Tag Archives: In the Kitchen

Jack’s Beef Enchiladas

16 Friday Oct 2009

Posted by in In the Kitchen, Life at Home

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blog_jacks beef enchiladasMy first husband’s parents were wonderful hosts.  Tom’s father Jack was a great cook who would give up his entire Saturday afternoon to prepare some fine meal for his large expanding family, who at that time, was in the process of adding spouses and children to the fold.

I remember the first time I met Jack and Betty.  And their children:  Linda and John and Mike and Don.  And their current spouses or signficant others.  It was a full house that Saturday evening in a tiny cottage:  full of people, full of love and full of hugs.  I came home telling my mother that I’d never been hugged so much in my life.  And I wasn’t sure I liked it.

But the food.  What can I say but that I’ve never tasted food in the way they prepared and served it; while I was no stranger to good food, Jack and Betty served foods that eventually had me asking for every recipe, foods that today are staples on my table and in my life.  Big weekend breakfasts and every Saturday night supper with family featuring a menu that changed with the season — if good weather, we were treated to an outside grill featuring  barbequed chicken and roasted ears of corn — if rainy or cold, it was homemade beef tacos or these beef enchiladas.

Jack and Betty’s weekly gatherings of family inspired my own weekly family gatherings when we first returned to Oklahoma three summers ago.  But like me, their gatherings were skinnied down to what eventually became do-able for all the families involved.  Jack and Betty had five children while I have four;  the larger the family, the harder it is to pull everyone together.  But I’ve found it easier when I offer to cook homemade calzones.  Or fry some chicken with all the sides with some home-made rolls.  And I think Jack and Betty found it easier when they offered to feed their frenzy as well.

Betty taught me how to make their grilled corn and her stove top baked beans and her birthday cake that we still serve to some members of our family.  Like Kyle.  But what Jack and Betty taught me most was how best to host a family get together by building a work and wait sandwich:  first you work hard to prepare something good to eat — second you get out-of-the-way and wait for love to make the dinner a party — and third you work hard to clean up the dishes and package up the leftovers, either for home or as a take-away.

I don’t possess Jack’s beef taco recipe.  It was a deep dark secret that Jack promised his source never to share.  And to Jack’s credit and our loss, Jack never did share that taco recipe.  But as for this beef enchilada recipe, Jack was all too glad to share.  I’d forgotten how good these enchiladas were until my husband and I sat down to dinner last night.

And one more thing: Now I say hugs all around.  From my life to yours.

Jack’s Beef Enchiladas

Serves 5 to 6

Ingredient List
1 large package of flour tortillas (Jack used 10 large ‘burrito’ size tortillas  — I opt for 16 of the smaller 10″ size),
8 oz package of mild cheddar cheese
2 lbs ground chuck
onion
2 8 oz cans tomato sauce
flour for thickening
Spices:  salt, garlic powder, chili powder, cumin

Enchilada Filling:

In a skillet, brown meat; then season and set aside
2 lbs of ground chuck, browned and crumbly
1 tsp salt
1/4 tsp garlic powder
1 to 2 Tbsp of Chili Powder (I use 2)

Enchilada Sauce

In a deep skillet or sauce pan, saute onion in margarine/oil over low heat.  When onion is soft and translucent, add spices, then stir in flour until mixed in good.  Immediately add tomato sauce and 2 cups of water.  Cook until thickened, about five minutes.  Then add more water to thin to the consistency you like.  Set aside.
5 Tbsp margarine (I use 4 Tbsp olive oil)
1 medium onion, finely chopped
1 Tbsp Chili Powder (I use 2 Tbsp and in addition, I add 1 tsp cumin)
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup flour
2 8 oz cans of tomato sauce
2 cups of water (I add more to thin down the sauce — at least another cup)

Assembly

Soften tortillas in a mircrowave for 60 seconds on high setting.  One at a time, spread tortilla with a little enchilada sauce, add meat (1/3 cup for large burrito size) and roll into enchilada.  Place in a greased 13×9 pan.  After assembling all enchiladas, cover with remaining enchilada sauce and 2 cups of grated cheddar cheese.

Cook

Bake in a 350 oven until cheese is melted, 10 to 15 minutes.

Serve:

Plain or covered with chopped lettuce and tomato

Tortilla Soup

09 Friday Oct 2009

Posted by in In the Kitchen, Life at Home, Mesta Park

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This simple Tortilla Soup recipe has made the rounds in my life.

I first enjoyed the soup ten years ago, when my husband prepared it after snagging a copy of the recipe from a lovely church lady in Lake Jackson, Texas.  Betty was then Council on Ministries chair of our church.  And like any good Methodist, Betty found it easier to get people to a church meeting when she offered to feed them.  Lucky for me, she served this Tortilla Soup that’s been part of my life ever since.

When we moved to Oklahoma three plus years ago, we were asked to open our historic home to the public in Mesta Park’s annual Holiday Home Tour.  Like  a fool with stars in her eye, I said yes with nary a thought.  Because I love it when guests descend, especially when the house is all decorated for Christmas.  But I was a fool to get ahead of myself, because that first Christmas back in Oklahoma, our house was still in a state of transition — it was half-former owner’s style and half mine — and in those months leading up to the tour, I sort of wished I’d waited another year until the house was more put together.

Moving is so unsettling.  Furniture and furnishngs acquired for a previous home don’t always fit the new place.  And even when they do, it may take a while to figure out what goes where.  And then what color to paint the walls, especially the dining room walls.  Yet, I’m still hanging pictures and moving furniture around and fine-tuning the wall color in the dining room — which so far, I’ve changed three times.

So maybe we were on the tour, exactly when we needed to be.  Especially, when I recall how Mom and my sister Christi came up to dress my home for the holidays.

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Because one short year later, Mom was no longer with us.   And even though the house was less put together, I’ll be forever glad that Mom was here to be a part of it, since she really loved decorating the house.  Even now, I cherish the memory of watching Mom slowly and painstakingly shaping the holiday greenery to artfully cover the staircase railing.

Anyway, this home tour story has a point that leads back to the soup recipe.  I thought it would be fun to offer a gift of one of our favorite recipes to those touring our home.  So I laid out professionally printed copies of the Tortilla Soup recipe under a Christmas-tree shaped Rosemary sitting on top of our kitchen counter.  The only problem was that in the printing process, one ingredient was inadvertently removed.  So there are 500 plus copies of an incomplete soup recipe floating somewhere around Oklahoma City.

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I should have brought a few leftover recipe cards with me last night to church, when I became the church lady serving this soup to a small group of prayer companions.  Because like the church goers of Betty’s meeting ten years ago, I was asked to share my soup recipe.  And I will, though I can’t claim the recipe as mine.  And it really wasn’t Betty’s either.  Appropriately, Betty got the recipe from Julie, a local Lake Jackson doctor’s wife, who in her spare time, puts on a great imitation of Saturday Night Live’s church lady.  But this recipe isn’t just for church ladies.  Try it yourself.  Here’s a copy with all the ingredients included.  From my life to yours.

Tortilla Soup

A simple and quick holiday supper – serves 6 to 8

 
Ingredients:
1 lb sausage or ground beef, browned and crumbled
1/2 cup each, chopped onion & green pepper, sauted in 2 Tbsp olive oil
1 can beans – pinto or black beans (rinsed) or ranch style
2 envelopes of taco seasoning
1 4 0z. can of chopped green chilies (optional for a milder soup)
4 cans chicken broth (or home-made) – About 8 cups or 60 ounces
1 can Rotel
1 to 2 cups of frozen corn
1 14 oz can petite chopped tomatoes (optional — for a less spicy or salty soup (which accompanies use of sausage)
1 package tortilla chips  (Reserve for serving bowls)
8 oz package of cheddar or Monterey jack cheese, grated  (Reserve for serving bowls)

Preparation: Add all ingredients, except tortilla chips and cheese, to a large pot.  Simmer for 30 minutes.  Taste.  If too salty or spicy, add a 14 oz can on petite diced tomatoes.

 
To Serve: Ladle soup over tortilla chips, covered with grated cheese.
 
 
 

Savory Baked Chicken

02 Friday Oct 2009

Posted by in In the Kitchen, Life at Home

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To my eternal good, my husband’s first wife discarded her marriage vows for greener pastures.  But liking my husband’s last name so much, Cathy wore her first married name through two subsequent marriages and divorces.  While I don’t know what subsequent husbands thought about her last name souvenir, I can report that husband number one simply shrugs his shoulders and laughs;  Mr. West is glad she found something about him worth keeping.

Thankfully, when wife number one vacated my husband’s life, she left behind a few recipes worth keeping.  This baked chicken recipe is one.  It takes less than an hour to prepare from start to finish, which makes it a perfect meal to whip up after a day at work or school.  We keep it just as simple with the sides — a package of Lipton’s Butter Noodles and maybe some green beans or English peas.

All our kids enjoyed this meal. My husband began preparing it in our early days of marriage, before the boys came along.  Since hubby beat me home from work by an hour, he’d have supper on the table when I walked in the door.  Ohhhh, the memories.  It was a fine arrangement but for the girls; they were use to my cooking, such at it then was.  And being kids stuck in their comfortable groove, there was much gnashing of teeth about their new step-dad’s exotic style of cooking.  To their way of thinking, it was a scary world of Crab Quiche and dishes with ucky mushrooms compared to Mom’s kid friendly fried bologna sandwiches and fried potatoes.  So it’s saying a lot that my girls love this baked chicken recipe from their first bite — well, once my man got smart and ditched the mushrooms.

The meal grew to become our oldest son Bryan’s favorite meal — and when O.U. housing asked all the parents of  incoming freshman for their child’s favorite taste from home, this is the recipe they got from us.  With a grin, I think I called it “Bryan’s Savory Chicken.”  I figured the first Mrs. West wouldn’t mind since she’d taken the same liberties herself, when she wrote the recipe out for her own use way back when.  Our copy of the recipe still lives in a little home-made green binder that my husband received as his parting gift; in Cathy’s long hand written on notebook paper, there at the top of the page, bigger than Dallas, it says:  Cathy’s Savory Baked Chicken.  In parenthesis underneath Chicken, is the name (Brenda C——-.).  In Cathy’s life, it looks like some names were ditched while others are forever hitched.

And who knows but maybe you’ll want to hitch your own name to this recipe.  From my life — in a leftover sort of way — to yours.

Savory Baked Chicken

Serves 3 to 4      Preheat Oven to 400 degrees
 
1 pkg of chicken breasts ( three halves), sliced in half, leaving six thin cutlets
1/2 cup flour
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp paprika
1/4 tsp black pepper
1 tsp basil
6 Tbsp butter
 

Melt butter and add to 9×13 pan.  Combine dry ingredients in a bag or sack, and one cutlet at a time, coat chicken by shaking it until well coated.  Lay chicken in pan, than turn butter-side up for baking.  Bake for 30 mins at 400 degrees.

 
Meanwhile, make a sauce to cover chicken, for final 20 minutes of baking time:
 
4 Tbsp butter
4 Tbsp flour
2 cups hot water with 4 tsp. chicken bullion (can use chicken broth and add salt to taste)
Optional:  Cooked sliced mushrooms, fresh chopped tomatoes and green onions)

In a skillet, melt butter over medium heat.  Stir in flour until bubbly.  Add hot chicken broth and cook until thickened.  After 30 minutes of baking, remove chicken from oven to cover with sauce.  Add vegetables if desired and return to oven for final 2o minutes of baking.   Can serve over rice.