Roasted Tomatillo Salsa and Tacos with a Cuban Flair

Posted on August 5, 2014 by Our Growing Paynes

Our tomatillos are coming along like crazy so it is time to pick them and make delicious food. There isn’t any way to use them all at once so I’ll be freezing a bunch this week to keep up with it all. We had roast pork left over as well as the marinade from the Cuban sandwiches I made so I thought with these ingredients and a tomatillo salsa we’d have a delicious dinner.

I enjoyed puttering about the kitchen making the various components to this dish. First on the list were the easy tortillas. Though it is hot work in the summer! I found this tomatillo salsa recipe that was easy to make and needed some hot peppers. Which are ready to pick in our garden!

Remove the husks of about a pound of tomatillos, rinse and slice them in half. Place them face down on a baking sheet. Add two jalapenos and two cloves of garlic with the skins still on.

Broil until the three ingredients are charred. Keep an eye on them while broiling as you don’t them to be charcoal!

The original recipe calls for using a mortar and pestle. One I don’t have one and two I’d rather have this quick and easy. I do have, however, a blender! Top the peppers, skin the garlic, and remove the toughest char on the tomatillos. Add this to the blender. Slice about 1/4 of a small onion and two tablespoons of fresh cilantro.

Add the juice of half a lime.

Season with salt then pulse in the blender.

The hard part is over! Not that it’s been that hard up to now. 🙂 For the tacos prep the veg you want in the dish. In addition to the mushrooms, onions, and sweet pepper I picked a Ring O’ Fire pepper and a poblano pepper.

I sliced up the remaining pork and sauteed it with the onion in a little bit of olive oil.

Add in the peppers and mushrooms and saute for a couple of minutes. Then add about 3/4 cup of the marinade and simmer until the sauce reduces by more than half. Spoon some down the middle of the tortilla.

Sprinkle shredded cheese over the filling and spoon the tomatillo salsa over the cheese.

Add the sour cream and enjoy!

The tomatillos worked really well with the citrus of the marinade. A bit messy to eat though!

Beyond Easy Tortillas…

Posted on April 8, 2014 by Our Growing Paynes

Quite a while ago now I pinned some tortilla recipes swearing I would try them but never got round to it. The whole time flying by would be the excuse but not a very good one. I mean I’ve posted some complicated recipes so I can’t say I never had the time to try them out. For my birthday I asked for a tortilla press because I hadn’t read the flour tortilla recipes all the way through.

Turns out the press is for corn tortillas and you roll out the flour ones. Doh! So I’ve added corn tortillas to my list of things to try. I did try the press on this recipe and yes, like they said, it won’t work.

However, that being said, flour tortillas are so easy to make it’s ridiculous. It only has five ingredients! The recipe I followed was this one but there are tons out there that are very similar.

In a mixing bowl add 3 cups flour, 1 cup lukewarm water, 1 tsp salt, 1 tsp baking powder, and a third of a cup of vegetable oil.

Using the dough hook mix the ingredients on low speed for a couple of minutes, scraping the sides as you go. Once the dough comes together dump out on the counter that is lightly floured. Knead for a couple of minutes.

Divide the dough into 16 somewhat equal balls. Cover and let rest for about 15 minutes.

Heat a skillet that will take tortillas 6-7″ in diameter. You want this hot but not so hot it will burn the tortillas. A golden brown is what you are going for. Roll out the first ball so it’s 6-7″ or so. You’ll want to keep the surfaces floured as well as the rolling pin. Also, don’t stack the dough. It will stick and be on the soggy side.

The first one was as close to a circle as I got. 🙂 Brought to mind those who post comparisons of the pinterest pictures vs reality. So don’t stress if these aren’t shaped perfectly. They will still work and taste good. Place the first one into the skillet. While it is cooking roll out the next one. I got a sort of assembly line going. This process does go quickly as you only need to cook for a minute or so on the first side and just over half that on the second.

They do puff up a bit and get all bubbly. When you flip them over press down to deflate the bubbles a bit. Don’t cook them too “firm” as you want them to fold easily when you eat them.

So of course I did tacos. I did our normal mixture with a bit of beef and veg. I decided to do a different topping to our usual sour cream.

Mash up an avocado, add about 1/3 cup of homemade salsa, a few squirts of lime juice, a bit of adobe seasoning, and some cilantro.

I really liked this as an alternative to sour cream. Just something different. Of course melted cheese goes well with this. 🙂

This recipe makes 16 tortillas. The ones you don’t use freeze well until needed.

So one more week of tax season and I can get back to reading everyone’s posts and having the usual chats. I hoped it would be different this season in keeping up with everything but it just proved to hard with everything going on. But next week I can’t wait to start the regular reading!

Fire Roasted Salsa

Posted on August 27, 2013 by Our Growing Paynes

As I was up to my elbows in food prep yesterday I got a little notice from WordPress saying Happy Anniversary! A whole year has passed in a blink. A year ago I took a deep breath, threw caution to the wind, and became an official blogger. I had no idea what to expect but I remember doing my first post and then wondering if anyone would read it. To my surprise I quickly got a comment, and then another, and I got to discover some amazing bloggers out there and find out what a wonderful community it is. So a big thank you to all who take the time out of your busy schedule to read and comment on my posts. It means a lot. 🙂

We had another round of harvesting a ton of tomatoes so it was the salsa’s turn to be made. We first made my husband’s salsa which is a raw salsa and great for a quick dish before heading to a party. To make his we processed tomatoes, sweet peppers, hot peppers, onion and peaches. It is seasoned with salt, pepper, lime juice, and cilantro. For his we used the grinder on the Kitchen Aid then we drained the salsa a bit to thicken it. It is always a hit whenever we bring it to BBQs. Something about fresh out of the garden veg to make this so tasty.

That only took a portion of the harvested tomatoes so I wanted to try a new salsa with similiar veg but a different technique. Richard from REMCooks posted this salsa and I thought I would take his technique and apply it to the ingredients I wanted to use. It is not a hard salsa to make but given the volume of veg I had it took me all afternoon as I had to stage various ingredients and process them in stages but I got there in the end!

I started with the tomatoes first and instead of roasting them on the grill I had to do it in the oven as the cookie sheet was much bigger than my grill pan and even then I had to do two batches. I heated the oven to 350F/ 177C. On the large cookie sheet I did one layer of tomatoes and drizzled them with a bit of olive oil, salt, and pepper.

I roasted the tomatoes until they looked like this:

I like Richard’s tip about roasting the garlic in the skins on the grill so I gave that a shot. Per his advice I started those first then about halfway through I added the onion. For this I used one very large red onion.

Remove and set aside. While the onions and garlic were cooking I gathered the peppers from the garden and the peaches from the co-op. Found some nice white peaches. The peppers I used were cayenne from the co-op and hot wax, jalapeno, poblano, and sweet peppers from the garden. I sliced the hot peppers lengthwise and cleaned them to prep them for the grill.

While I was roasting them on the grill I got out a large bowl and chopped the onion and put that in the bowl. I also chopped up the sweet peppers and put them in the bowl. I left them uncooked for a bit of texture. I then put together the food processor and put in the first batch of tomatoes, half the garlic (skins removed), a handful of cilantro and set aside for the peaches and hot peppers.

When I went out to check on the peppers I discovered I ran out of gas. My first thought this was now going to be a two day process but my daughter reminded me the cast iron griddle has a grill side to it. Thank goodness! I got that heated up and brought the peppers in to finish.

Once they were done I took the smaller hot peppers and added them to the food processor and then chopped the rest of the larger hot peppers and added those to the bowl. The trick is to have a bit of heat but make it so most people can eat it. I wanted the hotter peppers to be evenly distributed through the salsa.

The last ingredient to grill was the peach. I love grilled peaches and will have to make some as a dessert as my daughter requested some soon. They impart a lovely flavour.

Add half to the to the food processor and process until it’s a bit chunky. Repeat with the second half of the ingredients and add all to the bowl. Then add lime juice to taste. If it needs a bit more salt add that as well and then stir it all together.

We like to have our salsa with lime flavoured tortilla chips. We also had some last night with tacos. It was pretty yummy!

My 9 year old son’s take on this was that there was a punch of heat but it didn’t take away from all the flavours. 🙂

Our Growing Paynes

A journey about cooking, traveling, gardening, and crafting.

Tag Archives: salsa

Roasted Tomatillo Salsa and Tacos with a Cuban Flair

Beyond Easy Tortillas…

Fire Roasted Salsa