We already knew Mario Batali was the king of all things Italian but who knew he could pull a rockin' Mexican recipe out of thin air? Okay..not really out of thin air. He poached the recipe for Chicken with Green Sauce from his babysitter. But would Mario lead us wrong with any recipe?
So it's not the most glorious looking meal in the world. But put that out of your mind. The hardest part about this recipe was finding the three pounds of tomatillos. Because, of course, I see tomatillos everywhere when I don't need them. But the moment I need them, they become semi-impossible to find.
The tomatillos are husked and cooked quickly in boiling water, along with the garlic and chiles. This is all pureed and the chicken is cooked in the green sauce for about 30 minutes. It's not too terribly time consuming, excepting husking those sticky tomatillos did take longer than I anticipated.
I made Spanish rice with tomatoes and olives, Ryan made refried beans and we put it all together for dinner. The tang of the tomatillos and the spice of the chiles play off each other nicely. Some bites, we would slurp the green sauce with the chicken, others we could scoop it onto a warm tortilla. The green sauce fools you into thinking it's only mildly spicy, building up bite after bite. And there were enough leftovers that we happily ate the chicken and green sauce for two more meals. When the chicken was eaten, we still had leftover sauce to spoon over our eggs in the morning. It was the leftovers that never ended. But they were so good that I was actually sad when they did.
Hey, Mario.. You have any other Mexican meals?


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