Some of you all tell me what bad cooks you are because you don't measure and you use what you have when you make a recipe. Sometimes this is also the trademark of a good cook. Well. Today I threw caution to the wind and made chilaquiles with what I had on hand.
The recipe I was working from was The Thug Kitchen's mixed veggie and tofu chilaquiles.
Starting from the top of the ingredient list and working down,
the recipe called for corn tortillas. I had some of those, but my dog ate them, so I used spinach wraps.
2 teaspoons of olive oil, I stuck with that one, even though I had some gorgeous Trader Joe's ghee on hand.
1 block of Medium firm tofu was not available in my kitchen on this snowy day so I used 4 pastured eggs instead. I am aware that the tofu is a substitute for eggs, which I then substituted eggs for.
2 teaspoons of soy sauce or tamari. I used bragg's liquid aminos, but even the thugs would not complain about that.
1 teaspoon of garlic powder, check.
1/4 cup nutritional yeast (nooch) check.
1/2 medium onion chopped, yes.
1 green bell pepper, yes.
1-2 jalapeños. Didn't have 'em, so I left 'em out.
2 cloves of garlic, minced, check.
2-3 cups of spinach - here's where it gets interesting. I thought I had some baby kale, yum! But it had frozen in the fridge and turned brown and runny, gross. So I substituted - and here's the first point where I knew it was all going downward - romaine. This is one of those substitutions someone makes and then complains about the recipe and then you found out they substituted something like romaine for spinach or - I'm not good at coming up with these substitutions because they make no sense - and you want them to just not even try instead of giving home cooking a bad name.
Next on the list 2&1/2 cups salsa verde - yeah, unfortunately no. This is when I could have thrown in the towel, eaten the scrambled eggs with sautéed peppers and onions and made some berry oatmeal pancakes with what I actually did have on hand. However, I had a jar of taco sauce in the pantry. mmmmmm. Not so fresh, but spicy, at least.
1/4 cup vegetable broth or water. Guess what - I had the vegetable broth! A small victory.
toppings: avocado, cilantro, jalapeños, pico de gallo; This nightmare wasn't going to need no stinking toppings.
I would not expect this recipe to work, but for no good reason - maybe because it's a snow day, and I'm really enjoying this book, Thug Kitchen, and because Dan was already eating some Doritos for breakfast and I thought, well, this looks savory - I made something that was nothing like it anyway.
I'm still not sure what's going through you alls heads' when you cook like this and then complain about it. I learned early on that if you make a meal this way, you might never want to try making it the intended way again. Just get the right ingredients, follow the directions and you won't be complaining, you will be happy.
