Chef It Up with Pati Jinich

Born and raised in Mexico, Pati Jinich loves to cook her native food. “Being from another country fills you with nostalgia and romanticism for your home country,” she says. In her Emmy-nominated series “Pati’s Mexican Table” on PBS, the chef and cookbook author shares the tastes of her childhood intermingled with Mexico’s rich history and culture.  She recently premiered a series called “La Frontera” about food and culture in communities along the Texas-Mexican border “where my two beloved countries meet,” she says. And she also found time to work on a new cookbook, Treasures of the Mexican Table (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021), filled with a wealth of traditional recipes that date back hundreds of years.

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Pati Jinich’s Double-Stacked Shrimp & Cheese Tacos

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Chef’s Tips:

1. It’s important to keep your knives sharpened. It’s very frustrating to prep food for cooking with dull knives.

2. When you’re cooking a new recipe, take time to read the ingredient list and instructions from start to finish, and make sure you have the ingredients you need. Sometimes you think you have an ingredient, but don’t. If possible, try to prep ingredients ahead, too, which makes cooking a recipe easier.

3. Give yourself the time to cook; it’s very important. To get your food right, you can’t be in a rush. The attitude of cooking should be that you should relax a little. This makes cooking a lot more pleasurable.