The Lone Baker and La Kitchen Chicana Collaboration

The wonderful Fourth of July holiday took A and I to visit her mother (who happens to be The (one and only) Lone Baker and step-father in the lovely Moorhead, Minnesota. (Side note: The above picture documents a lot of flooding up in the Red River Valley which is exactly where we were - see the debris piled up on this bridge? Scary! Moorhead and Fargo are ok now, I just thought this was a cool pic of some of the damage the area had recently dealt with.)

Before we left, The Lone Baker called to make sure that I was bringing up my New Mexican Red Chile Sauce because she was preparing pulled pork for tacos and wanted to marinate it in my sauce! For her pulled pork recipe, see her blog entry on the subject: Slow Cooker Pulled Pork. I was excited yet nervous, knowing that the entire dinner was pretty much hinged on my sauce - if it wasn't good, the whole meal would be ruined! We pulled into town and The Lone Baker said hi quickly and then proceeded to ask where the sauce was! We brought it inside and it went straight onto her pulled pork and marinated as we settled into to our wonderful accommodations. The aroma quickly filled the house and our mouths were watering! The other main event of the night was that The Lone Baker had made corn tortillas for our tacos - and a delicious faux chile releño which set off the meal perfectly. The tacos were great, and everyone loved our meat and sauce collaboration! I just wish I would've taken some pictures and truly documented our tacos because they were great.

Here's a picture of our marinated pulled pork the next day, there was so much left over we decided to do a red chile pulled pork quesadilla an even truer collaboration because The Lone Baker was so inspired by my chicken quesadilla post that she wanted to try out some quesadillas with the left over pork and the left over homemade corn tortillas. Note the beautiful light that comes into the Lone Baker's Kitchen and the wonderful materials she has to work with! Here are quesadillas with a layer of cheese and the pulled pork adorning them. Don't they look marvelous? We decided to do three flour and three corn tortillas.

Here's another shot of our flour tortillas waiting for their final touches. Another layer of delicious cheese and it's flour tortilla hat.

I was in charge of finishing these up while The Lone Baker worked on preparing the pans and the corn tortillas.

On the corn tortillas we used queso fresco. Look at how beautiful they looked! And if we thought we would even make a dent in our pork we were seriously mistaken!

All of our friends coming together nicely.

The marinated shredded pork was so good A ran in from the living room and just had to have a few bites!

Here are our quesadillas all in a pan making friends and getting melty! I am so jealous of the Lone Baker's equipment - she cooked up all of them at once! In my kitchen one quesadilla per skillet- two if I'm working with the small corn tortillas!

The Lone Baker's kitchen is magnificent.

She finds these amazing tools just hidden in her bountiful cabinets! This is her birthday present and it sliced and diced these quesadillas in seconds!

As you can see the flours were quickly devoured and the corns were on deck.

During the meal I managed to catch this lovely shot. I promise I wasn't the only one eating - it seems as though the Lone Baker, Mr. Lone Baker and A are a bit camera shy. But, clearly they were enjoying the meal because it was quickly disappearing.

I had so much fun at The Lone Baker's house - there was delicious food every meal and I felt I contributed a valuable addition to two of them. I came home two pounds heavier than I left - I'm not exaggerating, the scale at the gym told me so this morning. But, overall it was worth it. On the way home we heard a statistic on the radio about how the French eat and live the best in the world - that opposed to Americans who spend an average of 40 minutes eating per day the French spend hours. We chuckled to ourselves that amidst the corn tortillas, red chile pulled pork, fresh baked bread, steaks, potatoes, and delicious homemade shortbread, that this is definitely never the case at the Lone Baker's - where we all eat like royalty, or at least like the French.