Chicken Tinga Tostadas

Chicken tinga is a traditional Mexican recipe that was taught to me by two friends that I met while living in Virginia. They loved this recipe and made it quite often since moving to the U.S. from an area near Acapulco, Mexico. This is a quick and easy recipe that delivers big authentic Mexican flavors. This recipe is made by first poaching 3-4 bone-in chicken breasts with the skin removed in chicken broth with a mixture of 1 chopped onion, 4 chopped tomatoes, garlic, and oregano.

When the chicken is cooked all the way through it is removed from the broth, shredded and set aside. The broth mixture goes into a blender with a can of chipotle peppers in adobo sauce. The amount of chipotles you put in is up to your own personal taste. The broth mixture gets well blended and then poured into a pan.

The chicken and the chipotle sauce are combined and brought to a simmer on the stove. Once some of the liquid has evaporated and the chicken mixture has thickened it is ready to serve.

I serve chicken tinga on a warm tostada with onion, cilantro, queso fresco, sour cream, avocado, and a lime wedge. It is also equally delicious if you choose to serve it as a filling for tacos or burritos as well.

Green Curry Chicken

If you are looking for huge complex flavors in a simple to prepare dish, curries are a great place to start. Here is a taste of the green curry that I made. I used a canned green curry paste as my base and its primary ingredients are ground green chiles, shallots, ginger, garlic, and lemongrass. The heat of this dish can be altered to taste based on the amount of curry paste you wish to add. We prefer ours a little spicy so we use a ratio of 4 teaspoons of curry paste to 1 can of coconut milk.

My ingredients were sliced chicken breast, red onion, red, orange, yellow, and green bell pepper, baby eggplants, Thai eggplants, lemongrass, ginger, garlic, kaffir lime leaves, cilantro, Thai basil, lime, green curry paste, chicken broth, and coconut milk. Perhaps the hardest to find ingredient in the list is the lime leaves but they are worth a trip to an Asian supermarket. They have an intense citrusy lime aroma that is hard to compare.

I started by simply stir frying all the vegetables in a very hot wok until they began to soften. Then a couple teaspoons of the curry paste and all the other aromatics such as lemongrass, garlic, ginger, and kaffir lime leaves go into the wok. Heating the curry paste up with the vegetables will give it a chance warm up and bloom its flavor a little bit.

Next we add the chicken broth, coconut milk, basil and cilantro. Once this mixture comes to a simmer we add the sliced chicken breast allow it to poach in the liquid until it is done. The lemongrass stalks can be removed from the mixture and a fresh sprinkle of basil and cilantro can be tossed in to finish the dish. I served it with lime wedges and a fresh scoop of rice from the rice cooker.