Cooking Cheap

From “A Cook’s Tour Of Mexico”, Nancy Zaslavsky. My notes after the base recipe. Obviously the amounts might need to change.

Serves 8 (or more)

2 Chickens, 2.5 to 4 pounds each, quartered and skin removed if desired
6 Heaping tablespoons “Recado Rojo” or achiote paste.
2 tsp salt
1/2 Cup Seville orange juice or mixed lime and orange juice
1 Tablespoon vegetable oil
2 large or 3 Small banana leaves with ribs removed
2 white onions, sliced
3 tomatoes, sliced
3 large epazote sprigs
1 habenero chile or 6 serrano chiles.

1. Put the chicken in a large bowl. Combine the recado (actiote) , salt, juice and oil and spread the mixture over the entire chicken

2. Line a large baking pan (with a lid) or dutch oven with banana leaves. Place the chicken pieces over banana leaves, in one layer. If your pot is not big enough, use two layers and separate the layers with additional banana leaves.

3 Spread the onions and tomatoes over the chicken. Scatter the epazote on top. Nestle a whole habenero chile in the center of the pot, to be removed at the end of cooking. Place additional banana leaves over the epazote and tuck the leaves around the chicken to seal in all the flavors.

4. Cover the top tightly and put in a 350F oven and bake for 1 and 1/2 hours (90 minutes). Remove the chicken from the pot, then remove and discard the banana leaves. Serve each person one chicken quarter.

Me again. That was the original recipe. I’ve done with it with one chicken or even just bone in chicken breasts, no banana leaves and no epazote. Use foil instead of the leaves. Use the fresh chile of your choice, you don’t eat the chiles, they get thrown away (as do the onions and tomatoes if you choose). I think you need fresh tomatoes and I would use white onion but it probably works with what you can get or are willing to get.

You’ll have to use both orange and lime juice if you don’t have the sour Seville oranges. That’s important, IMO. The paste will stain anything it touches, so think ahead. It’s also the best baked chicken you’ve had. You can use some low brow strange cuts of pork [chops?] instead of the chicken. Tasty.

As you all know, there’s Mom’s way and a bunch of other ways all of which are supposed to be perfect. i don’t know enough about them all. Not sure I care because I don’t do pies. I do like quiche though and this worked the first time I tried it by myself. These are all notes to myself in case I forget. If you change the ingredients you might want to change the technique — This is Mom’s way.

Make’s one pie shell.
1 C all purpose flour (maybe less)
1/3 C cold lard (maybe more)
1/3 tsp table salt.

Using your hands, cut the lard into the flour into the flour until the crumbs are the right size, not too fine but fine enough. Add lard or flour if needed. I know that’s not helpful.

Add 1/2 tsp COLD water and gather it into a ball. Might have to add a drop or two more. The texture that describes it best for me is a tortilla dough that is a drop of water short of perfect. That probably doesn’t help you either. Then you work the dough — squish the ball with your hands a few times. Mom says as much as you want and flatten it into a thick disk the size of your palm or a little larger. If it cracks at the edges of the disk, work it some more. On supposes one could add a drop of water if that fails but I haven’t tested that.

At this point, water is the enemy. Everything that touches the dough has to be dry. The counter, the rolling pin, your hands. Clean it of course (before you start) but dry dry dry. Get a sifter half full of flour and generously dust the work space (You can’t have to much) lay down the disk of dough and dust the top of it with flour. From the center, roll out in one direction an inch or so. From the center, roll out an inch or so in the opposite direction. Pickup the sifter with one hand and dough disk with the other. Flour the board, flip the dough over and rotate 90 or 60 degrees. Flour the top of dough, brush off the big clumps of flour. Repeat, dusting the board and the top until it’s too large to flip without tearing (8 inches?). Flour the top again and roll to the final size and the right thickness (another guess, you have to make). Flour the top occasionally as you do this last shaping. If it sticks, you didn’t use enough flour for dusting or something was wet.

Put your rolling pin near one end of your circle of dough and gently lift the edge of the dough up and onto the pin and then roll the dough up onto the rolling pin and then unroll into the pan. Major holes and tears mean you did something wrong. Minor holes and tears can be corrected after the dough is in the pan. You’ll have excess dough hanging over the edge of the pan. Get a small bit of that in one hand, wet one finger and use that to the glue to bits together.

If the recipe calls for blind baking the crust, poke a lot of holes in the bottom of the dough with a fork (don’t rip it , poke it) and each poke need to result in a tink as you hit the bottom of the pan, 20 or 30 pokes isn’t unreasonable. Put it in a 350F oven for 10 and maybe up to 20 minutes. That’s another guess. If it’s golden (but not brown) and flakes away when you touch the bottom, your done.

Like I said up top, this works and obviously so do the other recipes and techniques from all the other mom’s of the world. I like this one because It’s relatively quick and uncomplicated and it’s Mom’s.