Recipe Trials

I love to bake and cook and do all that kitchen stuff (except clean... UGH), but I find that I rarely try new recipes. This past week, I tried two new recipes! And they were both delicious. I must share.

The week before last, my husband came home from class and announced that his homework for the week was to get me to make something delicious for the following week's class period. Well, that's just not fair! He's the PhD student -- not me! I was going to bake some lowly brownies (actually, Ghirardelli is hardly lowly!) when he mentioned that the guy who brought snacks the week before really "did it up" -- you know, made something fancy. Sigh. Now I'm in competition with Week Before Guy? Well, BRING IT. So I went and perused my Pinterest (hello?! best invention ever!). And I found these... Spinach and Artichokes in Puff Pastry. Oh yes, take THAT, Week Before Guy!

They take a bit of prep time -- 40 mins to thaw pastry dough, 30 mins in freezer after filled so they can be cut, 20-30 mins to bake. This is not a last minute appetizer, but let me tell you, it is easy and DELICIOUS. I was so glad that my husband took the tray of them away because I could have eaten them all! Very, very yummy -- highly recommend.

The other new recipe was another one I pulled as a possibility for his class snack day, but decided would be too much work and might not hold up as well for him to take to class. The "too much work" thought was right. Later in the week, I made these Buffalo Chicken Bites for us for dinner. They, too, were DELICIOUS (yes, it requires capital letters), BUT -- they were really time consuming. I used chicken on the bone which made it take longer for me to shred. The part that I thought was never going to end was the "breading." (Can you call it breading if you're coating it in corn flakes?? Does that make it "corning?" That sounds weird...) I got 36 bites out of my not-quite-three-cups of chicken. In case you've never breaded 36 tiny blobs of chicken mixture, let me just say UGH.

Anyway, the finished product was seriously tasty and not deep-fried, so if you ignore the cream cheese, you can pretend they're healthy! (They really are healthier than the deep-fried version.) My suggestion would be to make them AT your party and set up a little assembly line of your friends. Maybe then you wouldn't want the recipe to be a failure so that you'd never have to go through making them again. (Not that I felt that way. I'm just saying...)