There is a little Mexican Food restaurant down the street from us that we really love. We started going there years ago when we could walk up and immediately get a seat. Now days, the place is packed and the wait for a table can take an hour to an hour and a half on any night of the week. I’ll admit, we been going there enough and know enough of the staff that we RARELY have to wait that long. Mysteriously, our name usually floats to the top of the list and we get seated pretty quickly!
This restaurant doesn’t prepare much of the run-of-the-mill Tex-Mex and instead focuses on interior Mexican food. This dish is one of our favorites but it was difficult to find a recipe online that really matched the one at our favorite neighborhood restaurant. This is our attempt to combine the different recipes we found online and come up with a suitable homemade version that doesn’t take hours to make. All the recipes we found called for cooking times of 6 to 10 hours, while ours only takes 2 hours total time for prep and cooking.
UPDATE – we started to think this is a little too creamy. Recently, we cut back the Nuefchatel Cheese to 1/2 package and added about 1/4 cup of whole milk instead of the original ingredient of 1 package.
Ingredients
- 2 pounds of beef tips, cut into 1/2 inch cubes
- 1 cup roasted corn
- 4 chipotle peppers finely diced and the sauce from the can
- 2 teaspoons butter (or vegetable oil)
- 1 large onion, chopped
- 3 cloves of garlic, chopped
- 3 poblano peppers, chopped (you can substitute green peppers)
- 1 cup sliced mushrooms
- 1 can of chopped tomatoes
- 1/2 teaspoon cumin
- 1/2 can beer (to help tenderize the beef)
- 1/2 package of Neufchatel Cheese
- 1/4 cup of whole milk
Directions
Brown the beef tips in a large dutch oven over medium-high heat. As it starts to get completely brown, add in the roasted corn, chipotle peppers and the beer. Turn the heat down to medium and simmer.
In a separate pan, melt the butter over medium-high heat and then add the onion. As the onion starts to soften, add the garlic, cook for 3 or 4 more minutes, then add the poblano peppers and mushrooms. Cook for until the pepper start to get tender, about 3 or 4 minutes.
Add the onion, garlic, and pepper mixture to the beef in the dutch oven. Mix this all together and then add the tomatoes. Once this is mixed together, cover and simmer for 1 hour to 1 hour & 30 minutes, stirring occasionally. In the last 10 minutes, add in the cheese milk. The cheese gives it a rich, creamy texture and enhances the dish.
We served ours with black beans and some tortillas.