southwesternish meal recipes

These are great summer recipes:

Chipotle smoked chicken

Ingredients:
1 whole chicken
1/4-1/3 cup butter
1/2 can chipotles in adobo sauce

You will also need an electric smoker and some hickory or mesquite chips.

Brine chicken for at least 5 hours first. Pat dry and stick chicken in smoker. Don't forget to turn it on. Leave the chicken in the smoker for about 1 to 1 1/2 hours. Remove chicken from smoker, combine softened butter and chopped chipotles (the seeds are the hot part. leaving them all in makes the chicken pretty spicy. Taking them all out makes it not spicy at all. You choose) and stuff the resulting mess under the chicken's skin. Then pop it into a 325F oven until done (will vary depending on size of chicken).

Corn Salsa Salad

This is a super-easy salad to make, contains zero fat and is extremely tasty.

Ingredients:

2-3 ears fresh corn
4-6 roma tomatoes
1 large mango
1 jalapeño pepper
3 tbsp or so chopped cilantro leaves
juice of 2-3 limes
salt

With a sharp knife, cut the kernels off the corn cobs. Some will spang around your kitchen, so it helps to have a clean-up dog around. The best way to minimize this is to hold the corn at an acute angle to the cutting board and cut on the underside, so the kernels don't have as far to fall and are less inclined to bounce. Watch your fingers though. Put kernels in a mixing bowl.

De-seed the romas and dice into approximately corn-kernel sized pieces. Add these to the bowl.

Dice the mango into approximately corn-kernel sized pieces (in 2 dimensions, they'll be longer in the third, don't worry about it.) Add these to the bowl.

De-seed the jalapeño and dice it as teensily as you can. Add to bowl.

Chop cilantro and add to bowl.

Juice limes over bowl, no need to get fancy and measure or anything.

Add about 1/2 tsp salt, sprinkling all over.

Stir well and taste. It might need more salt.

This salad improves in the fridge but is fine to eat right off the bat. Optionally, you can add avocado and/or red or green onion.