Recipe – Tinga de Pollo

Today Normita had a craving for a Mexican dish she likes a lot ‘Tinga de Pollo’. It is an easy-to-make chicken dish that is very tasty and normally it is prepared very spicy. She prefers to tone down the heat so that the flavors shine through. She first cooked a whole chicken breast bones and all, but without the skin and fat. She prepared at the same time a nice batch of her famous chicken soup and we enjoyed a large bowl first. After picking the cooked chicken into small shreds with her fingers, she prepared the Tinga. We ate it with some tostadas, so the dish became ‘Tostadas de Tinga de Pollo’. The normal way of preparing those is to put a nice coating of refried beans on your tostada (we used chipotle ones), then the tinga, then a layer of heavy cream, some ‘queso fresco’ (grated fresh cheese), top it with some pieces of avocado and it makes a succulent meal. After a few of those you will not need dessert. We did not have refried beans at hand and did not want to open a can of them just for a few tostadas, so we skipped them, and we replace the ‘queso fresco’ with parmesan as we did not have the former. It was a nice filling meal and now I think that it is time to go rest and watch some TV, but first I will go and prepare a lime pie for desert tomorrow as the in-laws are coming to visit.

Ingredients

2 chicken breast halves cooked, then cooled and picked with fingers into thin shreds.
1 medium red onion cut in thin slivers
2 tomatoes seeded and cut into thin slivers
1 clove garlic
2 tsp chipotles in adobo sauce puréed in a blender or to taste
2 tbs olive oil
1 1/2 tsp chicken stock powder

Preparation

1. Boil the chicken until tender and set aside to cool. Follow our recipe for chicken soup.
2. Once cooled pick the chicken apart with your fingers to create thin shreds.
3. In a saucepan put the olive oil and heat at medium-high.
4. Sautee garlic and onions until the onions are translucent.
5. Add the tomatoes and cook for a few minutes.
6. Add the chicken stock powder, the chipotle purée, and the chicken and heat through.
7. Serve as a main dish or as tostadas.

Lucito