Thug Week - Day 1

If you’ve not yet heard of Thug Kitchen, go to their website. Now.  I’ll wait…

This week I have the kitchen all to myself, and I’ve dedicated my meal plans to the recipes from the new Thug Kitchen cookbook.  I could write a whole blog in praise of the genius of this cookbook, but I won’t.  Instead, I will be cooking my meals every day from the fabulous recipes held within its pages, and posting my adventures here.

The biggest challenge?  Ignoring the ice cream that my loving but inadvertently unhelpful mother surprised me with for my “lonely” week. 

So, for my first dinner of Thug Week, I’m starting with a bang and making Mixed Veggie and Tofu Chilaquiles with Pineapple Guacamole, complete with homemade salsa verde.

The hardest part for this recipe was finding tomatillos for the salsa.  I could have bought premade salsa, but it is loaded up with salt.  Three stores later, I found some.  All the other ingredients were easy to find or things I already had on hand.

The salsa  verde turned out wonderfully, steam-out-the-ears, super spicy.  The pineapple guac, on the other hand, was very mild, so they made a great pairing for the Chilaquiles.

I am a decent cook, and have successfully followed some complex recipes before.  Yet for the life of me I cannot turn corn tortillas into tortilla chips.  Burn them every time, even if I am checking them early and often.  They seem to go from soft to yuck in a matter of seconds.  Burned them again for this recipe, and was too hungry to waste another 15 minutes trying again (and had no premade chips in the house) , so my chilaquiles made a quick costume change and became tacos. 

The overall result? Excellent!  And there’s enough guac and salsa left over to take to the Super Bowl party… or maybe I’ll just eat it for lunch.  As the authors of Thug Kitchen say, “that shit is too good to share.”