Instead, I decided to embrace the wide availability of delicious fresh salsas and make Stephanie's Salsa Chicken and Rice (pp. 69-70). This dish was super easy to put together, and I thought it was delightfully light and tasty. The dish is made by cooking up some diced chicken, then adding chicken broth and salsa, rice, and cheese. I had one deviation to the recipe, which was using regular rice rather than instant, because while I was at the store I thought I had instant rice at home. It turned out to be regular boil-in-bag rice, which I liberated from the bags and used anyway. The recipe worked anyway with the modification of letting the pot sit for 10 minutes rather than 5 minutes, and letting the mixture boil with the rice added for a few minutes instead of just turning off the heat and allowing it to sit. My son, of course, thought the meal was "disgusting" and wanted to know what that "red" was doing in there. I made some broccoli so that he'd have something to eat:
Luckily, I also chose to make Navika's Brownie Cookies (p. 122), which received rave reviews from my son. This is a recipe from our own Nutan's daughter, and they are everything you might want in a cookie - chocolate with chocolate chips. YUM. They turned out crispier than I imagined, but that just makes them excellent with coffee, or hot chocolate, or, as I discovered as the week wore on, dipped into chocolate ice cream.
The cookie recipe made just over 36 cookies, so I must have been making them a little smaller than Navika intended. I took a little less than half of them to work, where they disappeared into many a coworker's belly, as well as my own. Everyone seemed to enjoy them! Luckily we don't have many participants in the Wil Research weight loss challenge this year - particularly in light of my decision to bake all of the chocolate chip cookies in the Cookbook as part of a March Chipness Tournament.
You see, we had agreed that two or more similar (or identically named) recipes should be prepared at the same time, brought into work, and judged in a winner-takes-all (takes what, exactly?) battle for supremacy. But, there are far too many chocolate chip cookie recipes in this cookbook to fathom making them all on the same day, so I decided to set it up tournament style in March. The winner will receive some totally-unexpected token of my appreciation at the end of the competition. More on this later in the month, when all the competitors have been seeded and you can fill out your brackets in the hopes of receiving a much-more-expected-because-you-know-this-is-going-on token of my appreciation!
Here's a picture of the cookies to whet your appetites:
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