Rubbishy Cookery

  Let’s make chicken tacos for a small dinner party! Olé! Ingredients: Directions: Cut up the chicken breasts into strips like so: That’s a lot of chicken, but it is  for a party. Slice up two onions, retaining some slices for taco garnish: Heat up some canola oil in a large nonstick pan on medium high heat and sauté the onions: Sauté the onions until browning: Then add the chicken slices to the pan: Sauté the chicken-onion combo until the chicken sears all over: That chicken doesn’t look seared because there’s too much chicken crowded in my pan and it’s steaming instead of searing. Shame. Add the spices to the pan: a generous amount of chili powder, chipotle powder and ground cumin: Stir and sauté, and maybe you need more chilli powder: Now lower the heat to medium and put a lid on to ensure fully cooked chicken: Meanwhile, warm your tortillas in a cloth napkin or tea towel in the microwave, 1-2 minutes or so: Set your party table with everything: the cooked chicken, the warm...

  Here is another homage recipe to the gone-but-not-forgotten favourite restaurant of my youth, Latinos of Guelph, Ontario (see Recipe #6 for more back story on this beloved El Salvadoran restaurant). One of their appetizers was a dish called Nachos Deliciosos , but it was nothing like any nacho dish I’d had before or have had since. Rather than the common nacho dish of chips slathered in various toppings and melted cheese (not that there’s anything wrong with that! See a future post for my version), Latinos served their version in a shallow oval ramekin. The ramekin contained their beautiful black beans covered in homemade red salsa and a layer of melted cheese, served with a few homemade tortilla chips poking out of the hot beans-salsa-cheese ramekin like shark fins, and many more crispy chips around the ramekin for dipping. Sour cream was optional. And that was it. So simple, and yet so… deliciosos!  Ingredients: Note the leftover basic black beans from Recipe #4.  Not...

  When I was a young adult in the 1980s and 90s, there was a El Salvadoran gem of a restaurant in Guelph, Ontario called Latinos. It was one of my favourite restaurants of all time. I always had the same things and they never disappointed: an appetizer called Nachos Deliciosos, and a main dish called Enfrijoladas. We’ll talk about the delicious nachos appetizer another time.  Today is all about the enfrijoladas. At Latinos, the dish came with two folded corn tortillas filled with their brilliant black beans and cheese, fried on both sides, and served with sour cream, salsa, and hot sauce, with a side of their special rice pilaf and a little salad. Sadly, Latinos is gone. And after a period of despair and grief came the time to try to figure out how to move on with my life. Which meant trying to recreate their bean and cheese enfrijoladas on my own. When I searched for a recipe for enfrijoladas on the internet, I never came up with a satisfying recipe that seemed right. Most of...