Ringing in the New Year!

Today's been quite the cooking day. We usually have people over to watch football on Sundays. I don't like the sport but I love having people over - guinea pigs for new recipes. For lunch, I put together Southwestern Heat Burgers with Kansas City Baked Beans (Smoke & Spice, pg. 32, 372, respectively). The baked beans were a pain in the ass. First off, any recipe that calls for soaking beans for at least 4 hours before cooking them for another 2 to 3 ticks me off. I'm a fan of Rachel Ray's 30 Minute Meals. I don't like having to think about dinner the night before or start working on lunch at 9 in the morning. I'd actually started these beans for New Year's but Brian offered to make enchiladas which are absolutely incredible - I'll never turn those suckers down. So I tossed out a pan of soaking beans Friday night. Last night, I started the second bag of beans soaking and I started them cooking around 11 this morning. Oh, the recipe called for navy beans. Raley's didn't have anything called navy beans so I grabbed two bags of red beans. Should have checked Joy of Cooking (best reference cookbook ever). Turns out navy beans are small white beans. By the time I figured that out, there were a bunch of hungry people in the house and the wrong beans still a few hours from being done. At that point, I said "screw it" and went to the store and bought a few cans of white beans. That cut at least 6 hours off the recipe. I have to remember that in the future. So the Smoke and Spice cookbook is really good - Zeb pulled a ton of recipes from it. I think if we have one a week, we won't repeat until September. The problem though is that each recipe calls for a ton of ingredients and usually a cup of some other recipe. The flavors are incredible but it is time consuming. The cookbook is like a choose-your-own-adventure story. So for the baked beans, I chose the Struttin' Sauce, which also had about 18 ingredients. At first I was annoyed I had to make it but then I tried it. So delicious! I think it was my favorite part! We put the extra on the burgers. The baked beans turned out quite well but I think it will be a while before I try that one again. The burgers weren't that hot or flavorful but that may be because the recipe was for a rub and I just mixed in the ingredients into the meat. I may not have put in enough. But, I tell you what...slather on some of that Struttin' Sauce and you can't tell the difference!

After such a big (and late) lunch, Zeb and I weren't really in the mood for a big dinner. His suggestion was to just snack but one of my New Year's resolutions was to eat better and I tend to snack on crap. So I made Tomato-Basil soup (Intercourses, pg. 40 - such a great book - get it for Valentine's Day, the recipes are easy and delicious). We usually put the soup in sourdough bread bowls but the grocery store didn't have any loaves of the right size so I just toasted up some sourdough bread and stuck pieces in the soup. With the leftover basil (which tends to turn pretty quickly on me), I made up some pesto in the food processor (basil, garlic, romano cheese, pine nuts and olive oil) and used it as a garnish. Zeb preferred the soup without the pesto but I really liked it. Not too heavy but very filling.

Oh, when we got back on Thursday, I made up a batch of Chutney Chicken Salad (Sunset, May '04). It had curry powder, raisins, basimati rice, almonds, fruit chutney, and sour cream in it. Albertson's didn't have any roasted chicken, so I poached two chicken breasts in coconut milk. It really added another flavor level to the salad. I had made it once before last week before our drive to Washington but I left it in the fridge where it sat around for a week. Week-old chutney chicken salad is not nearly as pleasant as the freshly made stuff. Yuck!