Kentucky Fajitas

My spring and summer days have gone into planting, weeding, watering, harvesting then eating or preserving. Yes, in my absence from the blog I’ve been doing what I write about –enjoying the goodness of the garden. I hope you’ve been doing the same.

I return today with last night’s meal. Anyone who’s been in a Mexican restaurant has smelled the sizzling fajitas as the onions and spices waft through the air on a trail of steam. The server delivers the tempting plate to a neighboring table and I sometimes wish I had ordered it. 

Fajitas are one of those dishes that easy to prepare at home, especially if you have leftover fried chicken. My husband is the fried chicken king. He generously cuts the breast portions in half so I have smaller pieces that are more appropriate for my appetite. If only the two of us partake of the chicken, I have plenty for leftovers for the upcoming week. So I return to my blog with Kentucky Fajitas, created with Jim’s fried chicken and vegetables from the garden.

Kentucky Fajitas

1 red bell pepper
1 small onion
1 small zucchini
1 carrot
a handful of Swiss chard
2 cloves of garlic
1 TBSP olive oil
salt, pepper, oregano and cumin to season
favorite salsa, cheese and tortillas

Slice first four vegetables into small sticks. Heat oil at medium heat in skillet. Add veggies and a little salt. Warm chicken in toaster oven. (You can also use a microwave or the skillet, but I find a toaster oven keeps it moist and doesn’t heat up the house tremendously, a benefit in warm weather.) Chop chard until you have 1 cup or so. Chop garlic and add to veggies. When veggies are nearly as soft as you want, toss in the chard then add a sprinkle of the remaining seasonings, except salsa. Turn veggies to low and check on chicken to see if it’s heated through.

Grate cheese. I use whatever I’m in the mood for and have in the house. Sometimes I like the crumbly, white Mexican cheese. Then I get on a Swiss cheese kick or only have cheddar in the house. Last night I used marble cheese.

I also alternate tortillas. I prefer corn tortillas, which have more flavor and fewer calories. Sometimes I also use whole wheat tortillas. Either kind will warm well in the microwave for 10 – 20 seconds or in a warm skillet.

With everything warm, I chopped the chicken into slices then laid out one whole wheat tortilla and one corn tortilla. The whole wheat tortilla was larger, so I put in a layer of cheese, veggies, chicken, salsa (we make our own) and more veggies. The corn tortilla is smaller so I filled it with just a little cheese, veggies and chicken. 

The result? When I return from our favorite Mexican restaurant, I drink lots of water. Their flavorful food is high in salt. Not so for our home-grown and prepared Kentucky Fajita. So try your own and enjoy the goodness of your own garden.

Canning season opens at the Brown house

The smells of warming apple pie filling and salsa mingled in my kitchen last night as I prepared for my first canning of the season. We have at least 12 pounds of apples from our church’s mini-orchard and as many tomatoes from our gardens so I was chopping, measuring, stirring, chopping some more. It’s quite a way to get in the good but hard sort of work that makes me sleep well!

I’m still using the salsa recipe I found a few years ago at www.cdkitchen.com. That’s one of the great sites where you can enter the numbers of servings you want to get from a recipe and it will re-calculate the amount of all the ingredients for you. Of course, some will come out with something like 2.491 cups, but I certainly don’t concern myself with being that precise.

Although our favorite preserved apple pie recipe calls for freezing in a plastic bag, you can also find recipes for canned apple pie filling. www.allrecipes.com is one site where you’ll locate a canned possibility. That site also has the scaling feature plus another option that changes the unit measurements to metric if you would like.

There are all sorts of tools online to help with your preservation efforts this season. If you find a good one to share, do post it in a comment so everyone can share.

Tortillas and cheese enliven frozen vegetables

I am beginning to see the end of some of my frozen vegetable supply. I think I used my last package of frozen greens this week when I made a burrito bake casserole based on a more protein heavy recipe I found years ago. This is something anyone can easily make to suit their own tastes.

For my version, I laid out the whole wheat tortillas and topped them with unthawed greens and corn, plus a few carrots we had canned. Then I added a mixture of our canned salsa and tomato puree plus the remains of our roasted chicken and some black beans that I whipped with sautéed onions and sour cream. For more bite, add jalapenos or your other favorite peppers. You can also add sour cream and cheese inside or anything else you think you would like.

Next, I folded them like burritos and put them in a casserole dish then covered with salsa and topped with cheese. Bake at 375 for 30 minutes.

Alternately, you can prepare tortilla dishes like an Italian lasagna, alternating layers of tortillas with cheese, meat, vegetables and sauce. Of course, you can also make it meatless.

Either way is a relatively quick meal if the meat is leftover and the vegetables have been preserved, and therefore softened, and don’t need to be cooked. Use your creativity and see what you can come up with to tickle your taste buds.