Chiles Rellenos

I may have said this before, but I do believe deep down inside I am a little tiny bit Mexican.  Nevermind that there's not a drop of anything but European blood in me.  That doesn't matter.  I love Mexican food, and I could eat it every single day and not get tired of it.  Lucky for me, I work with several people who were either born in Mexico, or whose parents were born in Mexico.  I'm always asking them for recipes and tips and tricks to make my dishes better.  This is one of those recipes, so you know that it's authentic and delicious.  It takes a little while to make so I don't think this will be a regular week night meal for us, but it's perfect for a lazy weekend dinner.  Besides, you can indulge yourself in margaritas on the weekends.  And believe me, you're going to want a margarita or three.  It's the weekend, no one's judging!

Chiles Rellenos with Habenera Sauce

What you need:

Chiles Rellenos

4 Anaheim peppers

Mozzarella cheese

2 eggs

Flour

Oil for frying

Thin cut sirloin steak

Onion (sliced)

Cumin

Steak seasoning

Salt and Pepper

Habanera Sauce

1 tomato

1 onion

3-4 cloves garlic

2 jalapeno peppers

2 habanero peppers

15 oz can tomato sauce

Salt (to taste)

What you do:

Place the tomato, onion (peeled and cut into quarters), peeled garlic cloves, habanero peppers, jalapeno peppers, and anaheims on a cookie sheet.  Broil them until they skin is nice and brown and kind of peeling away from the flesh.  I turn the peppers over once to make sure they get browned on both sides.

As soon as you take them out of the oven put the anaheim peppers into a large ziploc bag, close it and cover them with a warm towel.  You will let them sit for at least 10 minutes.  

In the meantime take your onion, tomato, garlic, jalapenos and habaneros and put them all in a blender along with the tomato sauce.  Blend until mostly smooth.  When you take the lid off the blender do not, I repeat DO NOT, stick your nose in their to smell it.  You will regret it immediately.  I am speaking from personal experience.  

This is what the sauce should look like.  It's pretty spicy, so if you like spicy food 2 habanero peppers is perfect.  If you don't like spicy food so much I would suggest 1 habanero and maybe adding more tomato sauce to mellow out the spiciness.  Put the sauce into a small pan and keep it on the stove over low heat (just enough to keep it warm).  

Now, take those anaheims out of the ziploc bag and peel the skin off.  It should come over really easy now that we've let them steam in the bag.  

After you've peeled them all, make a small slit down the middle and stuff them with the mozzarella.  Put enough cheese in there to fill up the body of the pepper, but not so much that you can't kind of pull one side of the pepper over the other so the cheese is mostly covered by the pepper.

Now, whisk the two eggs with a 1 or 2 tablespoons of water and season some flour with a little bit of salt and pepper.  Dip the stuffed peppers into the egg wash, then roll them in the flour.  Accept that fact that your hands will get incredibly messy now.    

While your oil is heating up to fry the chiles, cube up the steak and season with cumin, steak seasoning, salt and pepper.  Cook in a large frying pan with the sliced onion.  Now all you need to do is fry the peppers.  It will take several minutes on each side to make the chiles all nice and crispy and golden brown.

Serve with Mexican rice and refried beans.  I swear, one day soon I will show you the recipe for homemade refried beans. Seriously, the easiest thing you will ever make.  You'll never want to buy the canned stuff again.

Homemade Pizza

Fact: Pizza is delicious.  Homemade pizza is EVEN MORE delicious, because you can customize it however you want and add tons and tons of toppings.  Pizza places are SO stingy when it comes to toppings.  Am I right?  For a while Cole and I were making our homemade pizzas with the Jiffy crust mix, and for a box mix it's actually really good.  But, it's really easy to make 100% homemade.  You can even make a double (or triple) batch and store the extra dough in the freezer.  Then you just pull it out in the morning, and *bam* you have homemade pizza in 30 minutes or less at night!

Pizza Dough

(adapted from The Pioneer Woman)

What you need:

1 tsp yeast

3/4 warm water (not boiling, not lukewarm)

2 cups flour

3/4 tsp salt

3 T olive oil

Various seasonings of your choice (I use garlic, oregano and Italian seasoning)

What you do:

Sprinkle yeast over warm water.  Let stand for a few minutes and do it's thing.  Meanwhile, in a mixer combine the flour and salt.  With the mixer on low slowly drizzle in the olive oil.  Then pour the yeast/water mixture and mix until just combined.  The dough will be sticky. 

 Coat a separate bowl with a little bit of olive oil.  Form the dough into a ball and toss it in the olive oil.  Cover the bowl tightly with plastic wrap and let it rise for a 1-2 hours.  

*Note- According to the Pioneer Woman, you can store the dough in the fridge and until you need it and it's best to make the dough at least 24 hours in advance.  I'll be honest, I never think about it early enough.  I usually decide that afternoon I want pizza, so I make the dough then.  Or I'll pull the pre-made dough out of the freezer in the morning before I go to work.

Now it's time for the toppings.  You can go crazy and use whatever your little heart desires.  Our pizzas are always insane, giant monstrosities.  Every time we make one we are like "Next time we're going to cool it on the toppings a little."  And you know what, we never do.  This time, we went with fresh mozzarella cheese (in the very back), bell peppers, tomatoes, and jalapenos.  We cooked up some ground breakfast sausage too to throw on there.  So good.  For sauce, I just take canned tomato sauce and mix in some fresh chopped garlic, a little bit of garlic powder, oregano, and Italian seasoning.  

Preheat the oven to 475*, and make sure your rack is in the bottom half of the oven.  Roll out your pizza dough and put it on a pizza pan (or cookie sheet, or pizza stone, whatever you have).  I fold over the edges a big to make a crust, but that's mostly because my pan is a little too small for the amount of dough this recipe makes.  A big pizza pan is on my "to get" list. Spread the sauce on the dough.  When I'm using fresh mozzarella slices I like to put the cheese underneath the toppings.  I don't know why that is, but I just like it better that way.  If I'm using grated mozzarella I put the cheese on top of the toppings.  I'm weird, I know.  Anyway, I digress.  Add the rest of your toppings (or in my case, pile the rest of your toppings on top of the pizza).  

Bake for 12-15 minutes, until the crust is golden brown.  My oven is kind of weird and lame (a new oven is also on my list of wants, but I don't think that's happening anytime soon) so my crust really isn't golden brown, but it still tastes good.  Let the pizza cool for a few minutes when you pull it out of the oven, slice and enjoy.  

Really, it's so easy to make your own dough.  And if you make a lot at one time you can freeze the extras and if you remember to pull it out of the freezer in the morning you can have delicious homemade pizza that night in less time than it would take you to order a delivery.  To me, the key to this is adding seasoning to the dough.  It really pushes it over the top.