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Weekend Cooking - The Chopped Cookbook

Weekend Cooking is hosted by Beth Fish Reads

I love Chopped. It's one of my favorite shows, but I was a little nervous about the cookbook.  I wondered if it would be a cookbook of weird food combinations. But thankfully it's full of recipes I can't wait to try. 

I have a sensitive stomach, so a key test for me when picking new cookbooks is finding out how adaptable are the recipes.  I went through the book and marked a few that looked good and looked like I could make the slight changes I would need and still have a good meal.





I chose the Grilled Chicken Sandwich with Parsley Pesto.

The adjustments I made were small and just dealt with the seasonings.  We cut the 1 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes in half (it was still a little too spicy for me) and did away with the 1 teaspoon lightly crushed fennel seeds.

The sandwich was really easy to make and was really good. The pesto was delicious but was nothing compared to the toasted buns.  The buns are toasted with Parmesan cheese, red pepper flakes and the fennel seeds. We just put the Parmesan cheese on the rolls and baked them. We enjoyed them so much we made them again the next night to eat with our pasta.


The pasta the next night we used the Quick and Easy Marinara sauce as a base for the sauce we had the next night for dinner.  It was really good and another recipe that tasted great on it's own but stood up to our quick kitchen adjustments.

I can't wait to try more things from this book!

I received this book from the Blogging for Books program in exchange for this review.

Comments

  1. Oh that sounds great! I'm a bit picky with seasonings--I'm a total wuss when it comes to heat--so love finding ones like that that can be tweaked a little and still work.

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  2. That's how we are, so there is not a post-it note in the book on how much red pepper flakes we will add when we make it again.

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  3. Love pesto in any incarnation, but the toasted rolls sound divine!

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  4. Those rolls were great! I feel like every roll from here on out needs to be toasted with some Parmesan cheese and other seasonings on them.

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  5. I too would have been hesitant about a chopped cookbook -- worried about some weird combos. But this sounds like a winner. We like hot, so we'd use that red pepper!

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  6. We have a number of recipes bookmarked to try and all of them seem easily adaptable (like taking out the ham or adjusting the hotness level).

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