Carne-val 2025
I ended up having an oddly full calendar this spring, making it challenging to find weekends for Meatwaves and also no time to fit in another love of mine, patio karaoke. My Memorial Day weekend was completely free though, so I decided to combine the two together into an entire evening shindig that was full of great food, friends, and singing that made this a Carne-val to remember.
I started the day with an old recipe I remembered fondly for Mexican roadside chicken. Instead of whole chickens though, this time I applied the basting sauce to just wings and it turned out even better in my opinion. That's because the acidic and earthy mixture had even more of a presence on wings, making them extra tasty.
Since I had most of the weekend free, I decided to take on some lengthier recipes too, which included a double batch of two different enchiladas. The first were these sweet potato and poblano enchiladas which had those two grilled ingredients paired up with Oaxaca cheese and a tomatillo sauce whose slight sourness and heat paired up well with the sweet and cheesy innards.
The second recipe was for smoked chicken enchiladas with a creamy poblano sauce. I've been using the same red and green enchiladas sauces for so long, I thought it was time to try something new, and this rich, fruity, and lightly spicy sauce delivered the goods to make this a favorite dish of the day.
Another project recipe were these burnt end tostadas. I had purchased an entire brisket and used the flat for a holiday earlier this year, while freezing the point and fat. I defrosted both and rendered the fat into beef tallow and smoked the point until super tender, then diced it up, tossed it with barbecue sauce, and let it cook longer to turn into burnt ends. To make the tostadas, fried tortillas were topped with refried beans, the burnt ends, pickled red onion, pickled jalapeños, Longhorn cheddar, barbecue sauce, and cilantro, all coming together into some delicious bites.
Not wanting the vegetarian contingency to miss out on these, I also grilled up some barbecue tofu and assembled tostadas that swapped that in for the brisket. These were equally as good with an even more pronounced barbecue sauce flavor thanks to light touch of the tofu itself.
As a side offering, I made charred jalapeño creamed corn. I grilled both the corn and peppers before turning them into creamed corn on the stovetop. I had made such a large batch of this that I was sure there would be a ton of leftovers, but this was hitting right for folks and it almost all disappeared by the day's end.
Continuing to go all out for Carne-val, I decided to make ice cream as well, which was once a common practice for me that has fallen to the wayside. One of my homemade favorites is dark chocolate cookies and cream, and since it had been a few years since I last made it, I stuck with this tried and true recipe. Here you see it in my latest addition of stadium ice cream helmets from a recent trip to Kansas City where I had a fantastic couple days of barbecue and baseball.
Kellyn delivered once again on the amazing thematic dessert with these tostada cookies. They always look so perfect that it's hard to commit to eating them, but I had one and they tasted just as good as they looked.
Carne-val on a holiday weekend is sure to attract a crowd, and we had probably 30 or more folks in attendance, but I was pretty bad at getting crowd shots this time around. I did, however, focus on the canine contingency which featured the latest addition of Ravioli.
Trixie made it out, bringing along her human, Christina, who's pictured here with Kris.
Betty made an appearance as well after being sorely missed at the first Meatwave of of the season.
Memorial Day is always a little iffy on the weather since it could already be uncomfortably hot here in North Carolina, but we got a big break with an evening in the high 60s whose cloudiness also let us get the karaoke started a bit earlier than expected. We have Steve here getting things started with a little Frankie Valli.
And the singing kept going into the night, ending a bit before 10:00pm when we put a cap on another excellent Carne-val.
