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.

Chopped Challenge #5, Part 3: Maple Bourbon Barbecue Sauce

I have to say, I really like this barbecue sauce. I'd never made homemade barbecue sauce before, and now I'm not really sure why. You just toss a bunch of stuff in a pot and let it cook down, stirring it occasionally. It's really easy, and you can make it taste like whatever you want really. I'm definitely going to make barbecue sauce more often now.

This sauce in particular is really sweet. I'm serious. There are 5 ingredients in there that have the main purpose of adding sweetness. A couple more add sweetness as well as other qualities. I also don't like my barbecue sauce to have a lot of spice to it, so if you're into that sort of thing, you might want to up the amount of cayenne you add or add in some other spicy ingredients.

Chicken Creole

I haven't always been a big fan of chicken Creole. It's very tomato-y, and as I've talked about before, I didn't really like tomatoes much until fairly recently. When I was a kid, the tomato chunks in chicken Creole are what turned me off, but now that I'm over it, I really enjoy this dish. It's still not my favorite Cajun-style dish, but it's definitely worth making once in a while.

Mom's Spaghetti Sauce

We ate spaghetti fairly often when I was a kid, and as far as I was concerned, spaghetti sauce came from a jar. If you wanted the "real thing," you got it at a restaurant. People didn't just make spaghetti sauce at home. Well, maybe if you came from an Italian family, but my family's not Italian. For whatever reason, one day she decided that she wanted to make homemade spaghetti sauce. I don't know where she got the recipe, but the day she made it for the first time, my life changed; there's life before homemade spaghetti sauce and life after it.

Chopped Challenge #3: Baked Pizza Roll-ups

It's time for Chopped challenge #3, and this time Justin chose gorgonzola cheese, poblano peppers, diced tomatoes (canned), and... wonton wrappers. Yep. Wonton wrappers. Clearly my first thought was to make some sort of wonton, probably fried. Then I thought about cutting the wonton wrappers in to strips, frying them, and using them as a garnish on a soup or someting. The other ingredients were fairly wide open--he didn't choose any kind of meat, so I could do almost whatever I wanted with the other three ingredients.

I started thinking about what to do with the gorgonzola, and my first thought was pizza. That's pretty much the only way I've ever had gorgonzola before. If I did something pizza-related, I could also use the tomatoes. Wontons often have some kind of pork filling, so I decided to pick up some sausage and go for a sausage pizza kind of filling. I could just toss the poblanos in there and call it done, but I thought it would be nice if there was a dipping sauce to go with the wontons. I settled on a modified version of my easy Alfredo sauce with a poblano twist.

Easy, Light Alfredo Sauce

My mom used to make her own version of Alfredo by tossing pasta with heavy whipping cream, butter, garlic, and Parmesan cheese (the powdery kind from a can, like you put on pizza or spaghetti). She didn't make it into an actual sauce first--she'd just toss it all into a pot together and give it a quick stir. It wasn't true Alfredo, but it was still delicious.

I've made Alfredo sauce from scratch before, and while it isn't particularly difficult, it's sometimes just more work than I want to put in and/or more calories than I want to eat. On those days, I make this sauce, an amalgamation of my mom's Alfredo and from-scratch Alfredo. Instead of making a roux of butter and flour, adding milk or cream, letting it cook until thickened, and then adding cheese, this recipe mixes the butter and cheese (with just a bit of flour) to make a roux. Then all you have to do is add the milk and seasonings. It's super easy. Justin and I like to pour this over baked potatoes with broccoli (and sometimes chicken, too), as well as on pasta.