December Recipe: Bacon Jalapeño Poppers

I did have big plans for my December recipe, but I have had to put them on the back burner. My relatives are visiting, and as soon as they leave, I'm leaving for my own vacation! So in the meantime, I decided to try out a little recipe that I saw on Pioneer Woman on Food Network. I dug up the recipe from her website and added some of my own modifications to whip up this tasty appetizer.

The recipe I used is here. My first modification was to add some shredded cheddar cheese to the cream cheese (about a 3:1 ratio of cream cheese to cheddar). I also added a clove of minced garlic just for some flavor and an extra little kick (but mostly because I'm a garlic-loving monster). Lastly, I did not use toothpicks purely because I did not have toothpicks and did not want to make a trip out in the storm just for them. For the most part, the bacon stayed wrapped pretty well, though I guess it could have been neater (as you can see in the picture above).

Surprisingly, the hardest part for me was just cleaning out the insides of the jalapeños. After that, it was smooth sailing. 

Stuffing them was quite a messy endeavor as well because I was wearing gloves.

Oh, and one more modification was that I cut the strips of bacon in half rather than thirds because it just seemed right. Who really is going to complain about having more bacon per jalapeño anyway? 

The finished products!

Mmm, bacon. I think some of the jalapeños still had a teensy bit of seeds left in them because eating these was like playing spicy roulette. One would be moderately spicy and the next would be on fire. Oops! Next time, I'll probably be more careful. Maybe.

And with that, I have successfully completed my new year's resolution! I've never actually followed through on any of my resolutions, so I am quite proud of myself (though I did kind of cheat one month, but I made up for it!). I'm still aiming for another couple recipes this month, just as extra credit, so I'll post those as I go. I think that one new recipe per month was a completely achievable goal, yet motivating enough to get stuff done. I'm probably going to do it again for next year. And maybe even increase it to two per month if I'm being ambitious? That kind of scares me, so we'll see about that.

-jennkay

Categories: appetizer, bacon, cooking, december recipe, food, food network, jalapeño poppers, jalapeños, pioneer woman, resolutions