Well I took a week off from writing on here because I made stuff that wasn't really anything new for me. This week I was feeling a bit more adventurous, I made something that I have never made before, and I actually didn't have a recipe, I just tried something out from my own brain and it really worked. My inspiration this week was Chipotle, I wanted to try to make the ingredients that I get in a burrito bowl. We will start from the bottom up.
This was the first thing that I made, 1 lb of pinto beans, 2 cups of chicken stock for flavor, and 3 cups of water. I added some bay leaves, oregano, cumin, coriander, and some mexican chili powder. The beans cooked for 5 hours in the crock pot.
This was the finished pot of beans, I drained most of the liquid from them and put them in my container and placed them in the fridge.
The next item I was making was some slow cooked carnitas using this smallish pork roast.
I pretty much used the same spices for the pork as I did for the beans, plus I added some salt to this spice mix as well. I stirred everything to combine in the bowl.
I coated all of the sides of the roast liberally with the spice mixture.
I added the roast to the crock pot dry, to keep the spices from all getting washed off right away.
I poured about 2 cups of chicken stock to the side of the roast as a cooking liquid and also added a few more bay leaves to the pot for more seasoning. The roast cooked for 10 hours on low, or just overnight while I slept.
This is what the roast looked like when it was done cooking. I removed it from the pot and let if cook for about an hour. I let the juices stay in the pan and cool off as well. I removed any chunks of fat that were floating in the juices.
I hand pulled the pork into bite size pieces, and removed any pieces of fat that I found. I also poured the remaining juices over the pork to keep it nice and juicy.
So the final thing I made was some corn salsa, I have always wanted to make some corn salsa, and figured it would go well with the things I was making. So this is 5 ears of corn with husks and silk removed, on a foil lined baking sheet that is coated in cooking spray. I placed them under the broiler for about 10 minutes and rotated them and put them back in for another 10.
This is the final roasted corn, I guess my oven is a little bit uneven as some of the corn got way more roasted than the other ears.
I took a knife and removed all of the kernels from the cob, I also ran the back of the knife down the cob to get as much of the corn out cob as I could.
The next step was to roast the pepper that I was cooking with, I used the broiler to roast the peppers using a method I saw online, removing the stems and seeds from the peppers and flattening them out. If I had gas burners I would have used them to roast the peppers, but I had to use what I have.
I roasted the peppers for about 10 minutes, in retrospect I would have probably cooked them for a few more minutes and gotten them really charred.
While the peppers were still hot, I tossed them in a bowl and popped the lid on to steam from their own heat, this would help to loosen the charred skin from the peppers.
I let the peppers steam for a while in the bowl before removing the skins from all of them. When I said I would have cooked them a bit longer, it was because some of the skins were really hard to get off, a little more cooking would have made that a lot easier.
This is the pile of roasted peppers.
I took them one by one and chopped them very finely, cutting them in strips vertically and then chopping finely across. This might have actually been some of my best knife work and it was at like 11pm at night as well. I wish I would have taken better pictures to illustrate what I did.
This is the corn along with all of the chopped peppers. I also forgot to mention, I used 2 red bell peppers, 2 jalapeno peppers and 2 anaheim peppers. I really wanted to get some poblanos, but the only poblanos that were left on the shelf were super wrinkly and did not feel or look fresh at all.
To finish the salsa, I added some cilantro and some minced red onion, as well as the juice of one line and a little bit of salt for seasoning. This salsa could not have turned out better. I really like it and will definitely be trying to do things similar to this in the future, especially when local sweet corn is available.
I eat the bowls with beans, pork, and the corn salsa, as well as some guacamole and the bowls I have made have been very delicious.
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