A few years ago, a friend of mine did those home parties selling those prepackaged food mixes and you would add one ingredient, maybe two and then voila, you had food and HEY! YOU COOKED. Beer bread was always my favorite – you’d get this box mix and you could add 12 ounces of beer or soda and then it was bread or cake or whatever and it was SO FREAKING GOOD.

But frankly, the thing about box mixes is that you really don’t know what the hell is in ’em. I stopped making boxed cake mixes long ago – and really? No boxed cake can beat a cake made from scratch. Don’t even try to argue.

I frequently rip recipes for beer bread out of magazines…but hadn’t made one. I kinda suspected that it’d be like cake – not that tough and worth the work.

But I couldn’t make up my mind so over two nights, I made two different recipes.

The first night, Beer Cheese Bread from Cooking Light magazine.

This one starts by sauteeing onions and garlic in some olive oil before adding it to the dry ingredients and adding the beer and Monterey Jack cheese – combining the ingredients and baking – pausing twice to add some butter to the top. Remember, that even with the cheese and beer and butter, this is a Cooking Light recipe so you can probably eat the whole loaf at once and be totally okay.

We didn’t quite eat the whole loaf in one sitting.

This is excellent when served warm, and it would taste AMAZING alongside a hearty soup. Then again, I heated up a slice and ate it solo for dinner tonight. It’s kinda filling.

**

The second recipe, Basil Beer Bread, was from Real Simple magazine. I couldn’t make this yesterday because our local grocery store is stupid and didn’t have basil. I mean, WHO DOESN’T HAVE BASIL?

The flavors here were different, obviously. Instead of jack cheese, parmesan was the required cheese (YUM). Also, basil adds an amazing flavor – and would have been perfect if I had chopped the basil up tinier (To be fair, I was in an awful mood and didn’t want to accidentally slice my finger).

Unlike the other recipe, this one called for yeast – but… it didn’t require time for the yeast to work it’s mojo, which I’m guessing has something to do with the beer. The downside is that you really have to be careful when baking yeast breads to make sure they cook long enough, otherwise they don’t taste QUITE right and are squooshy.

This bread has an excellent flavor and was delish – but could have stood a few more minutes in the oven (also, my cookie sheets are “weathered” – that’s my nice way of saying that they are totally beat up and I could use some more parchment paper).

My spinachy-looking basil isn’t the most attractive thing (SLICE IT SMALLER, PEEPS. I don’t even know how to cut basil, I admit it), but this bread would be a great accompaniment to a pasta with a meaty sauce, perhaps, or maybe even to bring together a meatball sandwich.

Both of these savory breads are definitely going to be made again.

Until next week… (What shall I make?!)

Despite my lack of total enthusiasm with last week’s baked lemon pasta, I decided that when you fall off the horse you really should just stop being so freaked out by your kitchen and get right back up on the figurative horse, even if your ability to eat dinner that night depends on it. I even went so far as to decide that just because Ree kinda let me down a little bit with her stroganoff-y pasta recipe, that doesn’t mean that her salsa recipe won’t be any good and I should just give her one more chance to prove herself (as if she’s begging. I’m pretty sure she’s kinda doing okay on her own without me chairing the fan club).

I actually chose The Pioneer Woman salsa recipe specifically because of how the recipe stated that salsa shouldn’t necessarily be chunky like a pico de gallo and AMEN TO THAT. Sure, I coulda taken ANY recipe and pulsed/pureed/squashed it into the right consistency, but I figured, Let’s start with the recipe of someone who has the same salsa philosophy as I do.

I think salsa is such a personal thing. Is that a nutty thing to say? By the time I was done with this recipe, I had veered a little bit beyond the stated quantities – and tasted and added more of and tweaked and improvised that while it was still salsa, it was salsa almost the way I like it. I say “almost” because frankly, I got too hungry, figured it was good enough and just sat down with a bowl of it and a pile of chips bigger than my head.

For example, there are people who don’t love cilantro. They say it tastes like soap.

Soap? Really, y’all?

BUT IT’S MAGIC.

I love cilantro. I don’t love it to the extent that I’m going to garnish birthday cakes with it or incorporate it into every dish I make – but there is a definitely time and a place for cilantro and it definitely makes certain things better.

Like salsa.

I’m pretty sure I more than doubled the cilantro.

And the garlic.

And maybe added a teensy tiny bit more sugar.

And onion.

But not more jalapeño. This shizz was spicy enough.

When my grandmother died several years ago, I inherited her decades old Cuisinart food processor. Literally, that sucker was probably my age and she had used it for years. It was a lovely and wonderful addition to my kitchen while I had it. I think of it kind of like that song, “My Grandfather’s Clock” – when the clock basically stops working when the old man died. I had that food processor for maybe a month or so before it stopped working. A month of beautiful creamy cheesecakes, and finely chopped cracker crumbs. It was amazing. And then…pffffft. Stopped working.

SURE WOULD HAVE BEEN NICE TO HAVE A FOOD PROCESSOR LAST NIGHT FOR THIS SALSA EXPERIMENT.

Especially because I didn’t really read just how much salsa this would make.

(A lot)

No matter, my blender kinda sorta did the job okay (Hey, you like big chunks of onion, right?). Buuuuut… someday I will have a food processor again because I think they’re worth it.

The kids hated the salsa – thought it was too spicy.

Me, on the other hand? I’ll probably be eating salsa for awhile since I made a bucket of it.