Chili Lime Beef Wraps: A Tale of Love, Loss, and Excuses

Looking at our blog from time to time and calculating the number of days that pass between entries sometimes, I could see how you would think we are lazy and never live up to our promises.

I could see that.

I could see it because, for the most part, you'd be right. A very successful, well-loved businessman in Cleveland, Umberto Fideli, once told me, "Always underpromise and overdeliver." He was speaking to a group of us on the topic of networking at a PR firm at which I was formerly employed. Mr. Fideli is someone that I greatly admire, and I took his words to heart. Why then, do we say that we'll do one thing on this blog and often do another? Well, for a few reasons.

First and foremost, you may have figured out at this point that I am in many ways the "captain" of this blog, having started it and, for the most part, having managed it over the course of its existence. I am not the most entertaining writer and I am not the best cook, but part of running something is knowing when to recruit people more talented than yourself. All of this being said, I get fanciful ideas about how to improve the blog from time to time, and in my zeal I share these ideas with you via blog posts. In my excitement, I often talk to Matty and Deering about how we could pump out more posts, try new recipes, improve our social media presence, and generally kick a bit more ass around here. They nod, say something along the lines of, "sounds good, man", and then go about their lives.

I do not fault my compatriots for being busy people, but the fact of the matter is that we are a bit too disorganized and generally tied-up to get a lot of stuff done around here. It isn't that we don't try - take the subject of this post, for instance. Matty, Britta, and I made "chili lime beef wraps" about a month ago, had a great time making them, and they even tasted pretty darn good. We had our girlfriends over for dinner while we made the wraps; it was a lot of fun. When it was all over, I talked to Matty and asked him to write up the post on the wraps and he agreed to. Here we are a month later now, the recipe has been lost (it was on one of those recipe cards you find around Heinen's or any other grocery store), and he never got around to writing the post.

The chili lime beef wraps were not the first casualty of our forgetfulness... We have made dishes before, some very intricate, expensive ones, even (especially when Deering is involved because he knows what he is doing more than we brothers do); we just forget to write up the posts, lose recipes, or can't recall details until it is too late to rectify the situation.

If you are reading this far and are thinking to yourself, "Boy, this is the longest excuse I've read all day", I feel for you. I'll cut out my ramblings soon enough; I just want to let you guys all know how things work around here. We haven't been fair to our readers, we haven't undertaken enough culinary projects, and we haven't got our crap together as far as organization is concerned. I'll ask that my fellow Conquistadors sign off on this post so that it is not simply one more "pseudo-promise" that we're going to go back on.

I am going to dedicate more time to making sure that this blog is something that I can be proud of at all times.

I know that blogging (at least for the vast majority of people) is about fun, and I intend to keep it that way. This isn't going to become work, but I still want to treat it with respect. I don't see us getting back any of the posts that we've "lost" in the past, but I also don't intend to let any more slip through the cracks. Conquistadors are adventurers, and sometimes you take a wrong turn or fall in a pit of quicksand/snakes/Alamo Soup. You gotta know how to learn from your mistakes and press on, more savvy than you started out.


Fall is a ballin' season and there are a lot of fun recipes (and beer pairings) to go along with it. Let's make the most of it and enjoy the culinary landscape this autumn, together.

My Hands Were Thai-d.

"So you've made this before?"

"Kinda, Whitney and I made something like this."

"But you have a recipe."

"Well yeah, but mostly I used it for rough list of what to buy. I'm making a lot of it up..."

"Oh... well you know I want to put this on the blog, I mean it's pretty exotic. I've never even had Thai food. How much of that sauce did you put in?"

"Um... whatever is gone from the bottle?"

"O..k... and the soy sauce?"

"I'd say like, 8 long drips?"

"I don't think a 'drip' is a standard measurement."

"Probably not..."

"Err... Erin, look, the point of this blog is somewhat just to log our escapades, but also the idea is that a person would be able to remake a recipe themselves based on what we write... Have you measured anything?"

"No. I put about a fifth of the bottle of cayenne pepper sauce in though. That is sorta a measurement?"

"I can't cook with you anymore."

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Matty, we miss you.

The Conquistadors, or Conquistador + guests, have been at it again folks! This time the undertaking was something truly exotic - Thai food.

Now I, dear readers, have never experienced Thai food. I realized how astoundingly hard to believe this must be given the culinary expertise exhibited on this blog regularly, but alas, Thai has not previously been part of my repertoire. All I know about Thai food is that it is supposedly peanut-y and spicy.

If that is truly all it takes for a Thai dish to be wildly successful, then hold your hats and try not to fall out of your seats - this one's an award winner.

That is, if you can actually make it.

As you may have effectively gleaned from the introduction to this wonderful post, we had some... issues with the bookkeeping. My lovely guest Erin was the chef de cuisine for this meal and apparently they teach cooking a little bit different in the far-off, secluded land of Indiana.

It was her opinion that food is to be made in the moment - a rough idea of ingredients and process and an adventurous spirit is all that it takes to make a memorable dish. This is a commendable idea to be certain; the Culinary Conquistadors exist not because of our years of training in the crafting of food, but because of our desire to submit to good old-fashioned trial and error. This approach to cooking, unfortunately, has two side effects. The first is that you, the reader of this laudable blog, have very little information to go off should you wish to re-create this dish, and secondly it seems that the less you follow directions, the spicier food becomes.

This second point may merit further research.

Anyhow, as things stand I will do my best to relay to you at least what ingredients were used and will post a link to the recipe on which this creation was roughly based... I wish you the best of luck should you attempt to follow our path.

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Our Ingredients
- Creamy Peanut Butter
- Red Bell Pepper
- Green Bell Pepper
- Soy Sauce
- Spicy Thai Chili Sauce
- Garlic (cloves)
- Paprika
- Chili Powder
- "China Bowl Five Spice Powder"
- Classic Olive Oil
- Sweet & Hot Mustard
- Large can of Tyson chicken
- Small can of Tyson chicken
- Brown Sugar
- Spring Roll Skins
- Red Onion
- Cayenne Pepper Sauce
- Lots o' TLC

I won't attempt to place any measurements on any of these ingredients as, to be honest, they'd be wrong. The assembly itself wasn't too difficult. Before starting, pre-heat the oven to 350 degrees. Next, mix everything (that isn't the spring roll skins) in a medium mixing bowl. Start with the peanut butter, add peppers, garlic (pressed), sauces, and spices, then chicken last. Be tasting the mixture as you progress, deciding on level of spiciness. Be aware, my fingers (24 hours and at least two-showers of scrubbing later) still smell like garlic.

Peanut butter seems to absorb spiciness from things such as chili powder, pepper sauce, or thai chili sauce, but baking seems to lessen the mitigating effect of the peanut butter. For this reason you may want to continually augment the mixture with more spicy additions, but be aware that the final product will probably end up slightly spicier than the pre-cooked mixture. I don't claim to understand the physics. I blame oils.

Once your mixture is "up to snuff", lay out your spring roll skins (or any sort of asian wraps ought to work). The Vietnamese wraps we used were made of rice starch primarily, and were extremely brittle... You honestly couldn't tell they weren't ultra-thin plastic circles. For this reason they will break when you try to bend them. The solution, we found, is to take the wraps and wet them beforehand... we rotated the wraps in a large salad bowl of water to give them pliability.

Take a wet wrap, place it on a plate. Take some of the filling-mixture you just created and place a line of it off-center atop the flat wrap: maybe an inch-wide line of mixture, about three inches long would be good. Take the edges of the wrap and fold it burrito-style. Here is an explanation I found on how to do this. Lay the filled rolls on a butter-coated baking sheet (will help prevent sticking). We made enough to comfortably fill one sheet with some space between the rolls (as a point of reference). Place the sheet in the oven, and begin cooking. I am unsure exactly how long we left ours in for, but check them periodically every 5 minutes or so after the first 10 minutes to check temperature and whether they seem to be baked.

Once you remove them from the oven the rolls should be ready for consumption - don't worry if they aren't pretty... they aren't really supposed to be. We chose to pour some of the extra Spicy Thai Chili sauce to garnish the rolls / for dipping; I would recommend trying this as I thought it worked out well IF you want it extra spicy. Otherwise you may want to skip it.

The final result was good, tasted much like I believe it was supposed to, just bowel-shakingly spicy given our zeal for heat. To be quite honest there is a high likelihood of your digestive system being in a bit of disarray after this one. Here is the link to the real recipe. You'll note that it is clearly not at all what we produced, but should give you an idea of some of the measurements.

Erin, unfortunately, had to head back to Indiana today, but she did succeed in leaving us a "recipe" and a lesson: "winging-it" can lead to a positive outcome!

With the return of Matty on Monday our culinary team will once more be complete. Best of luck on this recipe and try not to burn off ALL of your tastebuds... more concoctions (and hopefully more witty writing) will abound in the near future!