Sunday Gravy with yeah right: Pollo Asado with homemade flour tortillas!

Good morning everyone!

Happy Father’s Day to any dads out there!

Hope everyone is still safe and practicing proper safety measures.

The pandemic rolls on and now is surely the time to take it seriously.

Please take this shit seriously.

Had a strange dynamic start this week at work. I shared this in the DFO Socially Distanced Clubhouse (patent pending.) We started “contact tracing” at work. Where we have a log book by our work stations and we write in any areas that we spent longer than 30 minutes, as well as ANY individual that you spent over 10 minutes with who was within 10 feet of you.

I get the logic and my crew is doing their part but an unanticipated side-effect is everybody stays WAY the fuck away from everybody else.

Which is good!

It did kind of mess with the whole camaraderie thing that our entire building had developed. Having never been in an actual war where people are like, you know, shooting things at each other, it did feel like all of us had grown closer over the past 3 months during this crises. We’ve had each other for support, for a sounding board and for basically sharing a very rough commonality together. As the only fully staffed (with day-to-day rotations built in) building on the entire campus it allowed us to bond and we all consequently formed tighter friendships.

Now it feels like I’m in solitary or some shit because nobody wants to get within 10 feet because they have to document it.

Don’t get me wrong, we HAVE practiced social distancing the last 3 months and we have been wearing our PPE but the tracing adds an additional level of reserve and distance.

Nobody wants to just shoot the shit anymore.

Believe me, this shit is tough to do everyday and having someone else going through it with you definitely helps.

Fuck it, I’m probably just lonely.

Anyway.

Weekends always find me in my regular happy zone – the kitchen – and it allows me to spend time in one of my favorite ways.

Cooking some proper food!

Let’s do that today, shall we?

For those of you saying “I sure as hell hope we’re not doing beans again” well, we’re doing beans again.

HOWEVER!

I’ve got a new grilled chicken recipe for you and guess what motherfuckers?

I successfully made FLOUR TORTILLAS!

Woo-hoo!

One of these days I’m going to do a recipe collection episode where I link to every Mexican food recipe I’ve done and encourage one of you brave souls to open up a damn Mexican restaurant because I’ve given out a fuckton of Mexican recipes over the last 5 years.

Here are a couple of new ones.

Pollo Asado!

Or grilled, marinated chicken.

This would be similar in some ways to the carne asada recipe we did a couple of weeks ago but this marinade is more chicken-centric.

This is some seriously tasty shit too.

You will require…

Some chicken – today we used about 3 pounds of boneless/skinless chicken breasts cut in half

Juice of one fresh orange

Juice of one fresh lime

1 small/medium onion – sliced

4 cloves of garlic – mashed

1/4 cup of olive oil

2 tablespoons of white vinegar

1 teaspoon of cumin

1 teaspoon of chile powder

1 teaspoon of corriander

1/2 tablespoon of dried Mexican oregano

1/2 tablespoon of salt

1 teaspoon of black pepper

Some fresh chopped cilantro – a couple of small bunches

Let’s start with some fresh produce.

Over the last few weeks the heirloom navel oranges out here have been fucking perfect. Super sweet and juicy. Limes are always in abundance too. Slice these in half and squeeze out as much juice as you can.

Let’s add in the oil and vinegar next. I use extra virgin olive oil for my marinades.

Add to the juice and mix well. Next we’re going to add in the rest of the produce.

Now that the stores have gotten their garlic supply chain shit figured out, I’ve noticed that the garlic has been incredible. Pre-pandemic you would often find garlic that had some mold on it. That’s the black powdery shit on the bottom of the garlic head. Avoid that if you can. Lately this hasn’t been a problem and I’ll take whatever good fucking news I can find these days.

Smash up the garlic, you don’t have to get too fine with the mincing since this is going in a marinade.

Slice up the onion while you’re at it.

Next? Maybe some fresh herbage.

That’s the cilantro from my herb garden. The herbs are doing very well this year and I think I can attribute that to the distinct lack of jet fuel pollution over the past several months from my next door neighbor, LAX.

An actual benefit from the pandemic!

Now add in all of your spices to the bowl.

Mix to combine.

Now we address the chicken.

“Hello chicken.”

We’ve discussed the whole “cutting the chicken breasts in half” dynamic in the past. It makes for much more even grilling and it also allows you to manipulate the chicken pieces better on the grill.

Add the chicken halves to a one gallon zip top bag and pour in the marinade. Remove as much air as possible from the bag and squish that shit around to make sure all of the chicken in equally covered.

Bag and tag.

This will be left to marinate overnight in the refrigerator. You could probably get by with a 4 hour marinade but let this fucker go overnight for maximum flavor.

Now all you have to do is wash your motherfucking hands (again), clean your dishes, then grab a cold one. We’ll finish this bastard on the grill tomorrow.

Next day. Rinse your beans – again.

Now make a pot of beans.

Get them in the pot.

Standard rinsed beans, 6 cups of water, onion, garlic, cumin, chile powder, salt and pepper, chile de arbol application. Two and a half hour cook time on low simmer crap as we always do.

Yes, we will finish with some bacon fat as per usual.

In order to have everything finish at the same time today I needed to recruit a body to assist. I asked DJ TAJ to man the grill today while I handled the kitchen duties.

In addition to the beans I figured I would make yet another attempt at one of my worst culinary Waterloos – flour tortillas.

Just to refresh your memories, I was sitting at 0 for 3 in my flour tortilla batting average. Not just failing but failing fucking spectacularly. Having had recent success with my corn tortillas

gave me the courage to try this shit again. I figured the correction would involve having the right moisture content and goddamn I was correct. I had one failure with the corn tortillas and it was because the dough was too wet and since my flour tortilla failures all involved being too sticky to press out I figured I would approach this a little more scientifically.

Flour tortillas!

recipe courtesy of allrecipes.com

2 cups all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 tablespoon shortening

½ cup water plus MAYBE a tablespoon or 2 more

Let’s start this fucker.

In a mixing bowl, thoroughly whisk together the flour, salt and baking powder. Next, using your extremely clean fingers mix in the shortening until it resembles a course meal. This will take a few minutes but don’t skip this step.

Next add in the half cup of water and still using your hands work the dough into a ball. You want the dough to just pull together. It may be a little too dry to form into a ball and that’s when you would add in the extra water a tablespoon at a time!

Work into a ball.

The dough will need to rest for 15 minutes.

Next step is to divide the dough into 12 equal pieces. Roll each piece into a ball.

On a lightly floured surface roll one of the balls flat. I rolled the ball between two sheets of parchment paper which defintely helped. Not sure if it was this step or the proper moisture or both that led to todays’ success but I didn’t give a fuck. The tortillas worked dammit.

Roll it as flat and as wide as possible. Don’t think you’re going to roll out a perfect look alike to a store bought tortilla, these will definitely be a little more “rustic.”

I used that skillet that I cooked the bacon in for the cooking process. I simply wiped it clean with a paper towel prior to cooking the tortillas.

Cook until the tortilla has the familiar brown spots on them. I guess it was about 90 seconds per side.

Cook both sides then remove the cooked tortilla to a plate and cover with a clean kitchen towel.

Repeat the process until all of the tortillas are done.

REMEMBER! The process is roll the dough ball out then cook, roll the next ball out then cook etc. Do not pre-roll all of them and cook them, that was what led to epic failure in my first attempt.

When finished?

Fuck yes! No these aren’t perfect circles and each one is a different size but they were goddamn delicious and isn’t that the whole point?

I’ll work on my tortilla aesthetics as we get better at them.

Understand now why I recruited grilling help? These are a bit time consuming and I wanted them warm for service so I relinquished the grill for the day.

Speaking of which, let’s get after that chicken!

First and foremost you want to get that chicken out and up to room temp.

Always a key step to any grilling application.

Prep the grill station.

Yep, still using my trusty little Weber kettle grill. This fucker is over 8 years old now and still kicking.

Get your charcoal fire ready and let’s cook some motherfucking chicken!

Grill until done.

What?

Each fire is different, these went for maybe 20 minutes give or take. Toss and turn accordingly.

Work in batches. Cover the cooked chicken with some foil while you finish cooking the rest.

Oh my!

I’ll be honest here, that chicken can rest for up to half an hour. It lets the juices settle and allows the flavors to distribute. You know what else? This may have been even better the next day. I shit you negative!

The chicken has all of these residual juices, so let’s take advantage of that by slicing the chicken right into the juices.

So fucking good.

Let’s plate that shit up. Grab a scoop of beans and dress as desired. Get a couple of fresh tortillas, top with some chicken then gussy them up as you see fit.

Yes, of course it has my chile tepin on there but is also has some of this.

That’s our pickled red onion from our falafel episode.

Fucking delicious too.

You can almost taste this shit can’t you?

All this homemade deliciousness? You kidding me over here?

Let’s get a closer look at that taco…

Closer look at them beans.

Fuck that, I’m gonna need another round.

The plate was very clean.

Absolutely goddamn delightful. The chicken has the charcoal goodness along with citrus notes and the kick from the spices. The beans you already know about. That tang from the red onion combines perfectly but,

you already know what set this baby over the top. Those tortillas. There is no comparison between homemade and store bought. None. I’ve preached that gospel with fresh pasta, bread etc forever and these are no exception.

Fucking killer dish here!

Just in time for grilling season too.

Thanks for reading everybody. You’re my rai·son d’ê·tre.

Be well and stay safe.

See you next week.

PEACE and UNITY!