Mexican Recipes
498 recipes found
Roy Choi's Carne Asada
Roy Choi is the dharma bum of the Los Angeles food scene, a Zen lunatic bard of the city’s immigrant streets. He is a founder of Kogi BBQ, which used food trucks to introduce the city to Mexican mash-up cuisine, and the creative force behind a handful of Los Angeles restaurants that celebrate various iterations of big-flavor cooking at the intersection of skater, stoner, lowrider and Korean college-kid desire. He cooks poems, and they taste of Los Angeles. Choi's carne asada — grilled meat — might raise eyebrows in Puebla and Laredo alike. There is mirin in the marinade and a lot of garlic. But there is purity to its expression of urban Southern California. This is a recipe to expand minds, a delicious take on a venerable classic.
Grilled-Onion Guacamole
Tomatillo Guacamole
This is a guacamole with a punch. The roasted tomatillos blended with hot chilies add acidity and spice to the creamy avocados. It has the luxuriousness of guacamole at just over half the calories.
Basic Pepper Salsa
Spoon this pepper sauce over eggs, beans, pork chops or roast chicken. Or toss stewed, shredded chicken, pork, or beef with abundant salsa for a spicy, flavorful filling for tacos or enchiladas.
Aztec Hot Chocolate Pudding
It looks alarming when you make it -- it's hard to believe that sprinkling sugar and cocoa on top of a cake batter and then pouring hot water over it will end up edible, but it does, it truly does. This is a luscious, homey dessert, one of those self-saucing puddings that turn themselves as they bake into a layer of gooey sauce topped with tender cake.
Chicken Tacos With Chipotle
For good tacos, you need fresh, hot tortillas and a zesty filling. Canned chipotle chiles will do the trick with their smoky heat; it's an easy way to get flavor fast. Look for small cans with “chipotle chiles in adobo” on the label. And Mexican groceries generally have better-quality tortillas than the ones you find in supermarkets; it's worth seeking those out and heating them gently over steam, or by toasting them in a dry cast-iron pan. You can also use this recipe with precooked chicken, which makes this already quite simple recipe as easy as falling out of bed.
Tacos With Roasted Vegetables and Chickpeas in Chipotle Ranchera Salsa
These winter vegetables sweeten with roasting and contrast beautifully with the chipotle-spiked cooked tomato salsa. It’s another easy do-ahead dish that can be reheated when the crowds are hungry.
Pork and Mango Salsa Burrito
Big-Batch Ranchero Sauce
There is no other aroma coming from the kitchen — not truffle, not freshly peeled orange, not a chocolate cake baking — that will stop you in your tracks and make you inhale as deeply as this ranchero sauce simmering away. Here’s a large batch to use in many ways: Poach eggs in it for brunch, simmer shrimp in it for taco filling, or spoon it over shredded chicken with avocado slices inside a flour tortilla for lunch for the kiddos. Put it in tightly sealed Mason jars and bring it to friends as a host gift.
Salsa Ranchera
Mexican-Style Atole
Atole, a hot, corn-based drink popular in Central America, provides warmth and comfort when the chilly weather hits. This Mexican-style version, from Veronica Ruiz, a home cook who grew up in Mexico City and immigrated to the United States in the 1990s, is made with milk, cinnamon, piloncillo (pure cane sugar) and masa harina, a finely ground corn flour also used to make tamales and tortillas. You can find strawberry, coconut, chocolate and many other flavor variations of atole, but this one is rich and satisfying, and allows the corn flavor to shine.
Corn-Seafood Stew With Avocado and Chiles
The bright, tangy flavors of this colorful seafood dish, adapted from the chef Jose Salazar of Mita’s Restaurant in Cincinnati, are loosely based on Mexican pozole verde, a hominy stew usually made with pork or chicken, or both. But here, the starchy grains are replaced by juicy, fresh corn kernels, and seafood stands in for the meat. Perfect for summer, the stew is herbal and light, with a sweetness from the corn that’s balanced by lime juice and roasted tomatillos, while green chiles give the whole thing a kick. You can use any combination of seafood here, adjusting the cooking times as needed.
Bean Tostadas
This is by far my most popular tostada, appealing to both vegetarians and meat-eaters. If you don’t have time to cook the black beans, you could use canned beans and refry them with the spices called for in my recipe for refried black beans. You’ll have to moisten them with water.
Chiles en Nogada
Considered by many to be the national dish of Mexico, chiles en nogada showcases the colors of the country’s flag: green, white and red. Created by nuns in Puebla in 1821, the dish was presented to the general of the Mexican Army, Agustín de Iturbide, after he signed the treaty that recognized Mexico’s independence from Spain. The nuns used the best of the late-season harvest in the dish, including poblano chiles, peaches, pears, apples and walnuts grown in farms near Puebla. The original dish was stuffed, battered and fried, and significantly heartier than this version. Here, fresh poblanos are fried until lightly cooked, peeled, stuffed, topped with creamy walnut sauce, then eaten at room temperature. It’s served throughout the country every September, in honor of Mexico’s Independence Day.
Stuffed Peppers (Chiles Rellenos)
Pork Chops in Pipian
This is a recipe built on my memory of a dish I ate in a sticky-tabled Mexican restaurant in pregentrification Park Slope, Brooklyn: fried pork chops served over a thick, spicy sauce of seeds and nuts and chiles — what the cookbooks and histories of Mexican food call pipian, for the pepitas, or pumpkin seeds, used in its creation. It is hardly authentic, but it is simple to make and hugely delicious. Make sure to get a good hard sear on the pork chops before nestling them into the sauce, then serve with tortillas.
Roast Loin Of Pork With Southwestern Sauce
Black Bean and Poblano Tacos
There are many kinds of tacos, some piled high and overstuffed and some more minimal, meant to be more a snack than a meal. These little tacos are in the second category, similar to what you might find in a Mexican market for a quick bite. Savory black beans and roasted poblano chiles make a satisfying vegetarian version. Fresh soft corn tortillas, hot off the griddle, are essential.
Creamy Stovetop Corn With Poblano Chiles
Diana Dávila’s Chiles Rellenos
In her singular take on chiles rellenos, Diana Dávila crosses two classic Mexican preparations of the dish — chiles rellenos ahogados and chiles en nogada — to come up with her own remarkable variation. Roasted, peeled poblanos are stuffed with a ground meat picadillo spiked with apples, raisins, cider vinegar and brown sugar, then dunked in a feathery egg batter and fried until golden. Just before serving, those stuffed, fried chiles are bathed in a brothy tomato sauce lightened with carrot juice. It does take time to put all the elements together, but you won’t regret a minute of it when you taste what might be the best chiles rellenos you’ve ever had: complex, sweet and spicy, and deeply brawny. At Mi Tocaya Antojería, her restaurant in Chicago, Ms. Dávila uses a combination of chopped duck confit and ground pork for the picadillo. But using all ground pork works equally well.
Quesadilla With Mushroom Ragoût and Chipotles
Mushroom ragoût accepts chipotles willingly. I made a delicious and substantial quesadilla dinner with the ragoût, two tortillas and a bit of cheese in under three minutes.
Salsa Roja
Slow-Grilled Chicken With Lemon
The secret to grilling chicken is a combination of low heat, indirect grilling (in which the food is set off from, not over, the coals), and a final blast of hot, direct heat.
Spicy Chorizo and Red Lentil Soup with Kale
This recipe, adapted from “The Alaska from Scratch” Cookbook," by Maya Wilson, transforms a brothy lentil soup into a spicy, warming main dish with the addition of fresh Mexican-style chorizo and chopped kale. This simple winter dinner also features carrots, which grow unusually sweet in Alaska's summer light and temperatures, and are a root-cellar staple. Sweet or spicy Italian sausage works well as a substitute for the chorizo.