Smoky Chicken Tinga Tacos

In mid-April I started thinking tacos and Cinco de Mayo.  Mexican food screams warm weather to me and I have been dreaming about warm weather since about December...  If only I had visited the farmers' market on Monday I would have made these charred asparagus tacos for Cinco de Mayo but I didn't have time to visit the farmers' market before today.  Before today I hadn't been to the farmers market in 2 weeks so I was pretty excited when I went today and saw all of the fresh spring veggies.  Thank goodness for spring!  I was so sick of winter and so very excited for fresh asparagus.  When sugar snaps finally make it to the farmers' market I will do a giant happy dance.  Moving on.  My other Cinco de Mayo alternative was to make carnitas (Smitten Kitchen posted a slight variation on Homesick Texan's carnitas recipe and it looks super simple and tasty and Bon Appetit has a Beer-Braised Carnitas recipe that I find intriguing), but because Cinco de Mayo fell on a Monday this year it wasn't going to happen.  I don't know about you, but I am barely prepared enough on Monday to throw something together - roasting or braising pork shoulder for 2-4 hours (or cooking it all day a slow cooker) just isn't going to happen. 

So I guess you can fairly say that this recipe was my backup.  Alex occasionally orders chicken tacos but I don't think I ever do.  Then again, I do like chicken enchiladas so I guess it's not all that different.  But chicken generally seems like such a cop out to me.  I decided to try out this recipe anyway because what did I have to lose?  It sounded good and the pictures looked good.  And to be honest, I didn't have anything else planned.  I was looking for a little more depth of flavor - instead I mostly tasted the chipotles and adobo sauce.  And once I topped the chicken with tomatillo salsa I mostly tasted heat.  The tomatillo salsa added brightness and acidity, but I wish we had made an equally bright and spicy pineapple salsa or maybe a mango salsa instead.  I think a little sweetness would have been a good counterpoint to the chicken tinga tacos and some textural contrast would have been a really welcome addition.  With the salsa and the braised chicken you ended up with a mouthful of fairly wet and somewhat mushy taco.  Pineapple would provide some texture, but adding jicama to any salsa would work too.  If you do make these tacos, make sure to drain the chicken fairly well before putting it on the tortilla.  Same goes for the salsa.  Otherwise you end up with a pool of liquid in your taco, which leads to a rapidly disintegrating corn tortilla...

Recipe after the jump!

Chili-Marinated Skirt Steak Tacos and Green Salsa with Avocado

Sometimes we get stuck in a rut.  Sometimes we try to mix it up.  This dish came about when I was trying to use one of our cookbooks that we never use - Rosa's New Mexican Table.  I bought the cookbook ages ago at Costco or Sam's Club when I saw that they had the recipe for their homemade guacamole and salsas, plus several other interesting recipes in there.  And then it proceeded to sit on the bookshelf.  For years.  We have our go to cookbooks and the rest tend to get lost in the fray.  In case you were wondering, our go to cookbooks are probably Barefoot Contessa Back to Basics: Fabulous Flavor from Simple Ingredients, Hot Sour Salty Sweet: A Culinary Journey Through Southeast Asia, our two Fuchsia Dunlop cookbooks and Into the Vietnamese Kitchen: Treasured Foodways, Modern Flavor.  Runners up probably include The Asian Grandmothers Cookbook: Home Cooking from Asian American Kitchens and Crescent City Cooking: Unforgettable Recipes from Susan Spicer's New Orleans.  We really need to branch out into our other cookbooks more often.  I periodically page through all of the cookbooks that we don't regularly use and pick out recipes that I want to make.  We have tons of recipes on deck from those other books and yet they still don't get made.  Perhaps making at least one recipe from each of our cookbooks should be my goal for this year.  In case you're wondering, we probably have about 30 cookbooks, so that should keep us busy for awhile...

This salsa recipe came straight out of the cookbook and the taco recipe was inspired by a recipe in the cookbook.  We rarely marinate our skirt steak when we make tacos because it has so much flavor on its own, but every once in awhile I like to mix it up.  Plus we had all of these dried chilis in our pantry that I wanted to use - cascabels, ancho chilis, chipotle chilis, chilis de arbol, etc.  So I got out my blender and decided to whip up some marinade.  In the end, I thought the tacos were good, but not amazing.  The steak by itself was almost overwhelmingly smoky/aggressively flavored with the dried chilis. It wasn't exactly spicy, but it was heavily spiced (if you get what I am saying).  But the coolness and brightness of the salsa went really well with the marinated steak and gave it some much needed acidity (as did the squeeze of fresh lime juice at the end).  And I really thought the creaminess that the avocado gave the salsa was an interesting touch.  Altogether it worked, but it wasn't my favorite skirt steak taco recipe.  I  will probably make the salsa again in the future, but I think the tacos themselves are doomed to be a one time experiment.  It's not the type of salsa that I think would work well as just chips and salsas, but I think it would work well as an accompaniment to any meat dish.  I think the cookbook actually says to serve it with empanadas and other fried food, which sounds like a brilliant pairing.
 
Recipes after the jump!

Mario Batali's Leo Maya's Chicken with Green Sauce

My husband stumbled on this recipe on Serious Eats a few years ago.  We rarely make it, but not because it isn't delicious, it's more a matter of the three pounds of tomatillos.  This dish is incredibly easy to make and actually doesn't require that many ingredients.  It does take a while, as braising always does, but the braising leaves the chicken thighs incredibly tender and flavorful.  And the green tomatillo-based sauce packs a serious punch.  It is nice - with some serious heat, and a nice sour flavor due to the lime and tomatillos.  We generally serve the chicken with more sauce, tortillas, thinly sliced red onions (optional), and sour cream, but you can serve it however you want.  Batali recommends hot sauce, but we usually find that the sauce itself is spicy enough.  Alex leaves the sour cream off, but I think that the creaminess of the sour cream really complements the heat and tang of the chicken beautifully.  I tried to find some nice queso blanco or cotija cheese to top the soft tacos with, but the grocery store was out.  Oh well.  This chicken would also be a wonderful filling for enchiladas, or a nice Mexican lasagna. 

After braising the chicken you end up with a lot of leftover green sauce.  If you make enchiladas then you will have plenty of sauce for your enchiladas.  If you make tacos, you will have at least a few cups of sauce leftover.  We freeze the sauce and defrost it later for other meals.  You can use it with plain (store-bought) rotisserie chicken to make enchiladas, you can top eggs with it, you can serve it with skirt steak or shrimp tacos, etc.  It really is that good!

 Recipe after the jump!