How To Make Chicken Tinga Tacos In Your 300-Square-Foot Apartment Just Like You Saw On Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street
How hard can it be?
So you’ve decided to make the chicken tinga tacos you saw on Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street last night.
They looked pretty easy. They’re tacos. How hard could it be? And since you’ve eaten pizza every day for the last two weeks, a little variety is probably a good idea. Google the symptoms of beriberi. See?
First, the Mexican Gen Z hipster guest-chef wearing no makeup and horned-rimmed glasses like Buddy Holly says you’ll need to cook the chicken separately in water like they do in old México.
Since there are no empty surfaces in your 300-square-foot apartment, maybe put the chicken on the fire escape to cool, next to the mummified tomato plants you tried to grow three years ago.
Never throw these away. With a little water, sunlight, and the kind of miracle usually reserved for Catholic saints, maybe they’ll come back.
Next, grind the spices in a molcajete using a tejolote. Buddy Holly says the secret is to hold the tejolote lightly and use your wrist.
It’s important to remember that even though it looks like she’s just pulverizing the fuck out of some dried shit in a hollow rock, it’s much more complicated than that and only fucking losers don’t know how to properly use a molcajete and tejolote.
If you don’t have a molcajete and tejolote, placing the spices in an old plastic pot baggie and pounding them with a broken TV remote also works.
Next, char your vegetables. Buddy Holly likes to char them until they’re “almost burnt”, and by that, she means “burnt.”
Since your co-op probably has rules about large sources of open flame like a built-in grill in a kitchen the size of a hamster habitat, you’re going to have to roast your vegetables over a discontinued Moonlight Serenade three-wick candle from Bath & Body Works.
You want to incinerate the peppers like a marshmallow at summer camp when you got distracted by Emmie Bartelstein’s nipples.
Next, place the vegetables and spices into a 2-quart Vitamix 5201 XL Variable Speed Blender and pulse until smooth.
If you don’t have a 2-quart Vitamix 5201 XL Variable Speed Blender, you can use the Nutribullet you got on sale at Target if you can find it. Remind yourself you should make smoothies more often, but much like men, you only find bananas desirable for five minutes of their entire lives.
Push the cat away from the now-cool chicken on the fire escape and shred it lightly with a fork (the chicken, not the cat), or just use your hands.
Dump the shredded chicken into the sauce and onions that you sautéed earlier.
Oh, you forgot to sauté the onions. Fuck it. It’s probably for the best. Your neighbors still make comments about the swordfish steak you tried to microwave. “Hey, it’s swordfish girl! Make anything that smells like it came out of a whale’s hairy asshole lately?”
Finally, dump the chicken into the sauce, stir it up, and place a heaping tablespoon into each of the crisp, hot taco shells you also forgot to make, so you’re using a stale Tostido, and garnish with fresh parsley.
Pick out most of the cat hair, flip off Christopher Kimball—that Barney Fife-looking mofo—and consider it a win.
You know Bev, I had the grand idea to cook up some of these things but now I can’t. It’s dangerous to be around open flame when you’re bent at the waist from laughing and can’t feel your fingers!