Chicken, sweet peppers & mushroom quesadilla
The original Mexican quesadilla - supposedly folded tortillas with melted cheese and maybe another ingredient like beans, chicken or vegetables for variety. However the ‘Americanised’ version of the tortilla has taken over and what we now know as quesadilla is actually ‘sincronizada’ – which means ‘to be synchronised’ referring to the two tortillas fused together with cheese, like a sandwich. I never knew that, until now. Researching for this blog has opened my eyes to very interesting things.
Anyway, if that was indeed true I made some sincronizada, but for the sake of common ‘wrong’ knowledge…let’s just call it quesadilla.
Tortilla wraps have been quite a regular dinner option these days simply because it’s quick and there’s no cooking involved, just some ‘construction’ work. To jazz up the same ingredients a little, I thought making quesadillas may be a nice twist to a weeknight dinner.
Being Asian, cooking and the concept of ‘less is more’ doesn’t quite go together. I stuffed this baby to the max! There were roasted chicken pieces, sweet Ramiro peppers, mushroom, onion and cheese. More, more, more!!
The stuffing: Sweet Ramiro peppers, mushroom, shallots and cheese...oops, forgot to include the chicken.
The idea was to have a bunch of the ingredients spread on a tortilla, topped with cheese, covered with another tortilla, and placed under the grill or in the oven. With the exception of the pack of pre-roasted chicken breast fillets, I only cooked up the mushrooms. Everything else was left to be heated up in the tortilla sandwich while the cheese melted.
I don’t quite fancy the taste of raw onions, so I marinated some sliced up eschalion shallots with red wine vinegar and sugar. Like magic, the raw bite of the shallots melted away in the acidic marinate and you get the sweet flavours of the shallots without the stink.
Served with a side baby herb leaf salad, this was a very satisfying faux-mexican meal. All done in 30 mins. Sweeeeeet.
