Appetiz(ing)er

The other day, I had big plans for dinner.  I had purchased all of the ingredients, it was an appetizer and main course, multi-stepped recipe, included ingredients directly from my garden; the whole nine yards.  I was building up my esteem to rock it out, because even though I knew it was more of a Thomas-Type of food, I thought it'd be fun to try.

And then, we weren't hungry.  We could blame the usual culprits - big lunches, midday snacks, warm weather - we had the summer trifecta working against us.  Luckily, in my laundry list of recipes to try, I had a quick appetizer that only required three ingredients (two of which were already in the house), so I swung by the store on my way home, picked up the third, and was ready to try something else.

I decided to make the Quesadilla Cups with Nectarine Salsa.  Sounds awesome, right?  Sure thing!  Until you remember that I'm tired, don't really want to put the effort in to dinner, and there's no way on God's green earth that I'm going to make the cups AND the salsa.

No worries.  The grocery store also had this, which was only 10 feet away from the block Pepper Jack cheese that I purchased (instead of the recipe's Monterey Jack):

I figured it still had the sweetness of the nectarine salsa, and it would help tame the mild heat of the cheese.  Okay, true confession: if you look closely in that picture, you also see a tub of pre-made guacamole to the right of the salsa.  This tub had the added benefit of being within a foot of the salsa, and was consequently brought home just in case we wanted to change it up.  Stand back, we're living on the edge this week in the Pampered Jes household!!

 

I finally tried out my mini-tart shaper to squeeze the tortilla down in the mini muffin pan.  I used a more authentic tortilla for this, and they really refused to be molded, so if you look at the picture on the right, the cheese cubes are barely being held in by an indent in the sliced tortillas.  I'm pretty sure if I bought a package of the really processed flour tortillas, I would have achieved the optimal cup stature, but as they say, "c'est la vie!"  There was no one here but us chickens, and we just enjoy good food, not fancy cupage. :)

Start to finish, this whole recipe probably took me 12 minutes, not accounting for making any salsa, since that obviously wasn't happening.  It was easy, super yummy, and went great with the salsa.  The guacamole was also nice, but completely unnecessary with our favorite salsa to take its place!  As an actually appetizer, I would have just put the salsa in the cups, but we had more fun playing around with different quantities, and seeing how much salsa could really fit into one "cup"!