Who Doesn't Love Tacos?

... Especially Cheesy Tacos!

Here's what you will need:

• 1 lb ground beef
• Taco seasoning
• 14 oz diced tomatoes 
• 1-2 cups cheese (I used a cheddar & mozza blend)
• salt, pepper and chili flakes

What you do:

• Brown the ground beef in a frying pan and sprinkle with salt, pepper and chili flakes
• Drain out any fat (In all my excitement over cheesy tacos I made the mistake of forgetting to do this. I ended up with greasy - but still delicious - tacos)
• Add the diced tomatoes and taco seasoning

• Let simmer for a few minutes
•  Add cheese

• Mix it all together

• Drain out any excess fat again
• Serve on a tortilla with your favorite toppings!

Spicy Honey Garlic Ribs

What you will need:

• some pork ribs from the freezer
• 2 teabags
  
• 3-4 cloves of garlic minced
• 1/4-1/2 cup butter
• 1 - 1 1/2 cup honey
• 1-2 tbsp chili flakes
• 1 - 2 tbsp soy sauce (I didn't have any on hand so I threw in a couple tablespoons of some VH Honey Garlic cooking sauce)
• I also added a tablespoon of VH Spicy Thai Chili Sauce and a finely chopped Super Chili pepper just because I like it really spicy - these can be left out if you don't want it as hot, or don't have them on hand
  

Step One:

• Fill a pot half way with water and bring to a boil

• Add a couple teabags - I used orange pekoe, but have used an apple cinnamon tea before and it turns out delicious!!

• Add the frozen ribs to the hot water/tea and let it simmer until the ribs are no longer frozen together (5-10 mins)

Overwintering My Chili Plants

I have 4 Super Chili Hybrid plants I started from seeds last year, and a Jalapeno plant I bought last spring. I had no clue you could overwinter peppers until a few weeks ago. I'm sure you could imagine my excitement when I discovered I could have even more peppers earlier in the season! (Especially since my Super Chilis did so well - at least 50 peppers per plant!)

I brought my plants inside about a month ago and trimmed down my Super Chilis so just the main stem was left. This is so they don't waste energy trying to grow fruits, and it will concentrate all it's energy on simply surviving the winter. My Jalapeno plant still looks really good. It's still very green and not drooping at all despite getting less sunlight and I've been watering it less. I trimmed off a few of the leaves that didn't look so good, and I'm going to pick the last couple peppers but otherwise I think I'm going to leave it as is and see what happens.

My Attempt at Imitating Chili's Salsa

It was a hot summer day and the boyfriend and I were heading home from out of town. I spot a Chili’s from the highway and start shrieking incoherently in my excitement. Boyfriend who is driving swerves, probably thinking we were about to die. We had been wanting to go to Chili’s for a while, but didn’t think any had opened in Canada yet. Anyways, we go and we order the bottomless tostada chips and salsa to start. One bite and I was hooked! Little did I know this would be the start of a spicy food/salsa addiction that would quickly spiral out of control.
We got home that night and immediately started to Google recipes for this unbelievable salsa, only to find that almost all sites had the exact same recipe. I spent the entire next day making salsa, batch after batch trying to get it just right.