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 #8: Pulled Pork Sliders with Macaroni and Cheese

Even though I wasn't writing any blog posts during the holidays, Justin and I were still trucking along with our Chopped challenges. Over the next week or two, I'll try to catch up on the posts for the ones we did during that time. We'll start with my challenge to Justin to use Hawaiian sweet bread (one of my favorite foods), steak sauce, mushrooms, and condensed cheese soup.

Grilled Three-Cheese & Rosemary Sandwiches

Justin and I love grilled cheese. First of all, who doesn't like cheese? It's pretty spectacular. Then it's also just so easy to make. Slap some butter and cheese on some bread and toss it in a hot pan. Voila, dinner. Tangent alert: I don't like it when people make "grilled cheese" with meat on it. That's not grilled cheese. That's a grilled sandwich with cheese on it. That's a poor man's panini. I'm sure it's still freaking delicious, but it's not grilled cheese. I can make an allowance for veggies I suppose, but even that's a little iffy to me; you're still verging on grilled sandwich territory there.

Sorry about that. I get really passionate about my grilled cheese. Anyway, in my book, you really can't beat the childhood favorite grilled cheese, white bread with Kraft singles. However, sometimes we like to pretend to be adults and fancy it up a bit. That's where this grilled cheese sandwich comes in. It still has the American cheese in there to give it that classic, gooey creaminess, but it also adds sharp cheddar for a little bite and Swiss cheese for a rich nuttiness. The rosemary butter gives it a hint of freshness. While this will never be my absolute favorite grilled cheese, it's a good alternative for when I want to feel a bit more sophisticated. My one major tip for this sandwich is to put the American cheese in the center of the other two slices. Being harder cheeses, they'll take a bit longer to melt, so having each of them right up against the bread should help with that a bit.

Roast Beef Foldovers

This is one of my absolute favorite sandwiches. I make it for lunch fairly often and dinner occasionally. For me, the thing that makes this sandwich more awesome than a regular roast beef sandwich is the bread. I always use garlic naan. If you haven't had naan before, you don't know what you're missing. It's a type of flatbread, but it's puffy and soft; it's not tough like some flatbreads can be. Once you heat it up and all that garlic aroma gets released, mmmm...