Enchiladas

My first Daring Cooks challenge!


Our hosts this month, Barbara of Barbara Bakes and Bunnee of Anna+Food have chosen a delicious Stacked Green Chile & Grilled Chicken Enchilada recipe in celebration of Cinco de Mayo! The recipe, featuring a homemade enchilada sauce was found on www.finecooking.com and written by Robb Walsh.

I was really excited and nervous about my first Daring Cooks challenge. The recipe was pretty different from what I'm used to cooking, and the steps were certainly very involved. But that made it all the more rewarding. The result was exactly why I joined the Daring Kitchen, and why I started this blog - I was inspired to cook something out of my comfort zone, both in taste and technique. I tried new ingredients I'd never used before, and new methods that I'll certainly be able to carry over into other recipes.

I served the enchiladas on Cinco de Mayo, although that was more of a coincidence than anything else. We served them with rice and beans, and we had three other people over to try them out - my friend Amber, her boyfriend Ron and my sister Beth. Everyone agreed that the dish was amazing, particularly the salsa verde. I really couldn't get over how flavorful that was. The enchilada stacks stayed constructed nicely, and didn't slide around or fall apart when trying to eat them. Overall the experiment was a success! And I can't wait for my next challenge.

Chocolate Chip Cookies

I am a very lucky girl. Not only do I have wonderful friends and family, but I'm marrying into a wonderful family too. And I was lucky to have all of them, my old and new family, in attendance at my bridal shower last week.

Little by little I'm starting to use each of my shiny new kitchen gadgets, but one of the first that I was eager to break out was the Kitchenaid Mixer. Oh, it's pretty.

And what better way to break it in than chocolate chip cookies? Being a big fan of Alton Brown (my inner nerd is showing) I decided to try one of his essential chocolate chip cookie recipes - he does The Thin, The Puffy, and The Chewy, and I settled on the latter. No particular reason, but chewy sounded good at the time (spoiler alert: I was right).

Basic Macaroni and Cheese

Well that didn't take long. It only took until my second post to do macaroni and cheese. I held out for as long as I could, really I did. But macaroni and cheese is my absolute favorite meal of all time. Every shape of pasta, every type of cheese, every special addition. I've done chorizo and chiles, I've done fontina and gruyère, I've done tomatoes, I've done tuna, I've done peas and prosciutto, I've even done a macaroni and cheese from leftover welsh rarebit sauce (that was John's favorite). And believe it or not (gasp!), I even like it from the blue box from time to time.

My only rule is I don't make the same kind twice. Why should I when I love each variation as much as the last? I might as well keep trying new ones. In my recipe files, I have "breakfast dishes," "meat and chicken entrees," "soups and stews," etc., but I have a whole separate folder for just macaroni and cheese. And there are dozens I have yet to try (thanks, Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board!).

Believe it or not, I don't believe I've ever done just a basic, solid mac and cheese, at least not in recent memory. So that's what I set out to do the other day.

Creamy Tomato Basil Soup with Orzo

After a very exhausting weekend of house guests and my bridal shower, I somehow found the energy to cook for the week on Sunday night. But due to my laziness exhaustion I decided to do something quick and easy - tomato soup.

My specialty, and the one dish I can consistently cook well, is tomato sauce. I learned it from my grandmother, born in Italy, who learned it from her mother, and god knows how far back it goes from there. She usually uses salt pork instead of, or along with, olive oil, and almost always adds pork chops or ribs. The result brings me back to Sunday dinners, squeezing 15+ people around a tiny kitchen table, a vocal tug-of-war between half a dozen conversations.

When I have the time and ambition, I follow her method to the letter. But when I'm trying to be healthy, cheap or quick, I modify it to a marinara, substituting the salt pork for olive oil, and adding a good deal more basil. To me the combination of tomatoes, garlic, olive oil and basil is one of the most purely, simply delicious meals I can imagine. It's so good I can drink it. And I often do skip the pasta and eat the sauce just as a soup, which is what I decided to do here, adding heavy cream and orzo for some heartiness.