Fajitas

Fajitas are a great way to jazz up a mid week dinner. With a little advance preparation they can be done and on the plate in no time. The bare minimum advance prep is to marinate your meat overnight. If you want to take it a step further and really save some when you start to cook, prep the vegetables in advance too. Start with a flank steak, skirt steak or flat iron steak and prepare the marinade. I used flat iron steak for this recipe. Place the meat in a gallon size freezer bag then add the following marinade ingredients, shake to coat and marinate overnight.
• ½ cup canola oil
• Juice of 3-4 limes
• 2 tsp ground cumin
• 1 tbsp minced cilantro
• 2 tsp dried oregano
• 2 cloves garlic minced
• Kosher salt and ground black pepper to taste
• Splash balsamic vinegar
When you are ready to start cooking, remove the meat from the marinade and pat dry with paper towels, then place in the freezer for 10 minutes before you are ready to start slicing it. This will make the meat easier to cut into thin slices. For the vegetables, slice two onions and julienne one each green, red and yellow pepper. Sauté the vegetables a skillet for about fifteen minutes until they look like this.

While the vegetables are cooking slice the steak against the grain in finger length thin slices. Put the cooked vegetables in a casserole dish, cover and place in a 140F oven to keep warm.
Cook the thin sliced steak on medium high heat for about two minutes per side. It doesn’t take long for the thin sliced meat to cook. Cook the meat in batches so as not to crowd the pan. If you dump all of the sliced meat in the skillet it will stew and come out tough. It will probably take three or four batches to cook the meat. Put the cooked batches of steak in the casserole dish with the vegetables to keep warm.

Once the fajitas are done it’s time to heat the tortillas. Try to find fajita style tortillas as they are a bit smaller, thicker and handle the fajita juices better. Remove the fajitas from the oven and turn the oven up to 350F. Wrap the tortillas in foil and warm in the oven for ten minutes.
While the fajita style tortillas are warming prepare your condiments. Since this was a mid week family style, time saving recipe, I opted for store bought guacamole, salsa and sour cream. Shredded Monterey Jack cheese would be nice also. I served these with tortillas and salsa but I have a good recipe for black bean salad that would be great with this but that’s another post.

If you want to get fancy for guests or treat your family to an extra special presentation there are nice cast iron fajita skillets available for individual service. Place the fajitas on the skillets and place in a hot oven until they sizzle. When you bring them to the table, enjoy the ooh’s and ahh’s. If you use this method you will want to slightly undercook the meat as it will finish cooking in the sizzling skillet.