Lovely idea! I agree, sometimes when eating out, I think 'I could've done this better'. Luckily we have a lot of amazing restaurants around. And we love it, always gives us a lot of inspiration. But not tonight.... Because we have decided to save our money and not eat out for the rest of this year. Which is quite unfortunate.
Luckily we also love to cook and we decided to try some new Mexican recipes, since we couldn't go to our favorite Mexican restaurant. And they turned out AMAZING! I had constantly the feel as if we were eating out. Absolutely delicious, we're gonna make this more often.
The dish is called 'chilaquiles' and it's made from leftover (stale) tortilla and leftover poached chicken that is shredded. We made everything from scratch. So here comes the whole list of recipes.
First, the poached chicken.
We used 3 chicken breasts for this (because that's what we had left and it needed to get finished), but a whole chicken would work just as good.
Put the chicken in a pan, cover generously with water. Add: 1 onion (diced), 1 tomato (diced), 1 spicy red pepper (diced), cilantro, salt and a bit of chili powder. Bring to a simmer and cook (whole chicken: 1 hour, chicken breasts: 5 minutes) till it's done.
Than let the chicken cool down a bit and shred with two forks. Filter the broth and use in a number of other nice recipes
And you're done.
While the chicken is cooking or cooling down, make the salsa:
dice 1/2 an onion and put it in a large bowl, together with the juice of half a lime and a tablespoon full with freshly chopped cilantro.
Meanwhile: roast 4 whole tomato's, 1 whole jalapeno pepper and 2 cloves of garlic (in it's skin) in a dry, hot pan. When it's (a bit) blackened, mash all of it together. Just remove the skin of the garlic cloves first :)
When it has a nice consistency, mix with the onion, lime juice, salt and cilantro and bring everything to taste. Put aside.
Than make the chicken filling for the chilaquiles:
Put the shredded chicken in a pan, together with 250 milliliters of chicken broth and most of the previously made tomato salsa.
Bring to a simmer and stir regularly.
While this simmers, you make the fried tortilla's.
Pour some oil in a pan (layer of half a centimeter) and heat it up, so you can fry something in it. Cut some old tortilla's in pyramid sized chips. Put the chips in the pan (in batches), fry quickly and get them out. Sprinkle immediately with salt and put aside till you've finished them all.
Now it's time to put it all together!
Put the oven to 180 degrees Celcius.
Grab a oven dish and put in some of the fried tortilla's. Cover with the chicken-salsa-mix. Repeat previous steps once.
Put some sour cream on top and top off with cheese to taste.
Pop in the oven for 20-30 minutes. Take out when the cheese has melted and is golden brown.
Eat while still warm.
We ate it with some of the extra salsa, that I had hold apart, with some quickly made guacamole and the left over sour cream. It was absolutely delish! Highly recommended. Just make sure you have the time to make this. It took us 90 minutes from start till it was ready to eat. A lot longer than my dinners usually take, but on the weekends I don't mind cooking something that takes longer.