Here’s an amazing side dish featuring our ingredients this month: Barley & Salsa. Using my original Corn & Black Bean salsa recipe as a foundation, I made a delicious barley salad that paired perfect with sliders.

Welcome everybody to the January edition of the Crazy Ingredient Challenge!

Happy New Year to you!. This is the first of the 2017 edition of the Crazy Ingredient Challenge.  I’m not sure about you, but writing “2017” on papers/checks etc has been it’s own challenge. Do you feel 2016 flew by like I do?  With this first challenge of the year, I made a barley salad that you will certainly love! I think it works for winter and summer seasons and will be something you’ll make many times over.

I love this challenge. Each month, we have two polls and each poll has four ingredients to vote on. The winner of each poll becomes the crazy ingredients for the month. These were the winners for January: Barley & Salsa!!

OK… these two are an interesting combination. But, I like interesting. The cool thing is that any type of salsa can be used from a pico to a salsa verde. Even fruity salsas were fair game. So, the ideas were all over the map as you can imagine.  What to do for this challenge?