Faux-potle!

     For this Super Bowl Sunday, I had a simple vision in mind: build-it-yourself Chipotle food bar. I wanted to track down a bunch of copycat recipes and try them out to see if any of them came close to producing the same magical taste sensation that is Chipotle. Here are the recipes I tried (the titles will be clickable links) and what I thought of them! Also, apologies in advance for the fact that all the pictures are hastily taken cellphone pics. I was gonna send them off to the lab from CSI: Miami so they could be all "Enhance!" and they'd suddenly be HD photos, but they're closed on Sundays, so... 

CHICKEN MARINADE (USED FOR CHICKEN AND PORK)

Verdict: Tasty, and very tender, but not quite like Chipotle. It probably would have helped if I'd actually grilled the chicken instead of cooking it in a pan, but whatever, it's winter. 

RICE

Verdict: It's... rice-y? I can't tell you if this tastes like Chipotle rice or not because I've never eaten Chipotle rice by itself, only as part of a massive eight-ingredient food bomb. But it was good?

CORN SALSA

Verdict: Real talk, I don't order this at Chipotle and I didn't eat it yesterday because I don't really like corn. I only made it because my mom loves it. She said it was good, but something was missing so it didn't taste quite like Chipotle. I think grilling the corn fresh would be a step in the right direction, but that wasn't an option because, again, it's winter, so I used frozen corn. 

PICO DE GALLO (AKA MILD SALSA)

Verdict: Spot on. The recipe says to let the flavors marry in the fridge for a few hours, and I made this a day and a half ahead, so the flavors were settled down into a nice single family home with a baby and a dog by the time we ate it. Very tasty. 

GUACAMOLE 

Verdict: DING DING DING! Winner! This was deliciousssssssssss. Yes, I just said that in Parseltongue, I got that excited. I doubled this recipe and wished I had quadrupled it so I could just eat a whole bunch of it with chips. I'll definitely be making it again as soon as I can get to the grocery store to buy avocados.