Living the Life

I've been making this chili for a few years now, it started out as Jamie Oliver's chili con carne recipe from the Naked Chef series but I've changed some ingredients so it's more to our liking. I also added Dutch processed cocoa powder, which might seem odd but it adds a nice deep flavor to the dish! I prepare this dish in a large Le Creuset Dutch oven. Ingredients: 2 medium onions 2 cloves of garlic olive oil 2 heaped teaspoons chili powder 1 heaped teaspoon ground cumin sea salt and freshly ground black pepper 1 pound (455 grams) lean minced beef 7 ounces (200 grams) sun-dried tomatoes in olive oil 2 chipotles in adobo sauce 2 (14 ounce) cans chopped tomatoes (400 grams) 1 stick cinnamon 2 teaspoons Dutch processed cocoa powder 2 (14 ounce) cans red kidney beans, drained (400 grams) Serve with: corn chips grated cheese sour cream Preparation: Chop up the onions and garlic in the food processor and fry in some olive oil until softened. Add the chili powder and cumin an...

This version of Kung Pao Chicken is pretty close to the ones I ate in China with one difference, it's a lot spicier!! But don't let that put you off, you can cut on the chiles, take a less hot variety or leave out the sambal. The chiles I used this time are ones I grew and dried myself, the seeds I took from a bag of dried chiles that I bought in Long Sheng, China. They are scipy but not too much. Another kind I use a lot are dried bird eye chiles, these tiny peppers pack a huge punch, be very careful with them!! When I use them I use only 5 or 6 of them. Sambal is a condiment from Indonesia and a nice selection is available in every supermarket here in the Netherlands, that's because Indonesia was one of our colonies. I use sambal brandal, a spicy variety, but any other will do, I add it for extra heat and to give the dish a more complex flavor. I always buy my ginger at a Chinese supermarket we have here, I buy a lot and freeze it. When I need it, I just take a piece fr...

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 ...

The first chile peppers are starting to grow on my Long Sheng plants. I will use some of these fresh and green, but I'll let most of them turn red and dry them in my dehydrator. These are great in Kung Poa Chicken.

This is one of the side dishes I make for the ribs Smokey Potatoes Wedges. They get their smokiness from the chipotles (jalapeno peppers smoked with mesquite wood). The chipotles I used for this recipe I brought from our trip to Mexico last month and they are very nice, and have a good smokey flavor. Ingredients: 1 kg potatoes olive oil chipotle spice mix: (this makes way more than you need for this) 1/4 cup sea salt 1/4 cup dark brown sugar (packed) 1/4 cup paprika 3 tablespoons freshly ground pepper 1 tablespoon garlic powder 1 tablespoon onion powder 2 ground up chipotles (stems and seeds removed) Mix the spice mix ingredients. I remove the stems and most of the seeds of the chipotles and grind them up in a coffee grinder that I only use for spices. You can leave more seeds if you want to spice things up. The left over mix you can store in a jar or ziploc bag in a cool dark place. Preheat the oven to 400 F (200 C) Wash and scrub the potatoes, dry them and cut them in to wedges. The ...

The first flower on my chile plants opened today, it's on one of the jalapenos, I hope I'll have chiles soon, but with the warm weather we have at the moment I'm pretty sure they will do very well :-)

Everybody in my family loves Mexican dishes and some of the family (including myself) love mega spicy food. Here we have only a limited variety of chiles available so I started three years ago to grow my own. That year I grew "Spanish peppers" (the local cayenne variety), jalapenos and orange habanero peppers. The Spanish ones ended up in my regular cooking, the jalapenos while green in Mexican dishes and the red ones I smoked in the barbecue for about 7 hours over mesquite wood than dried them further in my dehydrator to make chipotles. Most of the Mexican peppers have different names the moment you dry them. The orange habaneros I dried and ground into chile powder, except for the first one which I cut in half and my nephew and I both ate it raw. It took a lot of milk to cool things down :-) Last year I grew other varieties but my neighbor over watered them when I was on vacation so that was pretty much the end of them. This year I have Jalapenos, Rocotos, Chocolate Habaner...