Easy appetizers and desserts

With these recipes, no matter what the score, your watch party will be a winner!

Easy cheese quesadillas with ranchera sauce

A Palatable Pastime
Stuff your quesadillas with cheese, veggies, or meat. Just be sure to use a good ranchera sauce.

By Sue LauA Palatable Pastime

14 ounces diced fire roasted tomatoes
Pinch ground cumin
1 tablespoon olive oil
1/4 medium onion
2 to 4 cloves garlic
2 fresh serrano or jalapeno chiles, stemmed and seeded
1 poblano chile, seeded and stemmed

Salt and pepper

For quesadillas

4-6 large flour tortillas
1 to 1-1/2 cups grated or crumbled cotija cheese (or other melting cheese)
1 cup sour cream (optional)

1. Saute onion, garlic, serranos, poblano pepper in olive oil until softened.

2. Cool mixture enough to process in a food processor with the fire roasted tomatoes (and their juice), ground cumin, salt and black pepper, pulsingmixture a few times to get a “chunky salsa” consistency.

3. Takeflour tortillas, and place on a heated griddle.

4. Sprinkle grated cotija or other melting cheese on one half of the tortilla, then fold the top over and brown on both sides as you would grilled cheese.

5. Serve quesadillas cut into wedges with a pizza cutter, along with dollops of ranchera sauce and sour cream.

Click here to read the full Stir It Up! blog post

Back to Index

17 of 30

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.