Chicken/Green Chili Nachos & Mango Margaritas

I was in the mood for Mexican last week. I was scheduled to work on Cinco de Mayo (the Drinko de Mayo pub crawl in Grafton....ick). I decided to make these chicken/green chili nachos that I saw Hot Tyler (aka Tyler Florence) make on Food 911 (Food Network) a while ago.

I must say, for nachos, it’s a complicated recipe. First, you have to make a salsa verde by boiling a few tomatilloes, jalepenos, & onions, then food processoring them up with cilantro and garlic (I was so tempted to just buy a jar of salsa verde, but in the spirit of this project, I went ahead and made my own...substituting parsley for the cilantro, though. I have that gene that makes cilantro taste metallic. Not good). Then, you make a cheese sauce that starts with a roux (butter and flour), to which you add chicken stock (not milk?) and eventually shredded jack cheese. When it’s thick, you mix in the salsa. This concoction gets multi-layered in a casserole with tortilla chips & shredded roasted chicken then baked.

Sounds good, right?

Well, there were some problems. When I make this recipe again, I wouldn’t boil the veggies for the salsa. It made it too watery, even though I left out the quarter cup of water the recipe said to add to the puree. I would just have blended everything WITH the water to make a nice, chunky salsa. Likewise, the cheese sauce was too thin, even though I added about a cup more cheese than what was called for. I would cut back the stock and add even more cheese. For nachos, that sauce should be THICK. Don’t get me wrong...the salsa verde/cheese mixture tasted good. It was just way too thin, and it ultimately made the nachos soggy.

And, why the baking? Why not just layer it all together, top it all off with lots of shredded cheese, then zap it under the broiler for a bit?

Nevertheless, despite the sogginess, it was still tasty. Just more like chicken/green chili/tortilla chip casserole than nachos.

On to the margaritas. Frozen mango margaritas just seemed like perfect compliment to the spicy layeredy chippiness. I figured I would just have to add some diced, fresh mango to the blender with the usual margaritas ingredients. So, I bought a few mangoes at the store. I should have noticed that the fruits were green instead of the orangey color that mangoes are supposed to be. But, I didn’t think about that...until I cut into one and noticed that something didn’t seem quite right.

These mangoes were completely unripe. Hmmmm. I decided to go ahead with the plan anyway. Once blended, they wouldn’t be all that bad, right? Wrong. I got the ice consistency right, but they were too weak and the bits of sour mango were not all that pleasant.

Oh well. I’ll have to try these two things again sometime, I guess.