Josh and I are planning a trip to WDW in a few months. We are so excited! As part of our countdown to Disney we have decided to make a recipe from Disney every week until we go. We got this great Disney Resorts cookbook for Christmas this year.

We have dabbled in cooking Disney recipes in the past. I bought this Delicious Disney Desserts book a few years ago, but so far the only recipe we have tried is the Maple Creme Brule. It was awesome but it made so much food! Also, it made the whole apartment smell like maple.

Anyway, we thought that making recipes from the book would  help us celebrate our upcoming trip. The books include recipes from Disney Resorts and Parks as well as the Cruise Line. These posts are going to be a little different than my regular recipe posts because I don’t plan on writing up the recipes. For the most part we have made the recipes as they were written in the book and so I feel like it would be wrong to put them here since you could get them from the book.

For our first recipe we decided to try the San Angel Inn’s Beef Tenderloin in Chili Sauce. We decided to start here because we both remember eating at San Angel Inn in Epcot and we eat lots of Mexican food so we thought this would be an easy recipe for us to make. Unfortunately, this recipe turned out to be a little more complicated and confusing than we thought it would be. To start with, two of the peppers for the chili sauce are actually dried peppers: pasilla and guajillo. However, the directions for their use was definitely written as though the peppers should be fresh, “Broil until skins are blackened.”

Josh and I were able to find the dried peppers at our local international market. However, as the directions were written for fresh peppers we hit the internet to figure out what the fresh equivalent of the peppers would be. This was actually more difficult than I thought it would be. It turns out that pasilla is a general term for green peppers and poblano peppers are often mistakenly called pasilla pepper. Well, we both love poblanos but the recipe separately called for 2 poblanos! We couldn’t find any of the fresh peppers at the grocery store so we ended up using some spicy red peppers and some Korean peppers. I was very worried that the chili sauce was going to be outrageously spicy and inedible. In fact, the chili sauce smelled very spicy when I put it in the blender but it ended up being fairly mild.

Here is the final product

Surprisingly, the beef was not as spicy or as flavorful as we had anticipated! The chili sauce was also very watery. This was more like a soup than I thought it would be. We served the beef with some flour tortillas, some yellow rice, and some black beans. The beef recipe called for 2 pounds of beef so we had a lot of leftovers! We ended up using the rest of the beef to make some enchiladas.

The black beans were something I came up with after a quick internet search and they turned out really well!

1/4 cup diced red onion

1 clove garlic

1 tsp vegetable oil

1 can black beans, rinsed and drained

1 can Rotel (we used cilantro lime)

1/2 tsp cumin

1/2 tsp oregano

Lime juice to taste

Chopped cilantro and green onions to garnish

Over medium heat, cook the onion and garlic in the oil until translucent. Add the beans, Rotel, and spices and heat through. Add lime juice, cilantro and green onions.