Food that makes you happy

In case you didn't get a chance to read the April Fool's Lesson post, hop down there and read it.  I'm still laughing at it.

Last weekend, anticipating the busyness of the holiday weekend, I planned a dinner for Sunday evening that could be cooking all day while we were gone.  It's so sad to come home exhausted from a weekend of partying, only to have no food to eat.  Kids need routine, and no matter how much we stuff ourselves all weekend, they still cry for dinner.
So, here's a good one I share with you.

Crockpot Apricot Beef Tacos with lime cilantro sauce.

The recipe I found was actually for pork quesadillas with brie and mango barbecue sauce, but the girls think the texture of pork is funny, I think brie is expensive and funny, and I thought apricot sounded good, so I went with the basic idea of the recipe, just changed all the ingredients. :)

3lbs brisket
1 jar of apricot preseres
1 4oz can of chopped green chiles (mild for us)
salt
cumin
water
garlic
1 chopped onion

I salted and cumined both side of the slab of meat and lay it in the bottom of the crock pot.
Throw on a few cloves of minced garlic.  I used a couple teaspoons of the pre-minced, bottled garlic.
Scoop out all that wonderful preserved apricot and spread it over the meat.
Throw in your chopped onion.
Dump the lovely chopped green chiles in there too.
Fill with water until the meat is covered.
Set your crockpot to 10 hours or the lowest setting. I cooked mine from the Sunday school hour until 12:30 (3 hours) and then turned the meat over.  At this point I also added a bit more water to make sure the meat was covered.
Then we ran off to Grandma's house.  When we came back 5 hours later, the meat was perfect. That's 8 hours total on the lowest setting.

I scraped off the fat (ew).  Cut the meat against the grain so that it shreds easily.  Then don't go dumping all that good juice the meat cooked in.  Put your chopped meat into a heat-safe glass bowl.  Get a slotted spoon and scoop out the onion, chiles, and whatever sweet apricot juices come with it, and add it to the chopped meat.  The sweet sauce is magical.  So I scoop rather quickly to ensure I'm slopping enough juice in there too along with the onion and chile chunks.

Have your husband grill the chopped bell peppers and onions in a grill basket, having been tossed with olive oil and salt.  Sometimes I just sauté these in a pan on the stove, but we have found that the taste the grill delivers is superior.

While your meat was cooking in the crock pot you should have been making your creamy cilantro sauce:

Pluck the leaves from one bunch of cilantro.  You want anywhere from 1/2 cup to 1 cup of leaves. Toss those into the food processor, or your great blender.
Thaw 1, 8oz block of cream cheese and add that to the cilantro.  It really does needs to be truly thawed.
Pour in 1 can of rotel (do NOT drain!).
Add 1 squirt of lime juice
1 or 2 cloves of garlic
A smidgen of salt

Process or blend until it's beautiful.

Into your warm tortilla fork some apricot-sweetened brisket, some blackened, grilled peppers, and spoon the creamy cilantro sauce.
It's messy, but we smiled all through dinner.