Monday, October 20, 2014

Chicken Club Con Queso!





Chicken Club Con Queso!

The best meals come together by a little creativity and what you can find in your fridge. The other day, I had ZERO motivation to put on pants, let alone go to the store and buy food. So I went to the ol' fridge to see what i could scavenger up. First thing i saw, beer. Beer is good I thought, so had a few and picked something off Netflix to add to my being lazy. As I was sitting there, I remembered that I noticed there was bacon and queso dip in the fridge. The queso dip was left over from a previous cooking venture, and begged to be eaten again. But I didn't want to just have boring ol' chips and queso ( which is NEVER a bad idea by the way ). I wanted to put it on something more worth while.

I went back to the fridge to get creative. I eventually found all the right fixings for a chicken club sandwich:

- Tomato 
- White Onion 
- Chicken 
- Lettuce

I chopped up the veggies, grilled the chicken, made the bacon, and was ready for lift off!I had a few Ciabatta rolls left over from a previous garlic bread idea I made earlier in the week. PERFECT! Not only is ciabatta an AWESOME bread in general, it will work great with tying this sandwich together. Don't ever understate the power of a good bread choice folks! It will ALWAYS make or break any sandwich or side dish. 

I put some butter and garlic salt on the bread, set the oven to BOIL, and placed them in there for a little bit. I watched carefully until I noticed the bread was at a toasty level. You don't want it too be too CRISP to where you cut the top of your mouth when you eat it. NOTHING, besides burning your tongue is worse than eating mistake. 

Here is the order of which I chose to make the final product:

- Bottom half of the Roll
- Chicken
- Queso Dip ( i chose to place the queso on top of the chicken rather than adding it last. i did this because i didn't want the hot cheese to make the tomato and lettuce warm and possibly make it soggy. )
- Bacon
- Onion 
- Tomato 
- Lettuce 
- Top half of the Roll 

You can choose to construct it anyway you want, but this order worked really well. On one of them I choose to put the bacon on top of the chicken, THEN the queso. Either work. So go ahead! Give this the ol' college try and if you think it's missing a little somethin' somethin' and it works, LET ME KNOW! i would LOVE to try it!

Wednesday, October 1, 2014

It's a Wrap!





Wrap it Up Wednesday


From what I can tell, in the blogger world it's Work it Wednesday. That's cool Bro, go get you some! Here on this blog it's Wrap It Wednesday. And you can take that however you would like. For this instance however, I'm sharing a simple and cheap way to make a wrap out of things you can find in your house already. To keep up that healthy lifestyle you put apon yourself today, lets keep it in the theme shall we!?

It's a tale as old as Charlie Sheens addiction to hookers, "What do I have at home to cook, and do I really want to cook?!" You blankly stare into your fridge for a few minutes. Then you go to the cupboard to stare some more. But nothing magically appears as you'd hoped. It's like those college kids you see in the booze aisle that have been there for 30 minutes. Trying to figure out which drink to consume for the night that is something different than 12 hours earlier. The question is always, 'Will we have enough?' 'Which is cheaper?' But as we all know, they're going to go for that same cheap beer in bulk as they usually purchase. Same applies to your kitchen. 'What can I make that will not only fill me up, but taste great as well?'

Here's what I came up with. I found some spinach ( or Kale works if you're a real health nut ) which lead me to the idea of constructing a salad. BOO YA! I'll be healthy tonight and eat a salad. I went on to find the following:

• Blue Cheese Crumbles ( I had left over from a previous meal, which will be discussed at a later post. Feta Cheese also will do if you have that around. Or don't add a cheese if you don't got none!).
 • Can of Tuna ( tuna costs .89 cents on a sale day, so it's always a good idea just to buy a few cans, you can always apply tuna to many different meals ).
• Tomatoes ( I had bought a can of fire roasted tomatoes for .90 cents and used it for at least 3 different meals )
• Apple ( I chopped up half an apple, ate the other half as I went about putting this together ).
•Honey Roasted Nuts ( I had a bag laying around from an event I worked, and chopped them up. You can use any kind of nut you like 😜. This adds a little crunch to the meal that breaks up the monotony a salad can have sometimes ). Or shit, if you have a bag of chips laying around, you can add those, Potato Chips or even Fritos will do just fine for the late night drunk version of yourself. Don't worry, I won't judge you. There's no room for judgement in the Mini Fridge!
•Raspberry Vinaigrette Dressing ( any salad dressing works in this case, whatever you got in the fridge is all good! )

I mixed together all the dry ingredients in a bowl first then added the dressing at the end. To switch things up I figured I would make a wrap. I found that I had some tortillas left over from taco night, so that's where the idea sparked from. I grilled them a little first, then applied my mixed salad to the tortilla. Wrapped it up, then out it back on the grill so the tortilla would stay connected and come apart. You don't have to do that, you can make it into a salad taco!

Making my salad into a wrap was a fun way to switch up the plain ol' idea of a salad. Plus if you're making this for your significant other, roommate, roommates, invisible friend, or that zany neighbor, it's an easy way to divide up the salad. Because we all know that feeling of: Did that bastard get more than me? Was this divided up evenly, or did Steve give more to himself?! OH HELL NO! It's like ordering a pizza for a group of people and the: People to Slice of Pizza ratio isn't "even". But i won't go into that Larry David rant now.

I'll spare you the bullshit. Anyways, there you have it. A way to start with one ingredient ( spinach ), add a bunch of other things that can be used in multiple meals, and make one awesome yet simple dish.