Archive for June, 2010

I am in love with sauces and specifically making sauces.  I think that everything that you make should minimally have 2 sauces to use with your meal.  I always find it exciting to be able to experiment with my food and mix in additional flavors.  With tacos,  pizza, french fries, burritos, meats… – sauces are very fun.  All you need to make a sauce is a recipe or some creativity.  It thrills me to take out the blender, think about what I’m cooking, and start throwing ingredients into the blender.  For example, I decided to make enchiladas today, but I was tired of always making cheese, steak or chicken enchiladas.  So I bought some country style pork ribs and thought I’d braise it to get the pork super soft and perfect for enchiladas.  I didn’t fell like looking up a recipe to see what liquid I could braise it in, so I pulled out my blender and thought about what I was making.  My enchiladas are made with corn tortillas, cheddar cheese, and a tomatillo cilantro sauce.  I could braise it in a tomatillo cilantro sauce (tomatillos, cilantro, sauteed onions, roasted garlic, salt and pepper), but that would be too similar to the rest of the enchilada, I want the pork to stand out.  So I added in 3 small tomatillos, 3 large tomatoes, 3 raw garlic cloves, a good amount of salt and pepper, smoked paprika, chili powder and chipotle powder.  Blended it all up and fell in love.  The sauce is a sour, salty and smokey mix – and it’ll be perfect for the pork.  I think that I’ll puree the sauce when the pork is done cooking and place some of this sauce inside the enchiladas with the tomatillo, cilantro sauce over the top.

So, I could read and follow a recipe for marinades – but that is soooo boring.  Instead, I like to just tinker on my own and learn through mistakes…

My wife had purchased a marinade from the grocery store for chicken and we let it marinade for 24 hours.  Now I had marinaded before, but never let it sit the full 24 hours.  Wow – what a difference.  The flavor of the marinade had truly melded with the chicken.  The meat was moist, and so very tasty.

So I was going to be making tacos and thought about creating a marinade for the steak, shrimp and pork.  I tend to not measure things.  So I added olive oil, white vinegar, 2 tomatillos, a whole head of cilantro, 2 raw garlic cloves, salt and pepper.  I created a few variations of this marinade for each of the three meats.  For the shrimp I had not used tomatillos, and did add some lemon juice.  For the pork chops, I had not used the tomatillos and added some chipotle adobo sauce and a little ponzu sauce.

I let them all sit and marinade for 27 hours.

The results:

1. super tasty steak that almost melted in your mouth and the marinade was so delicious.

2. hard shrimp – something went wrong here and I’m wondering if it was the lemon juice in the marinade or the amount of time that the shrimp marinated.  The shrimp was raw shrimp and I barely cooked it on the bbq – but it was hard.

3.  dry pork chop.  The pork chops that I used were boneless and it didn’t come out moist like the steak.

Since this first go at my custom made marinades, I did steak and chicken and they both came out great.  So, so far a 24 hour marinade seems to work well with poultry and steak.