Barbacoa Chimney Changas

Well I'm hosed. My apartment complex recently banned the use of my grill and smoker. It looks like I'll have to spend the remainder of the year either using the communal grill out by the pond or finding other ways to prepare my favorites.

I posted earlier about barbacoa. I used pork for that recipe. I decided to try some barbacoa using beef. I also decided to try roasting the beef in my George Foreman Rotisserie. I was looking more for the spice combination than the actual process of making barbacoa. I'm still stuck in a place and time where I can't dig a pit in my yard. The details of the cooking process have been detailed ad nauseum in this post so I won't bore you with them today.

I decided to eat my barbacoa in a slightly unusual fashion today. I decided to make chimichangas. For this wonderful culinary treat we can thank Monica Flin. In 1922 at the El Charro restaurant in Tuscon Arizona she was making a burrito and accidentally dropped it into the fryer. The rest is history. Chimney Changas were featured in the movie Napoleon Dynamite.

Chimney Changas

You can fill your chimichangas with whatever you want. Chicken, beef and pork are 3 popular options. Usually one will contain some sort of bean product but not always. Also cheese is a popular addition. Place the fillings in the center of a tortilla.
See the paste on the right side?
Fold two ends over and glue together with a mixture of flour and water made into a paste.

Fold the other two ends over and glue again. Fry in oil. You can either do this in a deep fat fryer or in an inch of oil in the bottom of a skillet.

Serve with plenty of garnishes and sauces.
My wife says that those are the best chimney changas ever but she is biased. I thought they were fairly tasty.

If I am remembering correctly, Easy E, a good friend of the blog, is a devotee of chimney changas. If I remember correctly I have seen him order chicken chimney changes on several occasions. I'll have to quiz him to see if my memory serves me correctly.