Week 2 - Noodles

The Week 2 challenge, noodles, was one of those themes where it's so easy to find something to fit that it makes choosing something really difficult. I ended up picking ketchup spaghetti / spaghetti Napolitan from Just One Cookbook, something we've never had before. I had no idea that ketchup-flavored pasta was a thing in Japan, but it seems that ketchup became popular for the sauce because tomato sauce was rare in the post-war era. According to the recipe notes, it's still a fairly popular yoshoku (Western-influenced food) dish there, so it sounded like a good one to try!

I didn't make many changes to the recipe here so that it would be as authentic as possible, and combined some tricolor spaghetti with garlic chicken sausage, green peppers, mushrooms, and onions. The sauce was predominantly ketchup with some Worcestershire sauce, pasta water, salt, and pepper.

This was a very simple dish to make, perfect for a school night. While a ketchup sauce can't match the richness of a well-developed tomato sauce, I don't really think it's fair to compare, as they felt like two very different dishes. We really liked this, and it's nice to know now that ketchup is another option for pasta sauce!

Week 1 - Weird Al

The 2022 challenge started off with Weird Al, and there were a lot of options here because there are a lot of Weird Al songs that deal with food. After a little looking around, I decided on the song Spam, because it was a good excuse to make something new with Spam, something that B absolutely loves to eat.

I ended up combining Spam with another thing that B loves - pizza - for a Spam Hawaiian pizza. Pineapples on pizza are controversial to a lot of people, but we love it, along with other more unique pizza toppings like bananas. That banana curry pizza from last year's challenge was one of our favorite things we tried, and our love for exploring different toppings on pizza has led to an additional development to the AtWCC (but I'll save that for another post whenever I finally get around to recapping those, hopefully soon).

Hawaiian pizza usually has pineapples, red onions, cheese, and ham, but here, I replaced the ham with Spam, for a delicious salty and tasty combo.

This was a big hit with our family, and we would definitely do this again. After a disappointing end to last year's challenges (that akutaq, if you missed it), it was nice to start the year on a high note.

52 More Weeks Done

I can't believe it took me until March to finally finish writing about last year's 52 week cooking challenge, but here we are. It may have taken until the last day of the year, but I'm proud that I completed every single one. Here's the whole list:

Week 1 - last meal (copycat burrito bowls)

Week 2 - meat substitute (vegan meatloaf)

Week 3 - Indonesian (mie goreng)

Week 4 - confit (potato confit)

Week 5 - whole spices (chickpea coconut curry)

Week 6 - English (full English breakfast)

Week 7 - Mardi Gras (red beans and rice burgers)

Week 8 - comfort food (vegan corn chowder)

Week 9 - Korean (potato and cheese hotteok)

Week 10 - foam (focaccia)

Week 11 - hard to pronounce (chicken gyro)

Week 12 - banana (banana curry pizza)

Week 13 - stuffed (Paraguayan empanadas)

Week 14 - forbidden fruit (cheddar bay biscuits)

Week 15 - chocolate (triple chocolate mint cookies)

Week 16 - Hunan/Xiang (pearl meatballs with sticky rice)

Week 17 - one bite (mini meatloaf muffins)

Week 18 - lime (coconut lime sugar cookies)

Week 19 - Ecuadorian (pan de yuca)

Week 20 - julienning (carrots for pancit)

Week 21 - eggs (carrot coconut pancakes)

Week 22 - across the border (Jersey disco fries)

Week 23 - picnic food (Italian pasta salad)

Week 24 - inspired by a restaurant (Alice Springs chicken and blooming onion)

Week 25 - Italian (arancini)

Week 26 - folding (folded kimbap)

Week 27 - floral (lemon lavender doughnuts)

Week 28 - Danish (frikadeller and brændende kærlighed)

Week 29 - grilling (Hawaiian BBQ skewers)

Week 30 - camping (veggie chili cornbread casserole)

Week 31 - coconut (coconut curry chicken)

Week 32 - Armenian (lahmajoun)

Week 33 - one color (tortilla española)

Week 34 - peaches (peach salsa)

Week 35 - Kenyan (irio)

Week 36 - yeasted (parmesan herb bread)

Week 37 - shells (fajita shell pasta)

Week 38 - earth, wind, and fire (BBQ cheddar chicken with 3 bean salad)

Week 39 - made two ways (soy two ways - loco moco)

Week 40 - a recipe you've been wanting to try (pork wontons)

Week 41 - German (toast Hawaii)

Week 42 - one pot (pumpkin chili)

Week 43 - single use gadgets (bacon cheese scallion waffles)

Week 44 - Native American/Indigenous American (akutaq)

Week 45 - brining (grilled brined carrots)

Week 46 - seeds (avocado bean salad)

Week 47 - Tunisian (lablabi and kesra bread)

Week 48 - ketchup (banana ketchup)

Week 49 - leftovers (Thanksgiving sandwich)

Week 50 - turmeric (turmeric ginger coconut fish curry)

Week 51 - South Indian (rava dosa and aloo masala)

Week 52 - Toasting (avocado toast 3 ways)

Moving on to the 2022 challenge!

Week 52 - Toasting

The final challenge of the year for the 2021 challenge was themed toasting. While toasting could be taken in so many different ways, I opted for toast with bread instead of a drink. One of little B's favorite Bumble Nums videos is centered on avocado toast, and he'd been wanting to try avocado toast for a long time, so why not? Thankfully this was back in December before avocado prices skyrocketed, so for toasting, I decided to make a trio of avocado toasts.

No real recipe here, just mashed up avocado (think one of those ended up being rotten, so used 4 mini ones), topped with za'atar, tomato-basil salad, and smoked salmon.

I don't know which one was our favorite or if we could even pick one because they were all good. B would probably pick the smoked salmon (he loves smoked salmon), but he did enjoy the za'atar one too. Mixing the za'atar and smoked salmon together also made for some good toast. With that, we've finally reached the end of (writing about) the 2021 cooking challenge, and it's time to move on to (catch up on) 2022!

Week 51 - South Indian

I was thrilled when I saw that the Week 51 theme was South Indian, because as a family, we love South Indian cuisine. I was also a little intimidated though, because some of those recipes are a lot of work! Making dosas can take hours sometimes. In the end, I decided on rava dosa (adapted from a recipe on Indian Healthy Recipes) with some aloo masala from the same site. Did I pick rava dosa because it looked doable and wasn't an hours-long process? Maybe...

The first step was making the batter out of semolina, rice flour, all-purpose flour, salt, cumin seeds, black pepper, finely chopped onion, finely chopped curry leaves, finely chopped cilantro leaves, and ginger, with enough water to make it runny. The batter only needed to rest for 20 minutes before cooking, which was great. I had never bought fresh curry leaves before, but I made a special trip for them so I could make this (and some other Indian dishes), and I think I'm going to need them whenever I make South Indian food in the future. There really is just no comparable ingredient (that I know of).

The recipe instructions said to start with a hot pan, and to add just a few drops of oil and grease it with a sliced onion. I feel like I've seen them do something similar at restaurants, but had never tried it at home. Wow, that was a revelation. I used so little oil to make each one of these dosa, but they came off the pan so easily thanks to this onion trick!

The batter gets poured into the pan starting from the edges and then filling in the gaps. That reminded me of banh xeo, and it hadn't occurred to me before making this that they are both thin, crispy pancakes, so why wouldn't they be made similarly? The dosa toasts on low until the edges come off the pan and it's cooked through. I did flip them to finish cooking them, but might not be necessary. The one thing I didn't plan on was that each dosa takes a long time to cook (again, I wish I had thought of the banh xeo connection earlier, because it's the same thing there), like maybe even 10 minutes type of long. For multiple dosa, I hadn't budgeted in that type of time, and it made for a very late, kind of stressful dinner rush. The dosa were excellent though, and I would make them again. I would just budget more time than I did for them.

I followed the aloo masala recipe fairly closely, other than leaving out the chilies because of little B, and they were delicious. Not sure what more to say here about well-seasoned mashed potatoes, but I would make this again too.

With all the work going into the dosa and the potatoes, I didn't make any of the other sides that you normally get with dosa at restaurants, but I just didn't have the capacity to. Maybe next time, I'll buy some pre-made chutneys at the store when I get the curry leaves for a more full experience, but we were still really satisfied with this!