Adventures in Cooking

So it's been awhile since I've posted, but I decided to get back on the horse. So you get a long post today! It's like reading a post, then going back for seconds. This may not come as much of a surprise to most of you, but I don't cook exotic meals very often. It's not that I'm lazy - I mean I am, but that's not the only reason. Mostly it's because it's only for me - I don't want to put a lot of effort into a meal that is just for me. Also there's the leftover issue - I will put more effort into something that will have leftovers that taste good for a couple of days. It's a simple effort v. reward calculation. But I decided to show all 6 of you or however many people read this the meals that I do make (I don't think that sentence was grammatically correct). So here's the main list:

Chili

Shown above is my famous (at least in my own mind) chili in its bowl form (with optional beer).

Short instructions to making it:

Cook 1 pound of beef and drain. Add 1 can of chili-ready tomatoes and 1 can of italian-style tomatoes (and half a can of beans if you're into that). Add cayenne pepper and A1 sauce liberally. If you want it a little spicier, use the A1 sauce with peppercorn - that is my preferred method but regular A1 works great too. Cook until there's not much liquid left. Enjoy.

Favorite way to eat it:

Crush a few saltines in there to soak up the extra liquid, then take spoonfulls and put them onto whole saltines and eat like nachoes. Absolutely delicious.

Mexican-style chicken and rice

Holy cow, I don't even know how to describe this. When you have got chicken, melted cheese, sauce, colored peppers, and spicy rice in your mouth at the same time, it is hard to imagine anything tasting better. It is a symphony on my tongue.

Instructions:

Cook chicken halfway, put some sauce on, add a layer of cheese, cook the rest of the way, add more cheese. In parallel: cook rice, add taco sauce and a little cayenne pepper while cooking to give it some color and flavor. Add colored peppers (red, orange, or yellow) and enjoy.

Possibly my favorite food to eat, but if you cook the chicken too long or not long enough, it doesn't taste right. On a scale of 1 to difficult-to-make, it gets an "easy to screw up" rating.

Tacos

Pretty standard taco - tortilla, meat, two kinds of cheese (mozarella and colby jack), sauce (ortega medium). I add my standard colored peppers because they taste so good.

Instructions:

Don't be silly, you know how to make tacos. I usually make nachos with the leftover meat the next day, so here is a bonus picture of nachos (again with my standard colored peppers - have I mentioned that they are good with basically any Mexican-style food?):

Hungry Howies' Pizza

Ok I don't make this, but I eat it a lot. They have a special where on Sundays you can get a large pizza for $8, so if it's Sunday and I am feeling lazy (which is often) I tend to get this.

So those are the top foods. Maybe I will show some of the experiments (both the good ones and the bad) I have done in a later post.