I Want My Cheesy Poofs!!

Obviously that was probably not the picture that popped into your mind when you read the words cheesy poofs.  Well, I have something so much better than those bright orange, artificially flavored, crunchy cheese snacks.  My cheesy poofs are little, two bite hors d’oeuvres.  Their texture is somewhere between a muffin and a biscuit and they’re loaded with smoked sausage, green onion, and tons of cheddar cheese.  Seriously, look up at that picture again.  Haven’t seen many things more drool worthy than that, have you?  And best of all, they’re simple to make!

Here’s what you’ll need:     

1 ¼ cup flour
1 cup light cream
1 egg
1 teaspoon baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon coarse pepper
¼ teaspoon garlic powder
1 ½ cups grated cheese
½ cup green onion
1 cup diced smoked sausage

I used 10 of the little Beeler’s smoked sausages.  If you can’t find that brand, I’m sure you can use one of the others.  Take each little sausage and cut it into quarters lengthwise. 

Then cut those strips into little pieces. 

Throw them into a pan over medium heat and cook them just long enough to cook off a little of their liquid and brown them slightly.  Then just set them aside to cool while you work on the other stuff.  Go ahead and grate your cheese, I used a combo of extra sharp and medium cheddar, and chop your green onions.  I think I used 7 or 8. 

If you grind your own black pepper, turn it just about as coarse as it will go, and crack about ½ teaspoon. 

Throw all your dry ingredients into a mixing bowl and whisk them together.

In a separate container, whisk together the cream and egg.

Add the cheese, onion, and cooled sausage to the flour mixture. 

Stir until everything is evenly distributed and coated, then pour over the cream. 

Stir just until the liquid is incorporated.  It’ll be a fairly thick mixture, more like a dough than a batter. 

Spoon the mixture into a mini muffin tin.  My pan is coated with silicone so things won’t stick, but if you’re pan isn’t, you might want to spray it or butter it. 

Fill each up to the top, pressing the mixture down to level it out and fill the corner of the cup. 

Place the pan into the freezer for 30 minutes.  This step helps to chill the fat and relax the gluten, which in turn makes them tender and well… poofy!  After 15 minutes, preheat your oven to 375°.  When the 30 minutes are up, pull the pan out of the freezer and pop it into the oven for 22 – 27 minutes.  During that time, glorious things are going to happen. 

They should be just starting to brown on top, and will probably have brown cheese extracurriculars (as I like to call them) around the edges.  Don’t worry about those… they are crispy and delicious. 

Remove them from the pan and allow them to cool for just a few minutes before devouring.  Pile them onto a plate for your guests… or yourself. 

Ok, I might not recommend eating that many in one sitting, but you might not be able to stop yourself.  I mean, just look at that sausagey, oniony, cheesy goodness. 

If can pretty much guarantee you’ll be singing this song after your first bite.    

Chicken Tortilla Soup

I briefly contemplated making brownies this week as well. But holy crap there's just no way to follow Taneasha's turtle brownies with something sweet. Those things are freaking unreal.

Instead, I opted for something completely different.

Chicken tortilla soup is this weird soup that never seems to be the same and has some strange little quirks to it. I mean, it's chicken soup, but you don't put the chicken in the soup? It's tortilla *soup*, but for some reason the tortilla chips are supposed to be crunchy? I have no clue how I'm supposed to pull that off, but apparently it's such a requirement that people will actually send the soup back in restaurants if the tortilla chips get soggy too fast? wtf?

Some people are very fussy bitches.

So, taking what we could, and what we wanted to, from various recipes we'd found on line, and memories of the soup from restaurants (I've only had it once in a restaurant, but Recipe Guy had a few stories for it) we created what we are calling "Chicken Tortilla Soup"

And now for something completely different.

Chicken Tortilla Soup

What you need:

• 2 L of chicken broth
• 2 tbsp oil
• 1 or 2 onions (one large or two small)
• 4 cloves garlic
• 1 tsp ground cumin
• 1 zucchini
• 1 poblano or anaheim or bell pepper (but preferrably poblano)
• 1 tin of black beans
• 1 tin of stewed tomatoes, diced
• 1 bay leaf
• 1 lime
• chicken (leftover works quite nicely)
• tortillas
• cilantro
• cheese (cheddar if you must, but ideally monterey jack)

What you gotta do:

So, if you don't have cans, jars, or boxes of chicken broth handy, you can do the next best thing: put a whole chicken (or cut up bits of one) in a pot, cover it with water, boil it for a couple hours.

If you boil a chicken for broth, you'll also find you have a handy source of chicken for the soup too. Leftovers freeze nicely, and once you've stripped all the meat from it, you can actually boil the bones again with some veggies to make a nice chicken stock. (Freeze them in the mean time).

Heat a medium pan over medium heat and then sautee the onions and garlic in the oil for a few minutes. Add the cumin and let it get nice and fragrant; it just needs a couple minutes.

Add the broth. Then tomatoes,

the diced veggies, and the bay leaf.

The pot we chose was getting a little full, so we only used half the tin of diced tomatoes. It was a large one anyway. We used difference in a spaghetti sauce. Tasty sauce is tasty!

Black beans are next! Drain and rinse them first though. They totally sink to the bottom of the pot, but they are there.

Squeeze in the juice of one lime. Whole thing.

Let this simmer just until the zucchini are just done. This does not take long; 15, maybe 20 minutes. Yup, this is actually a fast soup dinner. Totally doable on a weeknight, uses up leftovers, has veggies, and includes chips. Perfect Wednesday night dinner.

While that's simmering, shred the leftover chicken into bowls. Now, I'm not sure exactly why it has to be done this way, but Southern Momma (that's Recipe Guy's momma) absolutely insists that it must be done this way. Must! Shrill objection if it is not.

I tend to look at food from a somewhat frugal point of view, and I'm guessing that since this dish uses leftovers, it was a way to thinly spread the leftover chicken between bowls without any getting lost in the pot and without all of it ending up in one bowl. Whatever the reason, we did it this way.

You are welcome to add the chicken to the pot if you prefer.

The tortillas... in the bowl, on the edge, under the broth, on top afterwards, completely abandoned in favour of masa instead... I don't really know what to say here except that if you think your tortillas are going to stay crunchy in soup, you're a fucking moron.

I was aiming for something to take pictures of so I lined the sides of the soup bowls with them.

Ladel the soup over the chicken and tortillas,

then top with cilantro and cheese.

Oh yeah, some people put the cheese in the bowl with the chicken before ladelling the soup on.

Really, you're going to have to figure out how you want to do your layers on your own. This is a very individualized thing. When Recipe Guy when in for seconds, he crunched the tortilla chips up in his hands

and put them on the bottom, along with the cheese.

Some recipes require that slices of avocado be placed on top of, or in the soup once it's in the bowl. Warm avocado kinda grosses me out, so we didn't do that. Guacamole makes a nice side dish for this though, particularly if you have some non-soup-soaked tortilla chips handy.

Because once you pour soup on them this happens:

Tasty, but not crunchy.

Tortillas don't stay crunchy after you've poured soup onto them.

Seriously! Who thinks this??