A Perfect Time for Chicken Enchiladas

Latin cuisine has always delighted me, starting in my childhood when my mother made chile con carne.  As a member of my High School Spanish club, I joined in cooking arroz con pollo.  Yellow rice was a revelation!  The lady-in-charge took us to Joe Baum's original La Fonda del Sol, a pan-Latin restaurant in New York City where I had fantastic tamales wrapped in corn husks. Then I moved to the upper West Side of Manhattan and was regaled with Chinese Cuban cuisine. I especially loved the ropa vieja--slow-cooked, shredded beef smothered in a spicy tomato sauce. There were fried plantains cooked to perfection by friends of Puerto Rican ancestry and sizzling fajitas when we lived in California and Oregon.

Long, skinny, mild, green chili peppers: piments doux des Landes

Sadly a dearth of that kind of delicious food became a reality for many a year after moving to UK and then France. So when The Calm One wistfully brought home a packet of flour tortillas, I immediately thought of the pile of mild, green chili peppers Madame M recently gave us, cooked chicken and stock in the freezer, crème fraîche in the fridge, tomato paste and chili powder in the cupboard, and tomatoes, garlic, onions, scallions & flat-leaf parsley from the potager. Ah, it's time to make chicken enchiladas!

First the enchilada sauce is made.  You will need 3 T of olive oil, 1 T of flour, 4 T of chili powder (sauce is mild, add more if you want more heat), 16 fluid ounces of chicken stock, 8 dry ounces of tomato paste, and salt if needed.

In a saucepan, heat the oil over medium low heat for about thirty seconds and stir in the flour till smooth which should not take more than a minute. Add the chili powder and cook for one minute, continuing stirring.

My brand has bell pepper, onion & tomato flakes in addition to spices--it's really good!

Slowly pour in the chicken stock while stirring.  If not smooth, then give it a good whisk. Add the tomato paste and mix well. Simmer over low heat for about fifteen minutes until nicely thick, stirring occasionally. Salt to taste and reserve.

Ingredients
(makes five large enchiladas)

• Enchilada sauce, 16 fluid ounces (see above for recipe)
• Tortillas, about 10 inches in diameter, corn or flour, 5
• Chicken, cooked and shredded, 16 fluid ounces (I used simmered chicken but broiled, sauteed, roasted, grilled could be substituted, just remove all bones and skin)
• Chile peppers, mild, green, fresh, 5
• Tomatoes, chopped, fresh (canned can be substituted but drain them well), 16 fluid ounces
• Onion, medium, 1
• Garlic, 2-3 fat cloves, peeled and minced
• Cheese, grated (I used Edam, but Cheddar and Monterry Jack would be good or a mix of mild, firm cheeses), six fluid ounces
• Flour, a tablespoon or two
• Chopped scallions, tomatoes, crème fraîche/sour cream  & flat leaf parsley for garnishing

Preheat the oven to 350 F degrees. To make the filling, peel the tomatoes (if using fresh) by dunking them in boiling water for a minute or so and then placing them in cold water.  The skins will easily come off with a help of a sharp knife.

Chop them coarsely. Wash and carefully seed, de-membrane, and slice the peppers. Mince the garlic and thinly slice the onion.

Pull the chicken apart with your fingers and dust the shreds with a bit of the chili powder.

Grate the cheese.

Put a tablespoon of olive oil (or drippings if you broiled, grilled, roasted or sauteed the chicken) in a skillet and heat over medium flame briefly. Add the garlic and onions and saute for a minute or two. Toss in the peppers and cook for a minute or so.

Add the tomatoes and cook for about five minutes.

Stir in the chicken and the flour. Salt to taste. 

Pour the sauce in a shallow dish. Put a tortilla (if not pliable, briefly warm in a lightly oiled skillet) in the sauce and quickly flip it over. Don't soak or it will disintegrate. Place one fifth of the filling close to one edge of the tortilla and then roll up neatly. Spread a couple of tablespoons of sauce in a baking dish and place the enchilada seam down.

Repeat with the remaining four tortillas. Cover with the rest of the sauce and top with the grated cheese.

Bake for about 15 minutes or until cheese is well browned and sauce is bubbling. Serve with the scallions, tomatoes, flat-leaf parsley, and  crème fraîche on the side.

Since we were hankering for spicy Latin food for a while, these plump, moist, and yummy chicken enchiladas were happy food indeed.  They freeze well and taste even better when thawed and re-heated.

In the potager, the plentiful figs are maturing nicely.

In the flower garden, the pinks I sowed in the spring are now robust plants.

And the David Austin Falstaff super-fragrant climbing rose is still going strong.

Monsieur and Madame M gifted us with a regional sweet to thank us for watering their garden while they were on a short trip to Pays Basque.

The lovely tin will be a pleasure to re-use again and again.

I am having one of these buttery gâteau a la myrtille (blueberry) daily--OK, a couple of them, hmmm, several to be honest--with coffee, and they are GOOD!

This little 'cake' is like a Linzer cookie on steroids

À la prochaine! 

RELATED POSTS
How to skin tomatoes
How to make Piperade (a Basque dish with peppers & tomatoes)

RELATED LINKS
Dorie Greenspan's recipe for Basque Cake
Basque Cuisine

Cantaloupe Granita & Caramel Cream Parfait

Sixteen Charentais melons have been harvested in our potager last week, and there are another seven threatening maturity soon--lovely, sun-kissed, plump beauties emitting their potent fragrance as they sit on window sills, nestle in fridges, and lay in their patch awaiting judicious plucking. Several are almost the size of honeydew melons.

Charentais melons, summer pears, and Roma tomatoes from the potager

Besides serving them au nature or with ice cream/whipped cream (you could use both simultaneously), one can go the sweet fondue route and dip chunks of melon in warm salted caramel sauce. If something even more fabulous is desired then a parfait is the answer.

When the melon is good, simple works.

Some everbearing strawberries and raspberries from the potager were added to the melon cubes

Caramel sauce becomes fluid when left out for an hour during warm weather

Cantaloupe Granita & Caramel Cream Parfait

I remember well from my New York City childhood, street vendors in the summer shaving ice off a huge block, putting the jagged bits in a paper cone, saturating them with jewel-coloured, super-concentrated fruit syrups, and the best part, being handed this delight. Granita is a fancy, fruitier version of this simple summer treat.

Granita not only tastes great on its own, but is a good way of preserving lots of fruit

A light sugar syrup, flavoured or not, is made first. Fruit puree is then mixed with it and as the mixture is gradually freezing, stirring is done sporadically. C'est tout!

For about a quart of granita, two medium-sized cantaloupes (3 cups/24 ounces* of melon cubes) should provide enough for the granita recipe and some extra for fresh eating/garnishing. Additionally four ounces* of sugar, four ounces* of water, and two teaspoons of minced orange zest will be needed. *fluid measure (recipe can be multiplied)

One orange should suffice for making the zest. Wash and dry the orange well especially if it has been treated. I find a small ceramic knife works better than a zester. Remember you want just the thin orange skin with no white bits.

Put sugar, water, and orange zest in a medium-sized pot and over high heat stir until all sugar is dissolved which should take no more than five minutes. You will be able to see clearly the bottom of the pan. Then over medium heat, simmer for a minute.

Remove from heat, pour into an eight-inch-square or nine-inch round metal cake pan (several metal ice cube trays without their dividers could be substituted) and let cool. Make room in the freezer for it so when required it can be easily positioned.

Scrub melons well, cut in halves, scoop out the seeds, then slice thickly. Using a knife remove the flesh from the skin and make small cubes.

That's a tablespoon, not a teaspoon, in the largest melon (nearly ten inches in diameter!) from our patch

Via a blender or food processor, roughly puree the melon pieces. There should be just under sixteen fluid ounces of puree.

Puree will be lumpy

Add the puree to the syrup and whisk well.

Place the pan in the freezer.  Every ninety minutes until it is frozen, stir the mixture with a fork. When frozen (it took about six hours in my freezer), cover pan with foil or plastic wrap and keep in freezer until needed. When ready to assemble the parfait, take out the granita and scrape the surface with the tines of a fork.

Voila! Delicious, golden slush.

For the parfait, you will need cantaloupe granita, whipped cream, caramel sauce, and fresh melon pieces. Whip the cream with a small amount of sugar. Into each level tablespoon of fluid caramel sauce, fold three heaping tablespoons of whipped cream. While folding, let some caramel swirls remain.

For each serving, layer as neatly and evenly as possible two heaping tablespoons of granita, one heaping tablespoon of the caramel cream and repeat. Top with a piece of fresh melon. This pretty melon parfait was light and luscious at the same time.

Within two weeks of resuming his regular schedule after his long recovery from a paw injury, Dayo has shown all feline interlopers that the garden is still his garden.

To celebrate this important occasion, he ceremoniously jogged from a distance while I was working a veggie bed. The something in his mouth turned out to be a very still mouse. He graciously and carefully laid it on its back at my feet. Remaining motionless, it then suddenly turned over while giving out some of the most endearing high-pitched sounds I ever heard. Quick as, well, a mouse, it smartly hid under the tiles framing the bed completely flummoxing Dayo. One second, bringing home the bacon, the next, staring at an empty skillet! The look on Dayo's face was almost as heartbreaking as the little squeaks of the mouse were.

À la prochaine!

RELATED POSTS

Harvesting Charentais melons
Making salted caramel sauce
How to fold in whipped ingredients

Iced Coffee Caramel Float

Though the light golden syrup I recently made for a Carmelised Blackberry Sundae was good, I found myself pining for as potent a rush of caramelness as possible. I happened upon such a holy grail a few days ago when I made Salted Caramel Sauce.  It has a deluge of cream. It has mountains of butter. It has a beach of sugar.  All of these good things come together in an aurous, glossy, divine dessert sauce which takes only twenty minutes to make.  If that was not enough, the salt heightens the lusciousness of those ingredients to the point where all spoons and ladles need to be kept under lock and key...and fingers tied behind backs. 

During les beaux jours, one of the first things I do is make up a couple of quarts of iced coffee each morning.  Keeping them in the sous sol fridge allows my staggering in from the garden for a long cooling drink. Why not, I mused, while splashing cold water on my face before I keeled over from heat prostration, depriving the potager of a mommy, combine caramel and iced coffee to make an ice cream float?  That's exactly what I did, and this float is one tall glass of cool.

First you make the caramel sauce. For around two cups of sauce you will need two cups of granulated sugar, one cup of heavy cream, twelve tablespoons of sweet butter, and one tablespoon of fleur de sel.

Cut the butter up into small chunks

Put the sugar in a big, heavy-bottomed pot to accommodate the furious bubbling up when the butter and cream is added to the melted sugar. Whisk the sugar over medium-high heat.

Keep whisking as lumps are formed which takes about five minutes.

About ten minutes later it will start to melt.  When it is completely melted stop whisking as such motion could cause the liquid to seize. Swirl the pot instead of stirring. This is the crucial time when the sauce could become burnt. On my stove, that time came almost immediately after all the sugar melted.  The sauce becomes a deep golden colour and smells toasty. If using a candy thermometer, look for a registration of 350 degrees F.

The colour you are looking for is the darker area surrounding the whisk

Add all the butter at once and resume whisking.

Keep whisking until all the butter is completely melted, most of the bubbles are gone, and the sauce is smooth which should take a minute or two.

Remove the pot from the heat and slowly add the cream while whisking.

Lastly, whisk in the fleur de sel, making sure you blend the salt completely. A test stirring with a wooden spoon to ensure that no salt granules are lurking along the bottom of the pot is a good idea.

Let cool about fifteen minutes before pouring in a suitable container.

Keep covered in the fridge where it will last for about two weeks. When very cold, it will be quite firm which works well as a spread.

For the float, you will need ice cream (I used vanilla), some fluid caramel sauce, and iced coffee made with cream and caramel sauce.

When making the hot coffee, ensure that it is quite strong and beat/whisk in a tablespoon of heavy cream and a tablespoon or two of the sauce (if using firm sauce, it will melt) for each glass.  Put in fridge until very cold. To assemble the float, put a thin layer of sauce (warm it slightly to make it more fluid and drinkable) on the bottom of a tall glass and follow with a couple of spoonfuls of vanilla ice cream.

Pour iced coffee almost to the rim.  The ice cream will float to the top.  You can add a bit more of ice cream and then dribble on some more fluid sauce. Stick in a straw and keep a spoon handy! Keep in mind if you touch the bottom of glass with the straw, you will get a nice draught of caramel.

It's silly to suggest ways of using this fantastic sauce because its flexibility will trigger your creativity, but so far we have used it as a spread on scones.

And lavished it on crepes.

In the potager, there are delicious fruits and veggies to harvest each and every day.

Basil, beefsteak tomato, bay leaf, cucumber, ever-bearing strawberries, and plum

In the flower garden, zinnias are blooming.

The Lobularia Maritima I sowed several months ago in various cement cracks is blooming nicely.

As for Mr. Furry Pants, better known as Dayo, he has been remiss in showing up for photo shoots--he is either staying out all day and night out of sight or he is hiding under furniture because he remains shy of our house guests. So no photos of him for this week, I am afraid.

No Dayo to be seen!

À la prochaine!