When I first moved to France, the land of 400-plus cheeses, I tried to make queso with “La vache qui rit,” the laughing cow cheese. It’s the closest thing that the French have to our beloved Velveeta, but it’s not nearly close enough. It melts, but when it’s cooked, it becomes thin and watery. Plus, it’s white.
Queso is orange.
The other day when Mom and I were pushing our enormous red plastic cart through Target, sipping our afternoon lattes as we stuffed the cart with Ziplocs of all sizes, she said something about being in the mood for queso.
The easiest thing in the world — if you happen to be in the part of the world that has Velveeta.
You cut up some Velveeta. Put it in a bowl. Stick it in the microwave and nuke it for 20 seconds. Give a stir and nuke at 20 second intervals until it’s melty and hot. Now, pour in the Rotel tomatoes and stir again.
This is the unfancy version. If you want to go all the way, buy some spicy hot Jimmy Dean or Owens Country sausage, cook it up in the skillet, let the grease drain on some paper towels (to keep it healthy, you know), and then fold into the melted cheesey mixture (graf above).
Goes best with pitchers of margaritas. You probably already knew that.
On the second day of Cooking Matters Bloggers Boot Camp in Dallas, we braved the frigid north winds and drove to a nearby Walmart for a quick lesson in how to grocery shop.
On our first day of Cooking Matters Bloggers Boot Camp, after we visited the North Texas Food Bank to get an overview of hunger in Dallas, we hopped on a bus and drove to the Trinity River Mission in Oak Cliff, to see, first-hand, how another North Texas Food Bank-supported program works to help feed kids each day.
Our last exercise at Cooking Matters Bloggers Boot Camp was, appropriately, all of us going through a Cooking Matters cooking course back at the North Texas Food Bank.
When I wrote about the hamburgers at Kincaid’s in Fort Worth recently, I was slammed with comments about other burger joints in the area – most notably, Dallas’ newest, Maple & Motor. Open just a year, in an old taqueria on Maple Ave. across from Elliott’s Hardware, M&M’s brisket/chuck half-pounders had already achieved legendary status among the Dallas burgerati, and lines out the door into the parking lot were common, I’d heard.