Garlic Chile Eggs with Bacon is a classic Southwestern loaded scramled eggs – easy, always popular and very versatile
Garlic Chile Scrambled Eggs with Bacon is a classic favorite combo of eggs, green chiles, bacon, cheese and garlic with whatever else you want. You just can’t screw this up. Vary any of the ingredients however you want and it will turn out tasty and satisfying. I suggest viewing this recipe as a guideline and get creative.
In the photo, it’s served on a 6-inch flour tortilla, so it’s actually a breakfast soft taco. Convenient to eat if you don’t have or want to use plates. I used these “Spicy Hatch Chile” tortillas that I discovered in the King Soopers bakery; it’s a package of 10 for $2.99. Would I buy them again? Probably not. If you eat the tortilla by itself, you can taste the heat and a bit of chile flavor, but stuffed with the egg, chile, bacon mixture I can’t tell it’s not a regular tortilla. Personally, I prefer my deluxe scrambled eggs alone with no tortilla at all.
I made this for myself and my son. The photo is mine and for his I added a layer of cheese for the last 1-2 minutes of cooking, turned the heat down and put a lid on to melt it. It had a lovely layer of cheese goo on the top. It was a hit. You also might want to serve it with salsa or hot sauce – or sliced avocados or guacamole.
This is a no-fail tailor it however you like it recipe. Hope you enjoy it!
optional: salsa or taco sauce, 2-3 tortillas if serving as a soft taco
Instructions
Crack the eggs into a bowl, add water or milk a sprinkling of salt and pepper, and whisk beat with a fork till well blended. Set aside.
Fry bacon in nonstick skillet until just getting crisp, set aside to cook and crumble or tear into pieces as eggs are cooking. Drain about half the bacon fat leaving the rest to cook the eggs in.
Over medium heat, saute the garlic no more than a minute and stir in the green chiles and bacon. Cook no more than another minute to thoroughly heat the chiles.
Pour the eggs over, add the cheese, and stir or scrape with a rubber spatula and fold to make soft curds.
If desired, turn off heat, top with more shredded cheese, put a lid on to help melt cheese, and let sit 30 seconds.
Serve on plate or on tortillas for soft tacos and top with diced tomatoes. Add avocado and/or salsa if desired.
Smoky Peanut Butter Chili is a serious favorite in our house – spicy, full-flavored, meaty … and no, you can’t taste the peanut butter, just great taste
This Smoky Peanut Butter Chili is at the top of my list for favorite red chilis – eye-popping awesome flavor. Personally, I like to make it with the hot sausage, and it comes out really spicy. If you don’t tell anyone, they won’t know it has peanut butter in it; but the peanut butter is essential for the robust, full flavor. It’s definitely one of the more interesting dishes in my repertoire.
———–Note! Chili Cookoff Season Starts Today! Sept 10!——————–
I’m working today at the Big Chili Cook-Off in Evergreen, my favorite festival.
Next Saturday, Sept 17, I’m a judge for the ICS Chili Cook-Off in Superior, my other favorite festival.
See all the Front Range Chili Cook-Off schedules at DenverChiliFest.com
Also, fresh green chiles are in! We had a late season, but this weekend nearly all vendors have most varieties. Check out the Chile Stands pages in the top navigation on this site to locate a vendor.
In the meantime, you gotta try this recipe. It’s very easy, it’s a full meal, and it’s truly memorable. Let me know what you think!
2 14.5 oz cans diced tomatoes with basil, oregano and garlic, undrained
1 cup chopped green chiles
½ cup creamy peanut butter
1 to 2 tbsp dark chili powder
1 tsp kosher salt
1 tsp smoked paprika
Instructions
In a large skillet, heat oil over medium-high heat; add beef and sausage, breaking up into small chunks with a wooden spoon as it cooks. Cook in batches as needed until browned, about 7-10 minutes. Drain off fat.
Add green pepper, onion and carrot; cook and stir until soft, about 2 minutes. Add garlic; cook 1 minute longer. Transfer meat, vegetables and drippings to a 5- or 6-qt. slow cooker.
Stir in remaining ingredients. Cook, covered, on low 4 hours or until vegetables are tender.
Jalapeño Lime Chicken when it’s marinated in a blended concoction of lime juice and pureed jalapeño gets very tender along with a bright, slightly tangy flavor and just a bit of heat.
This Jalapeño Lime Chicken is a favorite in our house, exceptional taste and very easy to make. If you make it with two jalapeños, it has lots of flavor, but only a mild heat; I like it with three in order to get more of a kick.
The recipe this is based on came from Duggan’s, a local favorite near the Tech Center that closed about 20 years ago. Personally, I really like this flavor combination and I’m going to be trying variations on it, perhaps with beef or pork. My next riff on this will be in a slow cooker. I’m really into brain dead easy and no work.
Note this recipe requires marinating the meat at least two hours, so plan in advance. I’ve also made it where I marinated the chicken overnight. The meat gets more tender with marinating and the flavor totally permeats the meat. Everyone I served this to asked for the recipe right away.
This one’s a keeper, and you gotta at least try it. Hope you like it!
Rub chicken with garlic salt and cilantro. Puree jalapeños in a blender with 2-3 tbsp lime juice, Rub over chicken. (Be careful to wash hands afterwards.)
Place chicken in non-metallic container (glass, ceramic, or plastic), cover with remaining lime juice and olive oil, put in refrigerator and let marinate for at least 2 hours.
Saute chicken in 2 tbsp olive oil, skin side down, until brown. Turn chicken over, cook 3-4 minutes, and add chicken stock to pan. Bring to a boil and put in a 375 degree oven. Roast 15-20 minutes.
Remove chicken to plate and keep warm. Reduce sauce, pour over chicken, garnish with cilantro and serve.
Chile Cheese Grits are a classic super-rich comfort food – creamy rich with green chile, garlic and lots of cheese and sour cream. Yum!
Chile Cheese Grits are super rich and tasty – a total comfort food with a perfect combination of flavors. I never, and I do mean never, make grits; they’re not normally my idea of either a treat or a healthy side dish. This particular recipe is an exception.
This next week I’m going to a giant 5-day camp out. It’s an annual party where about 80 of us get together and share lots of music, craft beer, stories, and good food. Saturday evening we have High Feast, which is really a giant potluck. Guess what I’m going to make? Chile Cheese Grits. I’ve made it in a pot on the stove and also in a crockpot. My plan this time is to use a crockpot as we will have electrical outlets available. This recipe is as easy as it gets – about a half dozen ingredients that you just dump in the crockpot, then set it to low and let it cook a couple hours. Voila! I may or may not put the cheese on top since it will have a lid on it anyway. I’ll just set a ladle beside it.
Of course, this is not diet food, so for me it’s a special occasion dish. Hope you all try this at least once. It’s a keeper!
optional: top with extra shredded cheese, chiles, and a sprinkling of chili powder.
Instructions
In a medium saucepan, heat the chicken broth to a boil. Add the garlic and slowly stir in the grits.
Reduce the heat to moderately low and cook, stirring frequently, until the grits are tender, 20-30 minutes.
Remove the saucepan from the heat and stir in the cheese, butter, sour cream, and green chiles. Season with salt and pepper to taste and serve immediately.
Alternate crockpot method:
Pour chicken broth into crockpot, cover and cook on high 10 minutes. Add garlic and slowly stir in grits. Reduce heat to low and cook and hour or until fully soft, then stir in remaining ingredients and serve.
Spicy Kale Soup with Sausage is a complete meal in a bowl that’s nutritious, satisfying, and super easy to make … plus it’s got real heat.
This Spicy Kale Soup with Sausage is a spicy-hot meal in a bowl that is super satisfying; we’ve been living off this dish for a couple days now. It’s not at all a typical Southwestern dish; kale is pretty much a European and Mediterranean green. But the flavors go very well together. The soup in this photo includes the eggplant, mainly because I had an eggplant I wanted to use. The eggplant is not very noticeable because it’s mild compared to other ingredients, but it does blend in well.
I made this particular batch in a 6-quart Hamilton Beach slow cooker that has a removable inner pot. So I cooked the sausage and vegetables on the stove in the inner pot, then added the chicken broth and remaining ingredients and transferred the inner pot into the slow cooker. Then I cooked it on high for an hour. It was a very simple, effortless way to cook it.
This is a very chunky soup without a lot of liquid; you can always add more chicken broth if you want a more liquid soup. Kale, sausage and eggplant also tend to look rather drab. Garnish with more chopped tomato if you want to brighten it up.
1 lb hot Italian sausage or chorizo, cut into thin slices
1 large onion, chopped (about 1½ cups)
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 large sweet potato, peeled and diced
2 heads kale, stemmed and chopped (about 6-7 cups)
4 cups chicken broth
½ cup diced green chiles
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
2 teaspoons kosher salt
Freshly ground pepper to taste
3 roma tomatoes, diced
optional: 1 small eggplant, peeled and diced
Instructions
Place the sausage in a large pot over medium-low heat and cook until it begins to render its fat, about 3 minutes, then add the onion and cook for 2 more minutes.
Add the garlic and sweet potatoes and cook for 2 minutes.
Add the kale and cook, stirring constantly, for 2 minutes longer.
Stir in the chicken broth, green chiles, eggplant (if desired), vinegar and salt, then bring to a boil, reduce heat, cover and simmer for 1 hour.
Season with pepper. Stir in the tomatoes, cook for 15 minutes.
Mexican Seared Corn & Bean Salad is a cornucopia of fresh garden veggies along with beans, green chiles, and a tangy seasoned dressing.
Mexican Seared Corn and Bean Salad is a cornucopia of fresh garden veggies along with beans, green chiles, and a tangy seasoned dressing. It’s really very flexible as you can vary the amount of any of the veggies to taste or make substitutions.
I happened to have lots of fresh corn, bell peppers, and red onions, so this was a no-brainer. For the beans, I used a store brand 15 oz can of black beans and then the 22 oz can of Bush’s Grillin’ Beans Steakhouse Recipe. I did not drain and rinse the Bush’s Beans because I find the sauce on their Steakhouse Recipe beans particularly good – it would be a crime to rinse it off. But feel free to use whatever beans you wish.
All in all, this is a very forgiving recipe and you can pretty much alter it however you want, changing quantity of any of the vegetables, leaving some out, whatever. The flavors blend more as it sits, but it’s also good when served immediately after making.
This is ideal as a side dish for a cookout. Pretty much everybody likes this, it’s easy to make and it’s nutritious. Hope you like it!
22 oz can Bush's Grillin' Beans Steakhouse Recipe, not drained
3 ears fresh corn, kernels cut off the cob
½ tbsp butter
½ cup diced green chiles (505 is good)
1 large bell pepper, any color, chopped
½ cup chopped red onion
1 cup chopped tomatoes
2 stalks celery, thinly sliced
1 cup chopped peeled cucumber
½ cup cilantro, chopped
.....
¼ cup olive oil
2 tbsp fresh lime juice (1-2 limes)
1-2 large garlic cloves, pressed
2 tsp sugar
1 tsp cumin
1 tsp oregano
1 tsp Frank's red hot sauce, more to taste
½ tsp dark chili powder
½ tsp salt
½ tsp fresh ground pepper
Instructions
In a medium skillet, sear the corn in butter over medium high heat - just until cooked and hints of brown appear around the edges, about 5 minutes. Then set aside to cool down.
While corn is searing, make the dressing: In a small bowl, add olive oil, lime juice, garlic, sugar, cumin, oregano, hot sauce, chili powder and salt; whisk well and set aside.
In a large bowl, add beans, corn, bell pepper, cucumber, celery, tomatoes, cilantro and red onion.
Pour dressing over salad and gently mix with large spoon until well combined. Garnish with more cilantro.
Serve cold. It would be also great to let salad sit in the fridge for 15-30 minutes if you have time.
Sun-dried Tomato & Green Chile Quesadilla has tangy tomatoes and medium hot green chiles with gooey cheese, making a yummy appetizer or main dish
Every year I go on a camping trip/party at a camp in the woods … and I take a quesadilla maker and crank out quesadillas for about 40 people. Adding the Sun-dried tomatoes is a way to give a unique flavor that makes them even more memorable. This Sun-dried Tomato and Green Chile Quesadilla was an especially flavorful main dish – tangy and spicy beyond typical quesadillas. I always have a jar of sun-dried tomatoes in oil in the pantry, and they are great for adding a special twist to any quesadilla. The tomatoes and chiles go very well together, and Mexican spices gave it even more depth of flavor. This was a dish that I knew would be really good before I every actually made it.
I happened to have plenty of 12-inch whole wheat tortillas, perfect for making giant burritos each big enough for 2 to 3 meals per person. 12 inches doesn’t sound all that big, but they really are huge. After a few meals of deluxe burritos, I figured out I needed to branch out to something other than burritos for the rest of these tortillas. So…. I made giant quesadillas. By giant, I mean the 2 quesadilla wedges in the photo above (an entire meal for me) were made from one tortilla. Quesadilla makers toast cutting lines onto the quesadillas – typically dividing it ito 6 wedges, a nice size for an appetizer.
Here I’m suggesting using one 10-inch tortilla for each serving (folded in half to make the quesadilla). My large quesadilla makers can handle 10-inch tortillas max.
Usually I make quesadillas in my quesadilla makers, but these tortillas were too big not just for my quesadillas, but also for any of my skillets. So I microwaved them on platters that were about as big as the microwave. It worked just fine. The advantage of using a quesadilla maker is that it browns them just right, and cuts cooking time to less than half and you don’t have to flip them. I have 4 quesadilla makers and bought all of them at thrift stores for just a few bucks. Plus they leave cutting marks So easy….
I also made some without spices and some with spices. I used Lowes Fajita Seasoning, but taco seasoning also works fine. It adds a nice depth of flavor, but these quesadillas are also good without added spices. I did discover that the tomatoes stand out more than I expected. I thought the chiles but the tomatoes actually stood out more. So it’s good to go lighter on the tomatoes than the chiles.
This is a super simple, no brainer quesadilla that everyone gobbled up. I hope you enjoy it!
Jalapeño Bottle Caps are crunchy, tasty, spicy little bites of fried jalapeño that are particularly good on salads or with ranch dressing as a snack
Jalapeño Bottle Caps are tasty little bites of fried jalapeño that are absolutely killer on salads. Or… great as a snack with ranch dressing or cheese dip. Totally yummy, not a diet dish by a long shot.
I first discovered these ages ago at Red Robin. They serve an awesome Southwest Chicken Salad that is topped with these (which they call “fried jalapeño coins). They do a great job on these. But they are also pretty easy to make.
I made these with a buttermilk masa harina (corn flour) batter. I actually made 2 batches, one with wheat flour and one with masa. The difference is subtle, but when we did a side-by-side taste test, we both preferred the masa version. Masa harina is typically found in the international aisle of most supermarkets, and it comes in white, yellow, and blue. Here I used white masa. Often this is made with beer or seltzer water instead of buttermilk. I just particularly like using buttermilk.
Getting the right amount of browning is key – the bottle cap in front is ideal. It should be fried to a dark caramel color on the edges with the light golden color in the middle. If it’s all golden, they come out soft, not crispy enough. All dark and they are overdone with edges bordering on burnt. It’s easiest to judge by the color. You can see from the photo that the smaller ones cook faster, so you’ll want to take the smaller ones out earlier when they reach the right color.
Here you can see I served it on a salad. These are just great on salad – real treat. Hope you try these and enjoy them!
Calabacitas with Chorizo is served here in a burrito – really flavorful full meal of chorizo, corn, squash, chiles with a bit of cream and seasonings. Very satisfying!
This Calabacitas with Chorizo is my invention where I took one of my favorite Mexican vegetable dishes, calabacitas, and combined it with chorizo to make a full meal. Boy, was it awesome! As I expected, the combination works great.
In the photo, I made it into a Calabacitas with Chorizo Burrito. This was just because I brought home a package of 12-inch whole wheat tortillas – just made for making giant burritos. Once I finished making the calabacitas with chorizo in a skillet, I just fired up the oven, laid out 2 folded tortillas side by side in a 12 inch long glass baking dish, put a layer of shredded cheese on each and then a couple cups of the calabacitas filling. I folded them over to make them burrito-shaped and topped them with some shredded cheese and green chiles. Then I baked them at 350 degrees for 15-20 minutes and served them with fresh lettuce and tomatoes. This was a full meal – actually each burrito was enough to feed 2-3 people. This is my idea of real comfort food.
For 2 of us, we had enough leftovers for about 3 more meals. It’s just as good leftover as it is the first time. Sometimes I’ll make calabacitas with just yellow squash or just zucchini; it might look a bit different but the taste is about the same. Calabacitas is my all-time favorite dish for either squash or zucchini – there’s just nothing like it.
Since it’s summertime with an abundance of fresh squash and zucchini, I’ll be making calabacitas (and variations) all summer long. Hope you enjoy it!
2 medium zucchini, sliced into half moons (~ ¾ lb)
2 medium yellow squash, sliced into half moons (~ ¾ lb)
3 cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp coarse kosher salt
¼ tsp black pepper
¼ tsp dried oregano
¼ tsp ground cumin
½ cup shredded cheddar cheese
¼ cup heavy cream or sour cream
optional: shredded cheddar cheese, diced fresh tomatoes and cilantro for garnish
Instructions
Heat olive oil in a large nonstick skillet over medium-high heat.
Add chorizo, browning lightly for about 5 minutes while breaking up into small chunks with a large spoon.
Add onions, green chiles, and jalapenos. Cook for 5 minutes, stirring occasionally, until
vegetables begin to soften.
Add water, corn, tomatoes, zucchini, yellow squash, garlic, salt, black pepper, oregano and ground cumin. Stir to combine and cook for 5-10 minutes, stirring every minute or so until zucchini and squash are soft.
Uncover the skillet, add the shredded cheese and cream or sour cream, and stir together until the cheese has fully melted.
Remove from heat, garnish with chopped cilantro, tomatoes and shredded cheese, and serve.
Or, spoon into tortilla covered with a layer of cheese, wrap up, top with shredded cheese, and bake for 15 minutes to serve as a burrito.
