Chicken Tortilla Soup

My process for writing posts is as follows:
1) Try to remember to take pictures of cooking things or playing games
2) Do other things.  This step can take days, or weeks!)
3) Decide to write a post
4) Import photos from camera.  Look at photos and say "oh yeah, that happened!"
5) Write post

This week has been super full of the "other things" mentioned in step 2.  It was so full, that no menu was made, no groceries shopped for, no new fun recipes were made.  There was an emergency game night, but no pictures were taken.  Fortunately, there are pictures from over a week ago in the camera.

Soup! Cheese!  Avocado! What's not to love?

This is another slow cooker recipe from America's Test Kitchen Slow Cooker Revolution.  I've made it before, but this time was special.  The cooking time is only 4 to 6 hours, which means it's not great for starting in the morning and coming home to after an 8 hour day at the office (or school).  The solution? Mr. PotsAndPawns started it while I was out.  I came home to magic soup!  (Magic because I didn't have to cook it.) Hooray, soup!

All dressed up!  See how I put a chip in it?  Very fancy...

This soup made plenty of left overs, but it was so tasty that we didn't try to freeze any.  We just ate it all over the next couple of days.  

What: Chicken Tortilla Soup

Results: Tasty, and spicy! Watch out for those chipotles in adobo sauce!

Source: America's Test Kitchen Slow Cooker Revolution

Game Night: Munchkin and Seaside

Number of Players: 4
Games: Munchkin, Dominion Seaside

Warming up with Munchkin

In Seaside, we played the recommended set called Shipwrecks.  By this point, we'd seen most of the cards before, but there was one new one: Sea Hag.  The Sea Hag causes every player to draw a curse card, except the person who played the card.   In general, it seems that most people I play with are reluctant to use attack cards early in the game, including me.  It's just good tactics to not get everyone pissed off at you too early in the game - or so I thought!  There was one black-hearted rogue at the table who bought several Sea Hags, and used them until all the curse cards were distributed.  Surely, we thought, his lack of beneficial cards and money would destroy him in the end.  But we were wrong.  Very, very wrong.  He was the winner.  

The black-hearted rogue and his Sea Hag

The really embarrassing thing is that I ended up with a negative score.  How is that even possible?

A Seasonally Appropriate Menu

Have you noticed that lots of grocery stores only carry apple cider in October?  Or at least, they only display it in areas that are easy to see in October.  I have noticed, because my brain says "Look!  Apple cider!  You should make Chicken with Apple Cider Sauce!"  

The ingredients!  No, I think the lemon juice looks fine.  It must be your monitor.  

I came across this recipe years ago living in my first house with cable (and the Food Network!)  We had cable because my roommate got it.  I guess that How to Boil Water was on at a convenient time, because they made this recipe and they made it look super easy.  So I tried it, and it was awesome.  In fact, I made a whole dinner with roasted asparagus and rice pilaf.  

Look! I remembered to take pictures while cooking!  I'm pretty fancy.

I just checked on the internet and the show is still running!  Wikipedia says it's been going since 1993.  Crazy!  Here's the link: Chicken with Apple Cider Sauce.  

Ta-daa!

Notes:  Even though you use cider to make the sauce, it's not particularly apple-y or cider-y.  You will feel silly for buying a huge thing of apple cider and only using half a cup.  

Secrets: Pan sauces make you look (and feel) super fancy, but they are really super easy.  

Proto-apple dumplings

Still reading?  We had apple dumplings for desert.  These were pretty easy, too.  This recipe came from America's Test Kitchen Cooking for Two 2009.  You basically bake apples in a pastry dough, then cover with a cider syrup.  I made one major departure: the recipe called for puff pastry, but they were sold out at the store.  What they did have was single sheet crescent roll dough, so I used that instead.  It worked great!

Apple Dumpling with cider syrup

What 1: Chicken with Apple Cider Sauce
Notes 1: Pretty good.  Let sauce cook down more, use less butter

Where 1: Chicken with Apple Cider Sauce, Food Network: How to Boil Water

What 2: Apple Dumpling
Notes 2: Awesome!  Using crescent roll single sheet dough works great.

Where 2: America's Test Kitchen Cooking for Two 2009

Black Bean Soup

Black beans, or bleans, are one of the tastiest beans out there.  While I am sure there are many fantastic vegetarian black bean soups out there, this is not one of them.  This is a very porky black bean soup.  Apologies to vegetarians and pork-averse readers.

Black beans!  From the Wikimedia Commons

One of the things a slow cooker does very well is to cook weird pieces of meat and make them tender and delicious.  What makes a piece of meat weird?  Well, here are some things that are not weird: boneless skinless chicken breast, ground beef, ribeye, and boneless skinless chicken thigh.  Things that are weird: anything with skin still on it, anything with the bone still in it, and anything that I don't immediately know I can find at Super Target.  Chicken parts: weird.  Whole chicken: super weird.  Smoked ham hock: what?

Super weird Japanese thing.  Watch all the mameshiba videos on you tube!

This specialized ingredient was not at my normal grocery store.  This is not the first time this has happened.  The first time, I was looking for something called blade steak.  I went to the fanciest grocery store I could think of, approached the expansive intimidating meat counter, and made my request.
"A what?"
"A blade steak"
"Um...let me go in the back and ask someone."
They never came back out.  The was a learning moment for me.  All the celebrity chefs say to talk to your butcher, find out what's fresh, they'll have helpful tips on how to best cook certain cuts of meat, make friends with them, take them out for drinks.  Okay, maybe not the last part so much.  Anyway, it was at that moment I realized there was probably very little butchering going on behind that fancy meat counter.  Actually, the learning moment was spread out over the 20 minutes I was waiting for the meat attendant to come back.  Now my tactic is to look at two or three places, then find a substitute.

Look, they even have Mameshiba plushies!

This time I found a smoked ham shank instead of smoked ham hock.  Close enough.

Mmm...soup!  Is sticking a spoon on it at all like putting a bird on it?  

The soup turned out good, if a little smokier and a little meatier than when it has ham hock.  Garnish with sour cream, red onion, and hot sauce.

Mameshiba coin purse!  Squee!

What: Black Bean Soup
Results: Good.  Smokey, meaty
Where: America's Test Kitchen Slow Cooker Revolution

Dominion: Seaside

Dominion Seaside is an expansion of Dominion, which means you need the base cards from one of the stand alone games.  Or you can get a set of just the base cards.  Apparently that's a thing now.  We scavenged the base cards from Intrigue.

We had two players for our maiden voyage.  (Get it?  Because it's nautically themed!)  One of the things I like about Dominion games is the suggested sets for a well rounded game.  This is super helpful when you're not familiar with the cards of a new expansion.  We played the High Seas set.  There were a couple of cards with interesting mechanics.  The Pirate Ship was a little aggressive and allowed a player to either collect gold tokens or use the gold tokens she'd already acquired as money.  The Smuggler helped us build up our decks really fast.  The game changer, though, was Embargo.  This card let the player put an embargo on a stack of cards, which results in a player gaining a curse card whenever the player bought a card from that stack.  Put an embargo on the province cards, and all of a sudden your 8 coins buy effectively 5 victory points instead of 6.  Put an embargo on the duchy cards, and the victory points drop from 3 to 2.  

All set up and ready to go!  Oh wait, where are the curse cards?

We only had two embargos: one on provinces, one on duchies.  This was very effective to get people to stop buying duchies, but not so much with the provinces.  Embargoes can stack, causing a buyer to take two, three, four, or however many curse cards are required.  In a game with more people, the provinces could easily get embargoed to the point where a purchase is just not worth it anymore.

This was a really close game.  We both had the same number of province cards and estate cards (after canceling out curses), but I was behind by just one duchy!  Oh well, maybe next time...

Farmhouse Chicken and Corn Chowder

The weather has taken its first chilly turn of the season, which can only mean one thing.  Soup!  And what's the easiest way to make soup?  In the crockpot!  Or slow cooker, as they say these days.  So go blow your nose on a facial tissue, bandage your boo-boos with adhesive bandages, and store your food in resealable plastic bags.  Actually, I think my slow cooker actually is a Crock Pot, so I'm off the hook.

This looks exactly like my *ahem* slow cooker, except for the Rival label.  Found at nu-spoon.com 

Tonight's recipe came from America's Test Kitchen Slow Cooker Revolution.  I know you're shocked that I've made another Test Kitchen recipe.  I get in phases.  My previous phase was Alton Brown.  Before that it was Mark Bittman.  The Joy of Cooking was my undergrad cookbook.  Betty Crocker was my high school cookbook.  Of course, there were plenty of other cookbooks mixed in there as well.  Anyway, this is my Test Kitchen phase.  Deal with it.

The important thing to realize about this recipe is that it's not easy, at least not by my standards.  There is a lot of prep work to do, and it calls for cooking some of the stuff in a skillet before it goes in the slow cooker.  Yep, you read that right.  Cook it in a pan, then cook it in a slow cooker.  I was *very* resistant to this idea at first.  You should just be able to dump everything in and turn it on, right?

The thing about Test Kitchen is that they are very good at describing why they made the choices they made about a recipe.  You can only read that browning the meat in the pan first *really* improves the flavor before you start to believe it, and before you know it, you're pulling out the skillet along with the slow cooker to try it out.  *Even though* it's a whole extra dirty pan that you have to wash by hand.  That's faith.

Oooh!  Ahhh!

The other important thing about this recipe is that it is delicious.  I have no idea if it freezes well, but I do know it makes good left overs.  The 6 to 8 servings it makes always disappear within a few days.  

What: Farmhouse Chicken and Corn Chowder

Results: Delicious
Source: America's Test Kitchen Slow Cooker Revolution

Pandemic and Tsuro

This weekend we had a total of five people for game night, and we played Pandemic and Tsuro.

Normally, Pandemic is a four player game, but we had the expansion, On The Brink, which allows for a fifth player.  Pandemic is quite possibly my most favoritest game ever.  If you are not familiar with Pandemic, there is an *excellent* youtube video you should watch:

In fact, all the TableTop videos are awesome, you should watch them all, like them all, and subscribe to  Geek and Sundry.  

The expansion really should be called "New and More Interesting Ways to Die"

On The Brink is neat because it's kind of like three expansions in one.  You can choose to play with a virulent strain, bioterrorist, or mutation.  So far the only one we've tried is virulent strain, in which one of the diseases becomes virulent, meaning that each epidemic card introduces a new effect related to one color.  Last night, this was the yellow fever.  So there we were, with one disease left to cure, when the final epidemic of the game hit, produced multiple outbreaks, and everyone died a horrible death.  Fin.

After a short break, we recovered our wits, and played Tsuro.

Roar!  I'm a dragon!

In Tsuro, you are a dragon flying along a path.  You build your path tile by tile, but watch out!  If your path leads you to another dragon or off the board, you're out of the game.  Last man standing, or last dragon afloat, wins the game.  It's short, it's straightforward, and can have up to eight players.  It's also a good way to mentally recover from Pandemic.

Whee! Flying dragons!

Pizza-nini

When I can, I like to come home for lunch.  Unfortunately, I have only 20 minutes total to assemble and eat lunch.  Usually this means I have leftovers or a grilled cheese sandwich.  This time the leftovers were mini pizza leftovers, but I didn't have time to mess with the oven and the 10 minutes of cheese melting.  What to do?

The solution: Make a mini-pizza sandwich and cook it in the panini press.  Voila!  The pizza-nini!

Looking good!

It turned out great, but it was very similar to eating a pizza pocket. Better than a pizza pocket to be sure, but certainly thematically similar.  

Mini Pizza

Here's a recipe that requires no recipe.  Here's the completely unnecessary recipe.

Mini Pizza!

Ingredients:
Bread of above average strength*
pizza sauce**
toppings***

1.  Preheat oven to whatever**** suits you
2.  Assemble mini pizzas
3.  Bake in oven until heated through and cheese is all melty, if you even used cheese.
4.  Let cool as long as you can stand it
5.  Put it in your face.

Before baking.  Left: Canadian Bacon and Pineapple.  Right: mini-pepperoni

After baking.  Mmmm...melty cheese....

*We used Filone rolls.  I hear english muffins work too.  What is a Filone roll?  I don't know, but we saw them at Target in the fresh bread section and thought they looked about right.

Filone 

**Pizza sauce can be anything goopy and tasty.  Spaghetti sauce, alfredo, garlic butter, whatever.  I used a pretty awesome no-cook pizza sauce recipe that was embedded in America's Test Kitchen's recipe for Thin-Crust Pizza.  If you're an Amazon Prime member, you can watch season 12 for free.  The no-cook pizza sauce recipe is in there, episode 8. You can also find the recipe on their website for free, but you do have to register.

Pretty awesome no-cook pizza sauce

***Pizza toppings: usual or unusual, meaty or veggie, anything goes!

****Our oven's default is 350, so that's what we went with.  However, the oven thermometer (which can also lie) said it was closer to 250.  The point is, nobody knows what temperature it was really at, but it was in there for about 10 minutes.