Crawfish Bread

As soon as March arrives, I start to crave one thing: crawfish. Crawfish season is typically March to June. This is when they're cheap, big, and easily available, and so it's also when you get to have crawfish boils, an integral part of my childhood. There's nothing like running around in the spring sunshine while someone boils up a huge batch of crawfish, red potatoes, corn, and sausages/hot dogs. When it's time to eat, they just dump it all into a big pile on a newspaper-covered picnic table, and everyone digs in. It's messy. It's hot. It's a lot of work, but oh man is it delicious.

Living outside of southern Louisiana makes it difficult to experience anything even close to a crawfish boil. Thankfully, Norfolk, VA holds a Cajun festival every summer, and one of the things they offer there is fresh boiled crawfish. It's WAY more expensive than they would be in New Orleans (like $5-6/lb at the festival rather than $2-3/lb in New Orleans) and doesn't come with all the awesome extras, but it's the closest I've come to the real thing since moving away.

Fajita Macaroni & Cheese

Sometimes I just get this cooking idea that I can't seem to escape from. It's like when you get a song stuck in your head and you do anything to try to get rid of it. Think of that but with food. I don't even know where the idea came from, but I must have heard or seen something that set it off: fajita mac and cheese. Once the thought was there, I couldn't not make it. No matter how much I told myself I didn't need to make a pot of mac and cheese for dinner, my stomach wouldn't listen. Eventually I gave in and made this. Let me tell you--my stomach knows what it's talking about. It was right to urge me to throw together this recipe because it was pretty spectacular.

If you're looking for some sort of lighter twist on mac and cheese, you've come to the wrong place. This is a full fat, balls to the wall kind of mac and cheese recipe. The chicken and the veggies almost make it seem lighter than it is, but don't let them fool you. This stuff will make you fat if you let it. You can leave out the chicken or substitute it with beef or shrimp if that's your kind of thing. You can change out the veggies you don't like or add in more that you do. Do whatever you want to the fajita part of the recipe, but do yourself a favor and make the cheese sauce the way you're supposed to. When you get that craving for ooey, gooey, rich, creamy mac and cheese, there is no substitute. Enjoy it in all its fatty gloriousness. Work out hard to make up for it if you must, but don't skimp on the good stuff here. Trust me.

Chicken & Gnocchi Soup

Winter has been making one last effort (or at least I hope it's the last effort) to maintain a hold on the weather around here. It's been cold and windy and not quite sunny. In other words, it's still perfect soup weather. I decided to adapt another Pinterest recipe that I found. It was a copycat version of Olive Garden's chicken and gnocchi soup, which I really enjoy. I upped the amount of gnocchi in the recipe to make it more of a meal, but if you're serving it as an actual soup course, feel free to cut it back down to just 16 ounces. Justin wasn't a huge fan of this soup--he said it tasted canned, which is really bizarre since everything is made from fresh ingredients. Only the gnocchi came in any sort of a package, and I seriously doubt that would give it a canned flavor. I think he's just weird. I loved this soup and since Justin apparently doesn't want to have it for dinner again, I will definitely make it again for lunch sometime.

Chicken & Noodles

My younger sister is getting married next month, and I've been helping her with some of the paper goods that she needs (invitations, place cards, programs, etc.) for the wedding and reception. For one of the projects, we were discussing her reception menu, and she mentioned chicken and noodles. I've been craving chicken and noodles ever since then, so I finally gave in and made some. I didn't actually have a chicken and noodles recipe of my own, so I tried out one that I found online. While it wasn't a perfect recipe, it was a good first attempt. Next time I need to find a way to make it saucier. I want a thick, creamy sauce, almost like a gravy but not quite, on my chicken and noodles, and this just didn't quite do it for me. The flavor was good, but I just need to figure out the sauce.

That being said, I still ate it all up, and Justin liked it a lot, too. He compared it to chicken noodle soup without all the broth, and since that's pretty much how he wants his soup, he was completely fine with this recipe. Sometime down the road I'll give it another try, but for now, I thought I'd go ahead and share the recipe with you anyway. Be forewarned though; this makes a huge pot full of chicken and noodles. It all just barely fit in my 8 quart pot.

Chopped Challenge #13: Macaroni & Cheese Pot Pie

Well, it seems that I have misplaced/lost/accidentally deleted the photos for Chopped challenges #11 and 12. :( I'm usually so careful about my photos, but I seem to be missing the pictures for those two challenges and a couple other recipes I planned to post. I think I probably uploaded some of the pictures on the memory card but not all of them, and then when I looked at the card later, I saw those same photos, assumed I had transfered everything on the card already, and deleted everything that was on it. C'est la vie. There's nothing I can do about it now. For the record, for challenge 11, I had to cook with chicken, Italian seasoning, tri-color pasta, and flavored wine. Justin left it up to me to pick the flavor of wine. It could be blueberry, peach, strawberry, etc.--anything that specifically listed a flavor on the label was fine. I decided to go with an orange and peach flavored one and used it to make Orange-Honey Chicken with Asian Pasta Salad. I marinated the chicken in the wine and some of the Italian seasoning, and I also used it along with some honey to make a sauce. I coated the chicken with some panko and baked it until it was done, and then I served it with the sauce drizzled over it. For a side, I combined the tri-color pasta with some diced onion and bell pepper, as well as some Asian sesame dressing to make pasta salad. It was pretty good. I think the pasta salad was my favorite part.

For challenge 12, Justin had to use cream cheese, king cake-flavored vodka, chai powder, and frozen waffles. He turned that into Boozy Ice Cream with Chai Topping and Waffle Chips. He used the vodka in some ice cream, like in the Boozy Wedding Cake Ice Cream recipe, and he combined the cream cheese with some pudding mix and the chai powder to make a topping with a consistency that was somewhere between pudding and mousse. Just before serving, he toasted the waffles and cut them into quarters to use for dipping into the dessert. It was tasty, and the mixture of the warm waffles with the cold ice cream was really nice.

That's enough about those though. On to today's challenge! Justin gave me boxed macaroni and cheese, ranch seasoning, pork sausage patties, and frozen broccoli to use. I combined those to make a macaroni and cheese pot pie. In the end, I think it could've been a little saucier--it was definitely more on the dry side--but otherwise the flavors were good. You could just make an extra 1/2 recipe of the sauce (minus the extra cheese) or even just add a bit more milk so that it thins out a bit, and that would probably take care of it. If you like your sauce on the thicker side though, try it as is.

Chocolate Hazelnut Muffins

For my last batch of muffins in February, I decided to go all out and make something chocolatey, which I had been avoiding for most of the month because it's much harder to feign eating a healthy breakfast with a chocolate muffin stuffed in your mouth. These muffins have chocolate and hazelnuts in them, as well as a dollop of Nutella inside which is melty and extra delicious if you eat these muffins when they're still warm. (Full disclosure, I actually used Korger's brand of Nutella because they have a crunchy version that has little bits of hazelnut in it, too. You can use whatever kind you prefer though.)