Not the actual chicken I used.

Once again, I have failed to take a picture of the finished product, so look at this here chicken and use your imagination.

My dad makes a mean chicken biryani. I was visiting home one day, chowing down on some delicious chicken, asking him how he made it.

“Couldn’t be simpler,” he said. He gave me detailed directions, explaining how you mix the paste with a certain amount of water and rub the mixture all over the chicken before cooking it over the stove. He  even offered to give me a bottle of biryani paste so I could try it myself, and I gratefully took him up on it. It certainly sounded easy!

Well, as you know by now, just because a recipe isn’t complicated doesn’t mean I won’t find a way to make it so. I have a tendency to make things harder for myself, usually by not following directions, or not being literate, or forgetting how important eggs are…et cetera. That sort of awesome stuff.

It might have helped if I’d have, you know, written down the directions my dad gave me. Yup.

So I kind of winged it. It’s a good thing I didn’t take a picture of the finished product, because it was not pretty. It was the most un-biryani-looking chicken to have ever been biryanied. It tasted okay, though. Greg was a good sport about the whole thing and to this day insists it was delicious. I think that’s a charitable thing to say.

(Sorry Dad! Next time I’ll listen better!)

Oh yeah, the basmati rice…I made it out of a bag. It was yummy and not challenging at all.

Let’s give this dinner four noms for taste (per Greg) and two noms for the fact that I’m not entirely sure I actually made biryani chicken. We’ll call it three noms overall. Sound fair? NOM NOM NOM.

Remember this post? Where I said I was going to visit the Etsy Labs to make a recipe card holder and swap recipes with crafty folk?

Look at all dem recipes.

Well, I did. And it was awesome!

We were given an envelope template and a big book full of sheets of designer paper, and then we made envelopes to hold the gorgeous letterpress recipe cards that Moontree Press graciously provided.

Swapping recipes with the other crafters was a blast, too. I brought along that recipe for champagne cupcakes, and should probably have picked something that required a liiiiiiiiittle less writing; in fact,  I typed it up and printed it out myself, because I didn’t feel like writing the whole thing out. Ha! (But it’s all good, because some brave souls with a lot of writing stamina copied down my recipe anyway.)

I came away from the evening with recipes for Max’s Mac & Cheese, Moroccan-Style Carrots, Pecan Sandies (which the woman actually baked and brought along for us, and THEY WERE DELICIOUS), and a bunch of other tasty-sounding dishes.

All in all, not a bad night! Think I’ll be back again soon…

I realized that the timeline for this project is all kinds of screwy — for one thing, as I pointed out before, I’m writing in September about a project I started in January. And I barely cooked anything between April and July, thanks to wedding planning, the subsequent wedding, and general burnout. Then I got a second wind in August and have since been making several recipes a week, so I’m actually almost caught up at this point.

So, I’ve decided to number the recipes by, well, recipes, instead of by weeks.

That said, I present to you Recipe 5: Southwest Skillet Chicken, with a side of Nachos.

yaaaay i remembered to take a picture this time

I’ll get to the reason I called them the Worst Nachos in the World in a minute. I assure you, however, that it has nothing to do with the recipe (I’m pretty sure) and everything to do with my apparent illiteracy.

The chicken dish called for a blend of frozen veggies that my local grocery store didn’t have, so instead of corn, red pepper, and broccoli, I had just corn and red pepper. The bag size was smaller than was suggested in the recipe, which turned out be a blessing because (a) my skillet was pretty small, and (b) you had to practically dig to find the chicken as it was, since I chopped it up into tiny bite-size pieces.

My substitution worked out pretty well. I didn’t miss the broccoli in the recipe, and the extra corn provided a sweetness that perfectly complemented the, uh, picante of the salsa. It was tasty, though it didn’t totally knock my socks off, so I’m giving the chicken three noms.

As for the side dish: the reason I picked nachos is because I figured I’d be clever and use up the rest of the peppered Monterey Jack cheese that was left over from the Pepper Jack Turkey Burgers. That was a disaster. Not having made nachos before, I had to look up a recipe (yeah, yeah, I know, who needs a recipe for melting cheese on chips? Me! I do!) and it told me to broil the nachos for five minutes at 475 degrees.

Okay, folks: the key word here is broil. That is a word I completely missed, because evidently I can’t read. I also didn’t “keep a good eye on them,” as the recipe suggested. (Ooops!) So I popped a tray full of chips ‘n’ cheese into the oven, and five minutes later I had a pan full of charred, uncheesy tortilla chips. Some of them were salvageable, if barely so, and I sneaked those into the picture above, but most of them were pretty terrible and, uh, kind of resembled asphalt. In fact, I am fairly certain that these were the world’s worst nachos. Zero noms. :(

I’d like to try the nachos again and this time actually broil them. Maybe it still won’t work (the temperature seems awfully high to me) but maybe it will. Who knows? I remain cautiously optimistic!

awesome recipe cards and photo by Moontree Press

Those of you who know me well understand that I am obsessed with Etsy.com, which is basically an online store for handmade items. Crafters sell their wares (or their craft supplies or vintage items) directly to interested buyers, and it’s basically the best thing ever. (Ask me about my wedding and the amazing stuff my mom found on Etsy for it!)

Every Monday, Etsy hosts a craft night based on a different theme. I’ve never been, but I’ve always thought it would be neat to go sometime. Well, I finally have that extra motivation, thanks to two things: (1) Etsy’s labs are in the same building as my husband’s office, so I already know how to get there, and (2) it’s RECIPE CARD NIGHT!

Seriously, how perfect is that? We’ll get to swap recipes and make a case for our new cards. I’m trying to decide what recipe to bring, and I’m leaning toward these yummy champagne cupcakes from Beantown Baker. (That’s week 17’s recipe…so I guess it’ll take me a little while to get to it on this blog!)

Plus, as if I needed any more reason to go, Moontree Press is giving out the above gorgeous recipe cards.

Plus plus, just when I thought it couldn’t get any better, it turns out that Sweet Tooth of the Tiger will be having a bake sale.

I shall report back on Tuesday with all the details. OH YES!

Nope, this is not my cupcake, which you can tell because it’s a Cowboys cupcake and not a Ravens cupcake (GO RAVENS!). But isn’t it awesome?

Blue Velvet Cowboys cupcake! © Victoria Pearson

Between September 12 and 19, Sprinkles Cupcakes of Dallas is selling special Blue Velvet Cowboys cupcakes. Fully 100% of the proceeds supports the Salvation Army (so if you hate the Cowboys, you’re still not allowed to hate these cupcakes). Plus, one cupcake every day will have a silver star inside it, and if you find that star, you win some neat stuff as well as a chance at the MVP Grand Prize (which includes Thanksgiving Day game tickets, an autographed football, and a chance to see a private rehearsal of the halftime show, among other things).

This idea could only be better if the cupcakes were Ravens cupcakes. Maybe I could bake some. I could try making purple velvet, like the gorgeous cake here (scroll down for the photo of a lovely lavender slice). But I’d probably have to draw the line at recreating the Ravens logo out of frosting. Decorating tiny baked goods with bird heads is probably a little complicated for me at this stage.

(via Cupcakes Take the Cake.)