Iron Chef: Cilantro

Erik took all three kids to the store to buy my secret ingredient. I was a little concerned since he said Matthew screamed the entire time at the store that he would just pick something at random for my secret ingredient (dirt, motor oil, brussel sprouts....), but he picked something awesome: cilantro!

Of course Erik loves Mexican food so what do you expect?

This iron chef was very successful for me.  I made:



1. Avodoco skins.  You may have seen potato skins at a restaurant as an appetizer.  Well I put a twist on that and hollowed out an avocodo, put bacon, tomatoes, avocodo, and onion to fill it. Then covered it with cheddar cheese and baked it to melt the cheese. This was delicious and Erik said he could see it at a Mexican restaurant as an appetizer!
2. Crab cilantro nachos.  I loved this dish (I love all things crab!). I combined crab, cilantro, cream cheese, and cheddar and heated it. Then provided a fresh salsa to mix with the hot crab dip. This mixture topped the chips and was fancy yet yummy.
3. Cilantro pork quesadillas with black bean salsa.  This was a very pretty dish (Erik gave me 5 points for plating!).  I cooked pork with a cilantro, paprika, cayenne powder rub.  Then used the pork in quesadillas with cheddar cheese and additional cilantro.  Then I made a black bean salsa to pair it with.  The salsa was fantastic and so fresh.  I mixed black beans, corn, tomatoes, green pepper, red pepper, onion, lime juice, and (of course) cilantro.  This dish was delicious - Jenna's favorite.
4. Cilantro pesto. Erik and I love pesto. Traditional pesto with basil, olive oil, garlic, pecorino romano, and pine nuts. We love to just throw it in the food processor and you have a nice topping for pasta or sandwiches.  Well instead of using basil, I wanted to try this with cilantro. At first I just substituted cilantro for basil and kept the same ingredients. That wasn't happening. I mixed a few other things (white wine vinegar, avocodo) anything to make it taste good but it just didn't.  Then I had to resort to asking Erik my sous chef for help.  He suggested lime juice. Well I didn't want to use lime juice since I had already used it with the pork quesadillas but I added lime juice.That's what it needed. How interesting - no wonder lime is often paired with cilantro. It complemented the flavor enough to make the dish edible :). It wasn't nearly as good as traditional pesto but we still liked it.

This was one of Erik's favorite Iron chef competitions. My favorite was blueberries :).  So our last two iron chef competitions have been really successful.  Hopefully the next one will be just as successful!

Usually when we do iron chef we have tons of leftovers.  This was no exception but I also had another idea. I had seen a recipe for avocodo chocolate mousse and wanted to try it (since we had an abundance of avocodos).  I used 1 avocodo, 1 cup cocoa powder, 2/3 cup honey, and 1 tblsp vanilla extract.  It was good but needed a little milk to thin it out. Wow was this dark!  It was yummy with a good texture and interesting flavor. It was also much healthier using avocodas as a base than heavy cream. I'd like to try this again and experiment a little more to see if I can get it right.  I might experiment on my friends Tim and Jen which is what I did last weekend.

Last week I tried to perfect my chocolate caramel bars.  It is a recipe I created from bringing together a few different recipes in my cookbooks. 

I made this chocolate caramel bar recipe 5 times.  In one week.  5 times.  Yep - I think I'll be heading to the gym this week.  Anyway, I think I've come upon a recipe I like and am planning on submitting it to a contest.
I've submitted my mounds bar chocolate bread recipe and my snowtopped brownie recipes to contests before but didn't win.  Both of those I made several iterations of until I perfected it.  Erik likes it when I try to perfect recipes but then if it is something he really likes, I usually don't make it all that often after I perfect it.  Of course, I did perfect my chocolate chip cookie recipe and I make those every other week.

The best thing is that I got to make the word "baking" today on Quiddler!  56 points!

My winnings in Vegas!

I did not win tons of money in Las Vegas.  In fact, I won no money since I did not gamble at all.   

It's not really my thing. 

Food is.

And Vegas has SOOOO much good food.  Erik and I stuffed ourselves silly for just about every meal. We had to lay down after some of them.  Now that's a good meal.

Most of the time we went to the Monte Carlo buffet (since that is where we were staying and who wants to walk a lot in the 102°F weather) and the MGM Grand because that one is close too.

Here is how we would rate the buffets we had in Vegas:

1. Cosmopolitan Wicked Spoon buffet $35 per person (yikes!).  But ohhhhh so good!
2. Paris $25 per person. Amazing food from all over not just France. Still had lots and lots of heavy cream
3. MGM Grand $18 per person.  I ate a lot of sushi, pasta, desserts and pretty much everything else
4. Monte Carlo $18 per person.  Love the cheese blintzes!

Oh and my presentation went well too.  The conference was great and I learned so much.  It made me long for an opportunity to do bioinformatics research....

We even got to see our old friend Nick

He looks exactly the same as he did 14 years ago when we got married. Of course he just ran a marathon and I guess that will keep you young. Check it out:

Then we came home to this. 

We missed the kids so much. It was so hard for us me to leave them for so long.  I was so grateful to my parents for watching them the entire time.  It was a nice getaway for us.

42 points on quiddler today. Very poor showing!

Our Adventures

 The women from our home group had a girls camping trip at Alum Creek State park.  We had a beautiful site that looked out on the water (see picture).  We stayed up until 1am talking, sitting by the fire, and eating smores (that's pretty much an awesome existence).  

We got up in the morning and went out on my friend Jen's parent's boat.   She had an inflatable lazy boy chair that was tied to a rope on the back of the boat called "Big Mabel".  I LOVED Big Mabel!  We sat in Big Mabel and jumped and bumped and got splashed.  It was like a rollercoaster on the water.  We had a blast!

Now we are looking for more adventure! 

Since we had Matthew we have not been able to take a family bike ride.  Erik can put the girls in the bike trailer but what do we do with Matthew?  So we got a baby seat for the back of my bike. Today we rode a 4 mile round trip to Handels (obviously we need ice cream to cancel out the exercise) and it was a blast! Matthew did really well in the baby seat although he spent the entire time (the ENTIRE time) trying to get his helmet off.  I hope we can have more bike rides because this was a lot of fun!

Another fun thing our family has been doing is the Summer Letterbox program through the Delaware County Preservation Parks. These consist of a scavenger hunt through the park to find specific items (a particular tree, a type of prairie grass, bird calls, etc) and at the end we find a box with a stamp in it.  We stamp our little book to show we finished that park. There are 6 parks and we have done 4 of them. Every Saturday we've been going to a new park.  This has been a fun family adventure.

89 points on Quiddler today and I got to make the word "Riven".  Like Knights of the Riven Moon - our EQ2 guild - I miss you all!!

Dancing

Last week I started back to work and am teaching 4 classes and taking 1 class for my MBA (no, I don't have enough school yet!)

On Saturday we took the girls kids (why can't I ever remember we have a boy) to a nature preserve and went on a 2 mile hike.

I got back from a Girls camping trip yesterday at Alum Creek and we had an incredible time boating on the water.  I got burnt to a crisp but had the time of my life.

Details and pictures of all this later!

A Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin came in the mail today.  It is calling to me, beckoning me..... can't you hear it too? 

I'll be dancing for the next few days :)

Iron Chef: Blueberries!

Blueberries are quite possibly the most perfect fruit.  I love them.  Matthew could eat his weight in blueberries (that's a lot of weight by the way).  And that was my secret ingredient for Iron Chef this weekend.

Blueberries. 

Could it get any better?

This was a very successful iron chef for me.  In fact, I was very pleased with all my dishes - they were yummy (ummmm....blueberries are awesome!). 

I made:

1. Blueberry basil smoothie.  This is an odd flavor combination that you don't see often yet it worked. The basil complemented the blueberry and it was very refreshing.  I used yogurt but I think it would have been better with ice cream.  I just didn't have any on hand. If I was in kitchen stadium I would have had ice cream but Gina's Kitchen is not as well stocked.
2. Apple Blueberry Chutney with crackers.  I love mango chutney and thought I would put a twist on traditional mango chutney but using an apple blueberry combination with apple cider vinegar, brown sugar, onions, and cinnamon. It was pretty good but Erik didn't like it that much.  He thought the flavors clashed.
3. Blueberry cinnamon pork chops with blueberry orzo.  Blueberry pork chops?? Ohhh yea! These were SO good.  I made a blueberry sauce with lemon juice, jam, cinnamon and butter. Then I coated the pork chops with bread crumbs mixed with cinnamon.  The sweetness of the breading and the sauce went well with the pork chops.  I also made orzo and mixed the blueberry sauce with the orzo too.  It was a really good dish - even Erik loved it!
4. Blueberry nectarine crepes.  I made traditional crepes then topped them with blueberry nectarine cheese mixture.  This was delicious, light, and pretty easy.  I put blue sugar on top as a decoration but the blue sugar kind of melted and made the crepes look a little green.  Next time - no blue sugar.
5. Red, White, and Blueberry shortcake.  So this dessert was just plain fabulous.  I made yellow cake and put in a little lemon extract to give it a nice lemon flavor.  Then I cut the cake in half and filled it with pudding, red raspberries, blueberries, and white raspberries (Erik found these at the store - totally cool).  To top it off, I made blueberry whip cream with blueberry gelatin.  This was such a hit and a fun dessert.  The blueberry whip cream was surprisingly good too.

This iron chef was so much fun. 

Now I have to think of a good secret ingredient for Erik....

59 points on Quiddler today!

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My friend Lynn from Dale Lynn Photography took fabulous pictures of the kids at Innis Woods Gardens.  It is a beautiful place and the pictures turned out great.  Innis Woods is going on our list of frequently visited places - I had no idea something so beautiful was this close to me.

My birthday is coming up soon and Erik made a scavenger hunt with post-it notes so that I could find all my gifts.  He put riddles like "I make little waves" to give me a clue that the next clue was in the microwave.  It was AWESOME!  And I got cake pans, a cake carrier, and a new frying pan.  This was so much fun.

Then we had ice cream cake for lunch (yes that's all I ate for lunch).  We didn't have 36 candles so Erik wrote 36 on the cake in binary.

Yes in binary.

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In even more exciting news, we got a fish tank and two fish.  Sarah named her fish "mushroom" and Jenna named her fish "Jenna".  Now we have to remember to feed the fish everyday.

79 points on Quiddler today!