Friday, July 10, 2009

Hankering For Some Homecooking

If it weren't for the numerous cooking classes we have taken during our travels, we'd probably would have gone home a long time ago. There isn't anything quite like a homecooked meal. Sure we had plenty of great meals and even great homecook meals, but when we had the opportunity to shop and cook for our wonderful hosts we jumped at the chance. Now what will we be making? What have we been craving? In a city like Singapore where everything is available, if not costly, it is available. We quickly determined the one type of meal we missed and haven't been able to find was Mexican and not your typical tacos and burritos, but Southwestern smoked chili based meal. SE Asia is the perfect climate to find all the ingredients for an authentic Mexican meal, in fact we found many Mexican food establishments throughout our travels.We found beautiful little green chilis in Little India and everything else at the local market. However the one ingredient we could not find was corn tortillas. Flour tortillas could be found everywhere, so we took it as an opportunity to test our culinary chops and improvised. We were going to make a pork green chili casserole. Since corn tortillas were unavailable we brainstormed and thought corn tortilla chips would work just fine since we were going to have to fry the corn tortillas anyways.The chilis found in Asia are of the spicy hot or texture-mainly bell pepper variety, so we created a mixture of small spicy green chilis and sweet yellow peppers. Swine is the animal of choice in Asia therefor finding the right cut of pork was easy, however finding the correct marinading ingredients turned out to be tough also, so we made our own with the fabulous and versitile Maggi. According to our French cousins good cheese is hard to find, however we're Americans and found all kinds of cheese we could use!It was pure joy roasting the tiny peppers, creating the stew and assembling our casserole.We even made home made guacamole, spicy rice, and black beans. The casserole turned out beautifully and completely satisfied our hunger for Mexican.Our family thoroughly enjoyed it and cleaned their plates.Except for little Sarah who thought the black beans were weird, but love the guacamole.

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