White Chili via The Splendid Table's Weeknight Kitchen (from 2010) from P. Allen Smith's Seasonal Recipes from the Garden
This was...well...lazy. As a recipe it didn't take the time to develop the flavors at all. I saw simple modifications that could be done to, develop the chicken better, and to generally have better flavor over all. To me it really sounds like someone put this together who doesn't actually like chili. Anyways, it ended up being ok, but I have a feeling that it could have been a lot better (though if you add cheese and sour cream to most things, you'll end up liking it).
Pasta Puttanesca
Nice, simple, made me realize how old the olives in my fridge were (they got tossed, luckily I bought another jar). Being that it used olives and capers (both pretty salty) I imagine that this was something I should, in theory, avoid, but once in a while is ok, I would hope. I reduced the capers to 1 teaspoon from 2 tablespoons, because I know that Shannon is not a fan (from my previous experience, it can be a background flavor, but if it gets to up front, it's not ok). Olives have that same sort of thing, but really it was part of the dish, so you can't really remove one of the main focuses of the dish without leaning towards calling it something else. I liked it, a little salty and olive flavors up front. It made for a good, relatively quick dinner (though pitting the olives was kind of a pain).
Cornmeal Blueberry Pancakes with Spiced Maple Butter
So I had originally planned to make these on Wednesday but delayed it till Thursday for the reason that I needed to use the food processor to make pizza dough. So putting this together was pretty easy, as always, I ended up making eight inch (ish) pancakes in my 8" pans. For them, I made some with blueberries and some without. It came together very nicely. Some extra flavor from the cornmeal, I liked the cinnamon and chili powder (I used cayenne pepper, since I'm not a huge fan of the chili powder I have (any chili powder that contains salt, gets a thumbs down from me)) added to the butter, that added some nice spice to the pancakes. Good and quick. You can make the butter, fridge it (no need to wrap unless you are worried about presentation of your butter (I just put mine in a bowl) and then while it solidifies back up, make the pancakes.
The one issue I made here is that I forget to check to see if I already had cornmeal in my cupboard...so now I have extra cornmeal.
Breakfast Burrito
I vaguely followed this recipe (mostly for the beans) and put together a meal in a pretty short amount of time. It was ok. I ended up eating the rest of the beans buy themselves as either snacks or breakfast.
Chicken with Mustard-Fennel Crust
This was probably the winner for the week. The combination of a good crust, chicken thighs, fennel and Dijon mustard? We both enjoyed this very much. So much so, I'm going to make this again (to use the other 4 chicken thighs). Again, very good.
Pizza (spice testing)
So I forgot to buy the peeled whole tomatoes, we went out, got some and came back. Then I looked at my stash of tomato paste, and didn't have enough and wasn't going to take a second trip to get it either, I did play with the spice levels a bit, but don't consider it a valid test since it wasn't the tomatoes I've been using, nor enough tomato paste. That being said...I guess this'll go again next week.
Whoopie Pies with Mint Filling and Chocolate Ganache
So for game night I made these (Ok I made the cookies, and Ganache and Joseph made and piped the mint filling), they were pretty good:
So I didn't add the suggested green food coloring (why would you add food coloring when it doesn't have a purpose?). I do love the smell that the peppermint extract had when Joseph added it (from AllSpice).