2013 - Week 25

Hello everyone. How was your Week 25? Things outside of the blogosphere weren't terribly great for me this week, but I did manage to make a couple of tasty dishes to share with you.

For exercise, I'm still boxing . . . I'm determined to "beat" this game, but it doesn't like to register my movements sometimes and that makes me frustrated. Oh well, it's still fun, and it's keeping me in shape so I can keep eating all these desserts I make. My task is still reading. I finished the Hunger Games series and watched the first movie. I have to say, I was rather disappointed in the movie. I liked the first two books, and the third was okay. Not as happy of an ending as I was hoping for, but still okay. It just seems like they changed things in the movie that didn't really need to be changed, or omitted things that could have easily been included, and it was for those reasons that I wasn't really a fan. I liked most of the casting, but not the announcers or President Snow. Donald Sutherland will always be the nice father in the most recent "Pride and Prejudice" for me, so he just didn't seem as mean or snake-like as I pictured Snow. I suppose if I hadn't read the books, the movie might have been better, but as usual, the books were much better than the movie.

Now to my tasty dishes :) I have never tried to make a molten lava cake before, so that was my task this week. It was my husband's birthday, and we had a lot of desserts in the house, but I didn't think it would be right to let his birthday pass by without making him a special cake. He didn't really have any ideas about what he wanted (to be honest, I think he likes fruit better than cake . . . when I asked him what he wanted for his birthday, he told me "a pineapple" and he was pleased as punch when he got it :)). So I wanted to make something easy and relatively small, and these little cakes definitely fit the bill. They were very easy, didn't take much time, and turned out just great. This is the recipe that I used (Molten Chocolate Cakes), and it turned out so well, I would use it again in the future for sure. I used 4 oz. semi-sweet chocolate chips instead of the baking chocolate, and it still turned out perfect. I would recommend serving them with vanilla ice cream to get the contrasting hot and cold aspects, but they did not need the caramel sauce I added, they were sweet enough on their own.

Cute little cakes

Yum :) 

Speaking of cake, be sure you check out last weeks post (Week 24) to see the pictures of my completed Guacamole Cake that I finally got posted :) 

My other creation this week was a Creamy Chipotle Chicken Salad. I can't give you an exact recipe, because I just sort of make it up, but I started with a base of fresh lettuce, tomatoes, carrots and cilantro. Then I sauteed some chicken with drained and rinsed black beans, seasoned with southwestern seasoning. The sauce is really the crowning achievement though. I think it was about 3/4 cup sour cream with a finely diced chipotle pepper and some of the sauce and onions from the can. I also added green onions and fresh garlic, plus enough whole milk to make it into a nice sauce. I cooked it all together until I thought the green onions were soft enough, and then I blended it with my immersion blender. Then I thickened it with a little corn starch dissolved in water, and voila . . . creamy chipotle sauce. I also topped the salad with some shredded cheddar cheese and crushed tortilla chips to give it a nice crunch. So good :)

Creamy Chipotle Chicken Salad

That's all for now folks. See you next week :)