Ah, the grilled cheese sandwich. Such a comfort food. Everyone remembers back to their child hood of having Mom make a grilled cheese sandwich, most likely with two slices of Wonder Bread and a slice of American cheese. A little bit of butter and it was oh so good. This version is a more grownup take on the classic grilled cheese I came up with especially for Cinco de Mayo. The bite from the chiles acts as a nice counter to the richness of the cheese and butter. Enjoy.

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This is something that I came up with when making my Mexican Grilled Cheese sandwich, something I’ll be passing along to you in my next post. It is essentially a blend of salsa and guacamole, hence salsamole. I found that is quite the tasty treat as a dip and can be used as a topping on fish or burgers. Basically, any place that you would use either salsa or guacamole is just fine for this blend.

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I am very particular about my knives and my cutting boards. One of the things my mother in law has and my wife tried to get me to use is a glass cutting board. Yuk! Nothing ruins the edge on your knives faster than glass. However, she has also gotten me one of these pressed biomaterial cutting boards. It’s fine except it is quite thin and doesn’t stay in place when I am working quickly with a knife. The solution is to take a kitchen towel, fold it once and place it under the cutting board. This will keep it from sliding all over the counter top and making a potentially dangerous situation.

Continuing on our theme of Mexican dishes for Cinco de Mayo, I have a Mexican classic for you today, Tortilla Soup. While it seems that there are a lot of steps to this dish, it really isn’t as difficult as it sounds. Perhaps the most important thing is to have a good thermometer (and knowing how to use it! That means no touching of the bottom of the pan!) you can use to get the proper oil temperature to fry the tortillas in. On the bright side, it only takes on 4 quart pot to make everything in so cleanup is easy. My version is inspired by a recipe I got from Rick Bayless. Enjoy!

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One of the things that kinda pisses me off is when I go to the grocery store to buy fresh lettuce and it is saturated with water. I know they do it to keep the lettuce looking fresh in the store but when you get it home it contributes to the lettuce wilting quicker in my fridge. You can perk up the lettuce by adding lemon juice (about three tablespoons or the juice of one lemon) to a bowl of cold water and letting the lettuce soak in the fridge for about an hour.

I’m sure you’ve done this. You’ve gone and made hard boiled eggs and  when you cracked them open, the yolk is all the way over to one side of the egg leaving a barely discernable coating of white on one side. In order to avoid this predicament, store your egg carton on its side in the refrigerator. This will keep the yolks centered when you cook them.

I am not really a desert man. Most of the time when Ms Cocktail and I go out to eat I’ll look over the dessert list and then just order a coffee. However, there are couple of things that I just can’t seem to pass up and Flan is one of them. This is a wonderfully traditional dessert that fits nicely in with cuisines from Europe to America and I’m using it as part of my Cinco de Mayo celebration because it is wonderfully Mexican as well. There is some lime zest added to help give it that Mexican flair.

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Last week we were talking about eggs. One of the very cool and groovy things about eggs is that they can set more liquid than they contain. In other words, you can add additional liquid to an egg and it will still be able to turn into a quasi solid gelatinous mass when cooked. Ok, so that doesn’t sound terribly appealing, but in reality this is done in the world of cooking all the time. We have just come up with a bunch of fancy names for these things but technically speaking, any time an egg is combined with liquid and then cooked to a solid state, it is called a custard.

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To avoid making pale or lumpy gravy, brown the flour by making a roux when adding the flour before adding the liquid. If there isn’t enough fat from the pan drippings, add a bit of butter to the pan first. Add the flour and whisk continuously over medium heat until the desired shade of brown. Then add the liquid until you’ve reached the desired consistency.

Let me say this simply. The egg is the single most versatile food out there. You can do more things with eggs than with any other food source. Aside from being pretty tasty in their own right, they can also be combined with other things to make some pretty interesting dishes.

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