Ground Beef Quesadillas

"Quesadillas" are a Mexican dish of tortillas filled primarily with cheese, but often with other ingredients like meat and seasonings. In some form, the idea of quesadillas "likely" date back to the Aztecs, but there seem to be all sorts of stories about the origin of this popular food, although no one story has persuaded me to view it as conclusive. I use 6 inch diameter flour tortillas to make quesadillas, and I got eight quesadillas from the amounts in the recipe below, but naturally the amount of filling used in each quesadilla is the deciding factor, so let's say this recipe will make 6 to 8 quesadillas.

 

Ingredients (8 six inch quesadillas):

 

8 flour tortillas (6 inches in diameter)

1 pound ground beef

1/2 cup thinly sliced onion

3 cloves garlic, minced

3 teaspoons olive oil

2 teaspoons ancho chili powder

1 heaping teaspoon dried Mexican oregano (or regular), crumbled in the palm of your hand

1 chipotle (chopped) with a tablespoon of adobo sauce*

2 teaspoons (dry) adobo seasoning**

2 tablespoons thick ketchup

1 tablespoon Maggi or Gravy Master seasoning

2 teaspoons Spanish sweet paprika

1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper

(Optional) 1/2 teaspoon salt (the cheese and some seasonings already have salt)

1 cup shredded mozzarella cheese

1 cup shredded Monterey Jack cheese or chihuahua cheese

 

Add the olive oil to a skillet over medium heat; when heated, add the onion and saute for about 2 minutes, then add the garlic and saute a further 1 minute, stirring the contents about the skillet, then add the ground beef and keep moving it around and breaking it up so that no large clumps of meat are present. Add the salt, pepper, ancho chili powder, dried Mexican oregano and adobo seasoning; mix the seasonings in well throughout the meat. Add the chipotle pepper and adobo sauce, ketchup and Maggi or Gravy Master and mix everything well. Saute further for about 2 minutes, stirring everything around often. Put some of the meat mixture onto 1/2 of each flour tortilla, sprinkle a good amount of shredded mozzarella and some Monterey Jack or Chihuahua cheese over the meat, then fold the other half of the tortilla over the filled side. Fry for 2 to 3 minutes on each side in a nonstick skillet (I don't use any oil in the pan) over medium heat (or you can bake 6 to 8 minutes on a foil or parchment paper lined baking sheet at 400 F). Pay very close attention when frying the quesadillas, and use a cake turner to make sure they don't stick to the pan (nonstick skillet or not, foods still stick).    

 

 * If you are not familiar with chipotle peppers, they are smoked jalapeno peppers. They are typically sold in small cans packed in adobo sauce. Adobo sauce is a dark red sauce made from ground chilies and some seasonings. It is spicy and kind of earthy in flavor.  

 

 ** "Adobo seasoning" is not the same as "adobo sauce." "Adobo seasoning" is a mixture of dry ingredients that form a kind of seasoned salt. It is very popular in Puerto Rico, where many people make adobo seasoning according to their own family recipes. Of course, there are commercial brands of adobo seasoning too. Here is the link to dry adobo seasoning ingredients: https://pontificating-randy.blogspot.com/2017/11/adobo-seasoning.html

 

 

 

WORD HISTORY:

Vehicle-This word is related to many words, including: "via," a word borrowed by English from Latin, to "voyage" and to "convey," Latin-derived words borrowed from French, and it is distantly related to "wagon," "way" and "weigh," all words from the Germanic roots of English. "Vehicle" goes back to Indo European "wegh" which had the notion of "movement, travel, ride." This gave its Italic offspring "weyo" meaning "to carry, to bear, to convey," and this gave Latin "vehere" with the same meanings, which produced the noun "vehiculum" meaning "means of transport, conveyance;" thus also, "carriage or cart." This passed to Latin-based French as "vehicule" and English borrowed the word in the first quarter of the 1600s with likely Latin reinforcement and with the idea of "transport," including that of "a means to administer medication to patients," and "a device used to transport people or other livings things or objects;" seemingly, more and more common in usage as motorized transport became increasingly popular. 

Orange Julius

This frothy and creamy drink tastes a good deal like a "creamsicle." It was developed in the 1920s and refined within a few years to be a creamier and less acidic drink. I use some heavy cream in my version, but you can replace the cream with more milk. 

 

Ingredients (5 to 8 servings, depending upon glass size):

 

12 ounce can frozen orange juice

1 can water

12 ounce can evaporated milk (not sweetened condensed milk)

1/2 cup cream

1/2 cup powdered sugar, not firmly packed

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

ice cubes for serving

 

Put all the ingredients, except the ice cubes, into a blender and blend until everything is well mixed and frothy. Add ice cubes to individual serving glasses and pour the Orange Julius over the ice. If serving later, you can pour the blended liquid into a pitcher and refrigerate, but don't add ice cubes, as they will melt and water down the drinks, but stir briskly before serving to give the mixture its characteristic frothiness and then add a couple of ice cubes to individual servings, if desired.  

 

 

 

 I used a bigger glass for this one ...

WORD HISTORY:

Twitch (Tweak)-These words are related to words like "two," "twin" and "twain," all of which have to do in some way with the number and idea of "two," and they are all from Germanic. The origin of the forms "twitch" and "tweak" is Indo European "dwoh/dwah/duwo," which meant "two," which gave West Germanic (seemingly NOT Old Germanic^) "twikkjon(an)," meaning "to fasten (onto), to clamp (onto)," seemingly originally, "grab or fasten onto with 2 fingers or with 2 pointed objects"), with words in the West Germanic dialects/languages derived from this form meaning "to pluck, to pull, to pick, to grab, to divide something in half (that is, into two parts), to catch or take hold of, to pinch." The Old English verb form was "twiccian" meaning "to pluck, to pick, to take hold of," and this then became "twicchen," meaning "to pluck, to pull," "totwicchen," meaning "to pull apart, to pull into pieces," and "twikken" meaning "to pluck, to pull, to tug." "Twicchen/totwicchen" became "twitch" with the meaning "a quick, usually involuntary, muscle spasm (like a pulling or tugging feeling)," and the verb form meaning "for a muscle to produce such a quick pulling, tugging feeling." "Twikken" produced "tweak" circa 1600, meaning "to pinch or tug on with a fast twisting motion (usually in reference to the nose or cheek)." Some relatives in the other West Germanic languages: German has the verb "zwicken" ("to pinch"), noun "Zwicke" ("a pinch, a tweak"), Low German had? has? verb "twicken/twikken" ("to pinch, to squeeze"), Dutch has "twikken" ((to pinch, to squeeze"). I could not find a form in Frisian. 

 

^ There doesn't seem to have been forms in North or East Germanic from this specific verb. English is West Germanic. Understand, there were other, related, forms in Old Germanic that derived from the Indo European form.   

Mimosa Cocktail

This cocktail uses sparkling wine, likely the best known of which are French Champagne, Italian Prosecco and Asti Spumante, Spanish Cava and German/Austrian Sekt. I tend to use Asti Spumante, but once you select your sparkling wine, all you need is orange juice, and you can use the ready-made type in a carton, mix up some frozen or get yourself some oranges and make totally fresh OJ. It's best to have both the wine and the orange juice chilled when making this drink, which is often served in champagne glasses, but you won't be shot at sunrise if you use other types of glasses, except sunglasses. haha The drink name, "Mimosa," comes from a type of yellow flower known by that name in common usage, but which confusingly is also used for another unrelated flower. The yellow flowers and the drink's yellow color is the common point.    

 

Ingredients (per cocktail):

 

1 part sparkling wine (I use Asti Spumante) 

1 part orange juice

 

Chill both the sparkling wine and orange juice; thus, you don't need ice cubes, which likely would cut into the "sparkling" part of the wine. Add the sparkling wine to the glass(es) first (tilt the glass when adding the wine, so as not to cause too much foaming. Then  

DO NOT STIR, as that will dissipate some of the "fizz." 

WORD HISTORY:

Broad (noun)-From the adjective ^ (thus, of Germanic derivation) in the mid 1600s in the Norfolk region of eastern England, meaning "a river that expands to a shallow lake in flat land," but by the mid 1700s the word itself had broadened into use for the "wide part of things." The early part of the 1900s saw the word used to mean "woman," but exactly why this meaning developed is uncertain, although it could have been a shortening of "abroadwife," a word from the days of slavery, which meant "a married slave woman who worked on one plantation, while her husband worked on a different plantation." This also carried a further meaning of "an immoral woman;" thus also, "a prostitute." "Women with wide hips" may have also been part of the continued development of the word, but "broad" used for "woman" has always had a negative, derogatory sense to it. German has the related "Breite," "Low German has "Breedd," West Frisian has "breed," Dutch has "breedte," Danish has "bredde," Icelandic has "breidd," Norwegian has "bredde" and Swedish has "bredd," all of which mean "width, breadth," but none of these carries the meaning, to my knowledge, of "woman," in any slang form.       

 

^ For the history of the adjective "broad," here is the link: https://pontificating-randy.blogspot.com/2019/05/chicken-la-king.html