Tuesday Dinner - F Words

Tonight's menu:

• Fiery fajitas
• Friendly fruit salad

We're finally back to our planned dinners! My compulsively-organized librarian personality is much happier. This menu was one I came up with and again, I have no idea where the recipes came from. Which is ok, because we ended up not really using them anyway. Once we got all the ingredients, we realized we didn't like the cooking instructions so we made our own. It was...well, not great, but better than it would have been if we had followed the instructions blindly. Of that I am sure. The recipe called for broiling the chicken and broiling the veggies separately. I don't know about you, but in my mind that is just not the right way to make fajitas. They have to be cooked in a skillet! Over flames! You gotta hear that sizzle!

Anyway, what we ended up doing was very simple. We bought red, green, and yellow bell peppers, sliced them up with a sweet onion and some chopped garlic. We also sliced two chicken breasts and seasoned them with chili powder, salt, pepper, and our favorite Jane's Krazy Mixed Up Salt. Then we and sauteed it all together in our amazing new Calphalon stainless steel stir fry pan (a wedding gift from our dear friend Patrick...thanks Pat!). This tasty mixture was served on warm flour tortillas with Monterey Jack cheese and sour cream.

It would have been perfect, except the seasoning wasn't quite fiery enough for us. Even I, who don't like super spicy food, found these to be a little bland. I think next time maybe we'll throw some diced Jalapeno in for good measure. If you have any other good fajita-seasoning suggestions, please let us know!

The fruit salad is one of my secret weapons. Against myself. You see, I have something to admit. Something I'm embarrassed to share. Here goes...I don't like fruit. At least, I don't like fruit by itself. Give me a banana and I will turn up my nose. Hand me a freshly picked apple and I will hand it right off to someone who will truly appreciate it. I just don't like eating fruit plain. But put fruit in a dish, any dish, and I love it. Pies, cobblers, fruit smoothies, fruit salads, fruit preserves, even meats with fruit sauces...any way you can cook fruit or combine it with other things makes me happy.

So, to trick me into eating a full serving of fruit tonight, we had fruit salad. And it was amazing, even though it's still winter and none of the fruit was in season, at least not here in New Hampshire. It contained apples, bananas, grapes, cantaloupe, and pineapple chopped up and smothered in a sauce made of plain yogurt, honey, and fresh-squeezed lime juice. We added a dash of cinnamon to the sauce, stirred everything together and let it sit for a while. So incredibly good. We have a ton left over, which is great because fruit salad gets better when it sits and all the fruit can soak up the dressing. This will be excellent for lunch tomorrow. Big servings of fruit two days in a row! No one would ever guess I'm not into fruit....ssshhhhh.