Guacamole Guacamole!

Printable Recipe

Well, I have returned safely from my cross-country trip to my honey A telling me "guess what honey?! I volunteered you to make guacamole for my staff retreat tomorrow!" My response... hmmm, I'm not really in the mood and I'm not that confident in my abilities but since it involves an avocado (or three specifically) I guess I'll give it a try. It's not like I haven't made it before, or seen my abuela make many batches upon batches of guacamole with freshly squeezed lemonada yum! But, it's just guacamole is such a personal thing, so many different ingredients can be chosen or omitted so this leads to a dish that many people expect different things from. Imagine my trepidation then when I needed to make enough guacamole for seven of the Minnesota Justice Foundation's finest. This post is especially difficult because as my abuela cooks, there is no true "recipe" it's more like throw a little of this in, a little of that, as you'll see on the recipe card almost all of the ingredients have "to taste" after them. So, it's up to you and I even had to estimate how much of each ingredient I actually put in to actually post this entry! Not too easy!

Because I HATE brown avocado I tend to chop up everything that I am going to put in my guacamole before I peel the avocados. Here you see my delicious tomatoes. You can of course use any kind but these looked the best in the produce aisle so I cut them into fourths.

Then I chopped up my cilantro, with some help from two out of three of my kitchen assistants! The process of taking pictures was time consuming and I was supposed to have my dish ready to go and A came home to get her guacamole and was not happy when she found me taking pictures of my ingredients! But, look at how cute Sandie and A are as they're helping me rinse the cilantro!

After you wash, mince and chop all of your ingredients: tomato, pepper, cilantro, peel your avocados, de-pit them and cut them up into at least quarters. They should slice very easily. **Side note: look at my new shiny red bread box that A bought me

It's so wonderful to have a photographer during my cooking time! A totally helped me by taking photos of all of my steps (almost) from here on out.

At this point squeeze one half of a lime onto your avocado to prevent browning. You can of course use less, but I am a major lime addict.

Unfortunately because of time constraints I wasn't able to fully document my new jalapeño corer that I picked up along my many travels in Nuevo Mejico. It was AMAZING! I cut off the top of the pepper and then inserted my corer in, and gently and quickly scraped out the insides of my pepper! This made slicing and dicing the pepper absolutely amazing!

From this step you need to add all of your ingredients to the bowl, your garlic, salt, tomatoes, cilantro, black pepper, onion if you're using it (I had a special request not to so it's not here) and mash mash mash! I used a big fork, I don't really know of any other tool that will do the trick as well as a good ole fork.

Your finished product should look something like this. Here's the portion of guacamole I took for myself to ensure that I had actually made it edible for others. Unfortunately in A's haste to get to her staff retreat she took my pretty bowl full of guacamole away. But you get the picture, guacamole is like your favorite i-pod playlist, only you know what you want and what will make it good, but there are also always crowd favorites that many people might enjoy.

Off to my next project! I'm baking a cake for A's birthday this weekend and I still have plenty to write about from my travels, including my abuela's enchiladas that are about the best thing I've ever eaten. Yum. Off to my Boulevard Wheat and popcorn snack now!

Tasty Chicken Quesadillas

Last night I cooked up one of my quick and easy favorites - chicken quesadillas! Delish! Always a crowd favorite. A always gives my meals a 1 through 5 star rating. 1 star means it was inedible, 2 stars means A will never eat it again, 3 stars means it was ok, maybe could tweak a few things, 4 stars means she wants it again, but it could still be improved and 5 stars means it was perfect and she wants it again next week. Needless to say, this meal is a 5 star all the time! The beauty of a quesadilla is that you can use what you have at home and experiment with different ingredients. And La Kitchen Chicana is always stocked with tortillas and cheese.

Here are my ingredients for the night. Now, I am no Sham-dra Lee but I do like to take shortcuts in the kitchen when I can and when it doesn't jeopardize the overall quality of my end product. So, I usually use the left over aspects of a whole rotisserie chicken as my protein, shred it quickly and it's ready to go. The debate between corn or flour tortillas is one that often weighs heavily on me. Lucky for me, A loves flour tortilla quesadillas while I prefer corn. As a Chicana I love both - corn from the homeland and flour from Nuevo Mexico. New Mexican food rarely uses corn tortillas whereas Mexican food (authentic) rarely uses flour. You can understand my confusion then when it's time to put the tortillas on the skillet, topped with cheese. It's also incredibly important to have all of your materials ready to go as it literally takes seconds for the cheese to melt. As you can see in my photo I decided I would be adding in some avocado to make the best quesadilla I possibly could last night.

I've heard of some people who put their tortilla in the microwave, top with cheese and press the start button. As a Chicana, I cannot endorse this method. Nor, can I endorse the put in oven and bake method, although there are some tasty concoctions that do actually come out of the oven and involve tortillas - they just can't be quesadillas.

The cheese should be melted all the way - like so. You need to be able to pull your quesadilla apart and have the cheese be all gooey. Otherwise, you're just doing it wrong. Also, when using shredded cheese you're probably going to get it all over the place, outside the boundaries of your tortilla and that's ok! I just found out that A's favorite part of her quesadilla is when the cheese cooks on the griddle, hardens and attaches itself to the outside of her tortilla. Next time I'll be sure to make this happen more for her.

This is A's meal, two quesadillas with fajita size flour tortillas, chicken and cheese. Garnished with some pico and sour cream. Yes I could make my own pico but who really has time for that, I mean I'm procrastinating enough with this blog from my dissertation - if I was slicing and dicing tomatoes, onions and jalepeños all day I really wouldn't make ANY progress on my dissertation and we simply cannot have that!

Now, to witness the whole process with my quesadillas. Since corn tortillas are smaller than flour I was able to fit both on my griddle at once. This thing isn't technically a griddle, but it's not a skillet either. Should I know these things? Hmm... how does one go about finding this out? I guess I'm going to have to do some research!

Start with a thin layer of cheese then top with your chicken. I would also suggest throwing any other items in here now so that you're able to melt the cheese around your ingredients to prevent them from falling out of your quesadilla when it's time to move tortilla to your mouth.

Here I forgot I had sliced an avocado so I put it on after my additional layer of cheese. I tried to make a pretty design here but was unable to make the one on the left as nice as the one on the right. I could however, live off of avocados for my entire life. I'm thinking avocados and red chile need to meet one another and become acquainted.

Again, no matter what is inside your quesadilla, the cheese needs to get gooey and your tortillas should be crispy on the outside. This is a delicate balance, not so crispy you will lose a tooth or your tastebuds will be overwhelmed with charcoal, but crispy on the outside and still soft on in the inside.

Doesn't this just look so yummy? And it literally took me about 10 minutes after I shredded the chicken which took 10 minutes - so prep to table 20 minutes. Of course, when you become a quesadilla expert you'll be racing to the finish so you can get that bite of gooey cheese!

I just had to show off the inside, look at how delicious that looks! Cheese, chicken and avocado - heaven. In fact, I remember turning to A and saying, this is a slice of heaven, I really need to take a picture of this. As I said, quesadillas are easy, inexpensive, quick and can incorporate whatever you have in your fridge. I love corn tortillas with mozzarella cheese - I used to make them all the time for lunch when I was still taking classes, I'd make them in the morning before I left for school, wrap them up in foil and microwave them for five seconds to warm and have a delicious and nutritious lunch/snack while I read my feminist theory.

Other possible combinations for delicious quesadillas - shrimp, cilantro and lime for a "fish taco" quesadilla, cheddar, egg and bacon for "breakfast burrito" quesadilla, cesina, onion and cilantro "taco al pastor" quesadilla, olives, artichokes and feta for Greek quesadilla, you know the options are endless, I can't wait to hear all about what you create!

A note about the absence of my kitchen assistant - Sandie. The one drawback to making quesadillas is that I can't make them all at once with this method so I make A's and then I make mine. Well, with this system Sandie can't be bothered to be in the kitchen with me because she's too busy begging for a piece of chicken or cheese or tortilla morsel from A out in the living room. Sigh, maybe next time I'll get her full attention!