Pork and Chicken Enchiladas with Poblano Cream Sauce

Objective
Satisfy my enchilada craving using a thawed chicken breast, part of a pork shoulder and a poblano that I didn't realize had started to mold until I was already through the checkout at the grocery store. Technique was adapted from a recipe found on What's Cooking, Mexico?.

Hypothesis 1: These enchiladas will be the most incredible enchiladas I've ever had. Poblano peppers are currently tied with serranos for my favorite type of chile pepper. After filling myself with enchiladas, I won't even want to try the Chocolate Eclair Cake (don't judge me! I would normally make it from scratch, but frankly, I'm just not in the mood. I truly doubt the edibility of "whipped topping," but hey, at least they are truthful in not claiming it to be a dairy product) that's setting in the fridge.

Hypothesis 2: Pork is gross. 

Materials
1/2 lb. chicken breast
1/2 lb. pork shoulder
1 clove garlic
1 poblano pepper
1/2 large yellow onion
2 Tbs. cilanto leaves
2 Tbs. cream
6 corn tortillas
1/2 cup Monterey Jack cheese
cornstarch


Methods
1. Preheat the oven to 375°.
2. Place chicken breast and pork shoulder in the bottom of a medium sized saucepan and add just enough water to cover the meat. Sprinkle in some salt and pepper. Add one clove of  garlic (minced or pressed). Bring to a boil and simmer for 20 minutes.
3. Meanwhile, remove the seeds and veins from the poblano. Chop the poblano, onion and cilantro. Place in food processor (or blender) with 1/2 cup of the broth from the meat and process until smooth. Pour the mixture into the saucepan with the meat.
4. Simmer 20 more minutes.
5. Remove the meat from the water and let it cool.
6. Add cream to the saucepan. Keep the sauce simmering and stir until it begins to thicken. If it's taking too long to thicken, whisk in some cornstarch until it reaches the desired consistency.
7. When the meat has cooled, shred it or chop it into small chunks.
8. In a hot pan with a tiny bit of oil, heat the tortillas until they soften.
9. Fill the tortillas with meat, roll them up and place them seam down in a small baking dish. Cover with the poblano cream sauce and top with shredded cheese.
10. Bake 20 minutes, or until the juices are bubbling and the topping has begun to brown. Cool 5 to 10 minutes before serving.


Results
While cooking, the kitchen smelled very porky, but even so, I don't think the pork flavor overpowered the chicken. The verdict? I wasn't impressed. As a standalone dish, it wasn't flavorful enough. When I cut the poblano, it was surprisingly hot, but lost all the heat while cooking. The chicken was moist and tender, but the pork was tough.

Discussion and Future Directions
If I were to make this again, I would skip the pork and just use chicken. That would make the texture more consistent and much more tender. I would serve the enchiladas on a plate with cheesy refried beans, spicy rice, lettuce and tomato. That would give more textures and flavors and be a quick way to make it a meal.

The sauce is the heart of the dish. Without a good salsa, enchiladas are just meat and tortillas. Next time, I would add a jalapeño or serrano to the ancho and onion in the blender. Instead of adding the puree back to the saucepan, I would heat it up in a skillet. Then, I would add the cream and season with salt and pepper. I would double the cream, then add milk to keep it light while adding to the quantity. I would keep it simmering and whisk it until it thickened. I would add a tiny bit of the sauce to the meat in each tortilla, then pour the rest over the top. Then, I would sprinkle the top with cheddar cheese and pepper jack cheese before baking.

I've never been a pork lover. I can't say I don't eat pork, because I wouldn't want to live without bacon. This meal has me leaning toward the "pork-is-gross" side. I'm going to keep trying, but something is going to have to be really spectacular to turn me!

Supporting Materials

"Drown your Sorrows in Cake" Red Wine Cake

Objective
Cheer myself up with cake and my favorite boiled frosting for red velvet cake. Technique adapted from: Smitten Kitchen's Red Wine Chocolate Cake. Frosting recipe in supporting materials.

Hypothesis: Chocolate produces endorphins and wine is a sedative, which means this cake will make me feel much better.

Materials
6 Tbs unsalted butter, softened
3/4 c firmly packed dark brown sugar
1/4 c granulated sugar
1 large egg
2 Tbs cream
3/4 red wine (I used Jam Jar Sweet Shiraz; I also was just short of 3/4 cup, so I topped it off with skim milk)
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup, heaping, all-purpose flour (133 grams)
1/2 cup, heaping, Hershey's Special Dark cocoa powder (46 grams)
1/8 tsp baking soda
1/4 t sea salt
1/2 tsp baking powder

Methods
1. Preheat the oven to 325°F. Grease a 9" cake pan and line it with a circular piece of parchment paper, spray some oil on the parchment.
2. In a large mixing bowl, cream the butter and sugars on medium speed until smooth.
3. Add the egg, cream and vanilla. When incorporated, add the red wine and vanilla. 
4. Sift the flour, cocoa powder, baking soda, salt and baking powder into the wet mixture. Mix until nearly homogeneous, then gently fold until all of the remaining flour is hydrated.
5. Pour into prepared pan and spread evenly.
6. Bake 25-30 minutes or until toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean.
7. Remove from oven, cool in pan 10 minutes, then flip onto a cooling rack to cool completely. Remove the parchment paper. 

Results
Um, yep! I feel much better. The cake was barely in the oven when a buzz kicked in from licking the bowl clean (sort of like cookies, why bake them? Leave out the eggs and indulge in the batter). Getting to eat the frosted cake when it was ready was just a bonus! The cake is moist and chocolately with a hint of wine.


Discussion and Future Directions
I initially set out with the plan to make a Red Velvet Cake (I was in a wedding last Saturday and one of the bridesmaids was telling us about making Red Velvet Cupcakes for her birthday, which she spent alone in New York where she'd just moved for graduate school). However, I wasn't satisfied with any of the recipes I found. There wasn't a single recipe out there with 5 stars. The highest rated version on most websites used vegetable shortening and a full bottle of red food coloring, two things I prefer to avoid in the kitchen. Our bodies make and recognize cis-fatty acids. Cis-fats are unsaturated fats that allow fluidity in the membrane by kinking the fatty acid chain, so fewer fatty acids can cluster. I like to think that my fats are fluid, not packing tightly like trans-fats and saturated fats! As for red dye 40, my only real complaint is that nothing in nature is that red. The main role of food dye is food is for food identity. Most people in first-world countries are so far distanced form the natural form of their food that they won't eat an heirloom tomato because "it doesn't look like a tomato." For that reason some foods that seem natural, such as oranges and salmon, are artificially colored to give consumers what they expect. I made a red velvet cake to cheer up after my last breakup, and it was nearly black (I tried beet juice but it was overpowered by the dark cocoa powder). While searching, I came upon a recipe for red wine chocolate cake and thought it would be the perfect replacement.

I chose to use Jam Jar Sweet Shiraz for the wine because I had just about enough left and thought a sweet red would be significantly better in a cake than a dry wine. I don't like dry wine and I don't think baking it in a cake would make me like it more (it would probably just make me dislike the cake). The wine is a fruity wine described as "blueberries, blackberries and raspberries with dark chocolate undertones." Another sweet red I would recommend trying is Sweet Bliss. The original recipe included cinnamon, but I'm very glad I left it out. It had enough flavor without it and the fruitiness held it's own. I thought adding cinnamon would make it too much like a molten lava cake. While that is a delicious cake option, I was really most interested in making the frosting recipe that follows!

This is definitely an adults-only cake. I can imagine this being a wonderful cake to bring to a book club or a bachelorette party (not suitable for a baby shower or child's birthday party). This recipe is well worth a trip to the grocery store to pick up a bottle of wine (if you live in a state that allows such things). If you live in Indiana or another state that prohibits alcohol sales on Sunday, be sure to keep a bottle on hand just in case. If you live in Colorado and can't buy wine in the grocery store, add a stop to the liquor store to your next trip.I can promise that if you're having a bad day, this cake will cheer you up. The frosting is a bit tedious to make, but the cake doesn't even need it. Sprinkle it with powdered sugar to make it look pretty if you want, but it will probably disappear before anyone even notices the decorations.

Supporting Materials
Silky Butter Frosting
Adapted from Flour.
1/2 c milk (use whole milk if possible)
2 Tbs cake flour
1/2 c granulated sugar
1/2 c butter, softened
1/2 to 1 tsp vanilla
1/8 tsp salt
In a medium saucepan, whisk the milk and flour until it thickens. Remove from heat and whisk occasionally until it comes to room temperature. Once cooled, slowly beat the sugar into the thickened mixture on low speed. Slowly beat in the butter until well incorporated. Add the vanilla and salt. Beat on medium until smooth and satiny (6-8 minutes and don't be alarmed if it gets nasty and separates before it gets silky). This makes enough for one 9-inch cake. Make more for a layer cake.

Leek and Gruyère Tart

Objective
Make a visually appealing meal using the leftover leek and  Gruyère cheese in the fridge and cute little jar of herbes de Provence. Technique will be adapted from BHG New Cook Book.

Hypothesis 1: Savory tarts are disgusting. You always see them in cases next to the cash registers at cafés and coffee shops, but like the quiches, few people ever order them. As a microbiologist, I would ever eat something that has been sitting at room temperature all day unless it was a baked good (come C. diff or salmonella, I'll probably eat it anyway).


Hypothesis 2: Cookbooks are outdated. Rarely are recipes perfected on the first try. The beauty of the digital age is that the aspiring home cook can type nearly anything recipe into Google and get enough hits to have a fairly good idea of where to start. And as an added bonus, some sucker has usually tried every recipe and then comments underneath ("I was skeptical of the absurd flour to liquid ratio. My dough was the consistency of a bag of flour so I added a dozen eggs to get it to the consistency I thought it should be. It tasted great, but I think you forgot to add eggs to the recipe."). I usually don't make recipes that have under a 4.5 star rating and I read the reviews to make sure people weren't giving their version of the recipe 4.5 stars (which they usually do).

Materials
1 Tbs olive oil
1 leek
2 cloves garlic
1 tsp herbes de Provence
1 Tbs dijon mustard
3 oz aged Gruyère cheese
1 pie crust
1-2 T sliced almonds

Methods
1. Trim off leek's greens and roots. Slice in half lengthwise and rinse warm water between the layers to remove any sand or grit. Slice leek into small slices, up to 1/4-inch wide. Set aside.
2. Heat olive oil in a medium skillet over medium heat.
3. Add sliced leeks to hot oil. Using a garlic press, press garlic into the skillet. Stir occasionally until the leeks are tender.
4. Remove from heat and stir in mustard and herbes de Provence. Shred the Gruyère cheese and stir it into the leek mixture once the skillet has cooled a bit. Set aside.
5. Roll the pie crust to form a 10" circle. Move crust to a baking stone.
6. Place the leek mixture in the center.While leaving two-inch  border, spread  filling evenly over crust.
7. Pleat the excess crust over the filling to form the edge.
8. Chop the sliced almonds and spread over the tart.
9. Bake at 375° for 25-30 minutes or until the pie crust is golden brown.
10. Cool 10 minutes before moving to a serving dish.


Results
The smell while baking wasn't quite strong enough to have me checking the crust every minute to see if it was done. The tart looked beautiful. It broke in half while moving it from the stone to my serving plate. Maybe the crust wasn't done enough, the filling was too thick or the crust was rolled too thin. Tasted pretty good. The almonds didn't seem to add much, but hey, they're expensive so why not add them to this fancy little tart?


Discussion and Future Directions
Before making a tart again, I would scour the internet for crust recipes (store bought doesn't quite cut it--plus it's loaded with partially hydrogenated lard. I can think of fewer things that sound that disgusting). Finding another crust recipe might also lead to insight into the proper thickness for a tart. Might be interesting to try with some sort of layered, flaky, buttery dough (technically called "laminated" dough).The flavors were great and I would make this again (if I were the type of person to repeat recipes, which generally, I am not). Therefore the hypothesis that savory tarts are disgusting was disproved. However, one should be weary of eating food that's been sitting at room temperature all day, so maybe a tart sitting in a deli case isn't a great idea. 
This research neither supports nor refutes the hypothesis that cookbooks are outdated. The book itself was a pain to use and now has watermarks in it from spills. However, the cookbook was a good starting point as it has an index and the recipe used was easy to find by looking for "Leek." I believe this recipe could have been found as easily on the internet. I think part of the thrill of making a recipe is the time and energy spent selecting just the right version to try. A cookbook eliminates that. In the future, I will try recipes from cookbooks. Particularly when the power is out, oh wait..


Supporting Materials