Caramelized Peppers and Onions are great on grilled burgers and hot dogs if you’re having a Memorial Day cookout this weekend! They’re also great all by themselves. When I made this, I tried it on top of a grilled cheeseburger – yum! Really special. I had some leftover, so just put some in a bowl and tried it by itself that evening. Know what? I thought it was better a few hours later. It seemed like the flavors blossomed and blended more. I actually had this as my entire dinner. That’s what putting bacon in it can do – gives it a robust flavor that makes it seem like a meal.
This is one of my flavor combinations in general. I’m a pepper, onion, and garlic addict. You can add bacon to that list, too. Everything is better with bacon on it. I don’t know about you, but too much time alone is getting to me. Cooking is fun, but it’s nice to have events and groups to share it with. So share this with me virtually and we can pretend it’s a real cookout.
1½ cup thin sliced red bell pepper (1½ - 2 peppers)
4 garlic cloves, sliced thin
2 tbsp olive oil
2 tbsp balsamic vinegar
2 tbsp hot diced green chiles
optional: salt & pepper to taste
Instructions
In a medium skillet, heat olive oil. Add the onions, cover, and cook until soft over medium heat, stirring occasionally.
Add the bacon and peppers, cover, and cook another 5-10 minutes or until soft, then add the garlic, increase heat to medium-high, and saute until veggies start to brown on the edges.
Add the balsamic vinegar and chiles and saute a few minutes till well blended.
If desired, add salt & pepper to taste and serve on burgers or as a side
Caramelized Chili Pork Loin – winner of the 2009 Denver Chili Fest Recipe Competition – sweet, hot wonderful flavor combination in a pork loin roll – big favorite!
Caramelized Chili Pork Loin – a festive stand out main dish that’s hot-sweet perfect flavor combination. This was the main dish winner at the 2009 Denver Chili Fest Recipe Competition – hands down getting all the votes.
This recipe was from Mel Hollis of Houston. It’s an old favorite in her family. She knows her chiles! This has become a family favorite in my house; we think it’s the best way to make a pork loin. Well, there is also classic green chili, which is sure hard to beat. Now this recipe requires butterflying the pork loin. There are 2 ways to butterfly: one requires one cut where you open up the loin like a book. Then second takes 2 cuts and you end up with a longer rectangle of pork that’s about 1/2 inch. I used the first method, and you can see it’s rolled up but most of the apple is in the center. If you use the second method, you end up with a pork loin that look more like a jelly roll in that you can actually see a spiral with the apple filling rolled up in the pork loin. Here is a video on how to butterfly a pork loin.
It’s good either way. It even freezes well! It takes a bit more time, but not that much. You gotta try this one, it’s worth it. Hope you enjoy it!
Melt the butter in a large skillet over medium high heat. Add brown sugar, cinnamon, diced apples, and diced chiles, toss to coat. Sauté 3 minutes, without stirring to let caramelize on one side.
Toss and sauté another 3 minutes. Remove from heat and let cool completely.
Butterfly the pork loin by cutting lengthwise down the center to within ½ inch of the other side. Flatten with a meat mallet.
Salt and pepper the inside of the loin to taste. Spread the cooled mixture down the center of the meat. Bring the 2 sides of the loin up around the mixture and tie with butcher's twine and 1 inch intervals, to make a nice roll.
Season the exterior of the stuffed loin with salt and pepper. Sear the loin in the Olive oil on all 4 sides in a large Dutch oven over medium high heat. Pour the apple cider over the loin.
Roast uncovered for 1 hour and 20 minutes or until an instant read thermometer inserted into the center reads 155 degrees F.
Remove from oven and let rest for about 15 minutes before slicing. Serve with pan juices.
Creamy Chili Verde Noodles with Chicken is a classic comfort food, creamy, tasty & satisfying – it’s actually a version of a Home Chef dish and easy to make
Creamy Chili Verde Noodles with Chicken is a family pleasing, satisfying comfort food that’s very easy to make. It’s actually based on a Home Chef dish that I thought was very good – Creamy Chili Verde Chicken Penne with Corn and Poblano Peppers. I used egg noodles instead and increased the cream cheese a bit.
It’s simple to put together, then you throw it in the oven for a half hour, top it with come cheese and cilantro, stir it up and serve. It also keeps well, just heat it up the next day. You could freeze it, too.
Bombproof recipe – love those bombproof ones! I put those in my keeper pile.
1 oz shredded Oaxacan or whole milk mozarella cheese
6 oz. egg noodles
3 oz light cream cheese
5 oz frozen corn
¼ cup chopped cilantro
optional: 2 sliced green onions for garnish
Instructions
Preheat oven to 425 degrees.
Boil the egg noodles in salted water in a medium saucepan till soft, about 5 minutes. While noodles are boiling, combine cream cheese, Oaxacan cheese, ¼ cup water, 2 tsp olive oil, ¼ tsp salt, and a few dashes of pepper in an 8-inch baking dish.
Drain the noodles, and stir them into cream cheese mixture along with the corn and poblano chiles and spread evenly in the dish.
Top with the chicken, spreading it out evenly. Evenly sprinkle with the taco seasoning and lightly sprinkle with salt.
Cover with foil and bake for 30 minutes.
Remove from oven, stir, top with queso fresco, cilantro and green onions.
Southwestern Spud Soup – classic comfort food loaded with bacon, chiles, cheese – creamy and rich with flavorful chunks, a meal in itself
Southwestern Spud Soup with Bacon is an ideal comfort food – creamy, flavorful, with cheese, bacon, and a bit of a kick. It starts with mashed potatoes, so it’s a great way to use those leftovers. I like to use mild green chiles to get more of the chile flavor and also let the bacon, potato, and cheese flavors come through.
It’s nice to make a big pot of this to enjoy for a couple meals at least. It also can be frozen, but let thaw gradually and heat up slowly. If you’re like me, you may not have buttermilk on hand. It’s easy to make – just take a cup of whole milk, stir in 2 tbsp of either white vinegar or lemon juice, and let sit at room temperature for a half hour. Easy peasy.
Guess what I’ll be having for lunch today? Yup, leftover spud soup. Diet starts tomorrow. Hope you enjoy this!
Fry bacon until crisp in a large pot. Remove bacon and set aside, leaving the bacon fat in the pot.
Reduce heat to medium low and cook the onion in the fat until tender, about 5-7 minutes.
Add garlic and flour, cook 1 minute while stirring. Stir in chicken broth, bring to a boil over medium high heat then simmer for 5 minutes.
Stir in mashed potatoes, green chiles, and cumin, and simmer an additional 5 minutes. Add the buttermilk and stir to combine allowing mixture to just come to a boil. Add salt and pepper, as needed, to taste.
Remove from heat and stir in 1 cup cheese, half of the bacon and ½ cup sour cream.
Garnish with a dollop of sour cream, remaining bacon, remaining cheese, and serve hot.
Sauteed Kale Pepper & Chicken is one of those easy, nutritious, incredibly tasty, and very versatile dishes that can be an entire meal.
Sauteed Kale Pepper & Chicken has turned into one of my favorite easy, nutritious, main dishes. I’ve made variations of this about a half dozen times so far. I’ve made it with kale, with cabbage, with chicken, with beef, with Trader Joe’s Pollo Asado. It’s always good. I’m at the stage where if I have any sort of greens and any kind of chicken and want a quick, really good, nutritious main dish – I’ll make some variation of this. It’s very forgiving.
The garlic and red wine vinegar are key to the flavor in this dish. It’s good without green chiles, but with them, it has a very nice moderate heat – it’s like making a great dish more 3D and distinctive. One thing I love about this is that I can use it as a base for using up a variety of vegetables that I might find in the fridge. This particular version has lots of red bell pepper, but it’s also good without any bell pepper.
So knock yourself out – try this out and then try varying the vegetables. Easy peasy and always good. Hope you like it!
Heat olive oil in a large sauté pan set over medium-high heat. Add chicken, and cook just until opaque. Add garlic and cook for 1-2 minutes or until soft.
Add kale and bell pepper to the pan and add the stock. Use a spoon to toss in the oil and stock, then cover and cook until it is soft and wilted, but still quite colorful. Add the green chiles and stir in well. Remove cover and continue to cook, stirring occasionally until all the liquid has evaporated, another 2 to 3 minutes. Season to taste with salt and pepper, add vinegar and toss to combine.
Serve as a main dish with fruit, salad, bread, as desired.
Green Chile Rice Casserole is scrumptious, super easy dish that starts with left over rice. 5 minutes to prepare, it’s a guaranteed family hit.
Green Chile Rice Casserole is a brain-dead simple way to make leftover rice into a tasty side dish … with only 5 minutes preparation. With just a few simple ingredients, you just layer rice, sour cream-green chile mixture, and shredded cheese into a casserole, bake, and voila! A dish everybody loves.
This is the kind of dish you can throw together when company shows up, take to a party, or just make for the family when they want a treat. Rice and green chiles go together like soup and sandwich, and with sour cream and cheese, this is definitely comfort food.
Personally, I like the simple dishes that only have a few ingredients the best – I’m more likely to make them again and again. So, put this one in your recipe box, and you’ll find it comes in handy over and over. Hope you like it!
In a greased 1½ quart baking dish, layer half the rice, then half the sour cream and green chile mixture, half the shredded cheese, then half the green onions.
Repeat the layers, reserving the onions until time to serve.
Bake uncovered until bubbly, about 30 minutes.
Remove from oven, top with remaining green onions, and serve
Quick Charro Beans are a super crowd pleaser, extra tasty … and only take 5 minutes to make, with ingredients most people always have on hand
Quick Charro Beans are ideal for a quick, incredibly tasty side dish – this takes all of 5 minutes to prepare. Plus this is a great dish when you’ve got the family trapped in the house for weeks at a time (like most of us now). The canned beans keep in the pantry forever, and most of us have bacon in the freezer and plenty of onion and garlic (or at least garlic powder). Personally, I’m finding I’m going through onion and garlic faster than usual, but they generally keep well for over a month.
Most charro bean recipes use fresh jalapeno or serrano peppers, but the Bush’s Cocina Latina Pintos a la Diabla have plenty already in the sauce. It’s definitely spicy, and there’s lots of that spicy tomato sauce already on the beans when you open the can. The sauce is moderately thick; some charro bean recipes have a thinner sauce, almost like a broth. I invented this recipe because I already had a can of the Pintos a la Diabla in my pantry; I opened the can, tasted the sauce, and realized it was basically perfect for a quick charro bean dish.
I’ve been planning to publish a charro bean recipe for about 10 year, and a request from one of our readers finally got me off my butt. Thanks, Deb! I’ve also made a from-scratch charro bean recipe that I’ll publish in a couple weeks. They’re a bit different, but probably equally as good. Hope you like this one!
1 30 oz can Bush's Cocina Latina Pintos a la Diabla
6 strips bacon, diced
1 cup chopped white onion
¼ tsp garlic powder (or 1 clove garlic, minced)
Instructions
In a medium saucepan, start browning the bacon over medium heat, separating the pieces with a fork while it cooks. When bacon is about halfway cooked after 2-3 minutes, add the onion and continue cooking about 3 more minutes or until onion is soft and bacon fully cooked.
If using fresh garlic, add the garlic and cook another 1-2 minutes.
Dump the can of beans in; if you did not already add garlic, put garlic powder in now and stir well to blend. Heat thoroughly and serve.
Grilled Cheese Chile Dippers are classic comfort food, basically grilled cheese sandwich strips that you dip in enchilada sauce or soup. Yummy!
Grilled Cheese Chile Dippers can be an appetizer or an ideal lunch, but definitely fits in the comfort food category. This was inspired by my visit to Steamboat in February – we had lunch at Hazie’s Bar & Grill at the top of the gondola and I had their grilled cheese strips with basil tomato soup. It was really yummy and simple – just strips of grilled cheese sandwich that you dip in the tomato soup.
So… I made my own version. My grilled cheese and chile sandwiches cut into strips. Then I served it with 3 different sauces – green enchilada sauce, red enchilada sauce, and burrito sauce. I liked the red enchilada sauce the best as it was the spiciest. But actually, a very good tomato soup would also be good. It’s pretty hard to go wrong with this. You could go nuts with this and dip it in a sriracha sauce or ranch dressing. Or maybe a queso dip or guacamole. Just use your imagination.
Got any other ideas? If you come up with another that works especially well, just email me and let me know! This is so easy, it’s a no-brainer to make again and again…
1 slice cheddar or American cheese (sandwich size)
1 tbsp mild diced green chiles
2 tbsp butter
½ cup red or green enchilada sauce or basil tomato soup for dipping.
Instructions
Assemble your sandwich: put the slice of cheese on a slice of bread, spread the green chile on top of the cheese, and top with the other piece of bread.Spread butter on top.
Place on skillet butter side down and then butter the other piece of bread. Grill until nicely browned, and then cut into strips about an inch wide.
Heat the enchilada sauce or soup if desired and serve in a bowl.
To eat, just dip the strips in the sauce and pop into your mouth.
Chorizo Quesadillas are fabulously flavorful and super easy to make. The filling can even be frozen for a nearly instant, satisfying appetizer or meal.
Chorizo Quesadillas are my absolute favorite dish for chorizo. So what is chorizo? It’s a Mexican pork sausage that has a few key differences from other sausage. there are two versions, fresh and dried. Here we are using fresh. In a nutshell, it’s usually made with a chile paste; that paste is a combination of dried chiles and vinegar allowed to ferment a bit. This paste along with paprika (particularly in Spanish versions) gives the chorizo its red color. Seasoning varies and often includes other spices, pepper, and garlic.
Often I use Italian sausage rather than chorizo. It tends to have chunkier texture and more predictable flavor than chorizo. I find I like to use chorizo more as a robust seasoning in a dish rather than the main featured meat. When cooked up and broken up in a skillet, it tends to have a finer texture than Italian sausage. For quesadillas, I think it’s ideal – robust flavor and small crumbles that distribute throughout the shredded cheese really well. Note that in this photo, I used whole wheat tortillas. They seem to feel healthier, don’t you think? (Yeah, like quesadillas are health food!)
I’ve tried several brands of chorizo, and some were pretty terrible. This recipe uses Jenny-O turkey chorizo, which I find very well suited to quesadillas. I’d be less likely to use it as a main dish meat (as in a burger). Nice flavor and perfect texture for quesadillas.
This filling keeps well. I plan to cook up a batch and then freeze it – I’m pretty sure that will work just fine. That way, you can cook up some gourmet quesadillas in no time flat.
Over medium heat, lightly brown the chorizo, just until it's in small crumbles, then remove from heat.
Blend the cheese with the chorizo and green chiles.
For each quesadilla, place a tortilla on a large skillet or tortilla maker, spread mixture evenly, and top with second tortilla.
Of course, I prefer using a tortilla maker - in which case you cook until top tortilla is starting to brown and filling is melted. In a skillet, you need to flip it and cook the other side. I find the easiest way to do this is cook over medium heat, peeking to see cheese is melted and bottom starting to brown. Then slide it off onto a plate, invert skillet on top of plate and flip so uncooked side is now on the skillet. Then cook till bottom tortilla is starting to brown ( a couple minutes).
Slide cooked quesadilla off onto a plate, cut into wedges and serve.
If desired, serve with shredded lettuce, sour cream, salsa, whatever & enjoy!
Spicy Bacon Brussels Sprouts are an easy way to prepare a very robust, tasty vegetable dish that everyone loves – bits of bacon and a bit tangy and spicy
Spicy Bacon Brussels Sprouts are one of my favorite versions of brussels sprouts – bacon just goes so well with the flavor of brussels sprouts. After I made this, I ended up eating it as my entire meal (well, it made 2 meals for me).
It’s funny how when I was a kid, brussels sprouts fit in the category of weird vegetable – they look like little cabbages and have a distinctive taste. Now I love them and cook them up all the time. Sometimes I roast them with olive oil and seasonings on them, but this basic technique of steaming and then sauteing them in oil in a skillet has become my staple method. Why? Because the steaming ensures they are fully cooked and soft, then finishing them off in the skillet adds some crispiness and nice flavor. Plus it’s so easy.
This is a very flexible, forgiving recipe. Want more bacon? Go ahead and double it. Same with the onion or chiles. You can’t really mess this one up … just try it.
* double the bacon to 8 strips if you want it really bacony
Instructions
Rinse and trim the brussels sprouts, then slice each into thirds or quarters. Place in a steamer or a covered pot with a half inch of water. Steam over medium heat for about 5 minutes or until soft, then remove from heat.
While sprouts are steaming, cut bacon into ½ inch pieces and place in a medium skillet and over medium heat, brown for a couple minutes then add the onion. Cook while stirring a few more minutes, until onions are soft, then add the drained brussels sprouts.
Saute 3-5 minutes or until sprouts are starting to brown, then add the vinegar and green chiles. Cook, stirring, a few minutes or until any liquid is reduced, then add salt and pepper to taste.
Most charro bean recipes use fresh jalapeno or serrano peppers, but the Bush’s Cocina Latina Pintos a la Diabla have plenty already in the sauce. It’s definitely spicy, and there’s lots of that spicy tomato sauce already on the beans when you open the can. The sauce is moderately thick; some charro bean recipes have a thinner sauce, almost like a broth. I invented this recipe because I already had a can of the Pintos a la Diabla in my pantry; I opened the can, tasted the sauce, and realized it was basically perfect for a quick charro bean dish.
