Mini Party Poblano Quesadillas — The Saturday Night Dinner After the First Jail Visit

Saturday January fourteenth was my first visit to my brother. I want to write about it before I tell you about the dinner, because the dinner came after, and the dinner was the smallest reasonable thing I could put on the table.

The Tulsa County Youthful Offender Unit visiting hours run nine to eleven on Saturday mornings, and Mama and I left the house at eight in the morning to give ourselves a buffer for the drive and the lobby line. We arrived at eight-thirty. The lobby was a long fluorescent-lit room with rows of folding chairs and a desk where a uniformed officer checked names against a printed list. We waited forty minutes. The line moved slowly. The room was full of mothers and grandmothers and a few wives and a few girlfriends and one or two younger sisters like me, all waiting to see somebody.

I want to put on the page that the lobby was the thing I had not been prepared for. I had been prepared for the cells. I had been prepared for the orange uniform. I had not been prepared for the lobby of a county jail at nine in the morning on a Saturday, full of women whose lives had decided to organize themselves around this hour every weekend. The women looked, in their faces, like Mama and me. The women were doing what we were doing. I have decided I am not going to forget that.

We went through a metal detector. We put our purses in lockers. We were allowed to bring a small clear ziploc bag of personal items, but no food. We sat in the visiting room at a small round metal table. Cody was brought in at ten o’clock in an orange jumpsuit and tennis shoes that were not his.

I want to write down what he looked like. He looked thinner than he had on Monday. He looked tired. He had a small cut on his cheek that he said was from shaving. He looked alright. He looked like Cody. He smiled when he saw us. The smile was the smile he has had since he was a kid, the same one, the one that comes up easily and then goes away.

We had thirty minutes. He asked me about school. I told him about the home-ec teaching assistantship, which started this week. Mrs. Rivera has me helping her with the freshman class on Tuesdays and Thursdays after sixth period. He asked Mama about work. Mama told him about the new shoes still feeling good and about how Mr. Pinkston had given her a small raise after the new year, twenty-five cents an hour, which adds up to about forty dollars more a month. Cody nodded.

And then he told us about the inside. He told us about his cellmate, a guy named Marcus from Tulsa who is twenty years old and was sentenced for the same kind of charge that Cody had been arrested on. He said Marcus is, quote, not the worst guy. He told us about the GED program inside, which the unit runs two evenings a week, and which Cody is going to enroll in starting next Monday because the program lasts six months and a finished GED is one of the things on the list of completed programs that he can use to appeal for re-sentencing in six months.

And then he told us about the chow hall. He said the chow hall food was, in his words, the kind of food my sister could fix in a weekend. Mama laughed at that. I want to put on the page that Mama laughed for the first time since Monday afternoon when Cody made the joke about the chow hall food. The laugh was a small one. It was a real one. The visit, more than anything else, was the laugh.

The thirty minutes ended at ten-thirty. Cody hugged Mama. He hugged me. He said, I’m going to be okay, you two. Take care of each other. Then they took him back into the unit, and we walked back through the metal detector and got our purses out of the lockers and walked back through the long fluorescent lobby, and we drove home.

Mama did not cry on the drive. She cried in the kitchen, with the back door closed, for about ten minutes at the kitchen table while I made coffee. Then she stopped. She wiped her face on the hem of her shirt the way she does. She said, okay, baby, I am okay. And we did what we are going to do for the next twenty-two months, which is keep moving.

And the dinner. I made mini poblano quesadillas Saturday night because the day had used up everything else, and because the quesadillas are the kind of dinner you can make in twenty minutes without thinking, and because the recipe had been in my notebook for two weeks and Saturday felt like the night to use it.

The recipe is from Host the Toast. The technique: a poblano pepper roasted whole over the open flame of the gas stove until the skin is blackened, then peeled, seeded, and chopped (the recipe and many YouTube videos walk through this technique, which I had not done before but which is straightforward); shredded chicken from a leftover thigh I had pulled from the freezer; mexican blend cheese; on small six-inch flour tortillas, folded into half-moons, toasted in a dry skillet for two minutes per side until the cheese inside is melted and the tortilla outside is golden and crisp.

The math: one poblano pepper from Walmart, $0.79. A pack of small flour tortillas (the six-inch kind), $1.49 for ten. A half cup of shredded mexican blend cheese, $0.50. One cooked chicken thigh from the freezer, free since I had paid for it weeks ago. A clove of garlic minced into the chicken, free. Salt, cumin, smoked paprika from the rack. Total cost: about $4.20 for ten small quesadillas, fed Mama and me Saturday night and Sunday lunch with leftovers.

The technique on the quesadillas is the dry-skillet toasting. You do not use any oil in the pan. You set a folded quesadilla in a dry skillet over medium heat. You let it toast for two minutes without touching it. You flip. Two more minutes. The cheese inside melts. The tortilla outside crisps. The whole thing comes together in four minutes per quesadilla, and you can run two at a time in a regular skillet.

I made ten of them. Mama had four. I had three. We ate at the kitchen table at five o’clock with a small bowl of salsa and a few spoonfuls of sour cream from the small container in the fridge. The kitchen smelled like roasted chiles and toasted tortillas. Mama said, baby, this is the kind of dinner I needed tonight. I said, I know, Mama. And we ate the rest of the quesadillas and we did not talk much, and we washed the dishes together at the sink, and we went to bed by nine.

Sunday morning Mama got up early and went to First Baptist for the early service alone for the first time. I stayed home and worked on the homework I had not done Saturday. The basil plant on the windowsill is still alive. The pot on the stove from earlier in the week is washed and put away. The new normal is starting to take a shape. We are going to keep cooking.

The recipe is below, the way Host the Toast wrote it. The trick I want you to keep is the dry-skillet toasting — no oil. The cheese inside provides all the fat the tortilla needs to crisp. Roast the poblanos over an open flame if you have a gas stove; if you have an electric stove, broil them on a sheet pan in the oven for about ten minutes, turning halfway. The smoke flavor from the charred skin is the part that makes the dish.

Mini Party Poblano Quesadillas with Homemade Flour Tortillas

Prep Time: 20 min | Cook Time: 25 min | Total Time: 45 min | Servings: 12 mini quesadillas

Ingredients

For the homemade flour tortillas:

• 2 cups all-purpose flour
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• 1/3 cup vegetable shortening or lard
• 2/3 cup warm water

For the quesadilla filling:

• 2 poblano peppers, roasted, peeled, and diced
• 1 1/2 cups shredded Monterey Jack or Mexican blend cheese
• 1 cup cooked chicken, shredded (leftover works great)
• 1/4 teaspoon cumin
• 1/4 teaspoon garlic powder
• Salt to taste
• Oil or cooking spray for the skillet

Instructions

1. Make the dough. Whisk flour, salt, and baking powder together in a large bowl. Cut in the shortening with a fork or your fingers until the mixture looks like coarse crumbs. Pour in warm water gradually and mix until a soft dough forms. Knead for 1 to 2 minutes until smooth.
2. Rest the dough. Cover the dough with a clean dish towel and let it rest for 15 minutes. This makes it easier to roll thin.
3. Roast the poblanos. While the dough rests, place poblano peppers directly over a gas burner or under the broiler, turning until charred on all sides, about 8 minutes. Seal in a zip-top bag for 5 minutes, then peel, seed, and dice.
4. Roll the tortillas. Divide dough into 12 equal balls. On a lightly floured surface, roll each ball into a thin round, about 6 inches across. They don’t need to be perfect circles.
5. Cook the tortillas. Heat a dry skillet or cast iron pan over medium-high heat. Cook each tortilla for about 30 seconds per side until it puffs slightly and gets golden-brown spots. Stack finished tortillas under a towel to keep them soft.
6. Mix the filling. Combine the shredded chicken, roasted poblano, cumin, and garlic powder in a small bowl. Season with salt.
7. Assemble and cook. Lightly oil the skillet over medium heat. Lay a tortilla flat, scatter a small handful of cheese across one half, add a spoonful of the chicken-poblano mixture, and fold over. Press gently with a spatula. Cook 1 to 2 minutes per side until the outside is crispy and the cheese is fully melted. Repeat with remaining tortillas.
8. Serve. Cut each quesadilla into wedges and serve immediately with salsa, sour cream, or guacamole if you’ve got it.

Nutrition (per serving)

Calories: 185 | Protein: 10g | Fat: 8g | Carbs: 19g | Fiber: 1g | Sodium: 210mg