The month grinds on...

And the illness continues.  We are on round seven thousand of the cold plus teething combo (ok, I think it's round three - sorry for the melodrama).  The fabulous bonus this time is that after all of this marinating in germs, I am slowly succumbing to the ick.  I have the sniffles, combined with sleep deprivation (thank you Colin) and a general sense of gross that comes from wiping up snot all day and snuggling with a miserably unhappy child.

As much as I'm trying to live in the moment and enjoy Colin's babyhood, I can't help but wish away the winter.  This cold and flu season is thoroughly un-fun, and when you factor in the excessively cold temps to our lovely germ-filled life, we aren't getting out much.  Kenzie is lucky if she's given a chance to do her business more than three times a day, and we are missing Colin's classes left and right.

No news on the mobility front, since Colin is being quite the Clingy McClingerson.  I don't have the heart to make him play and practice his tummy time when he cries and just wants to chill out in my arms.

In the meantime, I have been cooking, baking, and eating myself into a stupor.  With my 2013 goals in mind, I made homemade Sweet and Sour Chicken, which tasted as good as anything you can get from a Chinese restaurant in Chicago (low bar - Chinese food in Chicago almost universally sucks - would love a recommendation if you think otherwise).   The recipe is from my new favorite cooking blog - Mel's Kitchen Cafe - and it was easy and delicious!

I also made the world's least healthy and most incredibly tasty enchiladas - the recipe came from a new food-blog find, Foodie Crush.  When hunting for a homemade enchilada recipe, almost everything I found used canned "enchilada sauce", which is a bit counter-intuitive in my book.  If you know what an enchilada is and buy the sauce, you hardly need a recipe.  

The recipe I ended up adapting (thank you Foodie Crush - this will blow your mind) essentially involved poaching chicken in broth and shredding it (my adaptation - she uses a pre-made rotisserie chicken), and then slathering in it in a sauce made with heavy whipping cream, chicken stock, avocados, cilantro and lime-y goodness.  I would have been happy to stop there and just drink the sauce straight out of the food processor, but thankfully, I held out. Because when you add tortillas, chicken, onion, green chili peppers, corn tortillas and cheese, it can only get better.  David and I have been devouring the leftovers with reckless abandon.  Please do not weigh me anytime soon.

And on the baking front, another fabulous find from Mel's Kitchen Cafe, brought to my attention from Mel's archives by another blogger I follow (who is equally enamored with Mel, if not more).  Chocolate Chip Cake, made all the more delicious with a heavy dose of cinnamon-sugar, and even better, it's basically baking for dummies.  One bowl, 11 ingredients, fool-proof, dump and mix - absolutely perfect for an amateur scratch baker like myself.  

I made an 8" cake with no occasion to celebrate other than the fact that we are still sick and deserve a little comfort food (that I will of course share with David, even though he has managed to stay healthy, and with anyone else who would like to drop by for a visit and have some cake....if there's any left).

So far, I've made THREE of my 24 restaurant-inspired challenge recipes, and I've baked FOUR things from scratch!  All that before the end of January...watch out 2013.