Chocolate Chip Cookies, Chicken Salad II, and Sonoran Style Favorite Enchilladas

Yesterday I had a picnic with a good friend I haven't seen in a couple of years. I made chicken salad sandwiches and chocolate chip cookies. There are two recipes for chicken salad in the cookbook. The one I made was just like a standart tuna salad recipe, except with chicken. It tasted really good, but like the deviled eggs, it was pretty watery because I used relish instead of actually dicing up a pickle.

I made a double batch of chocolate chip cookies because I had inteded to give some to my friend at the picnic. I'm not sure what happened, but somehow my cookie dough turned out very dry and crumbly. My only guess is that my brown sugar was getting old, so it was hard and stale. That's the only thing I can think of that may have caused the crumbly-ness. The cookies still taste pretty good, but they're crunchier than I would have liked. Adam says it's ok though because they're prefect for dipping in milk.

Tonight I made one of about 5 recipes for enchilladas that are in the cookbook. Sonoran style favorite enchilladas are beef enchilladas with a red sauce. I have been trying to get started on dinner as soon as I get home from work so we don't end up eating dinner at 9:00 like we have been. I had to pick up some things from the grocery store after work, so I didn't get home until after 6:00 and I forgot to pull out the ground beef to thaw, so dinner didn't get started until about 7:00. I didn't realize until I got started making the sauce that the recipe calls for tomato juice and not tomato sauce. Since I didn't have any tomato juice, I improvised with tomato sauce and water. I finally got the enchilladas in the oven around 8:15, they were done at 8:45, and we ate at, you guessed it, 9:00. Luckily, the enchilladas were very good and my lateness was forgiven.

Cherry Cream Pie, Deviled Eggs, Baked Fish in Sour Cream, and Fettuccini Alfredo

I know I haven't updated this Blog in a long time, but I've re-resolved myself to cooking and finishing this project by November. It will be a lot of work, considering I still have about 319 recipes to go, but I think I can do it.

A few months ago, I made a Cherry Cream Pie. It is a pretty easy pie to make, and it went well, except that I didn't notice the note at the end of the recipe that said the filling should be used for two pies. So my Cherry Cream Pie was very thick and the cherries didn't quite cover the cream filling, but it still tasted great!

On Tuesday, I made deviled eggs at my mom's house. She had a lot of eggs already boiled and peeled because she had planned to make deviled eggs for a party, but didn't have time to make them. My deviled eggs were a little runny because I used a bottle of sweet relish that was near its end. According to the recipe, I was also supposed to use dill relish, so I was a little concerned about how they would taste, but I actually really enjoyed the flavor of the sweet relish.


Wednesday, I made Baked Fish in Sour Cream. Super Wal-Mart in Benson had Tilapia fillets on sale, so I bought about 4lbs. The recipe calls for 2lbs of white fish, but 2lbs is a lot for just two people, so I cut the recipe in half. I wasn't very excited about this recipe at first, but Adam and I were both pleasantly surprised with how good it was. We ate it with leftover potato salad and deviled eggs.

Thursday night, I made Fettuccini Alfredo. I didn't have any Fettuccini noodles at home, so I used Rotini instead. There were several steps in the recipe, but I was surprised at how quickly it all came together. Normally I'm not a big fan of mushrooms, but surprisingly, the mushrooms mixed with everything else were pretty good. It made a lot of food, so I still have leftovers in my fridge.

Stay tuned...there's gonna be a lot more cooking going on at my house...

Chicken Wings, Enroladas, and Lemon Pound Cake

I have been cooking a little bit lately, but I haven't blogged about it in a while. A few weeks ago, I made Chicken wings and Enroladas. They are both in the "appetizers" section of the cookbook, but I made them together and called it dinner. The chicken wings were very good. Adam wasn't too excited about them because normally he doesn't like the vinegary flavor of wings, but we couldn't even taste the vinegar in this recipe.

Enroladas are basically cream cheese, hard boiled eggs, and bell peppers all mixed together, rolled in half a corn tortilla and fried. They tasted great, but my corn tortillas were getting old and several of them split open before I could fry them. I tried to fry them, but they popped and splattered grease everywhere, so I ended up throwing out most of the split ones.

Two Sunday's ago, my sister in law made a really nice family dinner, so I offered to make dessert. I made Lemon pound cake. It was a pretty simple recipe, but I was a little nervous because the last time I made a pound cake, a big chunk of it stuck in the bundt pan when I tried to turn it out onto a plate. I was very pleased with myself when this one came out perfectly. The cake didn't seem quite as heavy as pound cake usually is, but everyone really enjoyed it.

Tacos

I was going to make tacos last night, but Adam wanted pizza, so we ordered Domino's. Domino's has recently changed their recipe to something that is supposed to be better than what it was before. I found it to be quite disgusting and wished that I had made tacos instead. So I made tacos tonight.

I have attmepted making my Grandma's tacos before, but never in my brief taco-making history have the gods of Mexican food blessed me with such perfect results. Everything went so smoothly. In my past attempts, the tortillas have split open or folded wrong, resulting in meat being lost to the oil, grease splattering everywhere, and very oddly shaped and difficult to eat tacos. Tonight, I somehow managed to use exactly the right amount of oil at exactly the right temperature and the tortillas had exactly the right amount of "springy-ness" so that they folded nicely without splitting or tearing at all. There wasn't even any popping oil.

I thought that Cathcart's were the only people in the world who eat ketchup on their tacos, but I was wrong. Although Adam had never had "real" tacos before he met me, he grew up putting ketchup on his family's version of tacos. Usually, now that I'm "grown up", I use salsa instead of ketchup, but this time, we enjoyed our tacos with just ketchup and cheese.

When I got home and began making the tacos, I was hungry, so I ate some of the leftover Chocolate Chip Cake. The cake is very good, so I ate more than I should have. When the tacos were done, I was almost too full to eat them. I was disappointed that I could only eat two. Adam said that was probably the only time in history anyone was ever really sad that they ate too much cake.

Baked Chicken and Chocolate Chip Cake

I spent all day Saturday cleaning the house and doing laundry, so I wanted something easy for dinner. I made Baked Chicken, which is just chicken pieces rolled in butter and then in crushed cheez-it crackers. I don't think there is one correct way of doing this, so I did it "Shake 'n Bake" style. I rolled the chicken in butter, and then put the pieces in a ziplock bag with the crushed crackers and shook it up until the chicken was coated. It was very good.

We are horrible at buying fresh vegetables and eating them before they go bad. I didn't have the right ingredients to make any of the side dishes from the cookbook, but Super Wal-Mart sells bags of frozen vegetables that can be steamed in the bag in the microwave. They're the perfect size for two people, and they only cost a dollar! The chicken and vegetables was a perfect easy dinner, and Adam was glad to have dinner ready when he got home from work.

I intended to make the Chocolate Chip Cake on Saturday too, but after I was done with everything, I didn't want to do anything else. Last night, we just had sandwiches for dinner, but I made the cake for dessert. It was getting late, and by the time the cake was done, Adam had fallen asleep on the couch. I cut him a piece, put it in front of his nose, and he woke right up! Needless to say, it was a delicious cake.

Potatoes and Kielbasa and Albers Corn Bread

I had some potatoes left over from the Scalloped Potatoes with Hot dogs, and I had some Kielbasa left over from the Egg Spaghetti, so I made Potatoes and Kielbasa for dinner last night. This is another easy one; literally just sliced potatoes and kielbasa sauteed in butter with some salt and pepper. Adam was working late, so I ate without him. He likes to tamper with recipes, so when he got home, he decided to dice everything up smaller and scramble it with some eggs and eat it with sour cream and salsa. I gave him a hard time about tampering with the recipe, but his version tasted really good too. We ate the rest of the leftovers for breakfast this morning.

I also made Albers Corn Bread to go with the Potatoes and Kielbasa. It turned out pretty good. I'm always a little confused by recipes that require you to make a well in the dry ingredients, pour the wet ingredients into the well, and then mix it up. I don't know what the well does, but mine was a little too small to hold all the wet ingredients. This didn't really seem to matter, because it turned out just fine.

Funnel Cakes

I made Funnel Cakes on Saturday morning, and that was the only thing I cooked all weekend. The recipe was actually very simple. The only problems I had were that they were a little difficult to flip, and they weren't as pretty as the Funnel Cakes you get at the fair. I imagine that just takes some practice, but they were very yummy!

Scalloped Potatoes with Hot Dogs

A really good friend of ours came back from Iraq a few days ago, so we invited him over for dinner tonight. I had intended to make a big meal; at least a main dish, side dish, and dessert. But I got home from work and the house was a mess and I was running around like a chicken with my head cut off, so I ended up only making the scalloped potatoes with hot dogs. It turned out pretty good, except that I used a little more potatoes and hot dogs than the recipe required, but I didn't adjust the sauce at all, so it seemed a little dry to me. But there was plenty of food and Adam and Curtiss seemed to enjoy it, so everything was fine. We ate some of the leftover banana bread for dessert.

As an addition to my previous post, Adam told one of his co-workers today about the Egg Spaghetti that we ate last night. His co-worker thought it sounded so good that he called his wife and had Adam tell her how to make it. They were going to have it for dinner tonight.

Quiche, Tortino's Quesadilla, Egg Spaghetti, and Banana Bread

I've been trying to cook more lately because I realized several things: 1. Eating out is expensive and not very healthy. 2. Cooking really isn't that hard. 3. I'm behind on my project by about 30 recipes.

I made a Quiche for breakfast on Sunday. It turned out very well. Thanks to my handy-dandy Pampered Chef pie crust shield thingy, the crust was perfect. I did use a store bought crust instead of making my own, but I was very pleased with how it turned out. I really liked the recipe, but Adam and I decided that next time we make it, we'll add some sausage and bell peppers.

Monday night, I made Tortino's Quesadilla. It is just a chicken quesadilla, but instead of cheese, you use a sauce of nacho cheese and chicken broth. I put way too much sauce on the first quesadilla, resulting in a mess in the pan when I tried to flip it. Thank goodness for non-stick pans. I also used enormous tortillas, and even though I have an enormous spatula, they were still difficult to flip. I made 3 quesadillas and each one suffered at least one chicken casualty during the flipping process. Luckily, we have dogs specially trained in the disposal of such casualties. These quesadillas were a little messy to make and eat, but we really enjoyed them.

Last night, I made Egg Spaghetti and Banana Bread. I boiled the pasta before I sauteed the kielbasa, so I was a little worried that the spaghetti wouldn't be hot enough to cook the egg/parmesan/parsley mixture, but everything turned out great. The only problem was that I ended up with a lot more spaghetti than kielbasa, but the spaghetti tasted so good on it's own that we didn't mind the minimal amount of sausage.

I also made Banana Bread because I bought a lot of banana's last week, but we didn't eat them fast enough. I called my mom before I started making the bread because the recipe called for buttermilk, which I didn't have, so I wanted to know how bad it would be if I just used regular milk. I'm glad I called because she told me to just add a little lemon juice to the milk to sour it, and I learned that because the recipe calls for baking soda, it needs some kind of acid to counter-act it, otherwise the bread would taste like baking soda. I'm glad my mom used to be a Home Ec. teacher. She knows everything! (Everything about cooking, anyway). After I hung up with her, I started gathering the ingredients. I thought I had brown sugar somewhere, but I couldn't find it anywhere, so I just used white sugar instead. When Adam got home, he found the brown sugar hidden in a corner of the cabinet behind a bunch of cans. I think the banana bread I made has been the only thing so far that has turned out absolutely perfect! The outside crust was just a little crunchy, but in a good way. The inside was soft and fluffy, and the flavor was great. Adam told me that it would be ok with him if I never used brown sugar when making banana bread again!

Tortilla Eggs

Once again, I have been slacking on my project. I will probably find myself trying to cram 32 recipes into the last week of my project. Luckily, I started on Veteran's day, which I will always have off work. So if it comes down to it, I can have an all day cook-off. Anyway, two nights ago I made Tortilla Eggs. It litterally is just tortillas and eggs...and some cheese. I wasn't sure exactly how this was supposed to work, but I think I did it right because Adam loved it. I liked it too, but not as much as he did. It was another easy one, which is always nice, but so far I haven't made anything too complicated....except for the strawberry chocolate meringue on Thanksgiving. At the rate I'm going, my all day cook-off will probably be full of the 32 most complicated recipes in the book. Hopefully, it won't come down to that.

As an update to my last post, the rest of the cake was eaten and no eggshells were found :)

Mexican Lasagne and Buttermilk Pound Cake

I invited my family over for dinner last night because it was New Year's day and I was off work. I had intended to clean the house all day, make a quick trip to the grocery store, start cooking around 5:00, and have dinner at 7:00. Instead, I slept in until 10:00, bummed around the house until 2:00, made it home from the grocery store around 4:30, and finally started making the cake around 5:15. Adam and I then proceeded to alternate between cooking and frantically cleaning until 7:30. We still got everything done that needed to be done, but the house wasn't as clean as I had wanted it to be.

The Mexican Lasagne was pretty easy, but Adam actually did most of the cooking. All I did was assemble it in the pan. I think the recipe may have been intended for a pan smaller than the 9X13 that I put it in. It still worked out ok, it just seemed like I had to spread it out a little thin to cover the whole pan.

The cake tasted delicious, but making it was an adventure. It would have been easier if I had supervised Adam a little more. The recipe calls for 5 eggs, adding one at a time and mixing well between each one. Adam decided to leave the mixer on while he cracked the eggs into it. This would have been fine if he hadn't dropped half an egg shell into the mixer. Because the recipe called for 3 sticks of butter and 5 eggs, I didn't want to just throw it out and start over. So we searched through the mixture and retrieved all the egg shells...we think. As far as I know, no one got any egg shells in their cake, but there's still 3/4 of a cake left over. Everything else went smoothly until it was time to turn the cake out onto a plate. A fairly big section decided to stay in the bundt pan. Luckily, my mom was there to help me get it out and the cake still looked pretty good. Overall, the evening was somewhat stressful, but a success.