mexican

Lucky Lupitas Extravaganza

- Alex 2 Comments

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date of extravaganza: Saturday 16 Feb 2013

I’ve written about Lucky Lupitas before. It’s the tiny Mexican restaurant which sits next to Flinders Medical Centre. It takes no reservations and, on a Saturday, you can expect to start queuing for a table at 5pm (doors open at 5:30pm).

With one toddler, queuing doesn’t really work and while we’ve eaten in just the once, we’ve had take away a few times. That’s because we’re lucky and live nearby. However, we have friends, many of whom also have toddlers, who don’t live so close … so about a year ago (I kid you not!) we hatched the plan for a Lucky Lupitas extravaganza.

The guys at Lucky Lupitas were happy to help out: we could place our order a week in advance and collect before queuing started. This worked perfectly for us, because toddlers eat their dinner early!

As always, the tricky part was not ordering the food but corralling the troops. As soon as you get numbers, work out an order and a per head price, someone always has a change of heart. So there was a bit of last minute stuffing around with the order and I’d really like to thank Lucky Lupitas for bearing with me on that one.

And then the day arrived!

It was a (very) hot day so the lads had to use their muscles to shift the outdoor furniture under the tree (our patio has an old Alsynite roof and, while it’s great for keeping the rain off, my goodness it can’t half get hot and sticky under there in summer!). To maximise the amount of protein in our order (read – beef ribs) everyone brought along something to share, so we had plenty of salads, extra rice, corn chips, salsa and guacamole. One friend, who is Argentinian, brought along Brazilian pão de queijo (cheese bread) to share too. A couple of us headed off to collect the order while those left at home rustled up cutlery and paper plates. When we came back everything was spread over the table and everyone dived in. Our order was mostly Lucky Lupitas famous slow cooked smoked beef ribs (they are amazing – the meat just falls off the bone and they are huge), along with quesadillas, tacos and empanadas. Lucky Lupitas threw in a pile of their own corn chips (apparently excellent but I missed out on those somehow!). Quite a few sides came along with our order so there was extra rice, coleslaw, guacamole and salsa! Everyone raved about the ribs and given the hot day and the extras everyone brought along we probably could have just eaten ribs alone. However, I really like Lucky Lupitas quesadillas and the beef tacos were excellent, with a good spicy hit.

Naturally, we had way too much food but it did mean that everyone who wanted to got leftovers to take home and we still had some very generous leftovers in our fridge!

While the food at Lucky Lupitas is fantastic, this experience is also a lesson in customer service. There is no way that twelve adults and five children could have rocked up to Lucky Lupitas expecting to be fed. If you’ve been there, you’ll be able to imagine what kind of chaos would ensue! But thanks to the team’s flexibility (and hard work) we were able to have a fantastic, and very kid friendly, early dinner.

¡Provecho!

Chicken Quesadilla Recipe

- Alex 2 Comments

Quesadillas

I watch a lot of cooking tv. I’m not a huge fan of the ‘reality’ programs but pretty much anything else I’ll watch – no matter how old school the production values (the really quite awful Four Burners and a Grill) or how much the chef irritates me (er, no names, because that would be just mean).

The other morning we were watching Good Chef Bad Chef. This is one show that irritates me because it kind of ‘works’ under the assumption that the chef using the meat, cream, butter and salt is the ‘bad’ chef, while the nutritionist, whose food is predominantly vegetarian (she uses a lot of seafood) and who uses dairy alternatives, is the ‘good’ chef. Andy always grumpily points out that Adrian usually looks a lot healthier than Janella …

Philosophical issues aside, lots of the food that Adrian Richardson cooks on this show looks really good. On Saturday morning he cooked quesadillas with a prawn filling. Show over, Andy says “we should have quesadillas for dinner”. Wow, I thought, that is going to be one serious pain in the butt to put together.

As we have prawns coming for Christmas, we didn’t want to do seafood so we opted for chicken. I found a recipe on taste which we used as a rough guide.

We began with one onion, finely chopped and sautéed in the wok. We added just one clove of garlic and then half a red capsicum finely chopped.

I finely (super super finely) sliced one chicken breast and the meat was tossed with some ground cumin and ground coriander. The meat was added to the wok and quickly fried.

While the meat was cooking I made a variation on the avocado cream in the taste recipe: half an avocado mashed, mixed with a couple of tablespoons of natural yoghurt and then seasoned.

I also made a quick salsa: one tomato, quartered, deseeded and finely diced (deseeding, while wasteful, does make it a LOT easier to dice the flesh), a quarter of a red onion finely chopped, some chopped coriander, and a good squeeze of lime juice. The following evening I made some more salsa, which I jazzed up with some finely sliced jalapeño peppers and some finely chopped red capsicum. If you use the juice from the peppers you don’t need the lime juice.

To wrap up the quesadillas, we heated a non stick pan, gave it a very light spray with some oil and popped in a wrap. Andy topped half the wrap with some of the chicken mix and a good handful of grated cheddar. Fold the wrap in half and you can add a second wrap to the pan. When the wraps start to become golden, flip them over (not as hard as it sounds if you’re careful). Just pay attention to the heat of the pan as you want the cheese to melt but not at the expense of burning the wrap.

Quesadillas

Serve piping hot with the avocado cream and salsa.

With two of us on the case, this meal took less than 30 minutes to put together. With just the one chicken breast used it’s very economical and it’s also pretty healthy (look at all those vegetables!). Without a doubt it’s something we’ll be making again … especially as we reckon we could manage it on the BBQ during summer!

Arriba Grill Glenside

- Alex 4 Comments

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Disclaimer: James Peebles from Arriba Grill invited us along to the opening Saturday night and Arriba treated us to burritos.

Date of visit: Saturday 18 August 2012

If you’re an intermittent reader of this site, you could be forgiven for thinking we eat a lot of Mexican. And perhaps we do. When James from Arriba Grill got in contact and asked us to pop in for Arriba Grill’s opening Saturday at its new venue in Glenside, I was as keen as mustard.

Due to the way things worked out, we arrived at Arriba uncharacteristically early – around 6pm – and the place was already busy. There is a casual eat in area, but a lot of people were waiting for take away orders too. We chatted to one lady who lived nearby but had been driving out to Prospect for her Arriba fix …

Being Arriba novices, we had no idea what we were doing, so spent a bit too long standing around chatting to people, before we realised we were in completely the wrong spot to hand in our order. At Arriba, you take a card, customise your burrito, place your order and, if you’re dining in, you sit back and wait for your name to be called.

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We both ordered white burritos (one pork, one chicken – wholemeal tortillas are also available, or you can order a bowl which is the burrito without the tortilla), and I opted for the hot tomatillo sauce, while Andy chose medium. There are vegetarian options, very clearly marked on the menu, and, naturally, there are the usual extras: jalapeños, lettuce, cheese, sour cream. The burritos are $10, with guacamole $2 extra. As Zambrero has put up its prices (now $10.50 for a burrito or bowl) Arriba is cheaper.

And Arriba is considerably better. The first thing I noticed was how well wrapped the burrito was – it was really easy to eat and neither of us ended up spilling burrito all over the table or ourselves. A massive plus – I’m always surprised by how some so called ‘street food’ ends up being really difficult to eat, so it was great to be able to stay clean while polishing off my dinner.

The actual tortilla was excellent – it didn’t develop any of the kind of stodgy clagginess that so many commercial ones do. The fillings were both tasty in their own right and I personally thought I had won with the spicy, hot, vinagery tomatillo sauce. I thought it was plenty hot enough but I do have a couple of friends who are Arriba fans who think it could go even hotter …

Service wise, the staff at Arriba actually looked like they were enjoying their work – rather than coming across as bored teenagers earning minimum wage on a Saturday night, there was a genuine sense of engagement with customers.

It’s also noteworthy that many of Arriba’s ingredients are certified organic. While I suspect the debate about the health benefits or otherwise of organic food will rage for years, many people rate the more holistic and sustainable approach to agriculture that comes with organic farming. It’s good to see Arriba Grill wear its colours on its sleeve and demonstrate that this type of food doesn’t have to come with a hefty price tag.

All round – Arriba scored a massive tick from both of us. If we lived near a branch (in South Australia we’re talking Prospect, Cumberland Park and Glenside) we’d be best mates with the staff. If you live near a branch, you’d be wise to start making friends …

After our visit, I took the opportunity to pose a few questions to James about Arriba’s philosophy and plans for the future.

AP: Firstly – Prospect, Cumberland Park & Glenside … not bad for a business that’s been around for about a year … any plans for further expansion, particularly into the city?

JP: We would love to open another store in Adelaide and a city location would be brilliant. Our location choices are based on where our Guests have suggested they would like us most. The community feel afforded to us by having our stores in the suburbs is something we are very grateful for. We get to know our Guests by name, share plenty of good times and feel genuinely included in their lives. The people of Prospect have given us tremendous support and we are experiencing similar encouragement at Cumberland Park and Glenside too. Our hands a quite full at the moment but we’re hopeful a city store could happen in the future.

AP: A lot of the produce you use is organic … what drives that decision?

JP: A lot of the produce we use is organic as we agree with the conscientious methods used in organic agriculture and value the nutritional benefits of eating organic food. We always use organic produce where we can. Having the opportunity to share and in some cases introduce organic food to our Guests is a great thing. Personally I find it reassuring to know where our food comes from and so I make a point of meeting with our suppliers, getting to know them, their product and how they produce it. Being able to pass on that knowledge about our food and its sources to our Guests is hopefully reassuring for them too.

AP: And finally – why do you think Mexican food has taken off in the last couple of years? A few years ago there were only a couple of Mexican restaurants in Adelaide – now they’re springing up everywhere in all types of forms … why?!

JP: Why do I think Mexican food has taken off, oh wow, where do I start?!! That question excites me! I think Mexican food has taken off because it is fun, exciting and full of flavour which can be attributed to combining the best of simple fresh ingredients. It’s affordable, quick and easy to make. Plus you get to enjoy it by eating with your hands. A meal that is fast, casual, healthy and inexpensive ticks a lot of important boxes for many people and so I feel it was only a matter of time before the joy of eating Mexican food caught on.

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