Smokin' salsa

I was really craving some salsa, so I decided to whip up some. Salsa is very easy to make and home made tastes so good you'll never want to go back to store bought. I perused the veggies in my fridge and came up with three tomatoes, a jalapeno, and a walla walla sweet onion that I had to cut the mold off. We put whatever kind of veggies we have into our salsa, and have added zucchini, broccoli, spinach, tomatillos and even asparagus before. Salsa is a great way to use up veggies that are a bit past their prime, or even a little wilted. I tossed what I had into our BBQ pan, and added two cloves of garlic.

I fired up the BBQ on medium high, put the pan on and closed the lid. The trick with this is to have the proper kind of BBQ pan, the kind with the holes. It allows the heat to come through, as well as the flavors already on the grill. After letting it grill about seven minutes, I turned the veggies over.

All together it cooked about 15 or 20 minutes, until the tomatoes were soft and the jalapeno was blackened. The blacked bits give it a lovely smokey flavor. Then it all went into the blender, although I fished the garlic out first and popped the soft garlic out of the hard garlic husk. I also added a handful of cilantro and squeezed in the juice from a lime.

Blend it up until it is the consistency you like, add salt to taste, and you have a salsa with amazing flavor! It is even better the next day. I didn't have any chips, so I used Trader Joe's rice crackers. Yum!

To finish off dinner, I BBQ'd corn on the cob and grilled up some carne preparada, a delightful thin steak that we get at our local Mexican carniceria. 

Since summer is here and I have a bit more time on my hands, I'll try to keep this blog updated more frequently. We had a non heat eater living with us for awhile and we stopped cooking with jalapenos while he was here. Now we're back to the spice!

Easy tequila jalapeño chicken

Thank God it is Friday! It feels like it has been a very long week and I dragged myself home from school today feeling totally worn out. John suggested going out to eat, but the defrosted chicken breasts were looking a bit forlorn on the counter so I decided instead to whip up a marinade for them and then go sit in the hot tub for awhile. The marinade is:
one onion, chopped fine
one jalapeño, grated
a handful of cilantro
about a tablespoon of olive oil
3 pressed garlic cloves
1 oz. tequila (John later admitted he added about another ounce in when I wasn't looking)
the juice from one lime, plus a bit more from the bottle in the fridge when that didn't seem like enough.


And just because I wanted to keep it nice and easy, I wrapped a couple yellow potatoes in tin foil and tossed them in the oven to bake.


After about an hour soak in the hot tub while the chicken breasts marinated in the fridge, we got out and went to work. John put the chicken on the BBQ.

And then, since one little measly jalapeño really isn't that much heat in our world, he broke out the Mad Anthony's Extra Hot BBQ Sauce to add on top of his as well.

I boiled the veggies in the kitchen until John had the chicken breasts done. We were out of sour cream for the potatoes, so we broke out the Litehouse Jalapeño Ranch dressing. Yum! What an easy delicious meal.

Jalapeño Peanut Butter Cookies

Going a little stir crazy on this fourth snow day, I decided to bake. John suggested peanut butter cookies so I broke out my favorite cookie book. As I was making the cookies I began to wonder what it would be like if I put a jalapeño twist on them. So after making sure that I had at least four dozen regular cookies, I grated up a jalapeño and added it in to the remaining dough.

Then I decided to bump it up a level. I rolled the dough into balls, made a well in the center of each cookie with my thumb, grabbed the jalapeño jelly I made in September, and filled each well with some jalapeño jelly.

I upped the bake time to 12 minutes instead of the regular 10 minutes because the jelly makes the center soft.

The green of the jalapeño created a beautiful cooky. But the taste! It was a little bit of heaven. It has enough heat that it leaves a nice tingle in your mouth, and who doesn't love peanut butter and jelly together.  I think I've just found my new favorite cookie.