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Fajita Night

2011 July 19
by Thehousedaddy

Every Friday night during swim season, Noah and Sasha’s swim team hosts a pep rally and dinner after practice at the pool. Swim team has been a great new addition to our recreational portfolio. With soccer, ski training, and a multitude of summer camps scheduled, the last thing in the world we needed was to add swim team to our schedule. With that said, it has been fabulous.

At the beginning of the summer we wouldn’t have called either of our kids a swimmer, but since their friends were doing swim team they decided that they wanted to do it as well. Noah couldn’t swim a lap when he started and now he swims every stroke in the meets. He is far from the best swimmer, but he really enjoys it and our new found swim culture. Sasha has become a winning kick boarder and so far that his event to loose at the B meets. Virginia and I never did swim team and never thought our kids would. Who wants to get up at 4:30 am to drive your kids to an indoor pool? As a skier and cyclist, I don’t totally appreciate the desire to stare at a black line in the water for hours on end, but the summer swim team at our outdoor pool is fun and the kids love it. My only hope is that they learn to swim really well.

The other night was supposed to be chicken fajitas after the pep rally, but due to a raging DC thunderstorm the rally was cancelled. We wouldn’t have eaten them anyway, but we had fajita on the brain and so we decided to do our own version. It was hot, so the grill was our choice once again for cooking. If we had more time we would have made our tortillas, but as usual we were out of time and had a very early home swim meet to get up for in the morning. I can usually find great organic homemade tortillas so we weren’t so disappointed, but I will do a post when we make fresh ones.

Once again the fridge dictated our dinner and we had supper fresh Twin Springs broccoli, green onions, carrots, red and yellow tomatoes and scapes. With olive oil, salt, pepper, dried chilies from our friends Brooklyn rooftop garden, we put the mix on the grill. I have always used the grill year round, but have found that there is very little you can’t cook on it.

I have written about our hot sauce on a few occasions. We have a few different variations depending on what type of food it is going to accompany. With all of the Asian food we eat, we typically use an Asian style sauce, which is raw and gets its distinction from sesame oil and rice wine vinegar. Our other main hot sauce is a home blend that can be used on anything. I generally make a slightly different batch each time I make it. I always make with an olive oil base and salt, and can either roast the peppers, as I did with this one, or make it raw. Typically the salt, oil and vinegar allow it to keep for a long time. When you roast the peppers a whole new flavor comes out. There is a smoky richness that can give a dish a whole new dimension. Each pepper is very different in it’s heat index. Different batches of the same type of pepper differ greatly. It always takes a few tastes on food to figure out just how hot the sauce is. I often hurt myself and need to strip clothes off during a meal in order to combat the heat and sweat. The kids also like a little spice, but often over do it as well, and I end up eating more than I wanted or needed.

So with the added accompaniments of black beans, rice, guacamole, local lettuce and cherry tomatoes our meal was ready. Even though it was crazy hot, it felt like a red wine meal. We opened a bottle of Counoise. It is a little known Rhone wine that could stand up to the very strong flavors of the dish and help temper the flames in our mouths. I love to try unusual pairings of wines. Sometimes when cooking I taste a little something that triggers a ‘this might be good with that’ feeling and then go with it. I really feel like you don’t need to conform to any rules with wine with the exception of drink wine that you like. I often had to guide people towards different wines at my restaurant, but always tried to get a sense of the type of wine that people preferred. It is much easier to help someone pick out a wine that goes with a dish if you can establish what wine goes with that person. Just like food, everyone has different tastes.

As usual we got to bed later and fuller than we wanted, but we satisfied the fajita craving and had a wonderful meal.

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