Salsa Night

I love cooking on the weekends, because I have enough time to make several courses. I am the world's slowest cook, and I need the luxury of being able to take my sweet time with everything. Even with my incredible slowness, the Pepper Peach Salsa Chicken was a speedy dish to prepare.

Chet discovered the wonderful Robert Rothschild Farm Hot Pepper Peach Preserves. Upon tasting it, I thought it could make a great pan sauce for chicken breasts. Katie has a good recipe for Apricot Salsa Chicken. It easily adapted to using the peach preserves and peach nectar. The recipe can be halved or doubled as well. I tried my hand at cheese rolls, too. These were very quick to mix up and complemented the meal well. The recipe said to coat muffin tins with a teaspoon of shredded parmesan, use extra sharp cheddar cheese cubes in the dough, and then top the rolls off with another teaspoon of parmesan.

For dessert, we had pound cake. Pound cake is definitely quicker to mix up than your typical layer cake. For the glaze, I got to use the microzester that Wendy gave me for Christmas. I am too anti-gadget sometimes, thinking I don't need any more tools in the kitchen. The microzester worked so quickly and yielded tiny shreds of zest, while using the smallest holes on a box grater takes more effort, produces too large zest, and often collects bitter pith as well. No, I didn't serve the cake with the goofy flowers. We had planned to practice some dance steps after dinner, but after all that food, watching episodes of The Office sounded more appealing.

I am saddened by the lack of participation in the favorite birthday cake survey. I needed inspiration for a birthday cake with universal appeal. As it is, the party theme is Texas BBQ, so I'm taking The Once and Future Beans and a Devil's Food Cake with Coffee Buttercream. I figure coffee was the closest thing to dessert the cowboys had on the trail.