adventures in portland take 3-- fiesta!

last night we decided to share our magical cooking skills with an elite group of friends.

unfortunately, we were so hungry, the food was not captured in film, only in our tummies.

here is a breakdown of the fabulous menu-- comment if you would like to see the recipes.

homemade salsa
gaucamole
nopales (yeah, that means cactus-- see previous posts)
mango black bean salad
annie's famous burritos
mexican pastries (we didn't make these, but they were authentic mexican-made!)

everything was yummy and served with some guiltless gourmet chips. after trying all 4 kinds of chips (black bean, black corn, yellow corn, and chili lime) we decided a few things:
1) these are a little pricey, given that half the bag is full of air.
2) chili lime-- not as good as it sounds. not enough chili, or lime. kind of like burnt cumin?
3) lexy feels they were a little salty, but given that annie could drink salt for breakfast, she kind of liked that. i should get a salt lick.

although no food pictures were taken, here are some pictures of our attractive faces wearing hats that were won while playing a serious game of loteria, otherwise known as a mexican face-off... or just bingo.

this evening earned 5 scoops of icing, although there were no cupcakes involved. mmmm...cupcakes.

love,
lexy and annie.

Yummy Mexican Treat

Oh my goodness, its been forever since we last posted!! What with the holidays, and Annie and I each going to our respective homes in the middle of no where (hello Montana, hello Indiana), we've taken a little bit of a break. But dont you worry, during our time off from blogging we have been trying out some new recipes and are ready to share them with all of you!

Annie and I are big fans of the Mexican food. This recipe was shared to me by one of my co-workers who is Mexican, so you cant get much more authentic! The main ingredient is cactus, which in spanish is nopales. I think when you tell people they are eating nopales instead of cactus it goes over better, just because people get weird about ingredients sometimes, however I made this for an appetizer for Christmas dinner and all of my family members (we had 18 people in the house!) really enjoyed it.

This recipe creates a sort of chunky salsa type thing. You can eat it with chips, put it in a taco/burrito, or eat it on top of tostadas (thats what my co-worker does). The chips are really the worst part of the whole thing!

So... to make your yummy mexican treat, this is what you need to do:
1) Buy a jar of cactus (it will be in the mexican section of the store, or you might have to go to a special store. they are long green things in a jar of liquid). You want to rinse off the nopales really well before preparing them, or else they have this slimey residue on them, which is sort of gross. so put them in a collinder and wash them really well in cold water.
2) chop up the nopales into bite size length pieces. mix them with the lime juice of one lime, a chopped up jalapeno (i use the ones in the jar since i always have them in my house.. but you can use fresh... you could also use a serrano pepper instead, just be careful not to make it too hot!), and chopped up cilantro. There are no exact measurments for this, but i would say about 1/3 of a cup of chopped cilantro.
3) Leave the nopales, lime juice, cilantro, jalapeno mixture in the refridgerator for a little while (a few hours... at least 30 minutes for best results).
4) Chop up tomatoes (about 2 mid sized tomatoes). I like to deseed the tomatoes before hand, just so as to not add any more liquid into the mixture.
5) Add one small yellow onion all chopped up into mixture.
6) Right before serving you add a chopped up avacado. Mix everthing all together and enjoy!!

If you leave out the avacado the whole mixture is compelty guilt free! Annie has yet to try this fun recipe, but has some nopales in her cupboard so after she attempts it, she'll let us know how it went!