I have to say, for all the spice of the chorizo, this was definitely a comfort food kind of meal. It was supremely fast and easy to make, and the result was incredibly savory and smooth. The best part was the potatoes, small and soft, full of zesty goodness. They got the attention they deserved, and it really paid off! I hope you love this recipe and make it for yourself and your family soon. Knives down and aprons off! It's time to dig in!

Fajita, Fajata!

There is an amazing restaurant chain I used to frequent when I lived in Texas called Casa Ole. Among other things, they make what I consider to be the best fajitas I have ever had. They come sizzling and popping to your table, the onions soft and sweet, the meat charring on the cast iron platter. I would get a fajita food baby at least twice a month from that place. Amazing.

Since I moved to North Carolina, though, I haven't really found any Tex-Mex restaurants that knock my socks off, and the fajitas I have tried, while good, have missed the mark. When restaurants fail you, it is time to get in the kitchen and satisfy your own craving. What I found is that, at home, I can make the second best fajitas I have ever had. Being in second place never tasted so good, people, I'm telling you.

This is a picture of the ingredients you will need:

1 package chicken breasts (whole or tenderloin)
1 package medium flour tortillas
1/2 green bell pepper
1/2 red bell pepper
1 whole medium onion
2 cups Mexican or fiesta blend shredded cheese
8 oz. sour cream
3 Tbs. vegetable oil
1/3 cup water
3 Tbs. fajita seasoning

You will also need 2 large non-stick skillets for this.

Stir together your oil, water, and fajita seasoning in a bowl until it is well blended. This is technically a marinade, so you can pour it on your meat and let it soak in overnight, but it really isn't necessary to do so. You can also use it as a marinade for other meats if you are looking to give a meal some punchy savory flavor.

Before I move on to the rest of the recipe, let me speak for a few minutes about the la tienda Mexicana, a.k.a your local Mexican grocery store.

Do you see the chicken breast in the picture above? It was butchered shortly before I bought it, because at our tienda and in most stores like it, they butcher their own meat on site. Don't like chicken? How about live red snapper? Because they had a whole tank there. Freshly made sausage? Tender cuts of beef steak? Blue crab, scallops, shrimp? All fresh and all for prices you will never see in any chain grocery store. I paid a few pennies over $3 for those two huge, fresh chicken breasts. It isn't just the meat section, although that alone is worth the trip. Everything I saw in this grocery store was great quality, including produce, which is lacking in so many supermarkets. What really got me going though, was the spice section. A wall of every spice imaginable and at least half the cost of what other stores are asking. Do you want to make the tastiest fajitas? Then you need to go find this:

McCormick makes a perfectly good fajita seasoning, but it doesn't come close to the gusto this seasoning packs. You will relish every bite you take if you slather your veggies and chicken (or beef) with this stuff, I promise. Also, you can take pride in shopping at a store that is owned and operated locally. Check out your nearest Mexican or Latin American grocery store; you will not regret it.

Anywho, back to my easy fajitas. Set your marinade aside and get to chopping your peppers and onions. I like to cut mine into thin strips, but you can certainly do it the way you like best. I like my fajita veggies to get really soft, and thinner strips take less time to get tender. Throw your chopped vegetables in a bowl and pour half your marinade over them. Mix them together until the marinade is evenly distributed, and then throw them in a pan on medium-high heat. Let them sizzle and saute while you slice your chicken breast. I slice mine long and thin at an angle on the breast. I like the look of the diagonal slices:) Take your marinade bowl from before, and toss your chicken along with the remainder of the marinade. Put the chicken in the pan when your peppers and onions are just starting to get really tender. You don't want them to be cooked all the way because your chicken is going to take a few minutes to cook and you don't want a veggie mush at the end.

While your chicken is doing its thing in the first pan, start heating up your second skillet. This is for your tortillas. They are ready to eat out of the package, but giving each side about 30 seconds on high heat makes them nice and warm and gives them a slight, pleasant crispness. You can do this in between stirring your fajitas. Just set them on a plate to the side until you are ready to fill them with deliciousness!

Once your chicken is cooked thoroughly, you can remove it from the heat and spoon everything into a bowl. I know, these fajitas aren't the popping, sizzling kind. I just don't have the cast iron accoutrements to make that happen:( I take comfort in the fact that these fajitas are amazingly luscious without them. This is what my fajitas looked like when I got them out of the pan:

I don't know about you, but...YUM!!!

Get yourself a warm tortilla, fill it with fajitas, top it with sour cream and cheese, and eat until your appetite is appeased. Black beans, spanish rice, and any salsa you prefer can be added, as well. You can make some really good refried beans to go on the side with a regular can of refried beans and a half cup of milk. Mix it up, scoop them into a baking dish, and bake for 15 minutes at 350 degrees. Top with a little queso fresco and you are in business, folks. This is what the finished product looked like:

I hope you really love this meal and add it to your regular at-home menu. The best testament to this dish I can give is that my husband's plate was empty five minutes later and he was making man-grunts to tell me to make him some more.

I just realized that I posted fajitas on St. Patrick's Day. I guess I will have to make potato and leek soup for Cinco De Mayo! Erin go Braugh, kids!

Everything's a salad! I swear!

I have always loved food. Good food. I was lucky and grew up with a dad who would hang out in the kitchen as a hobby. He had a full spice cabinet that smelled like secrets and faraway places. From an early age, I wanted to know what they did and why they did it. I would watch him move in front of the stove. He was a calm and measured man; every move he made was deliberate. He would let me watch and learn while making barbecue sauce, home fries, chili, swiss steak, or any of the many things he made for my mom and me. Once I had learned how to NOT burn myself with the stove, he allowed me to start experimenting. I made some awful things when I was 10, but a long time has passed and I have had many years to tweak and develop the food I make. I even live by a food philosophy...

My best friend and mega-awesome-super-lady, Jenny, shares my love of food. We have done a lot of eating together over the years, and we are good at it. One late evening, we were tucking into a meal at Trumps, the best all-night diner in central Iowa, when I had a revelation. We had just come from exercising and I was feeling guilty about eating this beautiful fried fish sitting in front of me, when I was overcome with inspiration-everything is a salad! If you can somehow trace your food back to plant form, it has to be a salad. Cheeseburger? Salad. Veggies aside, the bun comes from flour which comes from wheat which is a plant. The beef comes from a cow which ate corn or grass (I hope!) which are plants. Ketchup? Tomatoes. Plant. Salad. This rule can be applied to almost everything. I'm not sure if this is an original idea; so few ideas are. But when this idea floated into my mind, it was fresh and liberating and invigorating. Jenny thought so, too, and we have embraced the salad mindset since 2006.

A few words for the health-obsessed: This blog may not be for you. I love fresh ingredients. I love "healthy" foods, because lots of "healthy" food is tasty food! I believe health is important, and I acknowledge the power of portion size and exercise. But this blog is not about losing weight or cutting calories or addressing the obesity epidemic. This blog is about making, eating, and enjoying good food. A lot of people have given Paula Deen a heavy dose of crap lately for loving butter and being diabetic, but I don't ever remember her presenting herself as making anything but great home cooking. I hope to make some tasty food and tell my adventures here without telling anyone how they should eat it.

My dad has been gone for many years now. Sometimes I think I have forgotten what he smelled like or the sound of his voice. When I really miss him, I put my apron on and I look for him in the kitchen. I have noticed that my hands move like his at the chopping board, and I stick my tongue out when I am concentrating on a difficult dish like he always would. But these are just habits; a style I learned from watching him when I was a kid. No, I always find him when I open the spice cabinet. It's there that I smell the past and the possibility of future food, and I am cooking with him once again.

So, welcome! I promise to always try hard to give you tasty ideas and to publish my real mistakes so you don't have to make them. Let's make something SO good today we have to talk about it tomorrow. Aprons on, people!