Burrito Bowls Featuring Chipotle Salad Dressing

The first weekend of quarantine when everyone was panicking and hoarding, the grocery stores were completely cleaned out of our usual staples. Wegmans literally had one package left in the meat case and it was a giant 5 lb. vacuum-sealed baggie of pork belly. Since beggars can't be choosers, we bought that and ended up cutting it in half and making carnitas and freezing the rest. The carnitas were so good, I ended up making carnitas with the second half after it defrosted. I roughly followed Rick's recipe on Bon Appetit, except with my own flair.

I had been craving Chipotle for a little while so I also ended up whipping up a dupe for their salad dressing and drizzled that over burrito bowls. Ita wasn't an exact match for Chipotle's dressing, but it comes close and is really delicious. Burrito bowls are great because you can get really creative with the ingredients. Tomatoes, avocado, jalapeno, cilantro, rice, beans, cheese, lettuce, cabbage, peppers, and onions are what we used but whatever you have on hand and whatever you like really works. This ends up being a great self-isolation meal because it's such a flexible dish.

Ingredients [yields ⅓ cup dressing]:

2 to 3 chipotle peppers in adobo
¼ cup red wine vinegar
3 tablespoons olive oil
2 to 3 tablespoons honey
3 cloves garlic
3 to 5 sprigs cilantro
1 tablespoon A1 steak sauce
½ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon pepper

The dressing is super easy to put together. Just grab all of the ingredients and blitz together in a blender or food processor until smooth and it's good to go. Let it sit for 20 minutes or so just to allow the flavors to develop before using. Because there's raw garlic in it, this time is helpful for calming down its potentially spicy bite.

This dressing keeps well in the fridge for a week so it can be made ahead and used for multiple meals throughout the week.

Serve the dressing alongside your favorite burrito bowl components and dig in!

The dressing has a light smokiness from the chipotle peppers, the honey adds sweetness, there's a bright acidity from the red wine vinegar, savoriness from the garlic and the A1 sauce, and I love the floral punch from the cilantro.

Here's the recipe page for the dressing: