Before we get to the recipe, can we please talk about this?
Boyfriend and I were in New York a few weekends ago, and we went to the (heavenly) SoHo Harney & Sons. I ordered us some biscotti with our tea and Boyfriend was like, “What is biscotti?” (He’s from Alaska.) Since then he’s become obsessed with it, so, naturally, yesterday he just invented his own recipe and made chocolate almond biscotti from scratch. And it’s delicious. It’s not quite as hard as normal biscotti, but it was his first attempt ever, after all.
As domestic as I was yesterday, Boyfriend beat me at my own game without even trying. In fact, I couldn’t make the nachos until he was done with the kitchen.
Recipe 4 was Rachel Ray’s nachos, because, though we are not football people (AT ALL), I figured I might as well make some sort of game day recipe, as we do like sitting in the living room and pigging out. They turned out nice.
This is actually three recipes in one. It’s chips, covered in cheese sauce (which was amazing), covered in meat and bean sauce (which… meh), covered in pico de gallo (for which I made liberal use of my food processor). Congruous to my self-imposed rules, I stuck to the recipe as much as possible, which was partially easy because Rachel Ray is like, “Put whatever you want on these nachos!” and partially difficult because I TOTALLY wanted to alter the pico de gallo until it just turned into salsa or guacamole. And I really wanted to season the meat a different way. And… look, I used pork instead of beef. Because pork has a much smaller carbon footprint. Yes, that is the way I am.
You may have noticed that I usually make vegetarian food. I cannot call myself a true vegetarian because I eat seafood, and, clearly, sometimes I make stuff with meat. I do this partially for boyfriend’s sanity, because he is definitely a carnivore and a plate full of meaty nachos makes him really happy, and partially because I do enjoy it– it’s the factory farming that turns me off to the whole idea. That said, when I do eat meat, I want it to be awesome, and, well, I would have made it spicier than Rachel made it. But of course my meat-starved Boyfriend thought it was amazing and delicious and he loved it. So, while this recipe got his approval, take that with a grain of salt.
The cheese sauce was the really amazing thing. I would definitely make it again for nachos, or just for fun. And it was nice that the nachos can go back into the oven to warm up, since we kept eating off the tray for a couple hours, which would be very useful if we were, in fact, football people, instead of killing time waiting for Downton Abbey to start. It was fun to do something sort of Super Bowl-y, for once.
Last year we did nothing at all, and we couldn’t figure out why people were setting off fireworks until I said, “Oh, doesn’t New York have a team in the Super Bowl? They must have won.” Boyfriend replied, “That was today?” ❤
I miss New Mexico! 