It's been a while since I posted here. May?! I thought it was more recent, but then realized there was a lot of stuff in drafts. So, what's been going on since May? Summer came and went in the blink of an eye. We went on our first plane trip since COVID arrived in 2020. We've explored more destinations in the AtWCC, and I've been keeping up with the 52 week cooking challenge, but you'd never know that since there aren't any posts here.
To remedy that, unless there is a reason for a separate post (like if it's also counting for the AtWCC), or unless it's one of the ones already languishing in drafts, I think I'm going to group together some of the 52 week challenge posts. For some of them, there just isn't that much to say. I made them, they fit the challenge, and that's that. So, in an attempt to catch up and so that I'm not finishing writing about the challenge next March like I did for last year's, here are weeks 31 through 35.
Week 31: Butter
For Week 31, I made a mixed berry cake with butter sauce. It wasn't the most photogenic cake, but it definitely spotlighted the theme ingredient - butter. The
original recipe from Taste of Home used cranberries, but it was the middle of the summer with no cranberries to be found in the grocery store outside of canned cranberry sauce, so I used strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, and raspberries (frozen, actually, since fresh berries are expensive and we prefer eating those fresh). It was the rest of the bag of frozen berries from
last year's failed akutaq plus some extra frozen raspberries, and I just kept hoping that this would be a better use of those berries than the last time.
Following the instructions, I actually got a little bit stressed out that this was going to be an akutaq repeat, because after I added the milk to the creamed butter-sugar mixture, everything started to look clumpy and curdled. It was still lumpy after the flour, so I had very low expectations. When it came time to make the butter sauce for the top, I ran into another complication because I hadn't noticed the half-and-half on the ingredient list. Oops. From some internet research, I found out that someone mixed olive oil with soy milk, and it had the same effect. I was skeptical since it looked like a pool of oil when it started on the stove, but it really came together as a nice, thick glaze. I have no idea why it worked, but it did. Overall, the cake turned out delicious. Super sweet and super buttery, but successful! If we can get some fresh cranberries in the fall, this may turn up on our meal plan again.
Week 32: Chamorro
This one is going to get its own post, because it's going to count for Guam!
Week 33: Allergies
For allergies week, I tried to get as many of the top 9 allergens (wheat, milk, eggs, soy, fish, shellfish, peanut, tree nuts, sesame) in one dish as possible. So this pasta dish had tricolor spaghetti (wheat) with peppers and onions in a peanut ginger sauce (peanuts, soy, sesame), topped with crispy tofu (more soy), salmon (fish), and slivered almonds (tree nuts). I've made this dish a number of times before (with just tofu), but it had been a while, so I didn't realize we were out of unexpired almond butter. The slivered almonds look like a last minute add-on, and they were, since I wanted to do tree nuts but didn't have almond butter.
The ones I left out were shellfish (inspired by a recent back of the cupboard challenge, I tried to only use proteins we already had at home), eggs (because of B's allergy), and milk (lactose intolerance over here). 6 out of 9 was pretty good! The dish didn't come out as well as I would have liked because I think it needed more sauce and had more sauce in the past, but at least it still tasted fine.
Week 34: Oats
Oat-crusted chicken and oat risotto were on the menu for the oats challenge. The chicken was brined in vegan buttermilk that had an oat milk base and then crusted with oats. A did most of the work for the chicken, since these are chicken tenders he makes often and they're always so good. For the oat risotto (which A really wanted me to call ris-oat-to), I used
a recipe from Allrecipes, added mushrooms, and it was fantastic. I would make the risotto again.
Week 35: Burmese
Burmese week sounds like a shoo-in for an AtWCC post, but this one was an absolute failure. I was hoping to make tohu thoke, a yellow tofu salad and one of my favorite Burmese dishes ever. (If it looks familiar here, this salad made our top 10 food memories list back
in 2010, and we also posted about
Rangoon in Philadelphia, which sadly no longer exists). Unfortunately, it didn't set at all. The tofu had the consistency of pudding and was not solid at all. I'm not sure what went wrong. Did I chill it for too long? Did I mess up something from the
recipe (which I followed from YouTube because I couldn't find the related website)?
The yellow tofu itself was made of chickpea flour (besan), water, salt, and turmeric, and it really thickened up on the stove, so I thought it would just need some time to solidify. I used different toppings from the video, trying to mimic the ones we've had at the food fairs, using cilantro, fried onions (didn't have fried shallots or an easy way to get them), lime juice, fish sauce, tamarind, and garlic. The taste, especially in certain bites, was really reminiscent of what we'd gotten in the past, but the texture was not. I do intend to try this again (have a giant container of besan right now), and hopefully it will turn out better next time and be worthy of an AtWCC post.
More challenge catch-ups coming (hopefully very) soon!
