September 2010 Daring Cooks Challenge: Food Preservation

The September 2010 Daring Cooks’ challenge was hosted by John of Eat4Fun. John chose to challenge The Daring Cooks to learn about food preservation, mainly in the form of canning and freezing. He challenged everyone to make a recipe and preserve it. John’s source for food preservation information was from The National Center for Home Food Preservation.

The biggest challenge for me appears to be completing them on time - I have not once managed to post on reveal day, even on the rare occasions when I have been ready to do so. Oh, well, there's always next month.

One of the preserving recipes John suggested to us was roasted tomatoes. I decided to capitalise on the bounty in my landlord's garden:





This experience definitely convinced me to roast tomatoes more often. Very easy to do, and the kitchen smelled wonderful during the process.




I decided to puree the roasted tomatoes, which was one of John's suggestions, because you can never have too much tomato sauce.




My only complaint (aside from the acidity of the final product, which probably had more to do with the tomatoes I used than with the process) is the teeny-tiny amount of sauce that came from a pound of tomatoes!



I have lots of tomatoes left, so I think they too will be roasted before they join the little tub in the freezer!

August 2010 Daring Cooks Challenge: The World of Pierogi

The August 2010 Daring Cooks’ Challenge was hosted by LizG of Bits n’ Bites and Anula of Anula’s Kitchen. They chose to challenge Daring Cooks to make pierogi from scratch and an optional challenge to provide one filling that best represents their locale.

Ah, I thought I would be able to post on time for once! True to myself, however, here I am, three days late!

As a Polish girl, I am fairly well acquainted with pierogi. A few years ago, however, somebody introduced me to the idea of blueberry pierogi. I've had plans for the last two summers to get to know this particular version of our beloved dumplings a little better, but never got around to it. The Daring Cooks finally "forced" me to do it.

I used Karolcia's shockingly simple recipe.

The dough is made of only flour, a pinch of salt, and boiling water. No butter or eggs. While I am very fond of these two ingredients, they do make the dough a little slipperier to handle.



The filling: a few raw, fresh blueberries. No need to cook them first.



Wrap the dough around the blueberries, boil the little packages, and enjoy with sour cream and sprinkled sugar. Smacznego!

July 2010 Daring Cooks' Challenge: Some Kind of Butter

The July 2010 Daring Cooks’ Challenge was hosted by Margie of More Please and Natashya of Living in the Kitchen with Puppies. They chose to challenge Daring Cooks to make their own nut butter from scratch, and use the nut butter in a recipe. Their sources include Better with Nut Butter by Cooking Light Magazine, Asian Noodles by Nina Simonds, and Food Network online.



I am back on the cooking challenge beat, after life prevented me from participating in the delicious-sounding bread-and-pate challenge. But I am back with a new camera, so all is well!


As the opening paragraph states, this month's challenge involved playing with nut butter. Alas, I belong to the sector of the population for whom playing with nuts in any form could prove deadly. Our gracious challenge hostesses allowed us to make seed butters instead. And thus, I made sunflower seed butter.

The recipe I used seems simple enough. All that is required to turn this



into this



are sunflower seeds, maybe a bit of oil and salt, and crucially, a FOOD PROCESSOR. Which I do not own. I used a coffee grinder instead. And killed it. Literally. I was stuck with mostly intact seeds when the grinder refused to continue grinding.

I then decided to use the next best thing in my possession, my prized immersion blender. Oh, the seeds how the flew all over my kitchen!

It occurred it might be best if the seeds were already somewhat paste-like before I applied the immersion blender to them. And so, I started to chop, and, chop, and chop at them with my chef's knife.




Once I got tired, I put them pack in the pot to be further puréed by the immersion blender. How the seeds flew again!



But they eventually started to hold together. The final product was not as smooth as I had hoped and expected, but it was getting late, and my shoulder was starting to hurt.



The second part of the challenge was to incorporate the butter into a savoury dish. I chose to de-veganise this Butter Chicken recipe.



This was certainly the easier part of the challenge!

Daring Cooks May Challenge: Stacked Green Chile and Chicken Enchiladas!

Our hosts this month, Barbara of Barbara Bakes and Bunnee of Anna+Food have chosen a delicious Stacked Green Chile & Grilled Chicken Enchilada recipe in celebration of Cinco de Mayo! The recipe, featuring a homemade enchilada sauce was found on www.finecooking.com and written by Robb Walsh.

This Challenge definitely lived up to its vocation. Let me count the new things I discovered and experienced through it:

1. I finally went to Perola's, in Kensington.

2. I cooked with tomatillos for the first time.


3. I also handled poblanos for the first time (the recipe actually called for Anaheim chiles; this seemed like a "safe" substitute).

4. I roasted peppers for the first time (you can kind of make out the blisters in the dismal picture above).

5. I used the broiler in my gas oven for the first time (you had to be there to understand just how much of a success this is)!

Here are the two stacks I prepared (obviously, I halved the recipe), moments before they went into the oven:

I ran out of the chile-tomatillo sauce, so I wasn't able to cover the last tortilla. The outer layer came out correspondingly crispy:


The sauce was too spicy for me - it was too hard on my poor taste buds. But from what I could discern of the other flavours, it tasted pretty good. A minor miracle, considering peppers and I aren't the best of chums.

My biggest complaint was that the enchiladas were hard to eat, much like the desserts on that episode of Chopped where the remaining two contestants had to make something out of dried chipotles, blueberries, violet mustard, and, you guessed it, tortillas. I don't know if I over-fried them, or whether they're just always hard to eat when baked (or fried) and attacked with a knife and fork.

That's a question for future experiments. Much like the matter of what I'm going to do with the handful of leftover tomatillos.

In the meantime, though, I'm inordinately pleased to be able to add these feathers to my cooking cap.

Daring Cooks Challenge #1: Brunswick Stew

The 2010 April Daring Cooks challenge was hosted by Wolf of Wolf’s Den. She chose to challenge Daring Cooks to make Brunswick Stew. Wolf chose recipes for her challenge from The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook by Matt Lee and Ted Lee, and from the Callaway, Virginia Ruritan Club.

I participated in my first Daring Cooks challenge this month. A friend of mine described this dish as "succotash with chicken." Alas, I am in the throes of frenzied last-minute packing, so this post will not do justice to the Southern classic. Here are a few quick thoughts on the finished product I ended up with:

1. Brunswick Stew is traditionally made with not only chicken, but also rabbit. We were, however, allowed to substitute other meats, including beef, for the rabbit. I had half a pound of stewing beef in my freezer waiting to be used before Moving Day, so I went with that. The beef turned out more tender than I expected, so that was a success, but if I were to try this again, I would probably use pork (another acceptable substitute - in fact, from what I gather, the preferred one). I'd love to try rabbit, but it would involve too much of an expedition.



2. Canned lima beans are much better than frozen ones. Who knew? Brunswick stew should be made with butter beans, but again, not easy to find around here. Enter Stockely's limas. Nice find.

3. I have an uncomfortable relationship with the onion family. I HATE raw onion of any persuasion, but can handle it if sauteed or caramelised. This recipe called for, I think, two medium onions, put into the stew towards the end of cooking. That is a lot of onion. A lot of onion which has not seen the bottom of a frying pan. Not raw, but still a bit off-putting. It reduced my enjoyment of the dish. Personal lesson learned: next time, use less onion, or pre-cook it before putting it in.

4. I halved the original recipe. As a mostly solo diner, I probably should have cut it to one-sixth. I had Brunswick Stew on its own, Brunswick Stew with green beans, Brunswick Stew with rice, Brunswick Stew with sweet peas (even though it already has the aformentioned lima beans, as well as corn). I even added Brunswick stew to tomato-basil spaghetti. I kid you not. It wasn't entirely successful, although I would probably do it again.



5. My finished product was soupier than I would have liked (and definitely too soupy to serve as a pasta sauce!). Since I don't have any other experience with Brunswick stew, I don't know whether that is normal.

6. Brunswick stew freezes very well, potatoes and all. It's providing me three fuss-free meals on moving week. A huge help. Now, if only I could think of more easy side dishes for it...

Overall, this was a really interesting experience, and a nice opportunity to play around with the leave-simmering-on-the-stove-top type of cooking that I don't get to do very often. Probably not a dish I'll be making very often, but I'm glad to have become acquainted with it.