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March was a bad time to have gluten allergies in my house. I did a lot of baking and most of it turned out great. The bake-sale muffins (used blueberries) in particular were a huge hit. I never knew blueberry muffins could taste so good. I’m kind of mad at every place I’ve ever eaten them before for making me think they couldn’t taste all that great. On the flip side, I was not a fan of the banana-poppy seed muffins. I think for now I’ll stick to banana bread and banana snack cake when I need to get rid of some ripe bananas. The lemon-buttermilk pound cake fell somewhere in the middle. It was good, but I find the loaf lemon pound cake I make to be easier and taste just as good. Then again, I have some mods I need to make to this recipe next time around to maybe get a better consistency.

As for the breads, the garlic rolls and the rosemary focaccia were the biggest hits. The reason I made the garlic rolls 3 different times in one month was due to family demand for more rolls. And the focaccia was eaten in one sitting. The kids (mostly Sam) just kept asking for more and more bits until the plain half (which I’d done for them) was gone and the wife and I had the rosemary half to eat. The rustic Italian loaf was good, but just white bread – nothing special.

Moving on, the fish and chips recipe was great and showed how well America’s Test Kitchen thinks about their recipes to get the timings perfect. Their boiled carrot recipe also resurrected that usually bland side dish for me. We also really enjoyed the skillet-roasted cauliflower. I was the only one that liked the black bean soup, but it was good.

Unfortunately, I really did not like the chicken burritos mojados. It’s not ATK’s fault, it was just a flavor profile I was not into at all. I think it was the amount of chili powder in the recipe which wasn’t actually spicy, but seemed to overwhelm everything.

Moving outside to the grill, I liked the gochujang chicken, but I was alone in that assessment. The Vietnamese rolled beef (bo lui), however, got rave reviews all around. We’ll probably do it again some time in the next week.