So the host and hostess of the twin girls birthday party had a housewarming party yesterday. They just moved into the neighborhood a few months ago from New Jersey. Free at last! I decided to make some of my favorite and easy to make party foods – queso and salsa dip. So easy, even you can do it!

This is very easy, although time consuming. I made a party sized portion, so I used two big things of Velveeta, one can of Rotel, two chopped jalapenos, and a dash of milk. I used my crock pot but you can just do it in a big pot on very low heat. You just heat it all up together until the cheese is melted. Once melted, you can add a meat of your choice. I’ve done it before with plain ground beef that I cooked up and I’ve also done it with chorizo, which makes the whole thing a bit spicier. The party was dictated to be veggie only, so I put in some Morningstar Farms fake meat crumbles, and it worked out quite fine.

Black Bean and Corn Salsa

Braised Hoisin Beer Short Ribs with Creamy Mashed Yukons and Sesame Snow Peas, courtesy of Dave Lieberman (Philly’s own!).

I think it was one of those weekend mornings when I lazily turned on the TV very early and just vegged watching the Food network. Dave was on and started cooking this dish in his beautiful multi-colored le creusets. Damn him. But with my much cheaper dutch oven in hand, I got to finally make this. And it was glorious!

Awhile back while randomly perusing recipes on the foodtv website, I found one that looked interesting. So yesterday, on a particularly lazy and snowy Sunday (alot of it spent watching a marathon of “Living with the Kombai Tribe”), I made it. Behold, Panko Crusted Chicken Legs.

I won’t write down the recipe here. After all, you’re obviously on the internet, so find it yourselves with the link. The ingredients were few and simple, but it definitely involved several steps. I had to remove the skin from the chicken legs. It didn’t tell me to do so, but I’m not that into chicken skin, so i painstakingly removed them. They did not want to come off very easily. And honestly, I really don’t like handling raw chicken parts very much. And then I had to marinade them for 2 hours. Everything smelled great.

After marinading, I put the panko on them and put them in the oven. It said to cook for 15 minutes on each side on 350, but after the 30 minutes, they still weren’t cooked all the way through. So I upped the degrees a bit and cooked them for probably another 20 or so minutes. I even put slits in the chicken to ensure cookedness.

Once ready, I placed over rice and drizzled on the sauce. All in all, very delicious. The chicken was juicy and flavorful. But my stomach did not feel too good afterwards, which I attribute to still possibly underdone chicken. So next time, I think I will either use chicken breast and just flatten them down or use chicken thighs (since I prefer dark meat) and also pound them down more into flatter filets. Then I’ll try the recipe. So it could end up similar to tonkatsu, but using chicken instead of pork and a different sauce. It was also just as tasty without the sauce. Thanks Tyler Florence!

Today was not much of a food day for me. Monday is bagel Mondays so that was breakfast. And I ran errands during lunch and did not end up eating a proper lunch. Instead, I finished off some Girl Scout cookies that my boss gave me on Friday (he just gave me a whole box) and ate January birthday cake. It’s allowed because I actually had a January birthday!