Cooking Challenge...Pinterest Style: Baked Cauliflower & Chicken Tortilla Soup

I have given myself a new challenge.  With all of these delicious recipes I pin on Pinterest, I have decided to not let them just sit on my boards and, get this, actually use them!  Now if you know me, I'm about as coordintated in the kitchen as a drunk donkey in an etiquette class.  So now you know why I'm calling this a Challenge.  So with this challenge, I am going to use at least one Pinterest recipe a week and tell you how I screwed it up give my review. 

It's just Tippy Tuesday, and I've already made two recipes this week!  Ambitious, I know.  The first one was Baked Cauliflower.  I've seen so many recipes with cauliflower as a potato substitute or even a pizza crust and I have yet to try them.  Let me rephrase that.....I've bought cauliflower and the other ingredients several times but I've let it rot in my fridge because I was too lazy to fix it.  I should probably mention that I've never even tried cauliflower before.  Maybe that was my hesitation.  So when I pinned this recipe where she said her husband loved them and they tasted like french fries, I was all over it like powdered sugar on my funnel cake.  I forgot to take a picture of it, but this is the pic from her website.



Via Delighted Momma



They don't look half bad, do they?  Well mine looked quite a bit crispier...some pieces were pretty much burnt.  So here's where I went wrong...

The recipe called for 2 heads of cauliflower and I only used one since I was only fixing it for myself.  So even though I cut the cauliflower in half, I forgot to cut the other ingredients in half.  Remember that drunk donkey I was talking about earlier?  Did you know that 1 teaspoon of black pepper can be super hot on 1 head of cauliflower.  Now that I think about it....did I use 1 teaspoon....or was it 2???  After I turned over the pieces so the other sides could bake, I licked my fingers and my mouth instantly started tingling!  Then I rubbed my nose and my nose started burning.  Tippy even had a hard time taking a treat from me.  Yeah, it was that bad.  So the only way I got them down was by soaking each piece in ketchup.  But they were actually really good....they just need the temp turned down a bit. 

Other than the pepper, the only bad thing about it is it made my house stink.  Not so much of a cauliflower smell (because I don't know what that smells like) but a burnt smell where I let them get so crispy.  I mean, when you keep something in the oven for an hour, it's gonna get stinky. 

The next thing I made was this Chicken Tortilla Soup. 

Via Baked By Rachel

Since it required some chopping up, I chopped everything up while my cauliflower was baking, tossed it in a bowl so that I could just throw everything in the crock pot this morning before work.  Once I got everything in the crock pot, I decided to add some black beans.  I love me some black beans!  I turned my crock pot on high and it was ready when I got home for lunch.  I noticed that it was very "brothy" so I ended up spooning out a lot of the broth.  I think it was supposed to be brothy but I'm not much of a soup eater anyway and the only way I'll eat it is if it's more chunk, less thin stuff....kinda like my body type.  Then I thought it might taste a little bland so I added a pack of taco seasoning that I had on hand.  I'm not sure I can give you an accurate review because I burned my taste buds off. When will I learn to let my food cool before I take a bite?  Between the peppery cauliflower and the hot soup, my tongue has had a rough 16 hours.   

In order to accurately review the recipes in my Cooking Challenge, I've come up with a rating scale:

1 - Dear recipe, RIP. Laters, Shari

2 - I'll cook it again....if I'm cooking for someone I don't like.

3 - Eh, if I already have the ingredients, I may whip it up.

4 - I like you, but I'm not in love with you.

5 - Get in my belly!

So how did I rate my first two recipes?

Baked Cauliflower: 4
Chicken Tortilla Soup: 3.5

There ya have it!  Let me know if you try any of these recipes.  I'd like to know what you think.  :)