Homesick Texan in September

I started flipping through Lisa Fain's Homesick Texan cookbook this week, keeping my resolve to attempt at least one recipe from it a month in mind, and found myself wondering what I had gotten into. Yes, I am homesick for Texas. Yes, I love Tex-Mex. But y'all, I don't fry things in lard - that's just not how I choose to cook/eat anymore. (And for good reason, too: if I don't cook/eat that way on a regular basis then I have absolutely zero qualms about splurging when the opportunity presents itself. Or, you know, I present myself to the opportunity.) Eventually I decided to pull a recipe for gorditas and picadillo and made a few alterations to tailor it more to my regular diet, inspired both by the desire to "lighten" things up and the ingredients that I already had in the icebox. Note, picadillo is a spicy, stewed ground meat (typically beef) used to stuff tacos, pastries, or, as the Homesick Texan suggests, thick corn pockets known as gorditas.

So let's get down to business. The typical Molly food items that I had on hand were: ground turkey, whole wheat pitas, kale, and the ingredients for a zucchini hummus recipe that I had my eye on. Ground turkey was an easy sub for the ground beef that the recipe called for, and the pita pockets were a logical and by far less labor intensive sub for rolling and frying my own gorditas. And then - y'all, this is the kicker right here - I realized how readily this emerging concept was lending itself to be pun material and knew that I absolutely had to make Greek-adillo. The process was simple. Brown the meat, add some veggies, season, let simmer. I opted to leave out a few of the more Mexican seasonings in favor of lemon pepper and turmeric to keep with the Greek vibe. The zucchini hummus was a simple puree of roasted zucchini, garlic, lemon juice, and tahini. There ya have it! Building blocks for either stuffing a pita or topping a bed of beauty-beauty-full kale (I've been going on and on about this bunch of kale, it is just gorgeous).

On a side note, food photography is difficult when you refuse to use any camera but your iPhone and when your yellowish granite countertops reflect harsh incandescent lights and especially when your food is all of a yellowish tone. I experimented for about five seconds in photoshop and decided that this was okay.

Verdict:

(Allow me to introduce our rating system. Jeff and I will both be rating the recipes out of five. Should be self-explanatory whose rating is whose.)