Stuff Your Quesadilla With Fried Chicken
One of the first foods I learned to make for myself was a quesadilla, in which I folded shredded cheddar into a flour tortilla and toasted it until the cheese melted. It wasn’t authentic or balanced in texture, but for a 7 year old it was good enough.
But even at 7 years old, I could probably cook a “real” quesadilla. In the end, all you have to do is reheat the tortilla in a cast iron skillet and replace the cheddar with the Oaxaca cheese, then pan fry until the cheese is melted (I love it when it pours out and creates a freak-like border). You can add more protein if you want, but I usually don’t, at least not until I saw this Danny Trejo Fried Chicken Quesadilla recipe on Food52.
I first ran into Trejo when my stepdad took me, 11, to a Con Air concert at the Cinerama Dome in Los Angeles. I liked the movie and I liked Trejo for everything else I’ve seen in the sense, but I love this quesadilla more than most movies. His recipe is thoughtful and balanced, with homemade fried chicken and spicy yet creamy kale.
You can and should cook Trejo quesadillas exactly as directed in the recipe , but you can also add leftover fast food fried chicken to any quesadilla, which I did yesterday afternoon.
I went to Popeye’s and got a spicy eight, ate the drumstick immediately after entering the house, then sliced the breast along with a lot of—I mean a lot of—crispy, salty skin. I then put a large flour tortilla in a skillet set over medium heat, let the tortilla warm up a bit, then flip it over and sprinkle an even layer of oaxaca and sliced fried chicken on top. Then I folded it over and fried for about a minute on each side until the cheese melted. (I also made a very lazy version of Trejo cream by mixing adobo chipotle with 1/2 cup sour cream.)
You don’t have to be a food writer to know it’s delicious. It’s hard to go wrong with fried chicken or melted cheese, and pairing the two is almost cheating. (Except that there is no cheating in food, only sports and board games, which is why I prefer food to sports and board games.)
So yes, I recommend listening to Danny Trejo and stuffing your quesadilla with fried chicken, but next time I’ll go one step further and not use skin-only quesadilla meat – decadent, crispy, cheesy, melting, salty business – because the skin – the best part. It definitely looks like cheating, but then again, that doesn’t happen.