Chicken Enchiladas

Anyone who knows me fairly well knows for years I have claimed to not be a big fan of Mexican food. Recently though that's changed. I don't know what prompted it, but now I like some Mexican food. And even find myself making it willingly!! Full disclosure here though, I have actually made this recipe for chicken enchiladas once before. But I really liked it, so I wanted to share. And this time I did use a different kind of salsa. I'm a big fan of Guy Fieri's salsa and that's what I used last time. However, this time Husband wanted to try something new so we ended up with this:

(Note my Miss Piggy hugging Kermit cookie jar in the background. It makes me happy.) Both salsas can be found at Walmart, but whatever you want to use will be just great.
This recipe is fairly straightforward, and I don't know if there's really a way to screw it up. The first time I didn't use enough chicken due to a brain fart at the grocery store, but now I kind of like them that way. I don't want the enchiladas to be super stuffed.
Here's my chicken, taco seasoning, sour cream, salsa, and cheese mixture; as well as my salsa and cream of chicken sauce that goes on top.

Fill your tortillas, roll 'em up, and stick 'em in a baking dish seam side down.

Then you pour the salsa and chicken soup mixture over the top of the enchiladas and spread it out so they're all covered. Now the recipe says you can add more cheese "if desired". Um, I don't know about you, but in my world more cheese is always desired. :D

Pop them into the oven, and then you end up with this gloriousness:

Mmm....boy. Easy, but really tasty. I still prefer the Guy Fieri salsa to the one I used tonight, but the enchiladas were still good. Husband on the other hand prefers tonight's salsa. Go figure. We both give this recipe 4 stars.

Bacon Mac & Cheese

Recently Husband and I have been watching a lot of Iron Chef America. We discovered it's on Netflix and well, it's more entertaining than a lot of the other TV offerings out there right now. (Although we love Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. It's hilarious.) Anyway, this week's recipe is courtesy of Iron Chef Michael Symon. You can find it here.

I adore mac and cheese. And I don't know a single person who doesn't love bacon. Win win, right? The recipe calls for alpine-style cheese, so I used gruyère. Side note here: gruyère is hard to find. And expensive. I found it at Harmon's in their fancy cheese island. And honestly I think the cheese was the problem. I should've taken it as a sign when I could smell it as I was grating and didn't like it. I don't have any pictures of the steps because honestly, the recipe is pretty simple. The only thing I had trouble with was chopping the fresh rosemary. I think my knife may not have been sharp enough. Anyway, this is the finished product:

Honestly I found it to be disappointing. And it's probably the cheese's fault. Husband liked it more than I did, giving it 3 stars. I give it 2. I doubt I'll be using this recipe again, but it did give me confidence to try a different mac and cheese recipe in the future because it was so simple.

Baked Sweet and Sour Chicken

My first kitchen adventure featured baked sweet and sour chicken. The recipe I used can be found here. The idea behind the recipe is fairly simple. Cut the chicken into chunks, dip it in cornstarch and egg, pan fry the chicken slightly, pour the sauce over the chicken and bake.

Well...easier said than done. I wouldn't say this recipe was extremely difficult, but it was a bit more involved than I'm used to. And I kind of feel like that amount of effort wasn't equal to the flavor and texture that resulted. But more on that at the end.
First I cut up my chicken. A word on that: kitchen scissors, everybody. They made that task SOOO much easier and faster.

Next I dipped the chicken pieces in cornstarch and egg. No pictures of that, hopefully for obvious reasons. I used the wet hand dry hand method, but still, this got messy. I made a large mess of the kitchen and dirtied probably more plates than necessary as I didn't really know what I was doing. Then I fried the coated pieces, and honestly I probably could have fried them a bit longer.

Chicken pieces went into the baking pan, I poured my sauce over them, and stuck the whole thing in the oven.

The dish bakes for an hour, but the chicken has to be turned every 15 minutes. The first few times I opened the oven, all I smelled was vinegar and it started to worry me.

This is what I ended up with. The taste was surprisingly good. However, I would not say it's as good as Chinese takeout like she does. I really wanted that crispiness you get from Chinese restaurants and didn't get that here. The coating seemed to fall off and just sit in the sauce on a lot of pieces. And I found the sauce to be almost too sweet, which surprised me. For all the work, I don't think the end result was worth it.
Husband gave it 4 stars. I give it 3.

Welcome

Welcome to my cooking blog. I feel like I can make a mean dessert, but I'm not so good at coming up with dinner plans and menus. Grocery shopping isn't something I look forward to because I feel like I have no idea what I'm doing half the time. So here's my plan: I'm going to try a new dinner recipe for me and Husband at least once a week and document my experiences here. Successes and failures. Probably mostly fails. I'll probably post an occasional dessert, but not as many because I feel rather confident with myself in that area. Except for cheesecake for some reason. That seems to be my Achilles heel when it comes to baking. Anyway, I hope you enjoy your time here!