Enchiladas in Brazil

That's right! If you're here in Brazil and you miss Mexican food, then this recipe is for you. (The definition of "missing Mexican food" can also be "finding fault in the bland and insultingly overpriced slop that is a sorry excuse for Mexican cuisine".)  This recipe is cheap if you decide not to splurge on the quiejo reino (the closest thing you'll get to cheddar), but I think the cheese is worth the price for this recipe!

This recipe is also totally doable in the US, especially if you want some nice, homemade food with little to no processed ingredients (it can be a completely unprocessed meal if you make Tiffany's recipe for homemade tortillas). I'm going to teach this recipe with store-bought tortillas. I tried Tiffany's recipe and failed miserably because I didn't do the math right when I tried to convert ounces to grams.

The ground beef can be replaced with boiled/shredded chicken, or, for a vegetarian option, ground soy or just cheese.

This recipe makes 10 enchiladas.

Ingredients: 

The basics:
About 350g of ground beef
A few cloves of fresh, chopped up garlic to fry with the meat (optional)
1 pack of Rapi-10 tortillas (you can buy them in the bread section of most Brazilian supermarkets):

About 150g of mozzarella cheese
About 200g of quiejo reino

About the queijo reino: I've been told that it's OK to eat the red waxy cover part; I've also been told to avoid it. So I usually avoid it because it doesn't melt well, but I don't panic if a little bit gets into the cheese.

For the pico de gallo, you'll need:
1 big tomato
1 big onion
A handful of cilantro (aka coriander aka coentro)

You can put this pico de gallo salsa directly into the enchilada, like I did, or you can leave it on the outside as a side dish, which is more traditional.

For a mild enchilada sauce, you'll need:
A 350-g can of tomato paste (extrato de tomate)
2 or 3 tablespoons of cornstarch (amido de milho)
1/2 of a chicken bullion cube
The following spices, mixed together:
2 teaspoons cumin powder
1/2 teaspoon spicy paprika
1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper (this is hard to find in Brazil, so if you don't have it, you can use tempero baiano or even pimenta calabresa)
1 teaspoon oregano
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons of the ever-popular Brazilian powdered garlic, onion and parsley mix (this can also be replaced with 1 teaspoon of onion powder and 1 teaspoon of garlic powder)

If you want it to be spicier, increase the spicy paprika and the cayenne pepper. But be careful-- it's easy to make this too spicy too fast. If you're especially sensitive to heat, just skip the paprika and cayenne entirely, and add them in to the sauce pinch by pinch while it's cooking.


Instructions:

1. Chop up your pico de gallo ingredients and mix them together.

2. If you're cooking the beef with garlic, chop it up now.

3. Fry the ground beef with the garlic and some salt and pepper. It's nothing special at this point: just a pan of cooked ground beef.

4. Start making your sauce. First, mix all the dry spices together separately.

5. Boil about 1 cup of water. The idea to making the sauce is to slowly keep adding water and tomato paste until you're satisfied with the texture and the level of spicy-ness. So start with the cup of water, then add in the spices, about 1/2 of the can of tomato paste, and 1/2 of a chicken bullion cube. Then add 1 teaspoon of cornstarch. Mix, taste, and then add paste, water, and cornstarch until you're happy. The sauce needs to be on the watery side, not too thick. It should be a little thinner than pizza sauce.

6. Now that everything's ready to build the enchiladas, set up your assembly line:

(does anyone have any better ideas on how I can organize my spices?)

7. As you can see in the picture above, you need to spread some of the enchilada sauce around the bottom of the pan that you're going to bake the enchiladas in. This will keep the tortillas from sticking to the bottom of the pan.

8. To build your enchiladas, dip one tortilla halfway into the enchilada sauce. Then set it into the baking pan and fill the sauced-up half with the ground beef, cheese, and, if you want, pico de gallo.

Your hands will get messy! Ideally you'll have help, so one person can get their hands dirty with the sauce and the rolling while the other scoops the filling in.

9. Now comes the hard part: you have to roll the enchiladas without ripping the tortillas. They'll easily rip if you've put too much filling, and sometimes, even if you haven't. I still haven't found a way to prevent this. I've tried heating up the tortillas first, but it didn't solve the problem. But if you don't drop the tortillas in the sauce first, then I think the enchiladas are too dry. Sigh. I just roll very, very carefully.

At some point in the rolling process, your sauce might start to run low, in which case you can always add in a little more water and tomato paste.

10. After rolling up all the enchiladas, cover them with the remaining sauce and cheese.

Don't mind the broken little runt one in the front.

11. Bake them in the oven at 220C/430F for about 15 minutes -- just long enough to heat the tortillas and melt the cheese.

Ta-Da!!! Delicious enchiladas! If you wrap them really well, individually, in plastic and foil, they actually freeze and reheat pretty decently.

If you're feeling extra ambitious and want to make a complete Mexican meal with beans, hot salsa, guacamole, and sour cream, click on the "Mexican" label below for more recipes from Jim and Corinne.

Enjoy!

The Sacrificial Kale

I know, I know, Jim and I have really dropped the ball on this poor little cooking blog!  Now that it's the holidays and we'll both be temporarily unemployed, maybe we'll have more time to update. I do want to share a perfect Brazilified chocolate chip cookie recipe with you all soon.


But first I just want to share a quick cooking tip with you guys: I call it "the sacrificial kale."

All it is is a kale (couve) leaf under the chicken when you bake it. It keeps the bottom of the chicken from burning. Also, depending on your luck, your amount of oil/fat, and your cooking temperature, you might get some nice roasted kale out of it, too. Sometimes the kale is too burnt, but that's OK, because the chicken isn't.

As you can see, kale leaves are the perfect size for my glass baking dish. It makes for some extra yummy baked chicken!

That's all! That's the tip! Enjoy!

Baked Baby Shark

 

Finding quality frozen fish in the supermarket has been a challenge. There are three supermarkets within about three blocks of our apartment, but all of them sell frozen fish that has been simply wrapped in plastic and they ALWAYS have ice crystals all over the fillets (or shrimp) and are most certainly freezer burned. Only the salmon comes vacuum packed.

I usually make a trip to the municipal fish market for fresh fish, but that’s not always possible on a busy day.

A few days ago I went to Horti-Fruity (it’s like a Whole Foods produce store) and looked through their frozen fish section. There they have everything vacuum pack, but the price is scary. Among the R$30 fillets I found a package of two cação steaks for R$10. Perfect.

Cação is baby shark, referred to as “smooth hound” in the States, although I never ate it before moving to Brazil. It’s tasty. The flavor is light, but it definitely has a flavor of its own. Luiz likes it because it does not have any bones (except for the spine running down the middle).

I had no idea how to cook it, so I asked several of my older female students for ideas.  Here’s what I came up with. Forgive me for not having exact measurements, but they aren’t really necessary. Follow your gut.

Ingredients: (I made just one of the steaks. Increase ingredients as necessary when feeding more people.)

1 cação steak, fresh or thawed
½ of an onion, chopped
2 cloves of garlic, minced
½ green pepper, cut into medium size chunks
½ red pepper, similarly cut
1 medium tomato, seeded, cut into large chunks
a few fresh mushrooms, sliced
fresh hot peppers, minced, to taste
some green onions and parsley, chopped
coconut milk (1/3 cup more or less)

Method:

Preheat your oven to 200 degrees C (about 400 degrees F)

Sauté the onions until clear. Add the garlic and cook until it smells wonderful. Add the peppers, tomato, mushrooms and hot peppers. Cook over medium heat until just soft, but not totally pooped. Add the coconut milk. Salt and pepper to taste.

Place a small amount of your vegetable mixture in a baking dish. Place your cação steak on top of that, then cover it with the remaining vegetable mixture. Sprinkle your chopped green onions and parseley over the top. Cover the pan with aluminum foil and place it in the oven for 30 minutes.

Remove from the oven and serve hot with your favorite accompanyments.

Chicken-Stuffed Bell Peppers

I felt like making stuffed bell peppers. I read some ideas from different recipes online. I tried to work with what I had in the fridge.

Bell peppers can be stuffed with pretty much anything, so, as always, take these ingredients and run with them!

it's hard to make these pretty, but they taste good -- I promise!

Stuffed Bell Peppers

Ingredients

red bell peppers
chicken
chicken broth or chicken bullion cubes for chicken broth
onion
garlic
olive oil
celery
cayenne pepper
fennel seeds (erva doce in Portuguese)
bread crumbs
tomato
cheese



Instructions

1. Shred the cheese. Chop everything else up. The food processor is your friend in this recipe. You can mix the onion, garlic, celery, and chicken together at this point (chop them up together if you want).

2. Fry the onion, garlic, chicken, and celery together in some olive oil (or regular oil!). Add in the cayenne pepper, the fennel seeds, and some salt and pepper as they're all cooking.
3. Boil some water in a pot and put the bell peppers in the water just to boil them for a few minutes. This will save you on baking time.

4. Use some of that boiled water to make your chicken broth, if you're making it using chicken bullion cubes. You don't need much chicken broth -- maybe 1/2 a cup for 2 whole bell peppers.

5. Mix the bread crumbs and a bit of the chicken broth into the chicken mixture when the chicken is almost fully cooked.

6. Put the bell peppers in a baking dish. I cut them down the middle and filled each side, almost like a taco; some people cut the tops off and stuff the inside, like a pumpkin.


7. Top/fill the bell peppers with the chicken mixture. Top them with just a little more chicken broth.

no, you're not crazy. They're different sizes. I used some of the bell pepper halves for another recipe.

8. Put the tomatoes and cheese on top of the chicken mixture.

9. Bake for 20-30 minutes at about 230C, just to warm it all up together and to make the bell pepper a little crispy.

Enjoy!
What do you stuff bell peppers with?

Hot and Sour Soup

This soup recipe is adapted from the Martha Stewart Cookbook I raved about a few weeks ago. I promised a friend I'd type it up for her, so I figured I'd share it with you guys, too.

this picture is from this cook, who also adapted this recipe to her liking

Anyway, Alexandre and I made this Japanese-style soup, and he loved it for its fresh mushrooms. I'm not a fan of mushrooms, and the egg mixture was strange for me, but I can see the appeal. And it's vegetarian, if you don't count the egg.

It's a little on the expensive side here in Brazil (tofu and fresh mushrooms, hello?), but this soup is easily freezable so you can get quite a few meals out of it. And, like almost all of the recipes I post, it's pretty easily modifiable. We added in a lot more vegetables, for example.

Hot and Sour Soup

Original Ingredients:

3-4 cups of chicken broth
2 tablespoons of soy sauce
a pinch of red pepper flakes (a.k.a. pimenta calabresa, but this can be any pepper/spice that you like)
One package of fresh shiitake mushrooms with the stems cut off (I found them in the produce section of the supermarket)
1 package of either kind of tofu (I bought mine at the farmer's market! holla!)
3-4 tablespoons of rice vinegar
2 tablespoons of cornstarch
1 egg, lightly beaten
2 tablespoons of fresh ginger, peeled and chopped
green onions, chopped up nice and small

We also added:
broccoli
onions
carrot
celery
peas (we put the whole pod in. it came out nice)

Instructions: 

1. If you're in Brazil, you'll probably need to make your chicken broth first.

2. Now's also a good time to start drying out your tofu.

3. In a large pot, combine the chicken broth, soy sauce, pepper flakes, and 2 cups of water. Boil. (I started with 3 cups of the chicken broth and added the rest later. You may prefer your soup thicker or more watery, so this number is flexible.)

4. Slice the mushrooms into small strips. Add the mushrooms, carrots, and onions. Lower the heat, then simmer for about 10 minutes.

5. Now's a good time to add in the rest of your vegetables (broccoli, celery, and peas, whatever else you want).

6. In a small bowl, whisk together 3 tablespoons of the vinegar and the cornstarch. Add the mixture to the pot. Simmer and stir until the soup thickens (for about 1 minute).

7. Add in the egg using a slotted spoon. Mix mix mix. Simmer simmer simmer.

8. Add in the ginger. Then chop up your tofu and then add it to the soup, too. Cook for another minute or so.

9. Remove the soup from the heat. Taste the soup to see if you want the rest of the vinegar or not.

10. Sprinkle the green onions on top and enjoy!

The next time we make it, I'll take my own picture, OK? :)

Kale Wraps

So I saw this video on a blog and really liked the idea of using kale leaves to make wraps.

anybody else noticing how Southern Californians are developing Canadian-style Os?

In the video, Margaret from eatnaked.com uses the term "collard greens," which, according to Wikipedia, is technically a category of these big leafy plants, and kale is a member of this category.

Since we're in Brazil, I had to buy the strain of kale available here, which is not the one in the video with the purple stripe down the middle. Alexandre complained that it was a little bitter for a recipe like this, but I'm really inexperienced with buying these kinds of leaves, so I welcome your suggestions on what we could use instead.

Anyway, I took the steaming and cutting techniques used in the video, and built up the filling using a combination of recipes from the internet. Here's what mine ended up like:

 

The ingredients are easily modifiable, but the tip I took away from the various recipes online was to have some kind of topping and then some kind of filling. So the ingredients I used are below. Feel free to just use my recipe as a template; be creative!

Kale Wraps

Ingredients for the filling: 

chicken breasts

chickpeas

avocado (preferably American-style Haas avocado and not Brazilian-style Geada abacate; you can read more here, Ray )

Ingredients for the topping:
tomato
onion
garlic
celery
green pepper

Instructions:

1. Chop up all the veggies for the topping into small pieces. Don't mix them together just yet. At this point, you can also chop up the avocado and wash your chickpeas (or cook them from scratch, if you have time to do that).

2. If you're using chicken, sprinkle your favorite spices onto a chicken breast or two, and fry them (or use your George Foreman Grill, if you've got one and want to avoid all the oil!). Once the chicken is cooked, chop it up into small pieces.

3. Cut and steam the kale leaves according to the video above. To steam mine, I put my metal strainer into a pot of boiling water and put the lid on it! Voilá! Homemade steamer. :)

4. In a nice pan, heat the onion and some salt in a generous amount of oil (olive oil worked well). Then add in the garlic, the celery and the green pepper and heat them up. You can cook the tomato a bit too, if you want; I mixed it in fresh at the end.

5. Mix the ingredients for the filling together and put them into the kale leaves, à lá the video.

6. Set the wraps in a baking dish and top them with the topping mixture (if you had extra chickpeas left over, like I did, you can add those, too).  Bake everything for just a few minutes 5-10 just to warm it all up together.

They're surprisingly filling!


What would you add? Any other ideas for fillings or toppings?

Jennifer's Perfect Brazilian Rice

 So newcomer Jennifer is very excited to share the Brazilian rice recipe that she has learned and perfected. She describes it as "simple but delicious!". There are a few different takes on the "best" way to make Brazilian rice, but this is the one I tend to follow, too (except I'm way too lazy to use a mortar and pestle). Lots of people have strong opinions on their version of Brazilian rice, so if you're one of those people, share your opinions and preferences in the comments!

Easy Brazilian Rice

Ingredients:

1 Tbsp oil

.5 Tbsp garlic/salt mixture

1 cup long grain white rice

2 cups water

Instructions:

In a mortar and pestle, grind 4 medium garlic cloves with a few pinches of salt (just so the garlic does not jump out) until it is a creamy paste. Add about 1/4 cup of salt and store in a sealed container for later. You will only use about 1/2 a tablespoon of the mixture for this recipe.

Heat oil in a rounded pan over medium-low heat. Add the half tablespoon of salt-garlic mixture and briefly sauteé. Don't let the heat get too high or the salt and garlic will burn.

Add 1 cup of rice and sauteé for about 2 minutes, stirring often. 

Add 2 cups of water and bring to a boil. Stir thoroughly, put on a well-fitting lid, and remove the pan from the heat.

In about 30 minutes, fluff with a fork, and enjoy your perfect pot of rice!