Sorry, no pictures on this one. My bad. My mother and I were cooking up a storm Wednesday night. There's something inherently awesome about Hispanic cuisine. Tex-mex, Mexican, Tapas, Columbian... you name it: if they speak Spanish where it's from, it's fantastic food. In fact, you could blanket statement that to "If they speak a Romantic language" and include France and Italy, if you wanted. But, I guess, the real statement should be "If they speak a language there, they have awesome food," cause I've yet to find an ethnicity/lingual barrier that dictates whether or not food is good.
In anycase, our family definitely has a love affair with Mexican food. One of the most watched cooking shows in the house (yeah, still living with my parents) is Rick Bayless' Mexico: One Plate at a Time, although I must admit: one of the main reasons I watch is because of that daughter of his (that sounds way creepier than it should be, she's in her mid twenties, I think. And it's a joke, I greatly enjoy Rick's journeys round the world). It isn't surprising that his cookbooks "Mexican Everyday" and "Fiesta at Rick's" are our most used cookbooks in the house, either.
I, honestly, can't really track down the exact moment or time in my life that our family gained our affinity to the cuisine of Mexico/Spain/South America. So, I'm not even going to try and explain. It's just like my posts in the past of "Mexican Wednesday." This week my family had Escebeche, Fajitas and my Mother and I just had lunch at Burrito Mexicano, which is the best Mexican I've had outside of a proper restaurant atmosphere.
The Escebeche actually came out of one of Bayless' books, which one? I couldn't tell you. The page the recipe resides on actually floats between the two books, it's been torn out somehow. And the recipe is fantastic. I'm not going to get too specific about it, but it's essentially poached chicken with caramelized onions and carrots in a Jalapeno pickle brine. It's fairly salty, but has a lot of flavors in the mix to combat it. Sometimes, it's a bit on the spicy side. This time, it was not.
To accompany it, we made rice with cilantro and green onions in it, to give it some color and flavor. There were two ears of corn in the fridge that were probably about ready to go bad, and not wanting to let some perfectly good sweet corn go, I proved to my parents that you don't need to butter corn.
I took a chef's knife and cut the corn off the cob (something my mother proclaimed "That's how Rick Bayless does it!" at) and then put it onto a bit of tin foil. The foil then went into a steamer to cook the corn. It proved to be very fresh and sweet tasting corn without any of the "dull, frozen" corn taste that my mother generally covers with a tablespoon of butter. It also retained all of its flavor and nutrients compared to boiling corn on the cob.
It's was a very good dinner, all in all. It delivered on all fronts. I just wish I could figure out my family's fascination with the cuisine.
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