Living the Life

So you are back from a great trip through Mexico and it's starting to look like summer, what do you make to make you stay in the garden a little more pleasurable than it already is? A frozen strawberry margarita! Ingredients: 1 shotglass Tequilla Silver 1/2 shotglass Cointreau 1 shotglass Rose's Lime Cordial/Juice 1 shotglass lime juice 9-10 frozen strawberries enough ice to fill your margarita glass three quarters sugar to coat the rim of the glass Preparation: Put your sugar on a plate, moisten the rim of your glass with lime and put the rim in the sugar. In a blender or food processor blend the remaining ingredients until a you get a thick slush. Pour into your glass and serve.

The newspaper said that it will be the coldest Easter in 40 years and when I looked out of my window this afternoon, I saw snow! So no spring dish this time, but hot chocolate and not your regular one! Oh no, one made from scratch! Last year on our trip through Mexico I picked up a bag of cocoa beans in Oaxaca, so I could show my niece what chocolate is made of. But what do you with it after that? So they ended up in the back of the pantry. Then last week I ran across a post on the Last Crumb blog where Rose made a chocolate bar from cocoa beans. I knew right away what to do with my cocoa beans! Make hot chocolate with them just like I had at the 20 de Noviembre market in Oaxaca. At that market you can buy bars of chocolate that are used to make the famous Mexican hot chocolate, but there are also places where you can have them grind up your own favorite blend of cocoa, canela (real cinnamon), sugar etc. A lot of the vendors inside the market sell their own blend, and it doesn't ...

I had some chicken that was left over from the barbecue and decided to make quesadillas with it. A quesadilla is a toasted tortilla with melted cheese inside, but you can put a lot more inside, like chicken, jalapeno peppers, zucchini flowers, chorizo, mushrooms etc. I went through the fridge and found besides the cheese and chicken, pickled jalapeno's and taco salsa. Ingredients flour tortillas grated cheese vegetable oil Additional chicken (cooked and shredded) jalapeno slices (fresh or pickled) mushrooms zucchini flowers etc. Preperation On medium high heat, heat up a cast iron skillet and put a tablepoon of vegetable oil in it. When the oil is hot put your flour tortilla in the pan, flip it over every 10 seconds until it starts to puff up. Add your grated cheese, I used a medium sharp Dutch cheese, and the rest of your ingredients. Cover the skillet with a lid and turn the heat to low. There should be plenty of residual heat to melt your cheese and to brown your tortilla. Give ...

With the corn tortillas I made chicken enchiladas. The recipe I used comes from Elise's Simply Recipes Food and Cooking Blog and can be found under the Mexican Food Recipes section. I had to use 4 tablespoon of chili powder and 2 drops of Dave's Insanity Hot Sauce to get a bit of bite, I think that the chili powder here in Europe is less potent than the US version, I will pick up a bottle next time I'm there to test. The enchiladas turned out great! I served them with chili, sour cream and home made guacamole.

Yesterday I made corn tortillas which I used for enchiladas. As I wrote in an earlier post I found the tortilla corn flour online here in Holland. I learned how to make them at Pilar's La Casa de los Sabores (the house of flavours) Cooking School in Oaxaca City, Mexico were we took a cooking class on our vacation in March. She took us to the market and we bought ready to use masa (dough) there. Now I had to mix it myself, which isn't very hard but it takes some time to get the consistency right. I used 2 cups of tortilla corn flour and started with 1 1/4 cup of very warm water, brought it together and found out it needed more water. If you make a little dough ball and flatten it and it cracks easily it's too dry. When I had the right consistency I rolled balls which were a little bigger than a golf ball. Keep the bowl you put them in covered with cling film to prevent them from drying out. Cut up a freezer bag in such a way that you have 2 sheets that fit inside your pres...

It's hard to find Mexican ingredients and cooking utensils here in Holland. When I was in Mexico in March I didn't buy a tortilla press because I couldn't buy the flour that you use for corn tortillas here, at least that is what I thought. My sister was surfing the net last week, looking for something completely different and ran into the website of La Tiendita which offers all sorts of Mexican ingredients ranging from corn flour (for tortillas and tamales) to epizote, cooking utensils, beer etc. The site is in Spanish only, but I used Babelfish to translate it for me, which gives some hilarious translations when you go to the chile and sauce section. Anyway I placed my order for a tortilla press and 2 kilo of tortilla flour and little over a week later I received my package. Tomorrow I'll be making enchiladas with homemade tortillas!