Chile Pork And Garbanzo Burritos

While our daily cuisine draws inspiration from many different cultures (and not just during our culinary world tour!), spicy south-of-the-border inspired food is a staple that makes frequent appearances both in breakfast and dinner. Recently Megan and I tried out a new recipe simply called "Chile Pork," which blends together several hot peppers for a scalding, yet delicious, rice and meat style meal.

This particular dish calls for chilis in adobo sauce, which you can read about in more detail at our pepper comparison guide if you aren't familiar with these devilish canned peppers. It's simple to control the spicy level in this dish: for ridiculously scorching hot use the whole can, for very hot use all the can but remove some of the seeds, for medium use most of the can and remove a good portion of the seeds, or for more mild only use one or two and remove most or all of the seeds. The remainder can then be used by adding into breakfast skillets or mixing into pork or turkey burgers for some fun heat.

Along with the chilis in adobo sauce we're also cooking up poblanos and jalapenos in a large cooking pan. We aren't using a skillet, as we'll need that for the meat and later the pan will be filled with the pureed peppers.

During the initial cooking we're adding in a few extra ingredients for a more complex taste that mixes a little sweet with the hot: in go diced onion, raisins, and some orange juice.

While the pepper mixture is boiling we take this massive pork shoulder and first cut it into two equal parts, as we're only going to need half for this dish (the other half was used for a one-pot style bake, which will be covered soon!)

Here Megan is cutting the pork into about one inch strips.

The strips are first browned in a skillet with a few teaspoons of vegetable oil...

...until we get to about this color on all sides.

When the pork is nearly done browning through we also throw in a few handfuls of diced green onion.

As the pork cooks, we then poured the previous pepper mixture into a blender and pureed until reaching this smooth consistency shown below.

The browned pork and green onions are carefully moved from the skillet to the blended pepper sauce.

Once all the meat is added everything gets mixed through and then simmers until all the flavors come together.

The sauce reduces over time until we get this chile sauce smothered pork, which is spooned over a bowl of rice.

Mix together (and possibly throw in a few tablespoons of sour cream if you made it too hot!) and you've got a fantastic chile pork bowl ready for consumption.

With all that pork we obviously couldn't eat everything that night, so this meal gets stretched out across two different dinners. We're going to use the leftovers for burritos, but for a twist we're going to heat up some garbanzo beans in a small skillet.

Here we've reheated the chile pork (now even spicier the next day after it's sat in the fridge - so keep that in mind when cooking) along with the rice. To complete the ensemble we've got salsa and some shredded cheddar.

For our burritos we cover a flour tortilla in a layer of sour cream and spoon on the chile pork and rice.

Top with shredded cheese, the garbanzo beans, and anything else you'd like such as salsa, lettuce, or tomatoes.

Thanks for checking in, and we'll be back soon with a radically different dish used with the other half of the pork shoulder, along with our Christmas dinner of pork wellington, the next stop in our culinary world tour, and more ways to make pasta dishes more exciting!