Mexican chipotle chicken salad with avocado

With a little help from my friends: KANKUN chipotle sauce, Don Agustin tequila, and agua fresca de Jamaica from the Cool Chile Company

Summer's here and the time is right for eating salads in the street.

Or, you know, in your kitchen/dining room. Wherever.

Some people make a big deal about how the Caesar salad was invented in Tijuana (it was, you know).

What they don't talk about as much as that the chef, Caesar Cardini, was actually Italian, or that he was based in California but opened a restaurant just south of the border because the US had the whole Prohibition thing going on at the time.

But this salad weather we've been having got me thinking about a Rick Bayless recipe I've been meaning to rip off: chicken with avocados and chipotles.

Rick didn't intend this to be a salad. His recipe is more of a snack/taco filling. But I think this makes an awesome summer chicken salad, and shows you that Mexican food doesn't have to be heavy and stodgy.

Rick's recipe uses diced chipotles en adobo, which you can get from La Costena. If you do this, you have to dice the chiles very fine, otherwise you'll get random smoke-bombs while you're eating.

To make it easier to distribute the chipotles more evenly, you can make a chipotle sauce by combining a tin of chipotles en adobo, a tin of tomatillos, and a couple cloves of garlic.

I didn't have any tomatillos on hand. However, I did have a fresh bottle of KANKUN chipotle sauce, which is awesome. Basically, this stuff tastes exactly like a homemade Mexican chipotle sauce.

For the chicken, I poached some chicken breasts as I would for carnitas de pollo except I added some sliced carrot and potato.

When the chicken was done and shredded, I chopped up some romaine lettuce and avocados (do the avocados at the very last minute so they don't oxidize).

I also added some green tomatos (NOT tomatillos, which are actually not tomatoes at all but really a kind of gooseberry), because I have kind of a thing for Mary Louise Parker.

I don't wanna have dinner with you. You're covered in BEES!

I tossed everything together with the chicken, carrots and potatoes.

Rick Bayless says this should be topped with raw white onions, but I don't like raw white onions, so I made up a white onion version of Yucatecan Pink Pickled Onions:

Cebollas en escabeche

Ingredientes
1 white onion
1 habanero, fresh or dried
6 allspice berries
10 black peppercorns
1/2 teaspoon Mexican oregano
1/4 teaspoon cumin
120 ml white wine or cider vinegar

Procedimiento

Peel and thinly slice the onion.

Make a 1 cm slit in the habanero. (You can use more habaneros if you like it hot!)

Put the onion, habanero, spices, oregano, and vinegar in a bowl and add just-boiled water until the onion is covered by at least 1 cm.

Steep for about four hours.

Drain the onions, fish out the habanero and, if possible, the peppercorns and allspice.

Transfer to a serving bowl.

I served the salad covered with KANKUN (which I used as a salad dressing - seriously, it worked!) and with some sliced sourdough bread on the side.

Sourdough bread is kind of like a Guadalajaran bread called birote, but you could use a baguette or crusty white bread or (of course) fresh hot corn tortillas as well. 

For a drink I decided to keep with the summer thing and make a traditional agua fresca. 

Aguas frescas are non-alcoholic drinks made by steeping something in boiled water. There are lots of aguas frescas. Probably the most famous is horchata, which is made with ground rice and almonds, but I chose the hibiscus flower water or agua fresca de Jamaica. 

You can get this from the Cool Chile Company.

Instructions are on the bag, but what you do is combine half the bag with 1.5 L of just-boiled water and 150g of sugar, give it a good stir and le it steep over night. 

The next day, sieve it and serve!

I decided to make mine alcoholic by adding a shot of Don Agustin tequlia!

Because YOLO!

(I can't believe I actually wrote "YOLO". I feel like such a douche.) 

Tinga Oaxaqueña: Mexican Comfort-Food with a Kick

I'm courting controversy here, because technically the dish should be called tinga poblana, "tinga from Puebla".

(Tinga, btw, means "disorder".)

A lot of traditional wisdom that holds Puebla as the culinary capital of Mexico.

It is the home not only of the tinga, but also of the poblano chile (used in rajas or stuffed to make chiles rellenos and the beloved chiles en nogada) and Mexico's national dish, mole poblano (the famous mole made with chocolate).

Plus lots of other less famous but no less delicious dishes and ingredients.

When you consider that poblano chiles in their dried form end up as chiles anchos (or mulatos, if they ripen to brown instead of red), Puebla's contribution to Mexican cuisine can hardly be overrated.

But for every book, chef or food writer who champions Puebla there is at least one (maybe more) giving the top spot to Oaxaca.

Oaxaca, too, is home to a distinct regional cuisine, including many ingredients that aren't readily available even in other parts of Mexico.

And they have not one but seven moles in a range of colours including black, green, yellow, and two shades of red.

So taking a traditional Pueblan dish and rebranding it as Oaxacan is about as cheeky as making "English" whisky.

The reason I'm tweaking the name of this dish is because I substituted rare pasillas de Oaxaca (purchased from Luchito, the only place to get them in the UK) for the usual chipotles.

Ordinarily, chipotles can trump any other chile in the flavour department, but nothing beats these pasillas de Oaxaca.

Prepping dried chiles does take a bit of work, but of you want to try this at home, you can easily use a tablespoon or two of Gran Luchito salsita de chiles ahumados instead.

A tinga can be made with pork, chicken, vegetables, or a combination. I went with chicken.

As usual with traditional recipes, I had several versions to choose from as a basis. I stayed pretty close to Thomasina Miers's version because she calls for dried chiles, but I added some chorizo to complement the smoky pasillas.

Because I made this in the morning but served it for dinner, I'm going to tell the prep method like a story, but first the

Ingredientes (to serve two)

• 2 chicken breasts
• 2 medium tomatoes
• 8 cloves of garlic
• 2 white onions
• 3 pasillas de Oaxaca (or 2-3 tbsp of Gran Luchito) 
• 1/2 small cone of piloncillo (or 1 tbsp of dark brown sugar)
•  Mexican oregano
• Avocado leaves (or bay leaves, but they don't have the same aniseedy flavour) 

So: in the morning I got up, peeled and quartered one onion, and tossed it in a soup pot. Then I bashed six cloves of garlic (one at a time) with the pestle of my molcajete, peeled the skins off, and tossed them in the pot with the onion.

Then I added my two chicken breasts and a great big avocado leaf.

If I had had any, I would have roughly chopped some carrot and celery, but no dice.

Anyway, I covered it all with water, brought it to a boil, and then turned the heat way down and let it simmer for 20 minutes.

These guys are ready to rock and roll.

In the meantime I cut the stems off three pasillas de Oaxaca , pressed them between my fingers to get the seeds out (but not the veins), and soaked them in just-boiled water for ten minutes.

You have to weigh them down with a plate to make sure they all stay covered with water.

If you use Gran Luchito instead of the dried chiles, you get to skip this step.

While the chiles were soaking and the chicken was poaching I heated up a dry frying pan and asar-roasted the tomatoes and the two remaining cloves of garlic. The garlic should be roasted in its skin to prevent burning, and it only needs a few minutes on each side. The tomatoes take longer.

Tomatoes roasted like this are one of the most characteristic flavours of Mexican cooking. They make the finished dish a world away from an Italian tomato sauce.

By now the chiles were ready. Using tongs, I removed them from the water and placed them in a blender jar with the tomatoes, garlic (minus the skins), a teaspoon of Mexican oregano, and two avocado leaves. A few minutes on high and I had a smooth, delicious tomato and chile sauce for my tinga.

By now it read time to take the chicken off the heat and let it cool in the broth. This keeps the chicken moist.

While it was cooling I sliced the remaining onion thin and chef-like because I totally have mad skills like that. In my mind.

I slow-fried the onions in oil for several minutes, until they got nice and translucent. Then I added some diced choizo.

It was Spanish chorizo, as all chorizo in the UK comes from Spain, but I mexed it up a bit by adding some ground chile powder.

When the chorizo was cooked through, I added the tomato and chile sauce, plus the piloncillo, and let it simmer for a few minutes while I shredded the chicken.

I added the shredded chicken to the pan and ladled in the broth I poached it in (which was now a light chicken stock) until their was enough liquid to cover the chicken: not quite 100 mL.

I let this simmer on low for about 15 minutes. Then I turned off the heat, let it cool, covered it, and put it in the fridge, where the flavours matured all the livelong day.

That way when it was time to make dinner, all I had to do was heat the tinga gently on the hob and make some Mexican white rice (arroz blanco).

I used the recipe from A Mexican Cook in Ireland because it includes lots of butter!

Ladle the tinga over the rice, top with some chopped avocado and spring onion y provecho!

Plated up and ready to rock your world.

This dish packs untold depths of flavour, balancing sweetness, acidity (from the tomatoes) and two types of smokiness, plus chile heat.

It's also dead easy to make. The hardest part is actually prepping the chiles, which you can skip if you just use Gran Luchito chile paste.

Also: I say this serves two, but we each got to go back for (eagerly anticipated) seconds.