Chilaquiles. Chee-lah-KEE-less! I mentioned I wanted to make chilaquiles to a Mexican friend the other day and you should have see the smile and look of rapture that come over his face. This is true Mexican comfort food, what your mom made you for breakfast when she had some stale tortillas that needed to get used up. Chilaquiles are basically corn tortilla pieces that are fried, cooked in salsa, and sprinkled with cheese. They are often served for breakfast with eggs and a side of beans or nopalitos. My mother grew up with her mother making them with green chile tomato salsa and grated longhorn cheese, a Tex Mex version. I recently brought some homemade salsa verde over to my friend Arturo‘s house and he made two traditional Mexican versions for me, one with the salsa verde, and one with a red chile sauce made with dried ancho chiles (pictured above). Recipes for both follow.

Do you like enchiladas? Chilaquiles are basically the same ingredients, but with a lot less work. No rolling.

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Nopalitos are the edible young paddles of the prickly pear cactus, grown throughout their native Mexico, the southwestern United States, and the Mediterranean (brought back by the conquistadores). The paddles are widely available in Mexican markets in the US, either whole (with spines) or prepared (cleaned, spines removed, chopped). They are tasty cooked, and are used in many traditional Mexican dishes. Here is a quick, easy, and delisioso nopalitos recipe prepared for me by my Mexican friend and caterer Arturo Vargas.

Do you have a favorite nopalitos recipe? Please let us know about it in the comments.

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Years ago, backyard quince trees were common. People would cultivate them to harvest the fruit for cooking in pies or preserves. Inedible raw, and looking like a cross between a pear and a golden apple, quince cook up sweet, with a vibrant rose color and a floral aroma and flavor. These days you can still find an odd tree here and there in backyards of older houses, though chances are the owners don’t know the culinary delights available in these hard yellow fruit. (I had a quince tree in the yard of my rented home in San Francisco for 4 years and never once cooked a quince. Now that I know better, just to think of it makes me want to bang my head on the wall.)

Here is an easy recipe for a simple quince jam. Feel free to spice it up a little with nutmeg, cardamom, or vanilla.

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Everyone loves Girl Scout cookies and the Thin Mints are my favorites! This past weekend I baked a batch of these with my nephew and they came out amazing. I hope you enjoy!

Chocolate Cookie Wafers
1 18 ounce package chocolate fudge cake mix
3 tablespoons shortening, softened
1/2 cup cake flour, measured then sifted
1 egg
3 tablespoons water
Non-stick cooking spray

Chocolate Coating
3 12-ounce bags semi-sweet chocolate chips
3/4 teaspoon peppermint extract
6 tablespoons shortening

Put the first 3 ingredients for the cookie wafers in a large bowl. Mix together while adding the water a little bit at a time until the dough forms. Cover and refrigerate for 2 hours.
Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. On a floured surface, roll out some of the dough until it is about 1/16 of an inch thick. Use a 1 1/2″ cookie cutter or the lid from a spice container with a 1 1/2-inch diameter to cut the dough. Arrange the cut dough rounds on a cookie sheet that is sprayed with non-stick spray. Bake for 10 minutes. Remove the wafers from the oven and let them cool completely.
For the chocolate coating, combine chocolate chips with peppermint extract and shortening in a large microwave safe bowl. Heat for about 2 minutes on low power, stir, then heat for an another minute or until smooth.
Use a fork or tongs to dip each wafer in the chocolate, allow the excess chocolate to run off. Place the cookies side-by-side on a wax paper lined baking sheet. Refrigerate until firm.

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We have a thing for greens in our family. Beet greens, collard greens, mustard greens, Swiss chard, kale. My mother even picks dandelion greens to add to soups, and mix in with other greens. The thing about most greens is that they tend to be bitter, and some, like collard and kale, a little tough as well. Blanching before sautéing can help take the edge off the bitterness, and soften the greens. Greens are often prepared with garlic, vinegar, sesame oil, bacon, chili pepper, or barbecue sauce, strong flavors that can balance the inherent bitterness of the greens. In this recipe, the kale is first boiled, then sautéed with onions, chili flakes, and smoked paprika. We’ve used smoked paprika in a few other recipes here; it sort of has the flavor of barbecued potato chips. It takes just a little more than a pinch to bring a little smokey kick to these kale greens.

My father made this kale for us last night, from a recipe in an old issue of Bon Appetit. It was so good (truly, the best kale I’ve ever eaten, ever), not only did I take more than my fair share, I insisted that he make them again today, for lunch, so I could eat even more and try to take a good photo. (Thanks dad!)

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Planning a holiday party? Consider putting these empanadas on your to-do list for appetizers. If you are not familiar with empanadas, they are basically turnovers, usually stuffed with a savory minced meat filling, and popular throughout the Spanish and Portuguese speaking world. In this recipe, the pastry dough is made with cream cheese, butter, and flour, resulting in a particularly scrumptious pastry. The filling is a delicious curried ground pork picadillo. Feel free to improvise with the filling ingredients; you can use practically any stew with finely minced meat, simmered down to the point of barely any liquid, with a little cornstarch added to help soak up extra liquid.

Do you have a favorite empanada recipe? Please let us know about it in the comments.

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Please welcome guest author Jaden Hair of Steamy Kitchen who brings us this Chinese-American classic, Broccoli Beef. ~Elise

After moving out of the dorms in college, I found an apartment to share with 3 others. My job was to cook, and as long as what I put out on the dinner table was better than instant ramen, I didn’t have to clean the kitchen or vacuum. A mighty fine trade of labor, if you ask me! But then pretty soon, friends of roommates discovered my cooking talent and would conveniently drop by at around 7pm. I knew cooking was my calling back then, because each new friend would try to find a suitable trade to be able to snag a coveted spot at our dinner table. No more grocery bill, laundry, ironing, washing the car or studying!

Broccoli Beef was one of my specialties, mainly because broccoli was cheap and beef could be sliced thinly to stretch and feed unexpected guests.

So, how do you get the broccoli crisp-tender and the beef juicy, succulent? Well, the secret is to blanch the broccoli first, before stir frying the beef. This helps you control the cooking times for the broccoli, instead of praying that the broccoli and beef finish cooking at the same time. You’ll add the broccoli back into the pan as the beef finishes cooking.

And how do you prevent the garlic from burning? Most recipes will have you add the garlic in the pan or wok before you add the beef. If you do this, you’ll surely burn your garlic, as the beef takes about 1 minute to 1 ½ minutes to cook through on high heat. In this recipe, you’ll add the garlic after you add the beef. There should be plenty of oil in the wok to fry the garlic (if you use a large frying pan or wok) and the timing will be perfect.

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Do you have an iPhone? Or a web-enabled cell phone? If so, you can now browse Simply Recipes with your phone, in a custom-built site, designed specifically for the itsy bitsy screens on mobile phones.

When Apple came out a few months ago with their latest “3G” iPhone, I finally bit the bullet and bought one. I love this phone. If I could marry a phone, it would be the iPhone. Favorite feature? The built-in GPS that shows you exactly where you are on a map, and gives you directions to where you want to go. I’ve also loved having the Internet so available. If I’m in a grocery store and can’t remember the specific ingredients needed for a recipe, I can look it up on the phone. With this new Simply Recipes iPhone app, looking up ingredients just got a whole lot easier.

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From the archives. One of our favorite cakes for the season that I first posted here over five years ago! ~Elise

When it’s apple season here in Northern California, we are picking and processing daily from our trees (3 trees, 15 varieties). Of the many apple recipes we have on the site, this is one of my favorites. You simply cannot go wrong with this raw apple cake. The ingredients of coconut and the apples ensure that the cake will be moist and flavorful.

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From the recipe archive, for Halloween pumpkin carving.

Fall has arrived and with it, the pumpkin season. There are always plenty of pumpkins to carve up around Halloween time and a great way to make use of the pumpkin seeds is eat them, salted and toasted. Our preference is with the shells on – if they are toasted properly they are wonderfully crunchy and easy to eat. It helps if you are going to eat them with the shells on that you use seeds from sugar pumpkins, somewhat smaller than the mega-sized carving pumpkins (not really pumpkins but large squash). The trick? Boil the seeds in salted water first, and then toast them in the oven.

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