Imitate

All good meals have green onions in them. They are a staple at my house. Can you believe I used this WHOLE bunch on dinner tonight?

All good meals also involve garlic. I almost never use less than 3 cloves in anything, so beware of that if I should ever bring you food. This is the prep for tonight's dinner.

Some of that eventually turned into pico de gallo. Tomatoes, onions, peppers, garlic, salt & pepper . . . Isn't it pretty? I have been know to just eat the pico with a spoon.

My chimis getting ready to go in the oven. This is one of our favorite dinners, and a great way to use up left over chicken.

Imitate - To copy or use the style of.

July 16, 2009

Sometimes I think I'm Cafe Rio. This is my own version of a chicken chimi, pico de gallo and cilantro lime rice. So, so good, and it works for both summer and winter meals.

Chimis

( I don't really measure stuff, so this is my best guess)

Shredded chicken (I just use whatever is left over, about 1 1/2 chicken breasts is about right for our family)

Shredded cheese - I don't know how much, 1/2 c maybe?

Green onion

About 1/2 t dried oregano or 1 t fresh

1 t ground cumin

Salsa - enough to hold it all together

Combine all that and put it in a tortilla. I prefer to use the big flour ones, but since I couldn't find any in my freezer, I used the smaller corn ones. If I have the flour ones, I put the filling in and fold in all the sides like a chimi should be, but since I just had the corn tortillas I just rolled it up enchilada style.

Brush the tortillas with melted butter. And I do mean butter. Margarine has no place here. This will make them all nice and crispy. Bake at 400 for about 25 minutes.

Then for the rice, I just cook my rice on the stovetop, using chicken broth. My no-fail-super-fluffy rice is on another day's blog. I also add some lime zest to the rice while it's cooking. While I wait for that to get done, in a small bowl I combine the juice of 1 lime (see, you really do need that Pampered Chef citrus press - $17.00 and worth every penny), about 1-ish T sugar, and some cilantro. When the rice is done, pour that over the hot rice and mix it together. I also add some green onion, but that's just me.

Add a nice green salad, and it's a quick, easy, delicious dinner.

For those who are not yet aware, Walmart has their school supplies out. I know this because I went to Walmart today to fill Lane's prescription, thinking it was one of those $4 deals, and get more low dose aspirin for Addie. They said it would take about 20 minutes to fill the prescription so I went wandering. That is just never a good thing to do at Walmart. So I found that the school supplies were out. I love when they put them out so I can stock up on EVERYTHING I might use during the course of the year, but I didn't know they would be out so soon and felt overwhelmed and unprepared. I hadn't checked to see what, if anything, we had left over from last year. So I just bought whatever I thought we might need. This includes 25 boxes of crayons. Yes, 25. We go through a lot of crayons and since the kids are forever telling me of a birthday party they were invited to about 30 minutes before the party starts, it's beneficial to have crayons on hand. I got tons of pens - black ink only. I have an aversion to blue. Filler paper, spiral notebooks, composition books, I got it all. They were out of those Bic mechanical pencils that I know Taylor likes, so I'll have to get them on another trip. So all that added up to about $30, which isn't too bad for everything I got, but I wasn't planning on getting anything. So I went back to get the prescription only to find out that it cost $30, it wasn't one of their $4 ones. Bummer. Once I got home I remembered that I had forgotten to get AAA batteries, after stomping around the house last night looking all over the place for some. We have 3 full and 1 part package of AA batteries, but no AAAs. Typical.