Attention conservation notice: this is a food post. If you’re not here for the food posts, maybe go reread Stargate Physics 101 instead or something.
Content note: Aggressively non-vegan food.
The other evening I had zero energy but felt like I should at least make some token effort at real cooking so I just flipped all the dials to easy mode:
- lots of salt
- more butter than you are willing to admit to
- caramelised onions
- a single strong spice or herb (e.g. chilli, black pepper, rosemary)
- meat
- a pressure cooker
Pretty much all of these dial up the tasty to effort ratio of everything you cook. None of them are essential (I want to emphasise that it is possible to make extremely tasty vegan food. Meat and butter are just easy mode).
Here’s the specific combination I deployed:
- Slice a lot of red onions. Put them in the pressure cooker with lots of butter, lots of salt, and a dollop of smoked chilli paste.
- Cook on high heat until the pressure cooker whistles, then low heat for another 20 minutes. The onions should be slightly caramelised and very juicy when you take the lid off.
- Add shredded chicken (about 3 times by volume of what I used for the red onions. I had a bunch in the freezer that I’d made previously).
- Stir it all up until well mixed. Same drill as before with the pressure cooker.
- Serve on corn talcos
I don’t know if I get to count this as properly Mexican food. I tend to get in trouble with my sister-in-law when I do that. But it was tasty and definitely in that direction.
The result was frankly almost offensively tasty. I had a sore throat which made eating painful and I still ate way too much of this.