Salpicon of Chicken Tacos

Burning Desires, Salsa, Smoke and Sizzle is a cookbook you just need on your shelf.  If you are a cookbook reader, ie you take a stack of cookbooks and a nice cold one out to the deck to plan all of the wondrous meals you will make during the endless hours of your weekend, you’ll be way into this.  The topics are all things grilled and lovely marinades and sauces to accompany them.  Chapters include the obvious like “A Smoldering Passion:  BBQ and beyond” and the less obvious such as “With a Little Help From My Friends: Starters, Salads, and Starches”  and yes, all of those are actually grilled.  There are recipes (duh!), each preceded by a little story.  But, the key here is the perfect introduction to each section.  How to grill?  Got that.  And I know you have access to this basic information a gazillion places.  Salads on the grill?  Interesting, but not new.  Here’s the kicker people … if you actually follow these conversational style directions, you cannot lose.  This is one of very few books where everything, and I mean everything, made from it is 100% top notch! Um sorry, just double checked on where you can find this priceless book, and discovered it is out of print.  Shoot!

On to today’s dish … this is kind of like a spicy chicken salad in a soft taco.  There is an interesting technique of marinating the smoked, shredded chicken after it was cooked.  It really makes for a fresh, bright flavor.  The book desribes how to perfectly smoke the chicken on a kettle grill.  While the dish is certainly exceptional with that method, I’ve been known to just rub a bit of liquid smoke on the chicken before popping it on a gas grill when the wind is whipping up too much of a breeze.

Ingredients:

1 chicken, cut into breasts, drimsticks, thighs, and wings

3 cups smoking chips

1/2 cup lime juice

1/3 cup olive oil

2 fresh jalapeno chiles, seeded and minced

1/2 tsp salt

1/2 tsp freshly ground black pepper

1 medium tomato, cut into 1/2 inch dice

1 avocado, pitted and cut into 1/2 inch pieces

1/2 cup whole fresh cilantro leaves

3 TBS thinly sliced green onions

Romaine leaves

flour tortillas, warmed

Directions:

1.  Smoke the chicken by setting on the cool area of the grill, starting skin side down, and turning every 15 minutes until just cooked through.  Remove from the grill and cool to room temperature.  Skin the chicken, remove the meat from the bones and coarsely shred it.

2.  While the chicken is almost finished cooking, prepare the marinade.  In a large bowl, stir together the lime juice, olive oil, jalapenos, salt, and pepper and let stand at room temperature for 20 minutes.  Add shredded chicken and toss together.  (The salad can be prepared to this point up to 1 hour ahead.  Cover and refrigerate.)

3.  Just before serving, add the tomato and avocado, tomato, cilantro and green onions to the bowl and mix gently.  To serve, line a tortilla with a large romaine leaf, top with chicken salad, and fold in half to create the taco.

Notes:

*  For a lower carb version, just do away with the tortilla.

*  Fresh lime juice is a must in this dish for that bright, zesty flavor.

A Platter of Figs and Other Recipes

You’ve just GOT to love an area in this grand world of ours that has not one, but two cookbooks on the regional best sellers list! Recently, I added A Platter of Figs and Other Recipes by David Tanis to my cookbook collection. This guy lives my dream, without the late hours and long work, of course. “For six months a year, David Tanis is the head chef at Chez Panisse, the Berkeley, California, restaurant where he has worked alongside Alice Waters since the 1980s in creating a revolution in sustainable American cuisine. The other six months, Tanis lives in Paris in a seventeenth-century apartment, where he hosts intimate dinners for friends and paying guests, and prepares the food in a small kitchen equipped with nothing more than an old stove, a little counter space, and a handful of well used pots and pans.” Chef Tanis lives local in two locales, which is simply divine in my book!

This cookbook is for cooks who like to read, think, plan, and enjoy the simple abundance of life. Recipes are organized by season, and further broken down into suggested meals. The key here is the implied simplicity of the dishes. Grilled chicken breasts. Fish tacos. Figs on a platter. As soon as I can find good anchovies, I’m going for the Tomato Bread (grilled bread, rubbed with fresh a tomato half, with an anchovy laid on top). The meal I’m so ready for is menu sixteen, “Another Early Autumn” with Roasted Pepper Salad, Double Duck Breast with Baked Figs and Duck Liver Toasts, and Panna Cotta. Why? I’ve never made any of those, and I trust the instructions in the book enough to dig right in and give it a go. But first, I think I’ll start with something really easy.

Cookbook – Hidden in Plain Sight

We’ve been doing a wee bit of painting around the house this past week. Its amazing what can be found when moving furniture and such! At one point, I took my cookbook collection down from the shelves, enjoying quickly perusing the books as they were being moved to the table. But these was this one book, a big, beautiful book, that I totally do not remember ever purchasing! What a wonderful cookbook, organized by season, with pictures that both make me want to dig in and cook but linger on the edge of intimidation in their perfection. Wouldn’t you know I find this book just as the dining al fresco season comes to a humble end for this year? And yet, I’ve already got my eye on the butternut squash risotto.