The First Third

Making our way back to the beginning of the challenge before next year's challenge starts, here's a group post from the first third. Besides the ones already posted, skipping weeks 3, 8, 9, 12, 13, and 15 for the AtWCC (managed to fit in a lot!) and week 6 because I wrote most of that one already.

Week 4: on a stick

I had high hopes for this Serious Eats tsukune recipe, because those Japanese chicken meatballs skewers are one of my favorite izakaya dishes, but these were just okay. Considering we made these almost a year ago (I really need to get better about more timely writing), I don't remember a lot about them except that they didn't live up to my expectations. I don't know if it was because we had to use an egg replacer, or because they were made on a grill pan instead of an actual grill, or what was different about ours, but they just didn't taste as good as the ones you would get at an izakaya. Because I love tsukune, I do want to give them another shot whenever we make our way to the Japan section of the AtWCC, so I'm not counting them for that here.

Week 5: plant milk

I decided to go sweet for the plant milk challenge to try something different instead of just using store-bought plant milk as a substitute in dishes like we often do. First, I made some vegan condensed milk based on a Make It Dairy Free recipe (far easier to do than I thought it would be), and then used that to make some lime coconut snowballs (a MyRecipes recipe). They were different than how I thought they would come out. I was anticipating something solid and chewy like cookie dough, but they were soft and sticky, plus incredibly sweet. Tasty, but I couldn't eat more than a couple at a time because of how sweet they were. B and his sweet tooth liked them a lot.

Week 7: molding

The molding challenge was a complete failure. I made, or tried to make, dinosaur fruit jellies based on a YouTube video from Let's Stella. They looked so simple to make - Naked juice smoothies, sugar, and corn starch set in an ice cube mold. I got some cute dinosaur molds, thinking that we'd have lots of juice-filled fruit snacks that would be healthier than the store-bought ones. Except they didn't set. There were also supposed to be orange ones but I couldn't get those out of the mold at all. The taste was fine, but they were not the jellies they were supposed to be.

Week 11: inspired by art

I always have a little difficulty with the "inspired by" weeks, whether it's movies or TV shows or video games or books or art. I guess I'm not very inspired. The only thing that came to mind for this (besides a Mondrian cake, which I am not talented enough to make) was Campbell's soup, based on Andy Warhol's Campbell Soup Cans. I found a recipe for tomato soup meatloaf at The Kitchen Magpie, and I went with that, subbing turkey for the meat portion. This was over 9 months ago, so I don't remember much about it except that it turned out a little too watery on the bottom and it had nice flavor from the tomato soup. We have other meatloaf recipes we like more, so we'll probably stick with those, but this was nice for the novelty.

Four more recaps done, 24 more to go (at least it's less than half a year?)!