New Recipes

Last week I made this pork recipe. It left me with A LOT of pork left over. Since I am trying to cook with what I have in the house and not run out and buy things, I spent quite a bit of time looking for recipes to use it in. I just couldn't find what I was looking for. I decided to do that which my husband excels at and I have no confidence in: make a recipe up. I learned quite well from my mom to take a recipe and "tweak" it to the point if someone asked for it I could say, "This is what I started with but not exactly what I made." However, not having a starting point is extremely intimidating for me. This time was different in that I had a clear sense of where I wanted my recipes to go.

The first one I made was Pork Enchiladas. I used black beans from this recipe. We were really pleased with these. I've been starting with dried beans rather than canned for the last year due to cost. Lately, I just hadn't been enjoying them until this recipe! I also make my own enchilada sauce. I absolutely love it!!! I really prefer homemade tortillas too but they have felt like more work than my 3rd trimester-night shift self is up to so I used store bought ones. I spooned some enchilada sauce onto the tortilla, added some shredded pork and black beans then rolled the tortilla up. I repeated this until I filled a 9x13 pan. I poured the rest of the enchilada sauce over the whole dish and topped with cheese. We LOVED it!! I was so relieved! In hindsight, I would split it into 2 8x8's and freeze one. It got to be a bit much for 2 adults and one toddler (who loved it as well, I might add).

The second recipe was Shredded Pork Tortilla Soup. I couldn't find ANYTHING close to what was stirring in my head (this should not surprise me, I know). For this one, I just started pulling things out of the refrigerator and took pictures along the way. I started with 5 carrots chopped in to large (1-2 inch) pieces, mainly because I hate chopping carrots. I had a quarter of an onion in the fridge so I chopped that up (not a huge onion fan, so they go a long way here). I finished off a garlic head (3 decent cloves, one hardly worth mentioning) and minced up some jarred jalapeno slices I had in the fridge. I would have used something like Rotel tomatoes but I didn't have any cans of that on hand.

I sauteed those up with some butter and olive oil, which I'm now learning from my Food Challenge maybe weren't the best fats to cook with. Ahhh, but I am in learning mode. I then threw in some corn I had in the freezer and a sad mostly finished bag of green beans (what else was I going to do with them?).

Next came the pork and black beans. I used about 2 cups of the shredded pork and half of what I had left of the beans (maybe a can's worth?).

Last but not least, I added a 14.5 oz can of tomatoes, 32 oz of beef broth (sounded better than chicken and I had some on hand), roughly a teaspoon of chili powder, a teaspoon of cumin and a hearty dash of red pepper. I debated about possibly using lemon pepper but the red sounded better. I also didn't use salt because the broth was not sodium free. That turned out to be a good choice.

The result? We LOVED it too!! Yay! We served it with some tortillas chips and cheese on top. Sour cream would have been good too but we did not have any of that. I'm feeling pretty good about this making up recipes thing! Maybe it's not just Ralph's territory after all.