Chicken Fajitas: Cheap and Easy

I made chicken fajitas on Thursday night. This is one of the easiest recipes in my arsenal of recipes. All you need are chicken breasts or tenders; I prefer tenders because they tend to be a bit cheaper, but breasts are fine, too; bell peppers of two different colors; and onions. Typically, you use red and green bell peppers, but I don't like the way green bell peppers taste, so I use red and yellow.
For the chicken, just slice it up and season it with chili powder, cumin, and garlic powder. Add it to the pan with your sliced bell peppers and onion and cook until it's all cooked through.
All you need to do is serve it with flour tortillas. This is also incredibly easy to make it vegetarian or vegan. All you need to do is either swap the chicken for tofu or remove the chicken and add another colored pepper to the mix and to make sure you use lard free tortillas (I'm from the southwest, so out here it's really easy to find tortillas still made with lard, but there are also ways of finding ones made with vegetable shortening if you know where to go).
Will loves this recipe, especially since I make sure it's still sizzling when I serve it. This recipe is best made on cast iron, but anything will work.

Yogurt Sauced Potatoes: Needs Work

I tried making potatoes in yogurt sauce. It was tasty, but I honestly think I screwed up because the sauce didn't stick the way it looked like it should have.
It was a bit hot for my liking; in fact we had to make an emergency run to the store to get more yogurt just to cool it down a bit because both of us found it too spicy. One thing that wasn't so bad, though, was that it was a great laxative.

Splurge Day: Kielbasa With Potatoes and Onions

Once in a while, I make this dish because it's quick, easy, and cheap. Unfortunately, this time the potatoes came out nice and crispy, but I added too much oil. I forgot that there was no pour spout to limit the speed at which the oil pours out of the bottle. I managed to get half of it back into the bottle, but I still couldn't get quite enough back in to keep it from getting greasy.
It was good, but next time I will be more careful about putting in a smaller amount of oil in. Lesson learned.

Goat Sausage and Mushroom Calzones: Not Bad

As I mentioned before, I had a ton of goat sausage and mushrooms left over from making grilled pizza, so I decided to make calzones with it. I really don't like to heat up my house by running the oven in the middle of summer, so I put them on a baking tray and cooked them in a grill. It would have gone great...had I not forgotten to brush the tops with oil. The tops were mostly anemic, while the bottoms were quite dark. Needless to say, I learned my lesson.
I will not have another entry till Friday, since tonight is a leftovers night. I will make sure to make up for it, though.

Brussels Sprout Soup: Time Consuming and Needs Some Tweaking

I had some frozen Brussels sprouts in my freezer because I thought I would have to use them in the stir fry. I ended up getting some fresh for that recipe, and don't like things to take up my freezer, so I was trying to think up ways to use it. Wouldn't you know it? When I borrowed one of my mother in-law's cookbooks, there was a recipe that called for, you guessed it, frozen Brussels sprouts. It even required the amount I had for a half batch.
It doesn't require a lot of effort, just a ton of multitasking. What you do is fry some bacon and garlic in a big soup pot. I forgot to thaw bacon, so it's easily omitted. Then you add almost a cup of chicken stock, milk, rice, oregano, and salt and pepper. Bring this mixture to a boil, reduce heat, and simmer 15 minutes. Then you add frozen peas and carrots. Again, bring to a boil, reduce heat, and simmer 10 minutes or until the vegetables are tender. Meanwhile coarsely chop your partially thawed Brussels sprouts. Combine about half a cup of broth, salt and two cups water. Bring this liquid to a boil and add the Brussels sprouts. Return it to a boil, reduce heat and simmer until tender, 10 minutes. Then you add the contents of the pot to the rice mixture. Stir in three eighths of a cup of Parmesan cheese, and serve with crackers.
Will liked it, but I wasn't all that fond of it. Call it me being my own worst critic, but that's just how I am. To me, it could have been so much better. I think this will require some extra tweaking for me to figure out exactly what I want to do to improve upon it.

Grilled Goat Sausage Pizza

My mother in-law brought me some ground goat from the farmer's market. I was looking for some inspiration on what to do with it, when I came across a recipe for goat pizza. That's when I realized I could make a pizza on the grill because I had frozen some pizza dough in my freezer.
I made goat meat sausage using garam masala, ground fenugreek, chili powder, ground coriander, and merlot. I also used some baby bellas for the toppings. For the cheese, we used a beautiful mozzarella.
Will took care of the sauce. All you do is get some watered down canned tomato paste, and add Italian seasoning, garlic powder, fennel seeds, oregano, basil, a bit of cayenne and just enough clove to cover the tip of a table knife. He made it a touch too spicy, but it complemented the Indian spices in the sausage, so it all worked out okay.
The grill gave the dough a nice flavor and browned it really nicely. The toppings were just right. I had a bunch of toppings left over, so I may ask Will to pick up some ricotta so we can make grilled calzones.

New Mexico Style Steak

Because it's been really hot out, I've been doing a ton of grilling and trying to find all kinds of grilled recipe ideas. This was one of them, and it's super simple.
All you do is grind together paprika, pepper, and fennel and rub it all over a cut of top sirloin steak. You then put it on the grill for eight minutes if you want it medium rare like Will and I do. Then you put some slices of Havarti cheese on the steak and cook until melted. Finally, you put some green chili salsa or some salsa verde on top of the steak. Will and I prefer El Pinto jarred New Mexico green chilies, but any will do.
Will liked this so well that he managed to forget the salad I served it with. This is most definitely a keeper.