One of our favorite Mexican restaurants makes a salsa out of chiles de Arbol, which has a different spice than the red salsas that you typically find at Mexican restaurants. After many incredible meals at this restaurant, we decided to try to make the chile de Arbol salsa at home. Our recipe is essentially our homemade salsa verde with the addition of chiles de Arbol. You can vary the spice level by adjusting the quantity of chiles.
This enchilada sauce is a cinch to make but it isn’t lacking in flavor. In a side-by-side taste test with a more in-depth and time-consuming sauce, my family chose this one as the favorite. I have given rough quantities of the spices that I use but I usually end up doctoring the sauce to taste.
The great thing about this vinaigrette is that you can adjust the ratio of the ingredients to season the dressing to your taste. I have found that it is best to start by adding small quantities of each ingredient because it is easier to add more of something than to “fix” it once you have added too much.
I have always been intimidated by making chicken stock (and chicken broth). After finally making it, however, I have realized how approachable it really is. There are many subtleties to making a good stock and I know I still have lots to learn by trial and error, but at its basic level, it is a simple process.
Mornay sauce is essentially Béchamel sauce with cheese and some seasonings. French sauces have a mystique about them and trying to make them has always seemed like a daunting task to me. However, I have recently discovered that at least the roux, béchamel and mornay sauces are surprisingly simple to make.
Béchamel Sauce is a basic French sauce used as a thickener and base for many other sauces and dishes. It is essentially a roux (equal parts fat and flour) with milk. Just because it’s a French sauce, don’t let it scare you away. It’s actually simple to make and can be incorporated into non-French meals, such as Macaroni and Cheese.
This sauce is easy to make and has the nostalgic pizza parlor pizza sauce flavor that is missing from most store-bought varieties. I use it for pizzas, calzones, breadsticks, and pastas.
My family loves this lime chicken in tacos and on salads and nachos. The chicken caramelizes when cooked in the lime juice, creating browned, slightly crispy edges with a tender and juicy interior.
The following guacamole recipe is my family’s favorite version but we change up the ingredients depending on what we have on hand. We really like the combination of the salsa verde with the chopped tomatoes but if we don’t have salsa verde, we use any other salsa.
My favorite time of year to make this salsa is in the summer and early fall when we are harvesting the tomatoes and peppers from our garden. It is great in many dishes, including fish tacos, omelettes and fajitas.
Sunday, April 18, 2010
4 Comments