Smoky chili-spiced fajita salad

This meal consists of:

• Smoky chile-marinated fajita steak
• Fried onions
• Sauteed green peppers
• Diced raw red peppers
• Diced avocado (optional)
• Diced tomatoes (optional)
• Fire-roasted corn (optional)
• Crushed tortilla chips (optional)
• Shredded cheddar cheese
• Cilantro chili orange yogurt dressing
• Salad mix

This was the very first meal that I cooked on my diabetic diet — what I made to prove to myself and my husband that we could still eat well within the new restrictions.

My goal was to get the effect of both fajitas and a taco salad — lots of different flavors, colors, and textures, spicy and crunchy and sweet — without a ton of prep work, the need to use more than one pan, or much in the way of leftover ingredients. I wanted the beef to be extremely flavorful, because I was serving it in 2 oz portions (although a calorie calculation afterwards led me to conclude that 8 oz a serving would have been fine). I wanted to pair it with a crunchy salad mix whose dressing would both emphasize the smoke and spice, but also have some sweet coolness to it, but I also wanted a touch of creamy sourness, to hint at the sour cream that I’d normally serve with fajitas but didn’t want to use on this.

I began with pre-cut sirloin steak strips, although this could just as easily be made with a leaner cut (or chicken), fajita-cut flank steak, or the like. I follow a plastic bag technique for marinade — I get a ziplock bag (I use one-gallon Hefty One Zip Freezer bags), put the meat inside, pour marinade into the bag, zip it up, and then massage the meat into the marinade, and stick the bag into the fridge for a few hours. In this case, I used Pasilla de Oaxaca Chile Sauce (contains smoked chiles, tomatoes, almonds, and pineapple), letting the beef sit in it for eight hours.

I made the salad dressing in advance, in order to give it some time to meld flavors in the refrigerator. This consisted of two teaspoons of yogurt, and about half the syrup in an individual serving of Dole Fruit Bowl of mandarin oranges. Then, I added enough ancho chili powder to give the dressing a speckled appearance, two dashes of chipotle chili powder for heat, and enough cilantro to lightly cover the top of the dressing. I stirred it thoroughly, put the lid on, and left it in the refrigerator after a few hours. It tasted entirely different after just an hour — sweet and somewhat spicy, with no hint of the yogurt sourness.

I bought a package of fajita vegetable mix from the pre-cut veggies section of the grocery store. This consists of sliced onions, green peppers, and red peppers. I divided these three ingredients from one another, as I had different plans for each. I diced the red pepper, to use as a raw crunchy garnish on the salad.

At cooking time, I started by melting some salted butter into a skillet. Then, I tossed in all the onions, and fried them in butter until they had browned and become slightly crisp. I removed the onions from the pan and set them aside. Next, I poured the meat into the pan, including the little bit of excess marinade that hadn’t been absorbed by the beef, and let that saute to medium-rare. I removed the meat from the pan and put in the sliced green peppers, letting them get coated with what remained of the chili sauce, and saute until they had softened but were still slightly crunchy.

I poured salad dressing over a mixed lettuce salad blend, topped it with the beef, the sauteed onions and peppers, the raw diced red peppers, and some shredded English Tophat cheddar cheese (a moderately sharp farmhouse cheddar). I would have added a little bit of fire-roasted corn (just thawing Trader Joe’s frozen fire-roasted corn in the microwave) and a little bit of crushed tortilla chips if I’d had them available. I also pondered adding a little bit of diced raw avocado and diced tomato, but decided I was too lazy to bother cutting up more veggies. (Alternatively, the avocado and tomato can be combined with some lime juice and diced onions to make fresh guacamole.) I’ll probably do that next time.

Most of the calories in this salad come from the beef, so portion control primarily consists of figuring out how much beef to serve. With a 2 oz portion of beef, the whole salad is under 300 calories per serving. The onions, peppers, and lettuce account for the 9 carbs (per serving), so any additional garnishes can be chosen based on carb allowance (a quarter-cup of corn is 9 carbs, for instance, while tortilla chips are roughly 1 carb each).

[Via http://foodmath.wordpress.com]