Quesadillas con rajas: starring queso fresco from Gringa Dairy

Note the colours of the Mexican flag. Most delicious flag ever.

Quesadillas are not a complicated dish, but they are good for two things:

• They're doable when you don't have a lot of time to cook because you have a three-month-old baby

• They're perfect for testing out the new queso fresco you bought from Gringa Dairy in London

Actually I've been "testing" the cheese since I got it. So has my family. We keep testing it just a little more, to make sure it's still delicious.

It always is.

The cheese has been a major player in my sandwiches all week as well. It even stood up to my homemade chipotle sauce.

For those of you who are whisky drinkers, my favourite single malt is Ardbeg, which should give you an idea of how smoky I make my chipotle sauce.

You might expect a fresh white cheese like queso fresco to get lost when paired with such bold, spicy flavours, but on the contrary it was present in every delicious bite.

My family and I also got through quite a bit of cheese just on its own (pieces of queso fresco are apparently served as botanas - the Mexican equivalent of tapas - in some parts of Mexico).

Until Gringa Dairy started up, you couldn't get queso fresco in this country, so a lot of us won't know what it's like.

Especially confusing to the uninitiated is the variety of substitutes recommended by various recipes, even in the same cookbook. How can one cheese be the equivalent of feta, mozzarella, ricotta, cottage cheese, and halloumi?

Well, there are different styles of queso fresco, which accounts for some of the above, but the cheese does combine several attributes we don't often see together.

Gringa Dairy's queso fresco holds together in a block but can easily be pulled apart into small pieces (not quite the same as crumbling, as it's a bit softer than feta).

It also slices easily.

On the palate it has a gorgeous texture. I've heard some people call it queso fresco creamy; personally I find it has more firmness than that (it's not a soft cheese like brie or Philadelphia), but it does practically melt in your mouth.

It's nowhere near as salty as feta, but slightly more salty than mozzarella, and whereas some mozzarellas are so mild they almost taste of nothing, this cheese has a definite personality.

Best of all for me is the subtle tang it has, sort of like sour cream, that tells your palate "Hey, don't sit down, cuz this is a party!"

So: this cheese is delicious on its own, as a sandwich filling, or as a topping. But what I dying to do was cook with it, and I chose quesadillas con rajas (strips of chile poblano).

(Chiles poblanos aren't in season in Britain yet, so I had to use tinned.)

By far the best way to make quesadillas is to make some tortillas and fill them with cheese before you cook them, but I didn't have that kind of time so I used premade tortillas, filled them and toasted them in a dry pan.

As usual, I recommend the
Cool Chile Company's tortillas if you're not making your own.

And as you can see from the photo, I basically "sandwiched" two tortillas instead of doing the traditional fold-over.

This was purely to fit more cheese into the quesadillas.

I really love this cheese!

And of course an antojito* is nothing without a salsa or two, so I decided to make salsa verde and a red chipotle and tomato salsa cocida (meaning I fried the salsa once more before serving.

For the salsa verde I used tinned tomatillos (fresh ones are not in season here yet), fresh jalapeños, one diced white onion, two cloves of garlic, and lots of chopped coriander.

Everything but the onion goes in the blender.

Pulse-blend until you have a thick, textured salsa (some lime juice wouldn't hurt if you need to loosen it a bit, but you shouldn't need to).

Then add the onions and stir well.

(You can blend the onions too if you don't want a chunky salsa.)

Tinned tomatillos are better than no tomatillos, but because they are less tart than fresh ones, this salsa benefits from frying before serving to intensify the flavour.

("Frying" a sauce to reduce it is one of the most typical Mexican cooking techniques and really makes the difference between a Mexican salsa and a nearly equivalent one from another cuisine.)

I think I've given this chipotle sauce recipe before, but here it is again:

3 tomatoes, roasted on a dry frying pan or comal until they come up in blackened spots

2 cloves of garlic, roasted with the tomatoes

One white onion, roughly chopped

3-6 chipotles en adobo (or to taste)

1-2 (or more) tsp of the adobo sauce
1 tsp Mexican oregano

When you roast the garlic, leave the papery skins on.

It will cook faster than the tomatoes, so keep an eye on it.

When it starts to blacken, turn the cloves over and let them start to blacken on the other side. Then let them cool and the skins should just slip off.

Everything goes into a blender; just like the salsa verde, you're looking for a textured consistency (though you could also strain it for a more "refined" salsa.

I let this chill in the fridge overnight so the flavours could mingle and develop and fried the sauce again before serving.

I served one salsa on each side, with more cheese down the middle, going for the classic Mexican flag theme.

Simple, but delicious! And the cheese makes strings when it "melts", which is another reason people compare it to mozzarella.

I can already see Gringa Dairy is going to change the way I think of cheese in Mexican recipes.

Before, I would think "What's the best substitute for this type of cheese?" Now ink starting to think "Maybe we can get this cheese in Britain soon!"

(Gringa Dairy is planning to introduce more varieties in the near future.)

And finally, I served the quesadillas with fried plátanos machos ("macho bananas" ie plantains).

These were Caribbean style, rather than Mexican style, meaning the skins were still slightly green (in Mexico, they usually wait until the skins turn black before cooking plantains).

Of you've never had fried plantains before, these were kind of like potatoes, only denser, with just the faintest hint of banana flavour.

Next time I'll wait for them to ripen. Maybe.

Avocados, Chiles, Tomatoes

This is my first post under my blog's new name. The story behind that is: the über-cool and talented @Book_Love_Sarah heard me carping on about how potatoes were discovered in Mexico and called me a MexiGeek. I said "I should change my Twitter handle to that." In the ensuing discussion it was decided to change everything to MexiGeek.

Y provecho: Edinburgh's first and only Mexican Food blog (prove me wrong, people, but only if your blog is exclusively or primarily focused on Mexican Food; I don't wanna see a lot of general food blogs with one measly recipe for baked enchiladas -which they don't really eat in Mexico - vying for the title).

Now, following on from my very popular post on chocolate (thanks to everyone who stopped by and tread it, and especially to Jess for posting a comment), I'm still taking Thomasina Miers' new book for a spin. One thing Thomasina and I seem to have in common is a love of breakfast. Especially Mexican breakfast. So I wanted to try her new recipe for corn pancakes and avocado cream, crispy bacon and roasted tomatoes. And I figured while I was at it I may as well make her avocado soup as well.

If chiles are my favourite Mexican indigenous ingredient (and they are), avocados are probably my second favourite. In fact, the only thing I miss about California are the fresh local avocados (and my family, of course).

Wanna get your mind blown? Avocado is NOT Spanish for "avocado". It means "lawyer". Is your mind blown? Please respond I'm the comments section.

The Spanish word for avocado is aguacate, which comes from the Nahuatl word ahuacatl, which means "testicle". (Now your mind is blown, right?) Apparently this refers to a purported stimulating effect of eating avocados, though I've always felt the more likely explanation is that the stones look kind of like testicles.

By the way, in case you don't know, Spanish slang for "testicles" is huevos, which literally means "eggs". Another vulgar word for them is cojones.

The avocado soup was, of course, from Wahaca Cooking At Home. To paraphrase the recipe, take two avocados, two jalapeños (or one if you want less heat), some chicken stock, and some coriander/cilantro. Blend it all together, then season with salt and pepper and fresh lime juice and serve chilled. Garnish with chopped chives and sour cream.

This could not be simpler or more delicious, and was perfect for the warm summer evening when we ate it. Avocados, chiles, and lime juice are the trio that forms the backbone of guacamole (literally "avocado sauce"), so the flavour is like an old friend, but the cooling, silky texture makes this soup something very special.

The chives are from our back garden. We can't get rid of them.

However, as a main meal, I felt it needed something on the side. So I came up with a warm ensalada de rajas or "rajas salad".

And what are rajas? They are strips of asar-roasted chile, almost always chile poblano (the big fat green chiles, relatively mild, they use for making chiles rellenos).

Of course, fresh chiles poblanos aren't that easy to come by in Britain (the dried version, chiles anchos, are much more common). So I used a handy cheat based on an idea from Rick Bayless. Because he's me mate, of course.

In the absence of fresh chiles poblanos, you can use some assorted sweet peppers and one or two common green chilies to replace the heat.

This makes a delicious and colourful assortment of rajas, though, strictly speaking, chiles poblanos are always green have no sweetness. You can make it more authentic by using green bell peppers, but I like sweet red and yellow peppers, so I just went for it.

The colours! Dude!

Now, this time I remembered to take a few photos of what I call "asar-roasting".

For my new readers, asar in European Spanish means "to roast", but in Mexico it means "char on a hot, flat, dry pan or other metal surface (a comal)".

This was one of the indigenous Mexican cooking techniques and remains essential to getting that distinctive Mexican flavour into your food. In fact, Thomasina Miers' latest book has a chapter on asar-roasting called "Burn Your Food" - because that's what it looks like to the uninitiated.

Observe a sweet pepper asar-roasting:

The black spots mean you're doing it right

 
The idea is to get each side to come up in those black spots. Here's a picture of an assortment of peppers, chiles, and tomatoes after they have been asar-roasted:

This is so hot!

Once they have cooled for a bit, the skins slip off easily (in theory). For rajas, you asar-roast the chiles, skin them, de-seed and de-vein them, and cut them into long thin strips.

Rajas are often mixed with something else and used as a taco filling or other main dish. I'm not aware of them being served as a "warm salad" in Mexico. This was my own innovation.

To get the warm rajas salad to work, I needed a dressing. I had asar-roasted some tomatoes, so I decided to blitz them and use them as the basis of an impromptu Mexican-inspired vinaigrette. I call it a vinaigrette anyway, though it doesn't have any olive oil.

Although the soup and the rajas were both delicious, the dressing is the bit I'm most proud of because I made it up as I went along and it turned out brilliant.

Vinagreta de jitomate

Ingredientes
3 medium-sized tomatoes
2 spring onions
1-2 tbsp cider vinegar
1 tsp Mexican oregano

Preparación
Asar-roast the tomatoes and allow them to cool. As they will be blitzed, it is not necessary to skin them. Leaving the blackened skins on will give the dressing a deeper flavour.
Finely slice the spring onions.

Blitz the tomatoes in a blender. If you want a smooth textured dressing, blitz the spring onions as well. I left them sliced so the dressing could double as a rough salsa.
Add the Mexican oregano and mix well. Then stir in the vinegar a bit at a time until the flavour is just where you want it.

I used spring onions because I had them lying around, but you could substitute (or add) shallots, a bit of white or red onion, or even a couple cloves of garlic.

You could also add some chile. I didn't, because this was a dressing for chiles, and you don't want to pour chocolate syrup over chocolate ice cream, if you know what I mean.

This dressing couldn't be any simpler, but the roasted tomatoes and Mexican oregano give it that unmistakeable yo no sé que that just screams ¡Mehico! If you try this once, I think you'll find it hard to put up with store-bought salsa ever again.

Vinagreta de jitomate. Because "jitomate" is Spanish for "tomato"

We ate this on that one day when it was sunny in Britain