Home Cooking

I was starving today when I came home and I was in the kitchen thinking I was just going to eat a couple of flour tortilla's with sliced avocado in them when I realized that I had all the makings of a real "Alarcon" down home meal.






My dad (pictured at left) can make a meal of almost anything as long as he has tomatoes and jalapeno's. He mixes them with potatoes or shredded beef or eggs or spam and even ground beef. MMMMmm good. So I had just a little bit of ground beef left over from the chili beans that I had made yesterday and so I thought I would try dad's recipe.






So I browned the ground beef in a pan with salt and onion powder. While it was browning I sliced and diced the tomatoes and jalapeno's. Once the meat was browned I added first the tomatoes, see below:





These were Roma tomatoes, not the regular big red tomatoes, so they didn't release as much liquid as they should have, but then again they don't have as many seeds and that's why I prefer them. Ok, so after the tomatoes cook with the meat a bit, add the jalapenos, like so...

There you go, and of course this meal wouldn't be complete without refried beans...

Now here I had barely spooned the beans into the pan, so they're not smashed and refried yet. I don't have a "done" picture of them because I let them overcook, just a little bit, without meaning to and they weren't picture perfect. They tasted great but they didn't look appetizing.

And here's the cook, happy and ready to heat up a couple of tortillas and sit down to a meal that brings back her childhood...

My son, Jim got into the mood of cooking after seeing me and decided he'd bake brownies. You can see my tortilla's sitting there on the counter ready to be heated up.

And here's a slice of finished brownies, I decided to slice them with the pizza slicer to make them more camera worthy...

Mmmmmmm Good!