Cheesy Pepper Jack Potato Chowder

The weather here this week has been glorious. Cool and rainy all week. Love it. I love fall. So, with this lovely fall type weather, I decided it would be the perfect time to try a soup recipe. (Unfortunately, it's supposed to heat up again next week. Boo....) When I told Husband what was for dinner tonight, he said, "So basically, potato soup." Sigh...

Anyway, this recipe starts out with bacon. Always a good place to start. The key here though, is to not get distracted dicing your celery and shallot so that you burn the bacon like I did. So I salvaged what I could, but it wasn't much.

After smacking yourself for burning the bacon, continue on with the recipe and cook your celery and shallot. Yes, I know the recipe calls for 2 cloves of garlic. I'll go on record here now and say I do not like garlic. Nope. At least, when I can notice it in a dish. So I didn't add them. It wouldn't make much sense for me to buy a bulb of fresh garlic, as I know I would not use it. So I sprinkled in a bit of garlic powder to make up for it.

After your veggies have softened, add the rest of the ingredients-except the cheese. This really is a fast soup. Bonus!

Once the soup has thickened, go ahead and add the cheese slowly so it can melt.

After the cheese is all melted, you're good to go. Unfortunately, I couldn't make my pictures of the soup look as pretty as the ones from the original blogger.

Regardless of how not pretty it looked, it was really good! I'm excited to try this recipe again and not burn the bacon. :P I'd give the recipe 3 stars, with potential to easily make it up to 4 when tried again with correctly cooked bacon. Husband says the same.

Taco Pizza

This recipe borrows from a couple different places. For the dough, I used Pioneer Woman's recipe. Pretty straightforward, although I didn't have active dry yeast. I had instant. And according to King Arthur flour, they can be used interchangeably. So guess what I did!! I made the dough yesterday, as per her suggestion that it will taste better if made at least 24 hours in advance.

Most recipes I found for taco pizza used ground beef, but I stumbled upon one using chicken. I liked this idea better, so that's what I did! Cooking the chicken was easy enough. I cooked two breasts instead of one, as it's impossible to find just one chicken breast unless you have a big package of frozen ones...which I don't.

After the chicken was ready to go, I spread out the dough on a cookie sheet. Side note here, I'd forgotten how much of a pain it can be to try to spread pizza dough. The dough was sticky and had a tendency to tear, but the store bought doughs I've used have been that way too. Such is pizza dough, I suppose.

The cheese mixture I used was my own random concoction of a bit of leftover mozzarella, Monterey jack, and a bit of cheddar. I didn't measure any of these, just eyeballed what looked good. I'm a rebel that way. ;)

I decided to put the chicken underneath the cheese, but it can go on top if that's how you'd prefer to roll with your pizza. The idea to use salsa instead of pizza sauce came from the same place I got the chicken recipe from. This really made a difference!

(I actually really like this picture. Have you noticed I broke out my fancy camera instead of just using my phone for this post?)

I baked the pizza according to the directions from PW's dough recipe. It says to bake 12-15 minutes, I baked for 12 to be safe.

Oh my gravy, folks. This was good! The crust was crispy, yet soft. And using salsa for the sauce added a little kick that really made this different. Next time though, I may bake it a bit longer to make the crust a bit firmer towards the middle of the pizza. 4 stars from me and Husband, we'll definitely do this again.

Spreads

*I never said I'd only post dinner recipes on this blog. Mostly dinner yes, because I'm trying to learn to cook. But sometimes I like to try new sweet recipes too.*

Sometimes I watch the Food Network. Actually, I watch the Food Network a lot. It's how I know a fair amount about foods I've never tried. Anyway, Pioneer Woman made these on her show yesterday. Ya know, sometimes I can't watch her because she's just so darn perky. But she does make good food. She calls them spreads, I'd probably call them cookie bars. But. They're super easy and you likely have all the ingredients in your pantry already.

Mix brown sugar and margarine.

Add an egg.

Am I the only one who thinks cookie dough looks weird after you add an egg but before you add the dry ingredients? Just me? Okay.

Add flour, salt, and vanilla.

Spread the dough on a cookie sheet as best you can. The dough is kind of sticky.

Note my peanut butter and chocolate chips and M&M's in the background. Those will be used soon.

Bake! The recipe says 15-20 minutes, I did 15 because I do not like crunchy cookies. Cookies need to be soft. End story.

So the recipe says to add 6 ounces (I think) weight of chocolate chips. I'm not going to weigh my dang chocolate chips, just eyeball it, folks. And I used the peanut butter and chocolate mix why? Because I can! And peanut butter and chocolate belong together.

Stick the spreads back in the oven for a minute so the chips will get melty then spread them all over.

Now she stops here with the recipe, but I didn't. I sprinkled some M&M's on top. Again, why? Because I can!

I thought I was going to wait until they'd cooled to taste them, but my self control isn't that good. And they're really good. I think these would be great for those days when your child reminds you at 9pm that he told his class he'd bring treats to school the next day. The recipe can easily be doubled or tripled, and you can add whatever toppings you want. 4 stars, this one will stay in my recipe arsenal.

Cheesy Jalapeño Lime Chicken Enchiladas

Guys. I was super excited about this recipe. It instantly sounded good when I first saw it. The recipe is from the same blog I got the chipotle pulled pork recipe from, so I figured it had to be good. She has great Mexican recipes. Yikes...I need to stop saying recipe.

Anyway, I started off by getting all my prep work done to make life easier for myself when I started cooking.

I was very careful to make the jalapeño very well minced. I don't know about you, but I don't want to bite into a big chunk of jalapeño. Maybe I didn't need to be so careful, as I'll explain in a bit.

I cooked my chicken in my cast iron skillet because I'm dumb and thought cast iron is non-stick. It is not. The chicken did stick a bit, but it wasn't too bad. More just annoying than anything else.

Honestly I probably could have just used a rotisserie chicken and been just fine, but I wanted to give it a go. Next time I might do that just to save myself a little time. It's not a difficult method of cooking chicken though, and it turned out really moist.

Making the sauce was pretty simple.

Melt butter and olive oil. One thing different here-I didn't have any unsalted butter, so I just used salted and left the salt out of the spice mix to make up for it.

Add the jalapeños and cook for just a few minutes.

Add flour and cook for a few more minutes. During this process, my jalapeños started to turn brown. And it freaked me out a bit as I wasn't sure if that was supposed to happen or not. They didn't smell like they were burning, but still. This is why I said maybe I didn't need to be so worried about mincing them as finely.

I took this picture while I was whisking in the chicken broth and spices (minus the cayenne pepper. I didn't have any, I wanted to see how spicy this would be without it.) Apologies for the weird blurriness. You can see how dark my jalapeños turned and why I was concerned.

Here's the sauce after adding the lime juice and sour cream. And my dirty burner. Yuck, sorry about that...

I opted out of using the optional vegetables she mentions for the filling just because I wanted to keep it simple for the first try. I didn't, however, increase the chicken like I was supposed to in that case. Oops.

At this point Husband came in and tried some of the chicken and said "Ooh! You could put that on a sandwich and I'd eat it!" Good sign! So that made me feel better about the dark peppers.

Time to get rolling!!

After they bake, you get this loveliness:

Hello, pretties. Don't you look delicious today...and taste delicious too! These are really good. 4 stars from both Husband and me. I don't know if I'd say they're better than the chicken enchiladas I've posted about earlier, but they're different. So let's call them a nice twist. The recipe is a bit more involved since you're making your own sauce, but man is that sauce yummy. Next time I may strain the jalapeño pieces out after it's all cooked, just because they seemed a bit funny to me, but Husband didn't seem to notice. Either way, this recipe is a keeper!! Oops, I said recipe again....

Baked Ravioli

Guys, I found my 8x8 pan! It had fallen back behind the drawer underneath our oven. Go figure. So since I found my pan, I knew I wanted to make this recipe. I love carbs. Potatoes, pasta, bread....those things make me a happy girl.
Anyway, to the recipe. It's pretty easy, which is another plus for pasta. However, I've never used pasta that isn't the hard stuff in the boxes, so when I dumped it in the water, I had no idea if it was supposed to float. Because it did. So I just kind of pushed the ravioli down into the water with a wooden spoon while it cooked.

The sauce was super easy and fast.

Now when I dumped the ravioli into my pan, it had gotten all stuck together in the shape of my strainer. Go figure. So I had to kind of break it up to spread smoothly in my pan.

I stuck it in the oven, and when it came out, you couldn't even tell I'd somewhat mutilated some of the ravioli.

I sprinkled some dried basil on top instead of fresh, and once again had it in my head that we have grated parmesan, but we don't. But this was still really good. And it's good because you can use any kind of ravioli you'd like, it doesn't have to be cheese. Husband and I both give it 3 stars. (Also if you haven't picked up on it, I'm using the movie stars system. 4 is the top, not 5.) It's a great keeper for when you need something quick.

Cheddar Ale Soup

Here's recipe number two for today. Again, both can be found here. Before I dive too much into the recipe, let me just say: the beer aisle of the grocery store really needs to be more dummy friendly. Husband and I don't drink, so I had absolutely no idea how to pick a decent pale ale. Not to mention I only needed a cup of the stuff. The smallest amount I could find was a pint. "This my friend, is a pint!" Lord of the Rings, anyone? No? Alright.
Moving on! I chopped up all my veggies and Husband grated the cheese and measured the ale before I got started cooking just to make my life a little easier.

Since Husband invited some friends over, I wasn't totally on top of my game of photographing the steps in the recipe. Sorry. But here's what it looked like before I blended everything up in my Ninja (we don't have an immersion blender) and added the cheese.

And here's the finished product:

The verdict was this: the pretzel bowls were extremely well received. We just ripped them into chunks and dipped the chunks in the soup since they ended up too flat to be used as actual bowls. Loved on all accounts. The soup itself was not so fabulous. The two recipes need each other. The soup is good with the pretzel, but by itself it's not that great. So I guess I'd have to say 4 big stars for the pretzel bowls from everybody, and a consensus of 2.5-3 stars for the soup. I can't say if I'll be making this again, as the soup can't really stand up on it's own, but the pretzel recipe is a definite keeper. Argh.

Soft Pretzel Bowls

Last week got away from me. My bad. So today I've got two recipes!! Both of them can be found here. Making the bowls wasn't very hard, it's just a bit time consuming waiting for the dough to rise and all that good stuff. But I mixed everything up in my stand mixer, using my dough hook (ashamedly for the first time) and then plopped it onto my counter.

Yes, those are our cat's paws in the background. He likes to hop up and watch me cook. I kneaded it before I took this picture, too. Failed to mention that. Anyway, I let it rise and kneaded it some more before forming it into two not so attractive balls.

 The hardest part of this recipe probably comes in the putting your dough balls into the boiling baking soda and sugar water. Mine got pretty deformed and deflated.

At least, the one on the left really did. Yikes. I don't know if I can even call that a bowl now. After baking, they definitely look and smell like soft pretzels. Seriously, my apartment smells fabulous right now. I can't really give them a rating on taste right now as I'm waiting for dinner to make the soup and put the whole thing together. But, they really aren't as difficult as I was fearing they might be, so that is going in their favor at this point in the day. Stay tuned for part number two of this double kitchen adventure!