Month 1 day 9: White Chili with Quick-roasted Garlic

We're mostly through the recipes we decided to cook for February. March's recipes will start after the weekend, since we already bought the ingredients for the last couple of meals. March will be jam-packed with a wide variety of foods, and it was hard to forgo some of the recipes, but there just aren't enough days.

Today we cooked:
White Chili with Quick-roasted Garlic, Food Network January/February 2010

One of Food Network Magazine's regular features is a cook-off between two chefs. Subscribers are meant to cook both versions of the dish (that month's was chili) and vote. I wonder how many people actually cook both of them, though. The competing dish seemed overly complicated, so we went with Melissa D'Arabian's version, which has about a full head of garlic in it. I should've used more, but I ran out after making the "roasted" ones. Instead of 12 shallots, I used 3 onions, thinking it would be less peeling and less crying. But the onions burned my eyes too... I think I need to sharpen my knife :-P

The picture doesn't really do it justice-- all the cheese melted before I could take the picture :-P This was really different than what I tend to think of as chili-- very soupy, and with just one can of beans, but it was good. We used a rotisserie chicken, and it was nice and moist.

After dinner we clipped the final recipes from the February issues to file away and closed up the magazines for good! I planned out the dinners for March. I think they'll be good.

Then, I put together a tea rack. I wanted a new way to organize my loose leafs, since I acquired a large number of new teas from a Lupicia New Year's "Happy Bag." But they didn't come in tins, so they were just in packets in a paper bag. I was looking for some sort of small shelf organizer, but ended up just buying a spice rack. I'm sure real tea connoisseurs will fault me for the transparent containers which will let light in and also for opening up nine airtight bags all at once instead of on an as needed basis. But I am just a tea enthusiast so screw them :) It makes me happy to have a rack of 18 spice jars filled with loose leaf tea.

This makes me so excited to drink tea! I think it's a nice display, and now I'll know what all of my options are. Now I just need to wake up early enough to fit in a cup with breakfast before it's time to leave for work.