rustic chicken pasta bake

Paul and I make our own tomato sauce all the time - in fact, we've never purchased tomato sauce before and we have bought pesto sauce, but mainly because fresh basil is expensive and for some reason, basil is the only plant that refuses to grow in our garden. We have never, however, purchased or made rosee sauce. I've ordered pasta with rosee sauce in restaurants, but we've never had it at home.

Maison Le Grand recently sent me some samples of their sauces, including their new collection of rosee sauces, to create some recipes with. I didn't want to use them to make normal pasta dishes with (ie. make regular pasta, cover with sauce), so Paul and I brainstormed some more interesting dishes.

One pasta dish that I always want to make more often is a pasta bake (or skillet bake), so the first recipe we tried used Maison Le Grand's Rustic Rosee Tomato Sauce.

simple butter chicken pizza

I have always loved the saucy goodness of butter chicken. Especially on a bed of rice. There's just something about the sauce that I can't get enough of. So I was pretty excited to see that one of the sauces in the set that Summer Fresh sent me to try was Butter Chicken.

Although I didn't want to do my usual Butter Chicken on rice dish, I still wanted to use chicken as the meat...and since Paul makes an amazing pizza dough, I asked him to get out the yeast and whip up some pizza dough for a Butter Chicken pizza.

I can humbly say that the results were INCREDIBLE. I used the sauce three times in this recipe - as a marinade for the chicken, to cook the chicken in and as a sauce on the pizza (instead of our usual tomato sauce).

You can use your favourite pizza dough (crust) for this recipe, but in case you're wondering about the pizza in our photos, Paul usually rolls his dough out so that the pizza ends up being about one foot across and less than 1/4 inches thick (oh yeah, we like our pizza crust THIN!)

thai curry chicken stir-fry

Paul and I love doing stir-fry - it's quick, healthy and uses up any random meats or vegetables that we have handy in the fridge and/or freezer.

The Summer Fresh Thai Curry was a perfect complement to this soba noodles and vegetable stir-fry - it adds a pop of colour and a kick of flavour to the recipe. If you prefer more heat, feel free to adjust the recipe and use more sauce!

thai curry chicken stir-fry
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ingredients:

5 cups soba noodles
1 cup Summer Fresh Thai Curry sauce
1 pound boneless, skinless chicken breast, cut into small pieces
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
3 cloves of garlic, minced
2 stalks celery, thinly chopped
1 sweet red bell pepper, thinly sliced
1 cup snow peas
1 tablespoon of soy sauce

impromptu wing sauce taste test

Today just happens to be Super Bowl Sunday, and although I'm not a football fan, this post is definitely a timely one (especially if you plan on having chicken wings at your Super Bowl party!).

Last night Paul and I headed to his parents house to fry up some chicken wings and watch the hockey game on TV. As I was packing up the wings and fries, I asked Paul which wing sauce to bring with us and he said he wasn't sure. So of course, I get the crazy idea to bring them all and have an impromptu taste-testing session.

It didn't take much to convince Paul and his dad to join in on the taste test (actually, it didn't take any convincing at all) so I opened up the four different wing sauces while Paul started deep-frying 106 wings!

The four that we tried were (from left to right):

1. Original Anchor Bar Buffalo Wing Sauce - Medium Recipe
2. Duff's Famous Wings Hot Sauce
3. Huy Fung Foods Sriracha Hot Chili Sauce
4. Frank's Red Hot Wings Buffalo Sauce

Since Paul's mom and I both aren't big fans of HOT sauces, I cut all the sauces with some butter, which reduces the heat (I use approximately 2 teaspoons of melted butter per 1/3 cup of sauce).

After several batches of wings had come out of the deep-fryer and we had a chance to try all the sauces, the unanimous favourite was definitely Duff's. It was the sweetest of the four, with the most flavour and the perfect amount of heat.

My personal favourite was Duff's, while the one I liked the least was Anchor Bar's (I found it the least flavourful and a bit too vinegary).

The most watery sauce was Anchor Bar and the thickest was the Sriracha (although that wasn't a big surprise).

By the time we were done, I was STUFFED. I love chicken wings as much as the next gal, but at the end of the night, I was definitely ready for some salad - haha!

I know there are tons of other great wing sauces out there, so next time, Duff's will just have to go up against three new competitors! I'm sure Paul will be up for it!

What about you? What's your favourite hot sauce for chicken wings? Maybe I'll take some of your recommendations and make it part of our next Hot Sauce Taste Test!