Chicana Cous Cous Salad & Green Chile Turkey Burgers

Printable Recipes:

Chicana Cous Cous Salad

Green Chile Turkey Burgers

Well, I just got done with my weekly search for Assistant Professor positions and let me just tell you, procrastinating with my food blog is not going to take away from my chances on that slim job market. The good news is (see I'm all about positivity) while there might not be any jobs at this very moment you always gotta eat. This week is a special two-for-one kinda of deal, where I'm sharing both the side dish salad and main dish for a complete meal idea. If you have 16 hours to kill go for this deliciously tasty meal. Just kidding, it only took a couple hours, but you will thank me when you make the delicious cilantro lime vinegarette from scratch to adorn your alliterative Chicana Cous Cous (CCC) salad. So sit back and enjoy the meal that A said was one of the best she's had in a very long time!

The CCC Salad is an inspired recipe for a Women of Color potluck BBQ I will be attending on Friday. I wanted to try it out before I actually fed it to others. I had originally signed up to bring a pasta salad, but then it was suggested that we bring something from our culture. So, I decided, I would make a new recipe using my favorite Mexican/Southwest flavors and make a pasta salad out of it. A's response was, "but I hate cous cous." Well, even she managed to choke this down.

Let's start with the CCC salad. Once you assemble all of your ingredients (as with most salads) it's a quick and easy side dish, or could even stand in as a side dish. The amount of spice in the salad makes a refreshing cool salad sophisticated and a great accompaniment to any bbq type meal. So, to make your dressing. Take one quarter cup of cilantro, de-stem it and throw it into your food processor. If you don't have a food processor, finely chopping your cilantro should work just fine. It's all going to be mixed into your salad eventually and it's really a matter of what consistency you want it to be in there.

Chop/Pulse it until it looks like this! Take a whiff it will smell delicious. I must admit when I was younger I was kind of not a fan of cilantro. Now I'm pretty sure it runs through my veins. Just wait until I have a yard garden in the not so far off future (once I get that tenure-track job baby!) it will have cilantro coming out of it's ears.

Then take your jalapeño pepper (you can use whatever hot pepper you prefer here or omit it if you don't like spicy food) and de-core it if you happen to have the very fancy jalapeño corer like I do. It works like a dream! I chose jalapeño because it's a classic for Mexican food no? And it's one of my favorite peppers. I think this also runs through my veins.

Add it to your food processor and let it rip. I added the bottom half of my jalapeño that was pretty much de-seeded. Don't however make the mistake I did of whiffing it. I know it's tempting but if you want to threaten your entire nervous system into almost shutting down, go ahead. However, if you don't want to choke on the inhalation of jalapeño fumes and learn your lesson the hard way, be my guest. I assure you that it will be hot as you have not really tempered it beside de-seeding it.

The good news is after all this chopping all you have to do is add in the rest of your ingredients into your dressing and blend. I added in one half of freshly squeezed lime before blending. I love using that top hole on my food processor while your foods are chopping and blending pour in 1/8 cup of white sugar, 1/4 cup oil and 1/4 cup white wine vinegar and you will have an absolutely sweet, light, refreshing and spicy vinegarette that will almost not make it onto your salad because you'll want to keep tasting it.

Next make up your cous cous, even if your partner tells you she doesn't like it. You can of course do this part first and then make up your dressing, but if you're spreading out your work on your meal you can make up your vinegarette and chill it until you're ready to dress your salad. This is one bag of cous cous that yielded 5 cups of cooked cous cous (try saying that five times fast). After cooking, let your cous cous come down to room temperature before you begin adding in your other ingredients. I made my cous cous while writing my dissertation (surprised?). I like cous cous because in honesty it takes the least amount of time to cook, as once you put it in boiling water you immediately leave it and let it fluff up on its own. I appreciate food that can cook independently of me.

Chop up your veggies. I made the mistake of only putting in half of my green bell pepper and only half of my container of cherry tomatoes, but I would highly suggest the more the veggies the better. A also mentioned that avocado wouldn't hurt the salad. If you do want to add that in I would suggest getting an avocado that is not fully ripened so that it holds its shape when you toss it in and doesn't make your salad a goopy mess. Otherwise you might end up with cous cous guacamole and I'm not sure that is really what you want to happen.

Feed your kitchen assistant some veggies. She'll like it. Notice that pink tongue. Adorable. I swear she should be in modeling.

Look at how beautifully this salad is coming along! Although, to be honest I wasn't able to find the freshest produce at my favorite Cub Foods on Lake Street. Oh well, maybe next time. It tasted fine, it just didn't look as vibrant. Again, you all just wait until I'm a professor then I'll have my own backyard and my own garden.

Now, for the key ingredient - fresh corn, and thank goodness it is corn season! I added in corn cut from two freshly cooked ears of corn. I've always wanted to cut it off the cob like this and it was very satisfying! I estimate this was about two cups of corn off the cob. If for some reason you're in a time bind, I guess you could drain and rinse a can of corn but I wouldn't suggest that. I would however, suggest if you have a grill to roast the corn. I was going to roast mine on my gas burners but I heard my partner's lawyer voice in the background of my mind saying, "you're going to burn the house down" so I dipped them into some boiling water instead. Humph. I want a grill!

Now, part two of the key ingredient. Mexican corn is absolutely delicious, it's buttered and cheesed and cayenne peppered in a spicy, creamy, steamy delicious treat. So, I tried to mimic this in my salad (minus the queso). I buttered my corn with just a tad of butter and about a tablespoon of cayenne pepper. Mixed it, tasted it and it was spicy goodness! Not as fun as eating it off the cob, but delicious none the less.

Add all of your ingredients together. I would suggest putting this in a pretty glass bowl so you can see all of the deliciousness at once. A definite improvement that I will be making when I remake this on Friday for my BBQ potluck.

Toss it all together with some tongs. Watch out for flying cous cous. Call in kitchen assistant to take care of spillage if necessary.

Pour in your dressing - this is how much my recipe yielded and it was a great proportion for the amount of cous cous salad I cooked up.

Toss again and you have your finished product. You should chill it for about half an hour if you didn't chill at any point during the process. Doesn't this look so yummy? I promise you won't be disappointed! Pair it with burgers or any of your other cookout treats or even fajitas. You decide, it will be a hit though, I promise.

Now for the main event: Green Chile Turkey Burgers! The salad was a lot more fun for me to make, but the fact that I got to try out my NM Hatch Green Chile that I found at Trader Joe's made me very excited.

Also, A loves turkey burgers so I felt confident I could make one up with my own twist because of my confidence of mastering my turkey burger recipe from Everyday Food. In a bowl I mixed up some ground pepper and kosher salt (not pictured) into my meat. Be careful not to squish it too much then your burgers become tough and not fluffy - not sure if that's the right adjective, but it's what is coming to mind, and honestly I think it works better than juicy.

Combine all of the ingredients, starting with 1/4 teaspoon of cayenne pepper for additional seasoning (since canned green chiles are not hot at all). I considered using my green chile powder that the Lone Baker keeps me up to stock with but decided to pump up the spice factor just a bit. Then mix in 1/2 cup of shredded cheese, I used Trader Joe's Three-Cheese blend today which I suggest, and half of your can of green chile. I also threw in some more purple onion from my previous recipe that I was too mad at for making me cry to throw away! Good thing I didn't it added a nice flavor to the cooked patty. I then pat out my burgers like so.

They then were covered with foil and sent to the fridge until after I picked up A from work. I'm glad to say that I need a lot on my plate to be productive. I have always been like this since I was young and so scheduling in my cooking around writing and reading and picking up A was very fruitful. I think I wrote about four pages of my dissertation when I made this up. Looks like I'll be making this once a week if I can assure this type of dedication to my studies.

I was also very excited as my loyal readers know, of the opportunity to use my Broil King 6000. Well, that's what I call her, isn't she a beaut? She cooked these burgers up like no one's business. I've been making breakfasts on her on the weekend, but this was amazing because A suggested I throw the buns onto the griddle to and they were toasted and delicious. (I suggest throwing them on clearly a bit closer to done.)

I am absolutely terrified of raw meat, so I cooked each of these burgers for about twelve minutes on each side, flipping every six minutes or so. When I say terrified, I mean terrified, the thought of biting into a raw turkey burger seems so unappetizing. So, I was sure to cook these up for a long time. You could probably go less on the time if you made your burgers thinner and spread the meat out amongst six. However, I don't do it like that, I like a round, juicy and thick burger so do at least twelve minutes per side. One way I can tell that they're ready is by looking at the meat around the edge of the burger get done.

Sorry for the poorly lit picture(s), go back to the first one to remind yourself how pretty it was. I served it with spicy mustard on mine and mayo on A's. She loved it. We also had fresh corn with the burgers and CCC Salad. Overall, we were stuffed and happy. I just wish I had a grill. But I pretended I was a fry cook on Broil King, de-cobbed some freshly cooked corn and wrote four pages of my dissertation. Overall I would say that's a successful night spent in La Kitchen Chicana no?

When I grow up I'm going to...

eat whatever candy I want whenever I want! Yes, this was a constant saying that I said to my mother and she also said to her mother (funny enough). Now, that I have "grown up" a little anyways I do have candy whenever I want, as many of my readers can attest, I LOVE candy. I mean, when people on facebook do quizzes or top fives or something like that which tell you to list the five things closest to you (no cheating!) at least two, if not three of those items around me are probably candy. I nearly squealed in delight when I found a bag of red hots at the dollar store last week when A and I were in the search for bingo daubbers before we left to go to the casino (and to play bingo!) so clearly candy is important to me. I love sugar candies, hard candies, soft candies, and chocolate and dark chocolate and oh, did I say chocolate? So, I had

been having a craving like no other for one of my favorite snacks and I just thought I would share, because now that I'm able to have candy whenever I want to, I need new aspirations like, when I grow up I'm going to get a manicure and a pedicure every other week, but I digress.

This recipe is also inspired by Julia Child. Yes, I mean the foodie/gourmand of all time, Mrs. Julia Child the great. I've been reading her memoir, My Life in France in preparation for Julie and Julia that is coming out on Friday (I'm so excited!) and I was thinking about how she herself also admits to not initially knowing how to cook. So, in that way, I am honoring her in the ways that she passed on information about the foods she did eventually learn how to cook, yet she never took herself all that seriously at the same time. Why do we eat the foods we do? I think because they taste good right? And for anyone who doesn't know about the best candy/nut combo in the whole world, it my dear friends, is my duty to teach you.

My best friend in high school taught me a lot of valuable lessons as I was coming into woman-hood. Her mother should get the credit for this wonderful creation because when I would go down to her house in the valley we would boldly charge into her pantry full of goodies and get out the can of salted cashews and the giant bag of plain M&Ms.

Yes, I know that Mars Co. has gone through extensive pains and troubles to change the notion that the plain M&Ms are in fact not actually "plain" but rather "milk chocolate" (I told you I know my candy ESPECIALLY M&Ms) but I am going to refer to them as "plain" because that is what they were called when I first discovered this tasty treat. Come to think of it, I did a speech in my college speech class that my best friend from college can attest to Kr to my Andace on these very issues - M&Ms. Aw, memories. Also, I refuse to call them "milk chocolate" out of sheer principal once they campaigned to resign my FAVORITE color of M&Ms and had that nonsense vote for which color to replace it with...

But this blog post is not supposed to be about my political views on M&M colors. It's about a tasty treat. Pour out your bag of plain M&Ms.

Pour in your bag of salted cashews, I got these out of the bulk bin at Cub Foods, don't they look delicious?! And I think it was a better deal than getting them in a can because these are almost all whole pieces! I bet your mouth is watering huh?

I really suggest making sure you get the salted ones because the sweet and savory mixing of the salted cashews and the plain M&Ms is divine. Stir your nuts and plain M&Ms and then eat a handful. I suggest two M&Ms to one whole cashew to achieve the proper ratio of chocolate to nut, but I'm not a control freak, you can do as you wish. The final step is to tell everyone you know that you just made this delicious snack mix so as to ensure that you don't eat the entire thing in one sitting. Luckily there is a lot left for later. Also, this is perfect for getting your blood sugar back up to a good functioning level: protein + chocolate = heaven.

New Mexican Red Chile

Imagine my surprise when I was at the Cub Foods on Lake Street (my favorite grocery store outside of Trader Joe's) and I went into the Mexican area of the produce section and there were dried red New Mexican chiles. Thinking to myself, "how could this be?!" I of course immediately threw them into my cart after looking around and seeing no other packages I just thought it was meant to be. Every time I go home, I always ask my mama to take me to Cosco so I can get a package to bring back to MN to remind me of home. Funny thing, these New Mexican red chiles came from St. Paul - but this is neither here nor there. Well it's maybe here, and there, because my dissertation works to show that Mexican Americans are in the Midwest, so how can New Mexican red chiles be in MN unless we are here too?

So, after running home and looking up my red chile sauce recipe, I decided right then and there I wanted this blog to be able to allow me to theorize the connections between my food, my familia, those who eat my food and my identity. So, I photographed all of the steps of my process, so here is what went down in la kitchen Chicana day one.

First I rinsed and dried my NM Red Chiles, cut them open, de-seeded and de-veined them. I Used the paper towel to scrape the seeds out but kept some on reserve to add some heat later.

While I was busily going through twenty of these bad boys. I just couldn't help but notice this precious little dog paying extra careful attention to my actions. This is her favorite position in the kitchen, waiting for my chopping skills to throw something off the counter to her. Unfortunately she didn't get anything good out of this cooking session.

After de-seeding and de-veining I placed my chiles on a parchment lined baking sheets. This is one of my favorite baking sheets that Mama Jean gave me! Also making a key appearance in this recipe, my red Staub, again, courtesy of Mama Jean. I toasted the chiles at 250 degrees for about ten minutes turning them twice during the process.

Here are some of the seeds that I reserved for adding some more heat. The drying of the chiles already takes some heat out of them and I wasn't sure how hot my sauce would be.

I went ahead and transferred them to 4 cups of water where the chiles were about to be boiled after toasting

Post toast - the chiles were darker in color and putting out some delicious smoky/hot/peppery smell. It made my mouth water just thinking about that perhaps soon I could have my own red chile sauce... but what would I do with it? This is clearly going to be about a five post journey in the decisions on what one can do with the sauce that is obviously going to have to happen another day...

I then transferred all of the peppers into my water and cranked up the heat, wanted to get this boiling. After it boiled I let it simmer while I peeled my garlic because apparently in a Staub water boils a lot more quickly than in my teflon-coated pans.

Here are my chiles taking a dip after just a minute the water was already bubbling. Perhaps in the future I will let this boil a little more. The problem with using the dried chiles is that you kind of have to rehydrate them back to life, and I'm afraid I might not have done this well enough. I'm sure I'll have plenty more opportunities to get this right in the future though!

I thought I'd be clever and peel my garlic while I was waiting for my pot to boil, turns out my pot had to wait for me to get done peeling the garlic. I added this much to my sauce, I LOVE garlic, I probably would add even a bit more for my next batch.

Combining all ingredients in my blender (did A get me this blender or did Mama Jean? Either way notice it's beauty here, the prettiest blender I ever did see). And yes, the chiles, the water the chiles were in and the garlic all went in here.

Blend. But don't liquify - unless you really know your blender, things will be hot and if you learn the hard way like I did, the power of the liquify will blow your top off and spew red chile sauce all (and I mean ALL) over your kitchen and your arm, scalding you in the process. At this point though, it smelled delicious.

Another view of my blended sauce, should've just stuck with it here but no... I had to go and liquify.

Here I used half a stick of unsalted butter, you can use shortening here too for a thicker/richer flavor (I would've used it but I didn't have any on hand) and 4 Tablespoons of flour. Melt the butter all the way and then slowly stir in the flour. Here in this picture is the evidence of the "liquify" button - my Staub would've been nice and clean ready for the sauce part two, but I liquified into it :-(. I could've washed it out, but since the sauce was going back in here I though, what's the point!? Oh well, first post, there is no where to go but up from here.

At this point I just combined the sauce back in with the butter flour mixture to thicken it up a little. Some people prefer to put their sauce through the strainer before adding it back in to cook, I like it thicker. Personal preference I guess. At this point one should also salt to taste. I don't really like salt so I tend to not salt excessively, if others want more salt of course feel free to add it in.

Now, if you were going to use the sauce immediately or within the week I would recommend simmering it for about 10-12 minutes, but as I was jarring mine up to bring as a gift for Mama Jean for the 4th of July celebration at her house I decided to simply jar it with the understanding that it (like a fine wine or cheese) should be aged before serving.

In other words, pour it out of that beautiful jar and heat it on the stove for 10 minutes. This is how much my 20 peppers yielded. Although, again, had I not liquified I would've had closer to a full larger jar too. Well, this Chicana's tired and headed to bed, I totally took pictures of tonight's dinner, strangely, not involving any chile, but delicious none the same you'll just have to wait till I get to that on an otra noche. Overall, my first foray into my blog was somewhat successful. I dipped a flour tortilla into my sauce and it tasted pretty yummy. Not very spicy (disappointment for me) but this means that more people can enjoy it.

I see some carne adovada in my future...