thursday night smackdown

As previously established, the best way to food blog is to write about food and how you might have prepared it without actually producing any food.  The second best way, as it turns out, is to have your husband do the actual cooking while you sit on the couch with your new MacBook Pro – did I mention I got one of those? – and do a real-time play by play.

Tonight:  Chilaquiles al chipotle, Rick Bayless, Mexico One Plate At A Time.  Highly convenient for several reasons:

• The aforementioned not having to do any actual cooking

• The fact that the dish I said I was going to make on Monday but didn’t was chilaquiles, then I promised them to you yesterday and totally failed to deliver, so now I’m hitting, like, 19 birds with one stone.  One giant fricking stone. (That I don’t even have to throw!)

• It turns out that Rick Bayless’s chilaquiles al chipotle are almost identical to my chilaquiles-that-weren’t.  Slightly more intensive and less reliant on the blender but on the whole, pretty damn close.  Although he doesn’t use bacon fat to fry the sauce, so I say -1 for Bayless.

Aside:  Brian is concerned that he’s putting “too much garlic” in the pan.  Isn’t he cute?  This from people who regularly increase the amount of garlic in any written recipe by a factor of four.

This isn’t actually the first time I’ve unknowingly invented something that had already been created by someone else.  Once upon a time, when I played in an instrumental stoner rock/doom metal jam band – and no, I am not making that up – I would routinely write songs that (1) had already been written by Black Sabbath* or (2) had already been written by Rage Against the Machine. (As it turns out, when you slow a Rage Against the Machine riff waaaaaay down it turns into a doom metal riff. Who knew?)

A quick quiz:  The name of my band was Esquilax.  If you can correctly identify the source of that name, you will earn 10 brownie points.

*Yes, I was in a stoner metal band and was not familiar with the entire Black Sabbath catalog.  I remain largely unfamiliar with any part of that catalog that is not “Ironman” or “Paranoid.”  Judge away, but know this: I rocked, and I rocked hard.  Like a hurricane.

If I have to be derivative, at least I’m derivative accidentally.

So there are good smells emanating from the kitchen right now:  Spicy chipotles and my all-time favorite onion and garlic sauteeing in olive oil.  An egg is frying, and since there was no specification as to how to fry the egg, Brian has wisely chosen to work bacon fat into the dish as his egg-frying lubricant of choice.  Tortilla chips are soaking in a chipotle-tomato broth.  Yes, they are store-bought, pre-made tortilla chips and yes, Rick Bayless told us we were allowed to use them.  I’m pretty sure he meant the thicker, heartier kind that are more like actual fried tortillas you can find in Mexican groceries; I may know this because he explicitly stated it.  But I’m sure Santitas are nearly the same.

The egg.

Seriously, I could take a nap here.  He’s even taking the pictures, despite his usual resistance to using the camera because of his shaky-hand syndrome.

Or instead of a nap, I could spend more time playing with a MacBook Pro which, incidentally, I happen to have right here.

Chilaquiles, as I don’t need to tell most of you except the freakish few who claim not to like them, are delicious.  Prior to tonight, I’d only had the green (tomatillo-sauced) version.  I think they’re still my favorite; there’s just something about the tart brightness of the tomatillos with the earthy corn that is, for lack of a better word, yummy.  These are now my second-favorite.*  The acid of the tomato and smoky-spicy chipotle went perfectly with the unctuous egg yolk and fresh bursts of cilantro.

The other thing to note: chilaquiles are WAY more filling than they look.  I don’t know if we had especially fiberous tortilla chips, but we each only had a small bowlful with a single egg and were full.  And although I didn’t keep track, this was cheap: can of tomatoes, can of chipotles in adobo, an onion, some garlic, a few handfuls of chips and an egg.

Tonight’s short post brought to you by my abrupt switch from Photoshop to Aperture and resulting inability to figure out how to resize a photo.  (Seriously, it took a good 20 minutes.  And I can’t even claim to have figured it out myself, I had to Google.  Shame.)

*Lest you think those are the only two kinds, Rick Bayless begs to differ.