Brandon's Dirty Breakfast Mollete Special

One of our favorite local restaurants is Taco Mesa. They have a breakfast special that is not on the regular menu but seems to be available every day called a mollete. This is one of my favorite breakfast items, and the one at Taco Mesa is made with ham or bacon and pinto beans, topped with an egg and cheese. They use half green and half red sauce. We have also had a more traditional style at Taco Rosa's magnificent Sunday champagne brunch, which has black beans, salsa, and cheese.

So, in keeping with Brandon's new resolution to make us breakfast every Sunday morning instead of going out, he wanted to attmept to replicate this meal. We found some really soft, fresh bolillos at the Albertson's bakery. Instead of ham or bacon, B continued his sausage kick and used the chicken andouille. Rather than regular pintos, we went with Ranch Style Beans with jalepenos. The eggs were overeasy, and the whole thing was then covered with regular red enchilada sauce. The final touch was a sprinkling of shredded jalepeno jack cheese. Then he popped them into the microwave to melt the cheese a bit. This made the egg a little harder on the outside but once pierced they oozed properly.

The only misstep in this yummy dish was that in addition to the enchilada sauce, Brandon drizzled a bit of the juice from the beans, so the whole thing was a bit wetter and soggier than we would like. I also liked the sausage quite a bit but it made it the tiniest bit harder to cut through all of the ingredients than when ham is used. Otherwise, the taste combinations were really good. Taco Mesa still comes out ahead, but for a homemade meal it was definitely worth it.

The pic doesn't quite do it justice, but here it is:

Barley, oops, Regular Risotto

A while back, Brandon decided he wanted to start experimenting with barley, so he found a few great sounding recipes from the Food Network site. While going through our collection of recipes trying to decide what to make this week, I came across this one for Barley Risotto with Roasted Winter Vegetables.

We headed to Trader Joe's, assuming barley would be easy to find there. Eh, not so much. We picked up some of the other ingredients, including the butternut squash, and figured we'd find the barley somewhere else. For some reason, B is totally opposed to Whole Foods (he claims the people who shop there are too douchey) so we only looked at Albertson's, to no avail. He gave up very easily and decided to adjust the recipe just using arborio rice instead. To my surprise, the rice had less calories than the barley.

We doubled the recipe so we could eat it all week. Other changes:

• omitted celery root
• used kale instead of mustard greens
• used frozen chunks of butternut squash
• added sun dried tomatoes
• added some red pepper flake and garlic salt
• only used a maybe 4 tablespoons of olive oil to sauté the onion and roast the carrots and squash, rather than the 8 tablespoons

Also, B has some aversion to not having any meat at all in his meal, so he decided to throw in one sausage, finely diced. In a bit of a callback to last week's jambalaya, we were very excited to find a chicken andouille at Trader Joe's. We actually bought it to use in this recipe for breakfast Sunday morning (it was soooooo good), so we had some leftovers. [Side note: He took them out of the package and put them in a baggy, but he claims they were only 160 cals each, so I choose to believe him.]

Here's a pic of the incredible final product:



It was insanely delicious. I am a huge fan of butternut squash to begin with, and it really added a great little zing. Brandon is not much of a fan, and feels that it would have been better had we used fresh and roasted it with the skin on rather than frozen. The kale has also become a fave of mine; many props to Julie for introducing it to us. We put it in a soup a couple weeks ago, and it was just as good in this meal. It stays firm and crisp, and the flavor is a bit spicy. Unfortunately, B has a problem cutting it up, though, so the pieces are WAYYYY too big. However, that's the one and only complaint I have about this meal. I am still very curious how this would taste with the barley instead, but I guess the selling point on the barley would be the nutrition rather than the flavor.

According to my calculations, this actually turned out to have less calories than listed on the recipe, coming in at around 315 per serving. This was despite the added sausage! The one and a half cup servings aren't huge, but I found it very filling.

Brandon always says that he doesn't understand why people fear risotto and seem to think it's complicated or difficult, when all it takes is a lot of stirring. Don't be afraid to give it a shot! I even helped with the stirring for a while. Super easy!

Cheater Jambalaya

Now, on to the first recipe share! This one falls under the category of souped up found recipes. Brandon can never leave well enough alone when I bring him a recipe, and this was no exception. We had been discussing trying to make a healthy version of jambalaya and I came across this recipe on Delish. It sounded pretty good and the numbers looked great to me, but of course B was less than impressed. So, he took it upon himself to add a few items. His first instinct was to add some celery, but as I am not a huge fan he dumped that idea and went a different route as we passed the frozen vegetable aisle. A bag of chopped spinach jumped into the cart, followed quickly by a bag of black eyed peas. This was a bit of a risk for us because he had never tried preparing them before, let alone frozen, but they seemed right at home in the southern dish. Thankfully, the gamble paid off big. The peas give the meal a bit more heft, and are a perfect compliment to the earthiness of the brown rice. Topped off by a few dashes of Zatarain's seasoning and Crystal hot sauce, the dish really came together.

The other difference is that, like the reviewers on Delish, we were unable to find a turkey andouille so we just used Cantella's pork andouille which is fairly low cal per serving and really tasty. I recalculated based on all of our changes, and it's about 450 per serving.

Here's a picture of the finished product (in Brandon's new Dutch oven):



And here's a closeup:

"What's a Blog??"

Welcome to A Sous Chef's Nightmare. This blog is inspired by Julie and Brandon's desire to share their recipes and ideas with each other, and now with everyone else! I'm Jen, Brandon's wife, titular sous chef, and ghost writer, and Julie's co-worker/soulmate. Brandon liked the idea of the blog but doesn't have the time or inclination to write entries himself, so I volunteered to step in. After a couple of years of bringing food to work to share with each other, Julie finally decided we needed a place to keep track of all the cool stuff she and Brandon come up with in the kitchen. I am the lucky recipient of all their delicious creativity, but my place in the kitchen is also well defined: find recipes or make suggestions, help with any prep that won't cause my clumsy hands to become charred or mutilated, stay out of the way, fill my belly, clean up after. That last part is my biggest challenge. The food may be amazing but WOW the messes are legendary. How does splatter end up on the top cupboards? I will never know, and at this point I don't really care. Bring on the disasters as long as the food is this good!

In general, we attempt to keep our meals in the healthy/low cal range, but on occasion we dip our toes into what we like to refer to as the dirty. Brandon can be something of a dirty genius, often kicking up a fairly innocuous meal into something smothered in all kinds of creamy, cheesy, dirtiness. These will be few and far between, I assure you.