BackRajma, roti, rice
How the 3 R's of Mexican food can make Punjabis fall in love with burritos, enchiladas, and tacos
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Last year we spent a month in the US and the only time we managed to cut through our pizza and donut haze was when a cousin dragged us to Chipotle to try Mexican food. The cousin, who survives on meagre student earnings, had a simple logic to favour Chipotle outlets (at least three times a week): they offered unlimited servings on some menu combos and that this food tasted most like home—Roti, Rajma and Rice (Mexicans call them Burrito, Beans but try telling a true blue Punjabi boy that).
Our next brush with Mexican food was a few months ago when we decided to treat ourselves to dinner at Hauz Khas Village and ended up at Maquina where we washed down a Chilli Con Pollo Chimichanga (served minus the guacamole dips promised on the menu) with at least 4 glasses of cola.
This weekend kiddo, my 11-year-old daughter, who now has the onus to cook one meal every weekend decided that we would experiment with Mexican. After all we did have a bowl of boiled rajma and corn sitting in fridge and we had an enchanting meal of fish and chicken tacos at Dos Burros, Cyber Hub, DLF Cyber City, Gurgaon over the weekend.
Tacos were rejected because I was not sure where we could find hard taco shells and besides we has just tasted them; burritos because most recipes sounded like a fancier version of a kathi roll, quesadillas because it is damn hard to pronounce.
Enchiladas won the race because of the cheese factor and because kiddo discovered an easy-to-make enchilada sauce on one of the many food sites we were trolled for that perfect recipe.
The only hitch: how to make flour tortillas? We solved that crisis by opting for store bought corn tortillas and spent better part of the early afternoon chopping away the vegetables we decided to add to our version of the chicken enchiladas. We had bell peppers, zucchini, corn, onions, tomatoes and of course, rajma beans and corn. We fried the chicken pieces, and then dry roasted the vegetables for the stuffing.
For the enchilada sauce we followed a simple recipe:
Enchilada sauce
1 tbsp vegetable oil
1 tbsp maida (flour)
2 tsp chilli flakes
1/4 tsp crushed garlic (most recipes recommend garlic powder)
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp roasted and crushed cumin
1/4 tsp oregano
1 cups vegetable stock
150ml tomato puree
Method:
Heat oil in a small saucepan and then add flour and stir for a minute. Stir in the remaining seasonings along with the tomato puree and cook for lesson than a minute. The paste will thicken. Add in the stock (use hot stock), whisking constantly to remove lumps. Simmer for about 7-8 minutes
We then stuffed the tortillas, ladled in the sauce, added a slice of Amul cheese and rolled up the tortilla and placed it in a baking tray. We ladled in some more sauce on top of the roll, threw in some chopped onions and tomatoes and then sprinkled leftover pizza cheese (most recipes advocate cheddar cheese) and baked for about 10 minutes.
A small secret trick: we baked the corn tortillas in a hot oven for about 2 minutes before use.
Since our very successful enchilada experiment (kiddo’s Punjabi grandparents loved the dish too), we have tried making Mexican rice, salsa and now hope to make churros some day. More on that later.
This weekly series, which appears on Tuesdays, looks at what’s new with food and drink, and how we are interacting with it.
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