Christiana Aretta writes a journal about food, photography, & toys.

Today’s post is a guest post from Wayne Moses Burke, Executive Director of the Open Forum Foundation and self-confessed spicy-food addict.

“I haven’t been cooking as much recently as I would like to (and perhaps even as much as I should), so this evening was a real treat. I tend to take my time cooking – carefully chopping and lining up the ingredients so that they can combine to maximize their flavor potential. Of course, I don’t really know what I’m doing but it usually works out.

Tonight’s recipe is a perfect example of mis-judging the amount of spice required for the dish. When I first started cooking, I would occasionally do this with salt – that is a hard-learned lesson, and I haven’t done that in a LOOOOOONG time (knock on wood!). See if you can pick out the spice that I was overly exuberant with this evening.

The name for this dish comes from its inspiration. I was looking at what we had to work with and was vaguely reminded of my favorite New Mexican squash dish: Tecalote Squash. This is clearly not the same, but it does allude to it, so I carried that through in the naming convention.

Enjoy!

Ingredients

• bacon fat
• 1 med white onion, chopped
• 3 cloves of garlic, minced
• freshly ground yummy salt
• freshly ground black pepper
• 1/2 bottle cayenne pepper
• a touch of cumin
• 2 lg pieces of bacon, cooked, sliced into strips
• 1 chicken leg and thigh, painfully skinned, deboned, and cut into bite-size chunks by someone inept
• kernels removed from 1 ear of sweet corn
• 1/2 purple pepper, chopped
• 1.75 small heirloomy tomatoes
• 2/3 cup black beans

Preparation

1. Heat the bacon fat over med-high heat in a skillet.
2. Saute the onions and garlic for about a minute. Turn up the heat.
3. Add the chicken and let brown for a minute.
4. Add salt and pepper, cayenne and cumin – keep it moving!
5. Lower the heat to medium and add the bacon. Give it a minute.
6. Follow with the corn, pepper, and tomatoes and a little more salt and pepper. Stir it around nice. Give it a minute.
7. Add the black beans and turn the heat back up to med-high to really get things cooking!
8. Once they are, lower the heat again and let it simmer away until the peppers are done.
9. Serve with tortillas and some sort of dairy because “Holy mother of God! I added too much Cayenne!!” (you can tell because Chris hiccups)

It’s still yummy, though – Chris said so.”

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