Week 34 - Figs

The Week 34 challenge came up as figs, which weren't the easiest thing for us to get in a pandemic, so I considered skipping it. Since I'm not a huge fan of mixing fruit into savory dishes, if I did get figs, I was just going to want to make Ottolenghi's roasted sweet potatoes and figs again, which I already did for a challenge in 2017. A couple of people on Reddit mentioned their difficulty in getting figs, and it was suggested that perhaps they use something like dates, since those are often interchangeable with figs in recipes. Considering the next recipe in Ottolenghi's Jerusalem used dates, that seemed like a logical place to go.

It took two years to make the first two recipes in Jerusalem, and over two years since the last one, we were finally moving on to the third recipe. I really thought we would move through the book a little faster than this, but first, not cooking that much for the second half of pregnancy plus the first 9 months or so after B was born, and then being in the salad section of the book which isn't super new eater/toddler-friendly, continuing on this cookbook project wasn't really on my mind. Since pandemic living meant we had different options for incorporating new meals into our days, I decided to make this for lunch since A was thankfully still working from home and B wouldn't really be able to eat it with all the chopped nuts.

The third recipe in the book was for a baby spinach salad with dates and almonds. Although I didn't love that I would need to mix fruit with savory again, after how well the first recipe in the book turned out (the sweet potatoes with figs), I trusted Ottolenghi on this one. Other than not measuring everything, I tried to stick closely to the recipe, hoping it would come out as intended.

The ingredients for our version of the salad were:

- 1/2 red onion ($0.50)

- 2-3 handfuls of Medjool dates ($1.66)

- about 1 tbsp white wine vinegar ($0.07)

- salt ($0.02)

- 2 tbsp butter ($0.18)

- about 2 tbsp olive oil, divided ($0.20)

- 1.5 whole wheat pitas (about 3.75 oz) ($1.39)

- 1/2 cup whole roasted and unsalted almonds ($1)

- a couple tsp sumac ($0.15)

- a few shakes of red pepper flakes ($0.02)

- 1 bag of baby spinach ($2.29)

- juice of 1 lemon ($0.39)

The salad cost about $7.87, which was less expensive than almost any lunch we would get if we dined out. Sounded good to us!

I thought this salad was relatively straightforward in terms of prep and that it wouldn't take more than half an hour, even at my glacial speed. The one thing I didn't account for, however, was that I'd never worked with Medjool dates before. I'd had dates, but never made them at home, so I had a lot of questions. Did they need to be washed? Did I need to peel the skins off? How would I know if they were fresh (even though we just bought them two days earlier)? The problem was, having never had one whole before, I didn't even know the questions to ask in advance, so I had to keep pausing to look things up, and as a result, prepping took far longer than it should have.

The steps for making the salad were:

1. Prep (part 1) - thinly slice the onion, remove the pits from the dates, and quarter the dates lengthwise.

2. In a small bowl, combine the white wine vinegar, onion, dates, and a pinch of salt. Mix with your hands, and marinate for about 20 minutes. [The instructions said to drain the residual vinegar here and discard, but we didn't have any.]

3. Prep (part 2) - coarsely chop almonds, and tear pita into pieces about 1.5 inches in width.

4. In a medium skillet, heat the butter with about 1 tbsp of olive oil over medium heat. Add pita and almonds, and stir continuously for about 5 minutes until the pita is crunchy and golden (or in our case, browned since we used whole wheat pita).

5. Remove skillet from heat, and add the sumac, red pepper flakes, and a pinch of salt. Allow to cool a bit. [We didn't have that much time, since my Medjool dates research took so long, but at least allowed it to cool enough to be touched without burning my hands.]

6. In a large bowl, add the spinach, pita and almond mixture, date and onion mixture, another tbsp of olive oil, and the lemon juice. Mix well. [I needed to use my hands because nothing else was working.] Season to taste if needed. [Nothing needed to be added here.]

This salad turned out really well! It was far more filling than I thought it would be before making it, but it did have a lot of pita and almonds in it, in addition to the dates. The sweet dates worked well with the rest of the salad, and it still made for a good savory salad. Although not our favorite salad, we would make this again.

Jerusalem Cookbook Project Rankings:

1. Roasted sweet potatoes and fresh figs

2. Baby spinach salad with dates and almonds

3. Na'ama's fattoush

Week 33 - Food in Disguise

The theme for the Week 33 challenge was food in disguise. They had the same theme back in 2016 when I attempted a (slice of a) meatloaf layer cake, so I wasn't sure what I would make this time, if anything. Some people are really creative when it comes to this type of challenge, but I often come up blank since my creative side has sadly kind of dried up over the years. In the end, I decided to make the same thing again but in cupcake form, which I had considered that time but hadn't done. We hadn't had meatloaf in so long, so this seemed like a good time. Not really a new recipe for the challenge, but it was completely new to B who had never had meatloaf before.

I know I did the breakdown for cost when I originally made this meatloaf for the historical foods challenge in 2014, but I'm curious to see how it has changed over the past six years. The ingredients for these meatloaf cupcakes (slightly changed because we had no Italian bread crumbs and can't currently cook with eggs) were:

- 1 tbsp olive oil ($0.10)

- 1 onion, chopped ($0.63)

- 5 garlic cloves, minced ($0.15)

- 8 oz cremini mushrooms, chopped ($2.79)

- salt and freshly ground black pepper ($0.03)

- 7 tbsp ketchup ($0.28)

- 1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce ($0.25)

- 2/3 cup panko bread crumbs ($0.27)

- garlic powder ($0.03)

- oregano ($0.05)

- basil ($0.05)

- just under 1/3 cup milk ($0.10)

- 2 flax eggs ($0.16)

- 1-1/3 lb ground turkey ($4)

The total for the meatloaf portion was $8.89, the mashed potato "frosting" added another $1 (guessing - can't find the receipt), and I made carrots on the side for another $2 or so, bringing the grand total to $11.89. Not much more than it was back in 2014, which was pretty surprising to me. The mashed potatoes were just from the frozen aisle at Trader Joe's, since I figured (correctly) that the meatloaf was going to take up the majority of my time and attention.

The steps for making the meatloaf cupcakes were fairly similar to when we made it as a meatloaf and a meatloaf cake. They were:

1. Prep - chop onion, garlic, mushrooms. Make flax eggs. Preheat oven to 400 degrees.

2. Heat olive oil over medium heat. Add onions and cook until softened, then add garlic and cook another minute or so, and then add mushrooms, some salt and pepper, continuing to cook until there is no more liquid left in the pan.

3. Remove the onions and mushrooms from heat, and move to a large bowl to cool off, combining them with 3 tbsp ketchup and 1 tbsp Worcestershire sauce.

4. In a medium bowl, combine the panko bread crumbs with the garlic powder, oregano, basil, and milk. Mix well. [This was Italian bread crumbs in the original recipe, but we didn't have any, so I combined panko with some Italian seasonings. It was also supposed to be a cup, but we only had about 2/3 cup left, so I just added slightly less milk. The meatloaf seemed fine with less bread crumbs to bind it, but I would have used more if we had more.]

5. Add the flax eggs and bread crumb mixture to the onions and mushrooms along with a little more salt and pepper. Stir well to combine.

6. Add the ground turkey to the large bowl and mix.

7. Grease a muffin pan, and add turkey mixture to each cup as evenly as possible. [It was a perfect fit for 12 muffins/cupcakes!]

8. Brush each cup with the remaining ketchup so that the entire top of each muffin is coated with ketchup.

9. Bake for about 40 minutes or until internal temperature reaches 170 degrees. [We baked it for 40 minutes, and it was about 200 degrees when we pulled them out. They were fine.]

10. Make mashed potatoes. [Ours were 5 minutes in the microwave, so that worked here, but if you're making mashed potatoes from scratch, would probably need to start earlier! We also used the baking time to make our side dish of carrots.]

11. Place meatloaf on a platter, and spread the mashed potatoes on top like frosting. [You could pipe it on, but it was really late. Didn't have time to consider doing that, and I'm not very good at frosting.]

We really liked the meatloaf cupcakes, but we like meatloaf and they were basically just meatloaf and mashed potatoes. The meatloaf was just as good in muffin form as it has been in loaf form, so we were happy about that. As usual, we finished all the meatloaf in one night, and it was mostly the two of us, since B was sort of lukewarm about the whole dinner. It was funny, because a lot of people had been interpreting the food in disguise theme as a way to hide vegetables in other foods so their kids/other family members would eat it, but B was the opposite and would have been more interested in the vegetables themselves. I even had to point out the mushroom pieces to get him to consider eating more of it. Maybe he'll like it better next time if I don't chop the mushrooms so small. We still love this meatloaf recipe, so we should probably make it more often!

Saddle Potato Crisps

One of the new snacks at Trader Joe's this summer was the sea salted saddle potato crisps ($1.49). Made from potato, sunflower oil, corn meal, rice flour, sea salt, and other corn products, they looked like the TJ's answer to Pringles, even using the same type of container.

We don't really have much to say about these. They were fine, but kind of boring, especially since they only came in the plain sea salt flavor. A liked them more than I did, but wasn't very excited about them since he usually prefers flavored Pringles. I do too, but I also thought regular Pringles tasted better than these and had a better crunch/texture to them. The photo on the TJ's blog (which we looked at after finishing the crisps) topped them with salsa, cheese, and cilantro, and while that does look tasty, you could do that with any type of chips, and I'm not sure how much these crisps would really add to that combo. Nothing necessarily wrong with these, but the most interesting thing about them was the package illustration.

Buy again? No, not for us.

Week 31 - Cucumber

The Week 31 challenge was announced as cucumber, and at first, I wasn't sure how that challenge was going to go in our household. Crunchy cucumbers are a bit of a choking hazard for babies, so even though we like eating cucumbers, especially in salads, we hadn't really bought any since we started doing family dinners with B. A was still working from home, so I thought about just making a cucumber onion salad for lunch, one that I hadn't made in over a decade. The other option was tzatziki, the only thing B had ever had with cucumbers before, since the grated cucumber there would be much easier for a beginning eater like B. But did tzatziki spotlight cucumber enough to work for the challenge? I decided that it was good enough for us, and picked out a recipe on Cookie + Kate that looked like a good place to start. 

Cucumber and dill too, but forgot to get a picture with those before I chopped them up

The ingredients for our adapted version of tzatziki were:

- 1 English long seedless cucumber ($1.79)
- 1.5 cups yogurt ($3)
- about 2 tbsp olive oil ($0.20)
- about 1/3 cup chopped dill ($1.33)
- a couple tsp lemon juice ($0.15)
- a few shakes of garlic powder ($0.05)
- one spoonful of jarred minced garlic ($0.10)
- a few grinds of salt ($0.02)

The cost for the tzatziki was about $6.64. It probably would have been about $1 less if we used 365 yogurt instead of Siggi's, but that's what was open at the time. We ate the tzatziki with carrots in a dill butter sauce (using up the rest of the dill), some turkey meatballs, and some Right Rice, so the total for dinner was probably about $12 (hard to calculate some of that stuff), right about average.

The steps for making the tzatziki were:

1. Wash and peel the cucumber.

2. Grate the cucumber on the large holes of a box grater. Put the grated cucumber into a colander sitting on top of a bowl, and let the cucumber drain while doing other prep work.

3. Wash the dill, pull off the fronds, and finely chop. [This step took way longer than planned, because our dill had already started to go bad a day after buying it.]

4. Squeeze out any remaining water from the cucumber. [The original recipe said to squeeze it out over the sink in a towel, but I tried that and our towel broke. So I just squeezed it out in my hands over the colander. I'm sure it wasn't completely dry or as dry as it could have been, but it worked just fine.]

5. In a large bowl, combine the cucumber, dill, yogurt, olive oil, lemon juice, garlic powder, minced garlic, and salt. Season to taste.

6. Let tzatziki sit for 5 minutes, taste again, and season if necessary. [I didn't add anything.]

7. Chill tzatziki until ready to eat. [Ours chilled for at least an hour and got even better.]

I really liked this version of tzatziki and would make it again. It was a great accompaniment for the meatballs, rice, and carrots, and also good on its own by the spoonful. A made some tzatziki for our Greek New Year's Eve feast back in 2017 with more garlic and no dill, and while he thought this version was good, he preferred the one he made. As a household, we're huge fans of tzatziki, so I would certainly not be opposed to trying as many versions as possible so we can refine a recipe of our own!