Chopped Challenge #10: Choripollo Flatbread Sandwiches

For our tenth Chopped challenge I gave Justin Pillsbury pizza dough, chorizo, chives, and mashed potato flakes. One of our favorite Mexican restaurants near our last apartment in Indiana had choripollo on their menu, which was a mixture of chicken, chorizo, and cheese sauce. It was really delicious, and you just tossed it onto a tortilla with rice, beans, etc. or inhaled it straight from the plate. Originally Justin was going to attempt to make some sort of choripollo empanadas, but he ended up just turning his idea into more of a sandwich instead, using the pizza dough as the bread and putting the cheese sauce on the side for dipping. The flavor was really good, and I would definitely have him make these for dinner again sometime.

Cinnamon Donut Muffins

Have you ever had those little, pre-packaged, cinnamon-coated donuts? These muffins taste a lot like those except more awesome because they're homemade. I used to make them at the coffee shop all the time, and it was always hard to sell them to customers rather than eating them myself. They're that delicious. The secret to these muffins is butter. You dip them in butter and then roll them in a cinnamon-sugar mixture. Not only does this make the cinnamon-sugar actually stick to the outside of the muffins, it gives them a bit of extra moisture and a ton of extra richness. If you're looking to save on calories, you can just dip the tops in butter instead, though believe me, you'll be missing out on the extreme deliciousness of a fully-coated muffin.

King Cake

Happy Mardi Gras! Being from New Orleans, this is one of my favorite times of year, though it's always a little sad when I don't get to go home for it. To make up for it though, I always bake a couple king cakes throughout the season. The Mardi Gras season officially starts on Epiphany, which is January 6, and lasts until the day before Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent. (In case you don't know, Ash Wednseday is always 46 days before Easter, which traditionally falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Vernal Equinox. It's complicated, I know.) Depending on when that is, Mardi Gras day can fall anywhere from February 3 to March 9, giving me anywhere from just under a month to just over 2 months to bake king cakes to my heart's content.

At this point you might be asking yourself, "What is a king cake anyway?" Well, dear reader, a king cake is traditionally served during the Mardi Gras season--in case you hadn't figured that much out already. It's not really a cake per se; it's actually much more bread-like. Flavorwise, it's a bit like a giant cinnamon roll, though don't let anyone fool you into thinking that it is just a giant cinnamon roll because it's not. The differences are subtle, yes, but it's still not a cinnamon roll. A plastic baby is also placed inside the cake, and finding it in your piece is good luck (and symbolizes the wise men finding baby Jesus in the manger). Typically when we would have Mardi Gras parties in school and such, whoever finds the baby also brings in the next king cake, in which case you may not feel it's so luck after all. Also, take it from the voice of experience here, when you go to cut the cake, try to remember where you put the baby so that you don't cut it in half. Nobody likes finding half a baby in their cake.

Tea & Honey Muffins

This year Justin and I decided that instead of making New Year's resolutions that we had try to keep for the whole year, we would make monthly resolutions and try to stick to them for 30 days at a time. Then the next month we'd make a new resolution, continuing this throughout the year. I decided to take it a step further and make three resolutions each month--one food, one fitness, and one personal. My food resolution for February is that I will eat breakfast every day. Too often I have a habit of waking up, jumping on the compuer and killing a few hours, and then discovering that it's lunchtime and I've yet to eat anything. For these 28 days, I'm trying to be very cognizant of that and make sure that I have some form of breakfast each and every morning, even if that's just a big cup of hot chocolate; I just need to have some kind of caloric intake to start out the day.

My go-to breakfast is usually a bowl of cereal. I decided to try to change it up this month and try out some new recipes, as well as making some old favorites. One of my favorite breakfast options is homemade muffins. They're incredibly versatile and can be as healthy (or not) as you want them to be. A basic muffin recipe also lends itself well to the addition of a variety of mix-ins and flavorings. For these particular muffins, I've adapted a basic recipe from King Arthur Flour. Some muffin recipes come out too light, crumbly, and cupcake-y for my taste, but these are much more dense and hearty like a good muffing should be. Any strongly brewed black tea will work here. I used some of my favorite tea--an apricot-flavored blend of Ceylon and Darjeeling--that we had at the coffee shop where I worked, but plain black tea from Luzianne or Lipton or something would be just as good. Tea isn't known for giving a very strong flavor to baked goods, so the stronger the brew the better.