Sometimes, but not often, being addicted to something isn't terribly bad. However, the unfortunate thing is that the world might still want to get between you and your true love. Such as a few nights ago when I really wanted Chipotle, but between having limited money and crazy amounts of snow, my only choice was to put on my apron and get to work.
Since I'm not incredibly intuitive yet when it comes to flavors and cooking practices (how much rice to how much water????), I followed a few recipes I found online.
Despite my food posts being based entirely on what I have in my "cabinet", I had everything to make the recipes fairly close (if not exactly) to the way it's suggested.
For the Rice, we bought a huge bag of Basmati rice almost two years ago and still haven't used it all, I keep lemon juice in the fridge, and cilantro on-hand (though not fresh).
There are quite a few copycat recipes that try to mimic the marinade Chipotle uses for their chicken; however, I didn't have that kind of time, and not all of the ingredients, so I found a flavorful list of seasonings that did a fantastic job of adding the kick of chipotle and southwestern seasonings. Considering I added some "Southwestern Seasoning" by Pampered Chef, it's really no surprise.
You can see I have two different meats on the cutting board. One is chicken, the other is ground turkey meat. In an effort to eat healthier, my husband and I bought ground turkey to make our own burger patties. We had bought frozen turkey patties before and were unimpressed with their dryness and lack of flavor. Since, if this experiment worked, I figured we'd be eating a lot of this "Chipotle", I took a bit of the meat to test with.
The corn salsa, one of my favorites, is really simple. It's just a matter of having the ingredients. Luckily, I had a red pepper in my fridge (totally wasn't expecting to have one when I read it!) and a friend had given us a whole bunch of jalapeno's that I blanched and froze last year. They thaw a bit soggy, but they're perfect for cooking with. Obviously canned corn may not be a person's first choice, but it's what we had and frankly turned out really well!Lucky for me, I also had the intuition to buy monteray jack cheese, which is the cheese Chipotle uses, the last time we went shopping. We also always keep a small stock of sour cream, tortillas, and Herdez's "Casera" salsa.
So I cooked the rice, mixed the corn salsa, then made the meat. I took the same seasonings I put on the chicken and smashed them into the ground turkey meat.
Honestly, I will always prefer chicken, but the turkey was a great flavor and really worked well as a substitute. I ended up mixing more of the seasonings and cooking the rest of the turkey the same way.
I didn't make in-progress pictures because it really isn't my recipe. Other people worked hard to put those suggested copycats together and I hope you enjoy their take on Chipotle as much as I did!
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