Happy Cinco de Mayo! Margarita Chicken Recipe

I whipped this up last night, and it was delicious! Since it’s still a little cool outside for grilling – up here in the high mountain desert, that is - I baked my marinated chicken in the oven.

Margarita Chicken

I adapted this from “Mexican Tequila Marinade”, a recipe in the Marinades & Rubs cookbook by Carol Wilson.

Marinade Ingredients:

• 1/2 cup fresh squeezed lime juice
• 1/4 cup tequila
• 2 tablespoons peanut oil
• 1 tablespoon grated lime zest
• 1 teaspoon dried oregano
• 1 teaspoon chili powder

1 to 2 pounds of chicken pieces (I like leg/thigh quarters)
1 to 2 tablespoons of coarse salt (kosher or sea salt) for sprinkling

Thoroughly whisk marinade ingredients in bowl or measuring cup (not metal). Let stand at room temperature for 20 minutes so flavors will meld.

Trim fat from chicken pieces, then place in shallow baking dish (not metal) or plastic bag. Pour marinade over chicken, turning to coat.

Seal or cover, and allow to marinate in the refrigerator for at least 1 hour, but no more than 3 hours.

Transfer chicken pieces to a non-metal baking dish – if you haven’t already – along with the marinade. Sprinkle the chicken pieces with coarse salt, if desired.

(I really like this crunchy seasoning on the baked chicken skin, reminds me of the salty rim of a margarita glass. If you don’t, just add 1 teaspoon of table salt to the marinade, and skip the sprinkling.)

Bake chicken pieces along with the marinade, uncovered, in preheated 375-degree oven for 55 minutes or until done.

(Note: this cooking time is for my altitude of 7,000 feet; at sea level, check for doneness after 50 minutes.)

Serving suggestions: Great served simply, with plain white or coconut rice drizzled with pan juices, black beans, and a green salad.

Grilling: This is fantastic on the grill when weather permits. Add 1 teaspoon table salt to the marinade & skip the coarse salt sprinkle. Then, instead of baking your chicken in its marinade, drain the marinade into a small saucepan & boil vigorously for 5 minutes. Drizzle over the grilled chicken at serving time.

Seafood: It’s an equally good marinade for seafood, especially shrimp or scallops. Marinate seafood in the fridge for only 30 minutes. Any longer and the lime juice will “cook” the seafood!

¡Buen provecho!

--MaggieBelize
Designer, kNotes for kNitters
Creator, Happy Hands Hand Creams for Fiber Artists
Sandia Park, NM

Blast from the Past: Pressure Cooking

 

I know, I say “pressure cooker” and you think (1) dangerous explosions, and/or (2) gray, flabby, over-cooked food.

It’s true, I witnessed a spectacular pressure cooker explosion back in 1968. Aunt Dee left me and my cousin Judy home alone, with vague instructions to “watch the pressure cooker”.

What’s to watch? We watched cartoons instead. Two hours later the pressure cooker went “BOOM”! We ran into the kitchen to find it had blown its lid, bashing a cantaloupe-sized hole in the ceiling and splattering green beans all over the walls.

Judy & I were in deep doo-doo for that one.

So I never considered trying a pressure cooker myself, until I moved up here to the high mountain desert. At 7,000 feet we have some unusual cooking “challenges” – my worst one being that I couldn’t cook beans. Seriously! I could not make a decent pot of beans up here.

My neighbors all advised pressure cooking to solve the high-altitude bean problem. And that’s when I discovered that “modern” pressure cookers are vastly improved over my Aunt Dee’s mid-century model. They’re electric, they’re digital, and they promise explosion-proof operation.

Okay … I decided to try pressure cooking.

After reading the reviews I purchased a Cuisinart CPC-600 1000-Watt 6-Quart Electric Pressure Cooker, shown here.

I’ve used it for almost a year now. And I have to say, this was probably my best purchase of 2010.

 

 

Top 5 Reasons to ♥ Electric Pressure Cookers

1. Dang, they’re fast! I’m talking 10-minute potato soup (although that project did make milk come out its nose), or a 40-minute brisket for 8.

2. They’re programmable. Punch in your settings and walk away (cartoons, anyone?). You don’t have to “watch” them, or adjust the heat, or anything. When the cooking cycle ends, they’ll automatically switch over to Keep Warm mode.

3. Yes, a pressure cooker IS the best way to cook beans. No, repeat NO, pre-soaking needed. And you can season the beans during cooking, even add a little salt, and they’ll STILL cook up beautifully.

4. They don’t heat up the kitchen. This past summer was the hottest of the century, so I really, really appreciated not having to turn on the oven, or even the stove burners, for weeks on end.

5. They don’t use a lot of juice. It’s about the same wattage as a hair dryer, and the actual cooking time is short, so the energy consumption is way less than a standard oven, or even a slow cooker.

Plus there are serendipitous benefits. For example, I’ve discovered that my electric pressure cooker makes the best stocks imaginable – chicken, beef, pork, vegetable, whatever. And it’s now my go-to method for ribs: cook ‘em with pressure, finish them on the grill.

Best Pressure Cooker Cookbooks

I’ve since acquired a number of pressure cooker cookbooks, and of them all I recommend two to get you started:

Victoria Wise’s Pressure Cooker Gourmet

From the first chef at Chez Panisse, this book is all you need to convince unbelievers that you can cook delicious food in a pressure cooker. (I started with her Brined Pork Roast & Figs, a revelation.)

This one’s also available in a Kindle edition.

 

 

Any of Lorna Sass’s pressure cooking cookbooks are great to have on hand, but I especially like her Pressure Perfect: Two Hour Taste in Twenty Minutes Using Your Pressure Cooker. Her substitution charts are pure gold when it’s time to convert your favorite traditional recipes to the pressure cooker.

 

Bon appetit!

--MaggieBelize
Designer, kNotes for kNitters
Creator, Happy Hands Hand Creams for Fiber Artists
Sandia Park, NM

Can You Freeze Guacamole?

There was some discussion on the Albuquerque City-Data forum recently as to whether one can successfully freeze guacamole.

After repeated experiments, my opinion is no, you can’t freeze guacamole – but you can freeze mashed avocado pulp, then gussy it up into guacamole at serving time.

Is frozen pulp as good as fresh? No, of course not. Is it better than nothing? Yes!

I used to do this all the time in Belize, where avocados ripen all at once in August & September. For two delirious months we’d be up to our elbows in buttery, ripe avocados … then we’d have to do without for the rest of the year. Wah!

So I would gather up all the ripe avocados I couldn’t eat then and there without exploding, and in a single marathon session I’d peel, pit and mash them with lashings of freshly squeezed lime juice, about a teaspoonful per avocado (count the pits). Here in the States, lemon juice works too.

(Despite what Diana Kennedy, the maven of Mexican cooking, says about this, I like the flavor of lime juice in my guacamole.)

Without adding anything more to the pulp, not even salt, I’d measure it into vacuum seal freezer bags, one to two cups per bag, and freeze it.

I strongly recommend the “suck ‘n seal” packaging method for this project. But whatever freezer bag you use, you want to remove as much air as possible. Oxidation is avocado’s enemy, turning exposed pulp an unattractive brown. The citric acid in the lime or lemon juice also helps preserve the color.

Depending on your freezer temperature and the bags you use, avocado pulp will keep nicely anywhere from two to six months in the freezer.

When it’s time to make the guacamole, first thaw the sealed bag of pulp overnight in the fridge. If you’re in a hurry, you can submerge your freezer bag in a bowl of warm water; but I don’t recommend defrosting it in the microwave. (I tried that once, and it got ugly.)

Once thawed, you’ll notice your avocado pulp may be a bit watery. Just punch a little hole in the freezer bag and drain off any excess liquid.

Then de-bag the pulp and mix in whatever fresh fixings you like – chopped tomatoes and Serrano chiles, minced onion, cilantro, etc. Salt to taste, maybe add a pinch of sugar, and serve.

Voila! Guacamole on demand.

--MaggieBelize
Designer, kNotes for kNitters
Have you seen my “Second Story”?
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A brightly-colored Easter

Just a quick note to post our doings this holiday weekend.

Last night we went wild coloring Easter eggs. Of course we had to try Martha Stewart’s technique of dyeing eggs using patterned silk. We used a 50-cent silk tie we found at a yard sale on Friday.

They came out kinda cool, we thought! To make the egg at the upper left, we used the maroon lining of the tie; the other three were made using the maroon tie fabric itself, which had blue and yellow stripes.

We weren’t sure how well this would work, after reading MaryBT’s CraftFail tale of her attempt that inexplicably yielded utterly white eggs … but fortunately our efforts went smoothly.

Then we dyed a bunch more eggs using a variety Paas dye kits. I’d gotten some crazy ones, including a Marbleized Egg kit and a Tie-Dye egg kit. Frankly, neither of these worked very well. They were fun to play with, but the resulting eggs were oooo-gly. (I’ll spare you the photos.) The best news is that the dyes did not permanently stain the granite countertops.

And once you start coloring things, it’s hard to stop. Here are a couple of shots of our Easter table, ready for our feast this evening.

Isn’t it great when you’ve bought a bunch of crazy random things over the years, and one day they all just come together? And look as if you planned it all along?

For Easter dinner, we’re making the maple-syrup-braised ham from Ruth Reichl’s revised Gourmet cookbook – my idea of a “desert island” cookbook -- plus cheese grits, a tossed salad of spring greens, and oven-baked zucchini and onions Parmesan. (Yeah, that probably sounds like cheesy overkill, but that’s the family’s vote so I’m going with it.)

Then, if we’re not too sick from eating chocolate bunnies and malted milk “robin’s eggs” all day, or maybe even if we are, we’ll have Ghirardelli brownies and peanut-butter ice cream for dessert.

Happy Easter, everyone!

--MaggieBelize
Designer, kNotes for kNitters
Sandia Park, NM