Something Cheesy about Loaded Fries

Mc Donald’s recently had a promotion/limited edition item on their menu – chilli cheese fries. I originally saw an ad for these fries on Facebook, an ad with a very enticing picture attached that is!

These fries have actual jalapeno slices in them! I knew that I absolutely had to try them.

Early one Monday morning my boyfriend and I set out to try these chilli cheese fries- boy was it worth it! We were up and about at 6 a.m. for reasons not worth mentioning but it was freezing!

I was actually in my pyjamas so was quite thankful that such a thing as drive-thru’s exist!

The chilli cheese fries consisted of the amazing mc dees chips with cheese sauce, jalapeno pieces and drum roll please- jalapeno sauce!

Now if you know me you would know that I don’t very often eat things that burn, I have a list of less than 10 things that I eat which are spicy. One of these things happens to be the jalapeno burger at McDonald’s. The fact that they added this sauce to the chips just put it over the top for me.

The warmth of the chips sent our stomachs into absolute heaven! It was a little bit too spicy for me though, extremely delicious but very burny! I regretted not ordering a milkshake with this dish!

A few weeks later we decided to visit one of the local Burger Kings in Port Elizabeth. On their menu we noticed loaded fries i.e. chilli cheese fries. These fries had cheese sauce and jalapeno slices, sadly no jalapeno sauce though.

These chips were amazing, they tasted delicious and didn’t burn too much (well actually it was more like I could handle the level of spice). I really enjoyed these chips- I could handle them!

I must say in comparing the two, the McDonald’s chilli cheese fries wins, it’s the better dish. I personally prefer the Burger King fries though as I could handle them. If you like a slight spice to your food I would suggest Burger King loaded fries. If you prefer like you had just battled a dragon in your mouth than the McDonald’s chilli cheese fries are waiting for you to give them a try!

One thing that I didn’t expect with both dishes was that the jalapeno slices would be refreshing. They have a burn to them yes but they had a very fresh taste to them. I would eat raw jalapeno again any time!

May you find your favourite chilli cheese fry! If you feel there are more chilli cheese fries that need to be tried let me know in the comment section!

Love Jo xo

Jo’s Take Away’s

Don’t be scared to try something new
Know your limits
Find that which you like

Mc Donalds

Burger King

Mc Donalds

3 Ways to make baked beans bearable

If you are anything like me who does not enjoy dry foods, you would probably share my distaste for baked beans. Yes, they have sauce around them but bite down into one and they’re still dry!

Living in the day and age that we are in today, baked beans is something that pretty much everyone has in the cupboard. They’re cheap and filling, even if they don’t taste great!

So I set out on a mission to find ways to make baked beans taste better, to make them bearable for those last week of the month meals.

I chose 3 ways to tell you about:

Baked Bean Salad

This is quite easy and honestly really tastes good. A friend of mine introduced me to this recipe while we were still house mates and I have made it many times since then.

So what to do is to empty the can of baked beans- sauce and all- into a bowl. Add half a chopped onion and some sugar. Lastly, add some mayonnaise and stir. I don’t have exact measurements for this recipe, it’s a bit of a “to taste” recipe. It has never tasted bad, but whenever it seems to hit the sweet spot of perfection I can never remember what the ratio of ingredients were. Works well with meals like sausage and egg or steak and chips.

Curried Baked Beans on Toast

This is a dish that a friend’s mom made for us when we were still in high school. I really wasn’t fond of baked beans but as a courtesy to my friend’s mom I decided to eat the baked beans. I was pleasantly surprised! I tried to remake it. I threw the entire can of baked beans in a sauce pan, added half a diced onion, added tomato sauce and chutney as well as some curry powder. Heat up and stir well. My bread was frozen and I’m not fond of toast from frozen (although my mom is). Luckily we had those sandwich squares from Blue Ribbon in the freezer too, and I quite enjoy them toasted from frozen. I added the baked bean mix on to the toasted and buttered squares and enjoyed for lunch!

Joxo Chilli

So I had some leftover baked bean mix and had this idea in my head to make American Chilli. When I googled the recipes for American Chilli I realised that I do not have most of the ingredients in my house and besides the fact that I prefer to cook with what I have in house, it was still a few days until payday! I decided to make my own dish. My dish is inspired by the idea of American chilli and probably similar to some that already exist. I threw green beans, carrots and split peas in a pot together to cook. In future I would put the split peas in their own pot or not make them at all. Although I did enjoy their taste though, they were sadly still hard when I dished despite being cooked for a really long time. I added some garlic to my baked bean mix. I fried some beef patties (hamburger meat) in a pan, once cooked I added some barbeque sauce over the patties. I cut up the patties and added them to the baked bean mix while I waited for the veg to become soft. Once the veg was soft, I added it into the baked bean mix. I made the sticky barbeque instant sauce from Imana (I used more water than suggested on the instructions to give the chilli a nice runny consistency) and added to the baked bean mix. I stirred well and ta da! Joxo Chilli! I made some mash to put the chilli on, and man am I glad that I did! In one of my previous posts I have mentioned that my mom had cancer, I swear the chemo did something to her taste buds. My nose was running from the burn of the chilli and she sits there not worried about a thing. I asked her if she didn’t taste it? She responded that she tastes it but it isn’t nose run bad – really hope the chemo affected her taste buds otherwise there might be something wrong with mine! Point being that the mash under the chilli really helped with the burn.

I hope this inspires you to take something you don’t like and turn it into something you would enjoy!

Love Jo xo

Jo’s Take Aways

Never complain about having food
There’s always a way to “upcycle” an ingredient you don’t enjoy
Try new things

Magnificent Mother’s Day and Its many Mishaps

This is a longer than normal post, because I wanted to be vulnerable and share the mishaps I made and lessons I learnt along the way- you have been warned!

Most people seem to believe that their Mother is the best Mother in the world- all of them are right! I am one of the people who believe this about my Mom! In the past few years she has been through everything you can think of, from divorce to retrenchment to cancer to most recently losing her father, but through all of this she still made sure her kids had everything we needed.

So you can understand that a thoughtful gift and a small meal doesn’t feel like enough to honour this amazing woman I have the privilege of calling my mother (even though she would be perfectly happy with that).

I decided to honour and thank her with a three course meal! The intended menu was as follows:

Starter: Butternut Soup with Homemade Garlic and Cheese Pot Bread

Main: Shepherd’s Pie, Homemade Feta and Tuna Puffs, Filled Gem Squash and Pumpkin Fritters with a Caramel Sauce.

Dessert: A cappuccino whicky whacky cake with a milo icing.

Please note that this was the intended menu but circumstance had to come and edit some of the dishes.

I don’t pretend to be a professional chef, I just love cooking but for this particular meal I think I was a tad overconfident. Thinking that I could cook a 3 course meal start to finish from the time I got back from church (after 11 a.m.) and be done by 13:30 was my first very big mistake.

I picked up my sister after church and stopped at the shop for the last ingredients I still needed, hence only getting home close to 12:00. I realised that day why my guests usually only arrive after the meals are already cooked – but you can draw your own conclusions on our family “fun”.

I started with the butternut soup – my first mishap. The recipe for this dish is in one of my previous posts (My Fav Winter Creature Comforts), however my soup came out as mush. I couldn’t understand why. Also, my supermarket was completely out of stock of every brand of fresh cream so I ended up buying canned cream. It tasted to me like the canned cream was trying too hard to be fresh cream and ended up having a very overpowering taste. To combat the overpowering taste of the canned cream I added some chilli powder instead of cayenne pepper, this was much to my personal regret later. It seemed like the chilli powder decided to be extremely concentrated in one particular spot of the soup/mush. This spot of soup ended up in my bowl. I took two bites (I don’t do very spicy things) and gave my leftovers to my mom. She said her soup was fine but could taste the bite in mine. It was only the next day that I realised how come my soup was mush and not the nice smooth soup it usually is – in my rush to finish the three course meal in way less time than it actually takes – I added too little water to the soup! I felt so silly!!

My next mishap came also in the first course! The pot bread…my first attempt at making this delicious treat. I wanted to make it over the top so I decided to add garlic butter to the top and the middle of the dough that I threw into the pot. I spoke to a friend about the menu and she suggested that I add garlic butter to the bottom of the dough too. Needless to say it burnt! So as the dough wasn’t cooked thoroughly yet, I cut the raw dough loose from the burnt dough, added some oil to another pot and put the dough in there. Still failed though- I ended up with a giant vetkoek (fried dough). I must say I believe that if I still had my trusty cast iron pot my pot bread would have been perfect besides all of this!

The next course went relatively well, except for the fact that I had done no prep prior to getting home. So making homemade feta in the time frame I had was definitely not going to happen. So sadly the homemade feta and tuna puffs wait for another day to be made. The pumpkin fritters were amazing, with the most delicious and super easy sauce! You melt butter and sugar in a sauce pan, add some milk and custard powder (I just realised I forgot the custard powder – still tasted good though) and stir. It tastes very similar to condensed milk and goes really well with the pumpkin fritters. My last small mishap with the main course was buying cottage cheese instead of cream cheese – but adding cottage cheese to the filled gem squashes still tasted good though!

Lastly the dessert!

I was googling a bunch of recipes for cappuccino cake but none of them were similar enough to the idea I had in my head. So I decided to take a classic recipe and modify it to be what I want. The whicky whacky cake is also known as the no flop cake. It doesn’t take eggs or milk, so if you’re sensitive to milk or eggs this might be a good recipe to try – before my edits though since the sachet has the allergens in again.

The ingredients are:

3 cups Flour

5 tablespoons Cocoa

1 teaspoon Bicarb

2 cups Sugar

½ teaspoon salt

12 tablespoons oil

2 tablespoons vinegar

3 teaspoons vanilla essence

2 cups water

You mix all the dry ingredients and then make 3 holes in the dry mixtures where you add the wet ingredients except for the water. Once the wet ingredients have been added you add the water evenly over the batter and then mix it all together. If it is too dry still add another half a cup of water.

I edited this recipe a little bit by replacing the cocoa with sachets of cappuccino. I also decided to make the cake moister- I would pour half a cup of cappuccino over the cake once it was baked. This was all good and well until it came to the icing. I left the cake to cool down and then added the cappuccino.

I then proceeded to make the milo icing, butter, castor sugar and some milo powder- mix them together to a nice stiff consistency and ice the cake. You need to make sure the cake is cool before you ice the take…I might have left the cake to cool before I iced the cake but I didn’t take the cup of cappuccino into account and ended up melting the icing!

All in all we still had a delicious meal and good time as a family but next time I will know my limitations!

Love, Jo xo

Jo’s Take Away’s

Appreciate your mom
Know your limitations
Let the cake cool

ps follow @imjoxo on instagram for more!