Most people have a story about lockdown: a friend learned basic Italian, another one learnt to play guitar, most of my social media friends made sour dough bread and got good at it; my coworker Liz and her partner did couple's yoga. Having so much time in our hands and no where to go and nothing to do, we turned to learning. The one commonality among us all, we all wanted to do something new.
Happy New Year everybody! 2016 was certainly a busy and weird year for me. It saw loads of ups and downs and a trip to Mexico after a long absence. It was great to see my family, to get a rest and to reconnect with friends. I came back all fired up and full of beans (literally!) so I am determined to make 2017 a good year. Loads of projects in the pipeline, some real work on my book - been putting it off for far too long- but mainly I want to write regularly in the blog again....
I've been playing around with snapchat for a couple of days. I must confess that I've been quite slow getting into it. I've tried it a few times, downloading the app, trying to use it and then after some frustrating attempts to snapchat, deleting the app and giving it up.
This is one of my favourite lazy lunches at Picado. When I'm busy in the shop and I don't want to distract myself from whatever I'm doing, this is my go to dish. It takes not time to make and I always have the two main ingredients in the fridge: tortillas and cheese.
This is a very lazy post, so beware! I was cooking during the week for a party of friends who will come over for Sunday and sneaked a bit of the Cochinita Pibil I cooked for our lunch. I normally cook 2 kilos of cochinita, then portion it and freeze it. This time I took a bowl of it and made this delicious Pork Pibil Tostadas which served two purposes: it fed us and provided the recipe for this post.
I recently blogged about barbacoa and how it is my one food connection with my dad. When I made the barbacoa for that post, I froze a small amount for this post as I knew once I had shared that recipe, I had to share this one too. These Tacos of Barbacoa en Salsa Roja are perfect for any leftover barbacoa you may have.
As those of you who know me, and those of you who've been patient enough to read previous ramblings in this blog, I absolutely hate food waste. I don't throw food away if I can help it; some of my Irish family find this odd and jokingly call me the queen of leftovers, so naturally, two weeks after Christmas I am still feeding my dearest and nearest turkey! Normally, Alan always asks - 'what's for dinner today?', nowadays, he asks: 'is the turkey finally all gone?' - the poor thing!
I don't know about you, but I seem to be incapable of ever judging what size turkey to buy so that I don't have a massive amount of it left after our traditionally Irish Christmas dinner. This year was no exception, the 14 pound bird was indeed too much, so I was left with about 5 pounds of cooked turkey! Now there's only so much turkey sandwiches you can eat and after two days, I have to fight the urge to choke it all in the bin.
Writing a food blog might give the impression that I am in the kitchen all the time... I wish I was, I do spend there every free minute I can squeeze out of my day; cooking relaxes me, it gives me joy and above all it makes me happy, but lately, I haven't been in the kitchen as much as I'd like to; we've been so busy getting a new home office built, trying to get rid of builders, cleaning up, etc, and all this while holding full-time jobs and running a business. All our meals for the past six months have been pretty much cooked in a hurry and eaten on the go or in a rush.
This is another of those recipes that was born out of desperation in my Dublin kitchen. I've tasted courgette flower quesadillas and stuffed courgette flowers before, they're quite traditional in Mexico, but they are fresh, so when I was first faced with tinned courgette flowers I thought, great! I don't have to miss them any more, but then I realised you can't do many of the things we do to the fresh ones. So I put my thinking cap on and came up with this little recipe. It's simple and delicious and perfect to make tacos with.
