Friday Night Mexican, Slowly

This week it's a mash up between two of our favourites: Mexican and slow cookers.  One year, instead of spending my grandmother's Christmas gift on the usual rent and food I finally put it to good use and bought myself a bona fide Crock-Pot.  I realized that with minimal effort and no attention, these magical devices would do all of the cooking for you.  Since then, a wealth of soups, stews and pulled pork have spilled forth from its ceramic vessel at the blistering speed of 0.125 meal/hr.

Onto to the task at hand: Senor Bayless' Smoky Pork Tinga Tacos which luckily enough are featured on his website, but page 191 in Mexican Everyday has the low down as well.  Oddly enough, we had to visit other websites to get an actual definition for what Tinga was.  It basically refers to the dish itself, a stewed meat (pork) with chipotles and chorizo.  So once more into the crock with a bed of potatoes and a pork blanket.

And into a mixing bowl: diced tomatoes, some chipotles in adobo, worcestershire, oregano, garlic, and a white onion.

Introductions should be made post-haste using whatever implement you happen to have handy.  The resulting conglomeration can now be added to your bed of meat...

...like so.  Just layer it right on top; mixing it with the meat may cause a taste malfunction and lead to sad faces at dinner.  Doesn't that look great already?  And you know what happened next? We left.  That's right.  We turned it on and then left!  Went about our business, saw family, went shopping.  But we certainly didn't worry about it, or have to communicate with it or bother it; not once.  And when we got home:

Bam! The slow cooker elves had been busy.  Well, that's a little bit of a lie.  We had to spoon off the grease, fry up some sausage and give the whole thing a stir, but that was essentially it.  Along with it came the usual (and I may face some criticism for using this word) coterie of Mexican dishes.   Coterie refers to people, but I'd like to think that all of our Mexican dishes have personalities and identities and they tend to associate closely with one another so, what the hell.  

We fired up the tortilla press for a batch of soft corn tortillas, Rick's red rice was definitely a repeat because it pretty much makes itself, and where there is rice there are beans, which we also did in the slow cooker.  Our guests brought the fancy chips and we supplied the guacamole.  Which was actually a little bit of a bear because we had to visit 5 different grocery stores to find ripe avocados.  The odd thing was that all of those grocery stores were in a 2km radius of our house.  Avocados, avocados everywhere, and all ... Coleridge just rolled over in his grave.

So here is this problem we've been having.  Everybody knows how to get at an avocado.  You slice around the meridian and give it a twist and the whole thing comes apart; one side comes off clean, the other side gets the seed.  In order to get the seed out, you take the avocado in hand, sink the knife into it as if you were making a chopping motion, and then give it a twist.  Magic: the seed comes out clean.  Now the problem is, getting the seed off of your knife.  Avocado seeds are very slippery, and knifes are very sharp.  Whenever we do this at home it usually involves fiddling around in a dangerous manner until the seed decides to spare our fingers for another week.  In an effort to make things a little safer we developed a method to make sure that the rest of your avocado eating days are all ten fingered. 

Place your knife sharp side down on the cutting board with the seed hanging down in front.  Then all you have to do is run the knife forward along the board.  The seed should bang into the front of the cutting board or counter top and fall right off.  You may want to have a hand underneath to catch if you're doing it right on your counter top.  How this never occurred to us before, we don't know; but we're pretty lucky to have all of our fingers.