Cilantro-Serrano Pesto with Grilled Chicken and Penne

My wife did the cooking tonight using a recipe I had picked out from Cooking Light.   This dish is a fusion between Italian and Mexican cuisine and it is the first time we have tried to make this.

Photo: Randy Mayor

The pesto is made from cilantro, Serrano pepper, and pecans.   Instead of grilled chicken we bought roasted chicken from the grocery store.  

The flavor was much more mild and the dish was much more dry than we expected.   Still, I liked the dish, but my wife found it to be a bit disappointing.   I don't think it is something we will make again.

Chicken Enchiladas with Ranchero Sauce

I know I say a lot of dishes are my favorite, but Chicken Enchiladas really could be at the top of my all time greatest hits!   They are so good and this dish is usually good for dinner for two nights and at least a couple of lunches.   I get to enjoy this dish for several meals after I make it.

Photo: John Autry; Styling: Cindy Barr

Its really the home made ranchero sauce which make this dish so good.   The recipe for the chicken enchiladas is based on Cooking Light recipe for bean and cheese enchiladas with ranchero sauce I found on myrecipes.com.   The ranchero sauce is made with fresh oregano, boiled ancho chiles, sauteed onion, tomato paste, lime juice, and cumin.   I boil the chicken in water, broth, and some water from the ancho chiles.    The enchiladas are stuffed with cheese, black beans, and chicken and then smothered in cheese and ranchero sauce.   Oh man, this is delicious!

I am getting hungry writing about it.  I try to limit myself to making this dish once over couple of months so I don't get too tired of it.   If I didn't restrain myself, I would make enchiladas a couple of times per month.

We usually eat two enchiladas per serving which comes out to about 450 calories per meal.  

Blackened Halibut Baja Tacos

I love fish tacos and Cooking Light has several great fish taco recipes.   Saturday night is the night I usually try a new recipe and tonight I made Blackened Halibut Baja Tacos based on Cooking Light's Blackened Tilapia Baja Taco recipe on myrecipes.com.    I don't really like to use tilapia because its almost always farm raised and I try to avoid farm raised fish.    Fresh halibut season just started and the fresh, wild caught halibut was wonderful.   This was my favorite meal since the Putanesca I made about a week and a half ago. 

The spice rub on the fish consists of cumin, paprika, garlic powder, salt, brown sugar, red pepper and oregano.  I will have to go back and compare this to the pork tenderloin spice rub I use which is very similar in the ingredients used but a much different flavor.     We finished every bite of fish. 

The jalapeno sauce for these tacos is made of fresh cilantro (hard to go wrong when something starts with fresh cilantro), sour cream, lime juice and jalapeno.    The sauce was so good, that during dinner I was really wishing I had made extra sauce to pour over my taco.

My wife really liked this dinner as well, so this is definitely something I will make again in the future.  

Grilled Fusion Chicken and Black Bean Salad

Since I didn't cook anything last night as I normally would on a Thursday night, I had no left overs for dinner tonight, so I needed to prepare something.   Nothing from my list of recipes seemed appealing so I decided to try something new.   I grilled some marinated chicken breasts.   The recipe for the marinade came from a Sunset magazine recipe I found on myrecipes.com.  

The recipe is called Grilled Fusion Chicken but a better name would be Grilled Tequila Chipotle Chicken.   The marinade is basically oil, lime, tequila, salt, chipotle, fresh ginger, hot sauce, and Worcestershire sauce.   The chicken had a wonderfully unique flavor and my wife and I both liked it.   The Sunset recipe for Fusion chicken also called for a rich creamy sauce made from whipping cream and some unused marinade, but I forgot to save some marinade for this so I did not end up making the sauce.

To go with the chicken, I made a Black Bean Salad from a Cooking Light recipe I found on myrecipes.com.   The salad turned out great.  My wife put her chicken in the salad along with some tortilla chips.   She really liked the combination of the chicken and the salad. 

Overall, it was a really delicious dinner.   And after getting the tequila out for the marinade and since I had lots of limes on hand, we decided to make margaritas, which were also very good. 

Black Bean and Cheese Enchiladas with Ranchero Sauce

I seem to be back to my normal cooking routine of cooking on Tuesdays and Thursdays.   Today, I made Black Bean and Cheese Enchiladas with Ranchero Sauce.    This is another Cooking Light recipe I found on myrecipes.com.   

This is a great vegetarian dish and we do like to go without meat once in awhile.   I would really like to cook one vegetarian meal per week, but there are just so many more meat or seafood dishes I like better.   I was a vegetarian when I started learning to cook, but that was many years ago.

Its the sauce that really makes the enchiladas so delicious.    The fresh oregano, onions and garlic cooking together smelled so wonderful when I was making the Ranchero Sauce.  

This is probably the fourth or fifth time I have used this recipe, so I am starting to get better at it (which means the dish has turned out well the last few times and I didn't skip a step or leave out a key ingredient.)

One thing I do find really annoying in most recipes is that the amounts are not included in the step-by-step description.    Most recipes list the ingredients and amounts of each ingredient and then leave the amounts in the step-by-step instructions.    I am often looking at the recipe on my phone or my Samsung Galaxy tablet while cooking and I frequently have to scroll up to see the amounts of each ingredient.    When the instructions say... "add broth to pan," then I have to scroll up to see that the amount is 2 cups of broth.   And if they say something like, "add remaining broth to pan," then I have to scroll up to find the amount of broth and then find the other place in the instructions where broth was used to see how much I should have left.   This process can sometimes ruin a dish when you are trying to cook something which should be over heat for only a minute or two or you don't have a free hand to scroll. 

Well, the enchiladas turned out great tonight and the Ranchero Sauce was excellent.

Steak Fajitas

The first time I ever had steak fajitas was in 1991 at a Chevy's Restaurant in Fremont California.   They were soooooo delicious.   Everything about Chevy's was good at that time.   The tortilla machine in dining area cranking out fresh tortillas, the hot, thin, salty tortilla chips, the fresh salsa, the margaritas, and the southwestern route 66 decor all worked together to make Chevy's my favorite restaurant of that time.   Chevy's has gone bankrupt since that time after selling out to Taco Bell in the 90s and then to various private equity firms.   I guess having an MBA is not nearly as valuable as knowing how to serve your guests when it comes to managing a restaurant.  

Well, I have never lost my taste for steak fajitas.    For a long time, I would make fajitas at home using a fajita seasoning packet to season the steak or chicken.   While the seasoning packet is better than no seasoning, its really not very good at all and I got to a point where I really had no desire to make fajitas at home. 

And after a particularly bad meal at one of the few remaining Chevy's restaurants, I had to be honest with myself... if I wanted good fajitas, I was going to have to learn to make them myself.

I don't know why I never looked into how to make fajitas before, but it finally dawned on me to look up some recipes for the marinade.   One of the keys is marinating the steak of chicken for several hours.  I since found a really good fajita marinade recipe on myrecipes.com.   The marinade includes lime juice, olive oil, garlic, cumin, salt, pepper, and worcestershire sauce. 

On Sunday, I cut the steak into 1 inch wide strips and marinated the meat for about 6 hours and then grilled the meat outside on a charcoal grill.   (BTW, why can't someone make a decent charcoal grill?)  The meal was delicious and we will have left overs for dinner tonight. 

One more thing... The steak fajitas were really good, but still did not satisfy my desire for the Chevy's steak fajitas I remember from 20 years ago.   After dinner I searched for the Chevy's fajitas recipe and found that Chevy's actually published a cookbook which includes their steak fajita marinade and that a lot of people have posted this recipe online.   Next time I make steak fajitas, I am going to try the Chevy's recipe.

Southwestern Chicken Soup

I wasn't sure what I was going to make tonight.   I wanted it to be a chicken night since we had steak kabobs the last two nights for dinner.    None of my chicken recipes seemed appealing then I remembered the Southwestern Chicken Soup I made a couple of weeks ago.     Its another Cooking Light recipe from MyRecipes.com.   I noted the ingredients in my phone and then left for the grocery store at 5pm and I had dinner ready by 6:30pm when my wife and daughter walked through the door.   This is a pretty simple recipe with some delicious fresh ingredients like avocado, tomato, and cilantro.    I substitute Cannellini the Great Northern beans called for in the recipe.   The soup was delicious.

Here is my shopping list and cost of the items (from Whole Foods).

32 oz Organic Chicken Broth (2@$3.59)...  $7.18
16 oz Can of Organic Cannellini beans... $1.19
1 Large Onion (0.86 lb)... $1.63  (I only used half of this)
1 Lime... $0.50
1 Organic Avocado... $1.79
1 Plain Roasted Chicken... $9.99
2 Organic Tomatoes  (0.5 lb)... $2.48
1 Bunch of Cilantro... $1.99 (I used about half of this)

Total cost:   $26.75

Makes about 6 servings, so cost per serving:   $4.46