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!

Cheesy Quinoa

This week's recipe (found here) happened mainly because I was looking for something I already had the ingredients for in my pantry. I don't normally keep quinoa on hand, I'm definitely not a health food nut, but I had it leftover from last week. Honestly I wanted to try a different recipe a bit more, but for the life of me I cannot figure out what happened to my 8x8 baking dish. It's so strange.
Anyway, my love of mac and cheese isn't a secret. And Husband did actually say something about trying some form of cheesy quinoa last week. So I gave it a shot. The recipe is very simple. This is not a pretty recipe, at any point in cooking.

One word describes this recipe in my mind: bland. I even used more cheese than the recipe calls for (2 cups), because there is no such thing as too much cheese. I could smell the cheese as I mixed it, and pulled it out of the oven, but dang if I couldn't taste it. :( But the weird thing is it wasn't necessarily bad. I think it could have potential with LOTS more flavor added somehow. And, obviously, more cheese. I know this was supposed to be a light recipe, but...come on. Husband gives it 3 stars, I give it 2.

Quinoa Chicken Parmesan

I love chicken parmesan. I've never tried quinoa, inside or outside of my own kitchen. But with it's sudden popularity for being ridiculously healthy, I decided I would give it a whirl. The recipe I used can be found here. For starters, I didn't even know there are different kinds of quinoa. There was white quinoa, traditional quinoa, and quinoa with some different flavorings thrown in. I decided to buy the traditional.

First, I cooked the quinoa. I babysat it, since I've never made it before and really wasn't sure of what I was doing. There are so many tutorials about how to cook quinoa online, that I was convinced there was going to be some sort of learning curve. But honestly, it's no more difficult than cooking rice.

The recipe calls for two chicken breasts cut in half crosswise, but I totally mutilated one in the process of cutting it, so I ended up with three pieces of chicken instead of four.

I heard once that if you're not making a mess, you're not cooking. Well, this recipe is definitely cooking. Evidenced by my dredging set up and the fact that quinoa is like the glitter of dinner ingredients. If it's wet and uncooked, it sticks to everything. If it's cooked, it still sticks to everything. You've been warned.

I got my pieces of chicken coated and stuck them in the oven. The recipe says to bake the chicken pieces for 20-25 minutes, I baked mine for 20. I pulled them out and sprinkled some mozzarella on the top of each one. I didn't measure because there's no such thing as too much cheese in my book. Also, I forgot the parmesan. Thought we had some, but it turns out we didn't. Oops. I baked them for another five minutes, and they came out looking like this:

They smelled amazing. Seriously. I did things a little differently here. Rather than putting sauce and cheese on top of the breasts and putting them back in the oven, I only did the cheese and put marinara on the plates, and placed the chicken on top. I also sprinkled some dried basil on top rather than the chiffonade of fresh basil. Comme ça:

It was really good. Not as good as an Italian restaurant, but still really good. I was hoping for a little bit more from them, but they definitely weren't a failure. Husband gives 4 stars, I give 3.

Chipotle Sweet Pulled Pork

It's another crock pot recipe! Gotta love it. There's a lot of copycat recipes for Cafe Rio's sweet pork floating around, and I can't say I'm surprised. It's glorious. This recipe supposedly started out as one, but she decided all the copycat recipes out there lacked spice. But you can read all that on her blog, I'll just tell you how it went when I tried the recipe out for myself.
My piece of pork wasn't quite 2.5 pounds, it was closer to 2, but the selection at my local Walmart was somewhat lacking. Either way, it worked out just fine. The recipe seems complicated at first, but it's actually quite simple.

Marinate your pork.

Throw it in the crockpot.

Let your pork hang out in the crockpot and do it's thing. The recipe said for 6-8 hours, I did around 6. Shred the pork and add the rest of your ingredients. Let it hang out a bit longer. You'll end up with something like this:

I decided to put it in a quesadilla, Husband had the pork in a salad. Either way, it's definitely a winner winner pork dinner. 4 stars from both of us.

I realize my food photography skills are somewhat lacking, but it definitely tasted better than it looks.